NBC News fact checker Erin Biba falsely blames “white supremacy” for a black man stabbing five Jews in Monsey, New York
Erin Biba is a fact checker for NBC News.
After a black man stabbed five Jews in Monsey, New York, Biba falsely blamed the stabbings on “white supremacy.”
After Biba’s tweet was proven to be a lie, she deleted her entire Twitter account.
Fortunately, before Biba deleted her account, Just Val saved a screenshot of Biba’s lie. Here it is. Source: https://twitter.com/Valnofux/status/1211193586290700288/photo/1
Here’s a photograph of the “white supremacist” who committed the five stabbings. Source: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/29/us/new-york-stabbing-rabbi-home/index.html
I’m not sure why a fact checker for NBC News would call this person a “white supremacist.”
I hope NBC News will explain their logic behind this ridiculously inaccurate description.
Video: When some idiot tried to carry out a mass shooting at a church in Texas, several other people immediately pulled out their own guns and stopped him. We’ll never know how many lives they saved.
I live in Squirrel Hill, where 11 innocent people were shot and killed at a synagogue last year.
In Texas, just today, when some idiot tried to carry out a mass shooting at a church, several other people immediately pulled out their own guns and stopped him.
It’s a good thing that it’s legal for law abiding citizens to carry guns in churches in Texas.
We’ll never know how many lives they saved.
Here’s a video of the incident:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53hleVLARbE
And here’s an article about it from CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/29/us/church-shooting-texas/index.html
Suspect shoots and kills 2 inside a Texas church before parishioners fatally shoot him
December 29, 2019
A man shot and killed two people during a church service in White Settlement, Texas, on Sunday before two members of the church security team shot and killed him, authorities said.
City Police Chief J.P. Bevering said it appeared the shooter walked into West Freeway Church of Christ and sat down in the sanctuary, then stood, pulled out a shotgun and shot two parishioners.
“There was a security team inside the church and they eliminated the threat,” Bevering said.
Bevering praised the churchgoers who returned fire and killed the suspect as “heroic” and said there is no ongoing threat.
Matthew DeSarno, the FBI agent in charge of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, said the motive is unknown, and nobody knows yet whether the shooter targeted the victims. DeSarno said the investigation will determine whether the shooter was driven by any sort of ideology.
He didn’t identify the shooter, but said he was “relatively transient with roots to this area” and had been arrested multiple times in different municipalities.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the incident was over within six seconds.
“This church has its own security team,” he said. “They were well trained. The heroism today is unparalleled. … Two of the parishioners who are volunteers on the security force drew their weapons and took out the killer immediately, saving untold number of lives.”
Video shows the shooting
A video livestream from the church, seen by CNN, appears to show how the shooting unfolded. The entire incident, from the time the shooter pulled out his gun until he was shot, took six seconds.
Lisa Farmer, the wife of the West Freeway Church of Christ Minister Britt Farmer, was not inside the church at the time of the shooting but said the video shows the inside of the church building.
The video, obtained by CNN affiliate KTVT, shows the shooter seated in a pew toward the rear of the church during the service. The shooter, dressed in dark clothes, approaches someone in the back corner and appears to talk to them. That individual gestures toward the center of the church.
The shooter pulled out a long gun and opened fire on the man before shooting a second man.
It appears that a man, toward the left of the screen, draws a handgun and fires. The shooter falls to the ground immediately. Three muzzle flashes are seen on the video.
The YouTube video has since been made private.
‘It was so chaotic’
The shooting happened during communion, Lisa Farmer told CNN.
“It was so chaotic,” she said. “I think all the congregation is being held inside, all being held for questioning.”
The church normally has around 280 people attending Sunday services, she said. She didn’t identify the congregant who died but described him as a close friend “who would do anything for anybody that he could. Good guy. He’s been there for us through thick and thin.”
Video of the scene from CNN affiliate KTVT showed several agencies present — including Fort Worth Police, Fort Worth Fire Department and MedStar EMS. Several people could be seen outside the church, which was roped off with yellow police tape.
Guns are legal in Texas churches
The shooting comes more than two years after a gunman opened fire at a church in Sutherland Springs — a community about 300 miles away from White Settlement — killing at least 26 people.
After the Sutherland Springs shooting, the state loosened its gun laws to allow churchgoers to carry firearms into houses of worship.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott offered his condolences in the wake of the shooting.
Police got a call just before 10 a.m. about people with gunshot wounds at the church.
“Our hearts go out to the victims and families of those killed in the evil act of violence that occurred at the West Freeway Church of Christ,” he said.
“Places of worship are meant to be sacred, and I am grateful for the church members who acted quickly to take down the shooter and help prevent further loss of life.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he was “shocked and saddened” to hear about the shooting.
“As reports come in, please pray for any victims and their families, this congregation, and the law enforcement officials at the scene. My office will assist in any way needed,” he said.
Vox Media is run by hypocrites. They praised California Assembly Bill 5 for allegedly making workers better off, but later laid off hundreds of their own writers in response to the very same law.
How a law aimed at Uber and Lyft is hurting freelance writers
December 19, 2019
In September, the left-leaning media website Vox.com ran a triumphant headline about a bill that had just passed the California legislature: “Gig workers’ win in California is a victory for workers everywhere.” Assembly Bill 5, or AB5, would go into effect on Jan. 1, essentially making the gig economy illegal in the state.
AB5 forbids businesses to use contractors unless the companies can pass a stringent requirement known as the “ABC test.” It’s designed to ensure that all workers are classified as employees unless they perform their work independent of supervision, have an established business doing the same sort of work for multiple customers and are doing work that isn’t part of the company’s core business. Meeting one or two of these requirements isn’t enough; you must meet all three.
At the time of AB5’s passage, I noted that its aim was a mite quixotic, given that its primary targets, such as Uber and Lyft, were still unprofitable. If they couldn’t make a profit using drivers as contractors, it was hard to see how they could afford to turn the drivers into staffers with regular schedules, hourly pay and benefits. AB5 seemed more likely to drive these firms out of the state, taking their part-time jobs and their useful services with them. And not just gig-economy companies; in passing, I also noted that AB5 seemed to ban most freelance journalism.
It turned out to be a bit more complicated than that; the legislature had actually created a special exception for journalists, allowing them to write 35 articles annually before they’d be considered employees. That still seemed unworkable to this journalist, and should have to anyone who’s ever been near a newsroom — the law would, for example, make it illegal to use a UCLA professor as a weekly columnist without taking on the prof as an employee.
You can guess what’s coming next, can’t you? With Jan. 1 approaching, Vox Media, parent company of Vox.com, just announced that it will be laying off hundreds of freelancers in California. I mentioned my September remarks above not as a tiresome “I told you so” but to note that the effect on freelance writers isn’t some unanticipated side effect of the law. It was the predictable result of trying to force companies into a 9-to-5 employment model. That model just doesn’t fit a lot of businesses, including the business of those journalists who were inexplicably cheering AB5 — or worse, explaining to freelancers, from the safety of a staff job, that actually the law was good for them.
California is trying to put freelance journalists out of business
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/california-freelance-journalists-sue-over-204250896.html
California freelance journalists sue over new state law
December 17, 2019
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Freelance writers and photographers on Tuesday filed the second legal challenge to a broad new California labor law that they say could put some independent journalists out of business.
The law taking effect Jan. 1 aims to give wage and benefit protections to people who work as independent contractors. While the public focus has been largely on ride-share companies such as Uber and Lyft, the lawsuit brought by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Press Photographers Association says the law would unconstitutionally affect free speech and the media.
The lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation challenged what it calls an “irrational and arbitrary” limit of 35 submissions each year to each media outlet.
That has “thrown our community into a panic, given that in the year 2020 digital media is a whole different beast than newspapers and journalism of the past,” said Los Angeles-based writer Maressa Brown, who founded California Freelance Writers United in September.
“You could hit 35 (submissions) in a matter of a few weeks, and we don’t feel that should require us submitting a W2, sitting in an office and tethered to a computer and under the oversight of one client,” said Brown, who likes having up to 15 clients at one time. “People are losing clients, income. Their livelihoods are under threat.”
The law establishes the nation’s strictest test for which workers must be considered employees and could set a precedent for other states.
The lawsuit says the freelance restriction draws “unconstitutional content-based distinctions about who can freelance,” noting that “the government faces a heavy burden of justification when its regulations single out the press.”
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit libertarian group, filed it in federal court in Los Angeles.
“First, it was the Endangered Species Act, then women on corporate boards, and now the Pacific Legal Foundation is attacking California’s landmark workplace rights law. That should come as no surprise to anyone,” the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, said in a statement.
The two associations together have more than 650 members in California. Their lawsuit asks a judge to invalidate the portion of the law that would affect them.
The lawsuit was filed the day after the digital sports media company SB Nation, owned by Vox Media, announced that it would end its use of more than 200 California freelancers, switching instead to using a much smaller number of new employees.
The California law “makes it impossible for us to continue with our current California team site structure,” the company said on its website.
The new law implements a legal ruling last year by the California Supreme Court regarding workers at the delivery company Dynamex. But the Pacific Legal Foundation lawsuit says that ruling would have had little direct effect on professionals engaged in “original and creative” work, like its clients.
The law gives newspaper companies a one-year delay to figure out how to apply to the law to newspaper carriers, who work as independent contractors.
“The bill represents an existential threat to our industry,” said Jim Ewert, general counsel for the California News Publishers Association. “Content doesn’t matter if you can’t put it on peoples’ doorsteps.”
His organization is not involved in the lawsuit, but he said the government “has to be mindful of the impact it is going to have on the freedom of expression.”
The law may be suspect on free speech grounds for singling out a particular classification of worker engaged in expressive activities, Ewert said. And he said this particular facet has the potential to harm what he called “underrepresented voices” that may be more limited in speaking out for minority, low income, LGBT or other communities.
The California Trucking Association last month filed the first challenge to the law on behalf of independent truckers. Uber, Lyft and DoorDash have said they will spend $90 million on a 2020 ballot measure opposing the law if they can’t negotiate other rules for their drivers.
Democrats Threaten to Skip Next Week’s Debate Over Union Dispute
https://www.yahoo.com/news/warren-sanders-yang-threaten-skip-191620412.html
Democrats Threaten to Skip Next Week’s Debate Over Union Dispute
December 13, 2019
All of the Democratic presidential candidates who have qualified for next week’s debate say they will skip the event rather than cross a planned picket line at the venue.
The seven candidates — Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang — all said Friday that they would not show up for the debate at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles next Thursday if the Unite Here Local 11 goes forward with its protest of food service contractor Sodexo SA.
The union, which represents about 150 Sodexo employees at the LMU campus, reached out to the campaigns on Friday to inform them they planned to demonstrate. The union and the food-services company have been negotiating for months but their talks stalled this week.
This is the second labor issue to complicate plans for the December debate. It had been set to be held at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. But the Democratic National Committee asked the debate’s media sponsors to find a new location because the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees demanded that the candidates to boycott it over a contract dispute involving patient care workers at the university’s hospital system.
“The DNC should find a solution that lives up to our party’s commitment to fight for working people,” Warren wrote on Twitter. “I will not cross the union’s picket line even if it means missing the debate.”
Biden said he would not cross a picket line and had to stand with the union’s members “for affordable health care and fair wages.”
Xochitl Hinjosa, the DNC’s communications director, said late Friday that the group’s chairman, Tom Perez, “would absolutely not cross a picket line and would never expect our candidates to either.” She added that the DNC was trying to find a solution that “will enable us to proceed as scheduled with next week’s debate.”
(Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
Wrongly-convicted man who spent 5 years on death row graduates from Texas college
https://abc7.com/society/man-who-spent-5-years-on-death-row-graduates-from-college/5755247/
Wrongly-convicted man who spent 5 years on death row graduates from Texas college
December 14, 2019
DENTON, Texas — At 17 years old, Ryan Matthews was wrongly accused of killing a man. Two years later, he was sentenced to death. Now, at age 39, he’s graduating from college.
In April 1997, a man in a ski mask shot and killed the 43-year-old owner of Comeaux’s Market in Bridge City, Louisiana, right across the river from New Orleans.
Investigators thought Matthews, a black teenager, killed the white business owner, and he was later found guilty by one black juror and 11 white jurors, WFAA in Dallas reported.
Activists rallied, and his family fought. DNA evidence eventually proved their case, and the real killer confessed.
After five years on death row, Matthews was exonerated, set free, and moved to Texas.
“All these years ago when I first came home, a reporter asked me what I wanted to do, and I told them I wanted to go to school,” he said.
And he followed through on that promise to himself. On Saturday, Matthews graduated from Texas Woman’s University in Denton with a bachelor’s degree in applied arts and sciences.
Moved by Matthews’ story, his sister and 71-year-old mother also enrolled in the university.
“So I decided to go back and pursue my Ph.D. because hopefully, I’ll be able to do some legislative work and get some of that wrongful conviction and reintegration legislation changed,” said Monique Coleman, Matthews’ sister.
His mother, Pauline, said she’s “proud, proud, proud” as she could be.
Matthews said he can feel bitter about his experience, though his feelings are nuanced.
“I am because of what happened, but I can’t because it would stop me from moving forward … I’m trying to be the best I can be,” he said.
Save the World with Nuclear Power – Leslie Dewan – TEDxUniversityofRochester
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoAcntoAVXE
Global warming hypocrite Al Gore says he supports the Green New Deal, but his actions are the exact opposite
Al Gore just spoke out in favor of the Green New Deal.
However, his actions are the exact opposite.
This video is called, “Hitler gets mad at Al Gore’s global warming hypocrisy.” The video’s description includes links to sources to verify the statements that are made in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfr37Xn9IL8
San Francisco’s 24-hour public toilets cost the city nearly $30 per flush. Officials want to add more.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/san-franciscos-24-hour-public-131200141.html
San Francisco’s 24-hour public toilets cost the city nearly $30 per flush. Officials want to add more.
* Since 2014, San Francisco has operated a program called “Pit Stop” that delivers mobile public restrooms to neighborhoods with dirty streets.
* In August, the city began offering 24-hour service at three of these stations.
* The cost of operating the stations overnight amounts to $30 per flush.
December 6, 2019
Even toilets are expensive in San Francisco.
Operating three 24-hour public toilets adds $300,000 to the city’s sanitation budget, according to recent city data reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Since 2014, a San Francisco program called “Pit Stop” has been delivering mobile public restrooms to areas where many of the city’s homeless residents live and congregate. In these locations, especially the Tenderloin neighborhood, sidewalks can wind up scattered with human feces.
The Pit Stop program started with restroom stations in just three locations, and it has since grown to include 24 stations across 13 neighborhoods. In addition to giving homeless residents a place to use the restroom, the stations come with used-needle receptacles and dog-waste disposal bins.
But only three locations are open 24 hours. They’re part of a pilot program that began in August and will last until July 2020. The other 21 stations have varying hours: Some are open from 9 a.m to 8 p.m., while others have more limited service.
Most of the additional operating costs for the pilot program goes toward paying staff attendants who help ensure that stalls aren’t misappropriated for drug use or prostitution.
The math works out like this: Thus far, the 24-hour toilets have been used around 10,500 times during the hours between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., when all other Pit Stop stations are closed. About a quarter of all flushes at the 24-hour stations took place at night, which means the overnight toilets cost the city about $30 per flush.
City officials are now considering expanding the pilot to other locations.
Matt Haney, who represents the city’s sixth district (which includes the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods) on the Board of Supervisors, has advocated for keeping all of his district’s stations open 24 hours.
Changing every Pit Stop station in the city to stay open overnight would require more than $8 million, according to the city’s estimate. The city’s annual budget for street cleaning was roughly $72 million in 2019.
So far, however, the three overnight stations haven’t led to a significant reduction in the number of complaints about San Francisco’s dirty streets. The Chronicle reports that the Tenderloin saw just 12 fewer complaints in the last three months compared to the three months before the pilot started. (Complaints in the neighborhood dropped from 188 to 176.)
But Haney told the Chronicle that there’s still a need for the toilets in his district — and probably in nearby districts as well. The Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods currently have around 3,700 homeless residents. The total across the city has risen to nearly 10,000.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 