The US state of Kansas has become the first to ban 2nd trimester abortions.
Republican state governor, Sam Brownback yesterday, Tuesday signed into a law an act to halt what lawmakers said are "dismemberment abortions."
The law goes into effect on July 1 and prohibits the use of dilation and evacuation. The bill says the procedure can result in the fetus being extracted in pieces.
The procedure has been described as horrifying by supporters in Kansas while women's healthcare groups have said it is considered the safest way to terminate a pregnancy in the second trimester.
The law allows for the procedure to preserve the life of a pregnant woman or when the mother's health is in serious jeopardy from the pregnancy.
Similar bans are being considered in Oklahoma, Missouri and South Carolina, as the procedure is used in about 8 to 9 percent of abortions in the United States.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
One of the best parts about being the president's kid must be having a bunch of Secret Service agents at your disposal. Case in point: The Obamas' teenage daughter, Malia, who'll be turning 17 this July, got driving lessons not from her parents but from members of the agency.
In an interview with Rachael Ray that will air this Thursday, Michelle Obama revealed that she wasn't allowed to teach her daughter Malia to drive, CNN reports. "They wouldn't let me in the car with her."
But, the First Family is making every effort to ensure both of their daughters have as normal an upbringing as possible, so they enlisted the Secret Service to help with that most classic teenage rite of passage: driving lessons. "I think [driving] gives her a sense of normalcy, like the rest of her friends are doing. And my kids have got to learn how to live in the world like normal kids," Michelle Obama said.
The First Lady also talked about what she misses most about being a civilian: getting to drive around in a car with the windows open. Apparently, when you're one of the most prominent women in the world, security concerns call for rolled up windows. She also hasn't been behind the wheel for seven years, since her family hit the national stage.
There are no reports on whether Malia got ordinary "here's how you parallel park" driving lessons, or some sort of top-level "how to lose a bad guy" course. But, if our research is any indication (i.e. watching the 1996 Sinbad classic First Kid), it was the latter.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
A South Carolina police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man Saturday was formally charged with murder this evening.
Police cited witness video that appears to show the moment when the officer fatally shot a driver whom he had pulled over this weekend, and the victim's family attorney, who gave the video to ABC News, believes it could prove that the officer used excessive force.
North Charleston officer Michael Slager was charged with murdering Walter "Lamar" Scott, 50, who died shortly after the Saturday morning incident. A magistrate at his bond hearing this evening denied him bond and he was being held at the Charleston County Detention Center.
A murder conviction in the state could lead to the death penalty or up to 30 years to life in prison, according to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.
The two videos that Scott family attorney Chris Stewart said were recorded by a bystander, whose name has not been released, appear to show the moments when Scott begins to run away from the officer. While the officer's stun gun is not visible in the video, what appears to be a string is visible stretching from Scott to Officer Slager, where it was apparently attaching the stun gun to his clothing. Scott is seen running away from Slager as the officer proceeds to fire eight successive shots in Scott's direction before Scott falls to the ground.
"I can tell you that as a result of that video and the bad decision made by our officer he will be charged with murder and that's not something that we like to hear," Mayor R. Keith Summey said at a news conference this evening.
he county coroner's office did not immediately return ABC News' calls about how many times Scott was hit, but Stewart told ABC News that of the eight fired shots, four hit Scott in the back and one hit him in the ear. The attorney said two of the shots were fatal.
Slager is shown in the video approaching Scott, who is face down on the ground, and then putting handcuffs on his wrists behind his back. Slager then walks away from the body and another officer arrives on the scene, appearing to bend down and take Scott's pulse as Slager comes back toward the scene and talks to the second officer.
"The video is very demonstrative of exactly what happened," Summey said. "Without the video, and that was the only witness there was, it would be difficult to ascertain directly what did occur. We want to thank the young person who came forward with the video because it helped us to resolve exactly what did occur."
The police incident report states that Slager called in a traffic stop in the area and then advised officers that he was in a foot pursuit of the driver of the vehicle.
Slager then said he had deployed his Taser and requested backup units to the scene, according to the police report.
During his next call on the police radio, Slager said: "Shots fired and the subject is down, he took my taser," the police report notes.
Summey said that they were made aware of the video earlier today and Slager was arrested after meeting with investigators.
"It goes to say how we work as a community," Summey said of the decision to charge the officer. "If you're wrong, you're wrong and if you make a bad decision don't matter if you're behind the shield… you have to live by that decision."
At a news conference this evening, Stewart, the Scott family's attorney, said the family is planning to file a civil suit against North Charleston.
He declined to speculate on whether the shooting was racially motivated, but said that "this was a cop who decided he could shoot a man in the back that many times."
In a statement tonight, Gov. Nikki Haley said, "We have many good law enforcement officers in the field. What happened in this case is not acceptable in South Carolina, nor is it reflective of our values or of the way most of our law enforcement officials act, and I assure all South Carolinians that the criminal judicial process will proceed fully. This is a sad time for everyone in South Carolina, and I urge everyone to work together to help our community heal.”
Walter Scott's brother Anthony said the family wanted the truth of what happened.
"If we didn't see the video, would we know the truth?" he said. "From the beginning … all we wanted was the truth. … We can't get my brother back … but through the process, justice has been served."
"I don't think all police officers are bad cops," he added. "But I don't want to see someone shot down like my brother."
The case is being investigated by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Slager has been placed on administrative leave indefinitely though that was not a mandatory reaction; his placement on administrative leave was decided by his police department and not by state law.
"This is a very tragic event for all of the families," Slager's attorney David Aylor said Sunday in a statement released to ABC News affiliate WCIV in Charleston.
"Officer Slager believes he followed all the proper procedures and policies of the North Charleston Police Department," Aylor's statement said.
Aylor told ABC News today he is not the officer's attorney at this point. "I have no further information on this situation," he said.
Slager has been a member of the North Charleston police department since 2009 and previously served in the Coast Guard.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
A private college in Pennsylvania expelled three students over a campus radio broadcast in which they made racist comments and used a slur.
Bucknell University president John Bravman met with about 1,000 students and staff about the matter on Tuesday, a day after sending a late-night email revealing the expulsions.
“Their conduct is an affront to our values, damaging to our community and in clear violation of our community standards,” he wrote to students, faculty and staff on Monday.
Bravman did not identify the students but shared their comments from a March 20 WVBU-FM broadcast in “the interest of transparency and candor.”
He said one of the students used the N-word, a second said “black people should be dead” and the third said “lynch ‘em.”
Bucknell spokesman Andy Hirsch said an inmate a nearby prison heard the comments and reported them to a prisoner advocacy group, the Lewisburg Prison Project. The group then contacted a university faculty member, who alerted the radio station’s adviser.
Hirsch said the school’s senior staff investigated. The students were suspended and interviewed before the dean of students expelled them, he said.
“I would emphasize that the context really doesn’t matter once you see what was said,” Hirsch said.
Hirsch declined to say if alcohol was involved, noting investigations were still ongoing.
“I can tell you that there were other people at the station,” he said. “Whether or not they were there at the time when this happened, we’re still looking into all those details.”
Bucknell, a liberal arts school with about 3,600 undergraduates, is located in Lewisburg, about 50 miles north of Harrisburg. The student body is 79 percent white, 5 percent Hispanic, 4 percent Asian and 3 percent African-American.
The Lewisburg Prison Project said an inmate at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg wrote a letter about the comments.
“He didn’t feel this is right and thought something should be done about it,” said David Sprout, a paralegal for the group. Sprout said he did not know what the inmate was serving time for.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Laurence Fishburne is a successful, critically acclaimed actor with roles on hit shows on both ABC and NBC, not to mention a part in the upcoming Superman v. Batman: Dawn of Justice film.
Yet, his mother recently told the New York Post that she is broke and facing eviction because he refuses to reach out to her.
“He’s gone Hollywood. For 20 years, I funded my son’s career. He promised me he would take care of me. … To this day, I have not got a Christmas present or a ‘Thank you, Mama’ present. He hasn’t given me a penny,” she told the newspaper.
Hattie Crawford Fishburne, 80, claims she’s being kicked out of her $1500 a month Los Angeles apartment due to overwhelming living expenses. She receives $3,000 a month from social security and her pension from years of teaching in public schools in Brooklyn and Los Angeles but is struggling to pay the medical bills from her arthritis, under-active thyroid, high cholesterol and injuries she sustained in a massive car crash.
Despite her attempts to reach out to her famous son, she says he hasn’t returned her calls in a year, and now, she faces being evicted from her home tomorrow, Tuesday the 31st.
This isn’t the first time Fishburne has estranged himself from a member of his immediate family. His daughter Montana has admitted he stopped speaking to her when she started appearing in porn videos. She was last reported to be working as a stripper in Texas.
Fishburne, who played the iconic character of Morpheus on the “Matrix” trilogy, is worth an estimated $20 million and also stars in and produces ABC’s new hit comedy Black-ish.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Missouri’s lieutenant governor lashed out at the Justice Department on Monday, accusing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama administration of racism in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson last year.
There is more racism in the Justice Department than there is in anywhere I see in the St. Louis area,” Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder said in an interview with NewsMaxTV Monday. “We are making progress. We’ve come an enormous way in 50 years. That’s not to say we don’t have still have more to do. But it is the left — it is the Eric Holder and Obama left — and their minions who are obsessed with race, while the rest of us are moving on beyond it.”
Kinder, a Republican, criticized the administration for “[inciting] a mob” during the protests that followed Brown’s killing.
“The whole blowup of this protest movement was based on the lie that never happened of ‘hands up don’t shoot,’” Kinder said in remarks that were first reported by BuzzFeed. “It’s bad enough the protesters were behaving that way, but we have a right to expect much more from the attorney general, the head of the Justice Department of the United States, and the president of the United States. And instead, what we got too often from them was incitement of the mob, and, uh, encouraging disorder in Ferguson and disrupting the peaceable going-about of our daily lives in the greater St. Louis region.”
He added: “Many of them have spent most of their careers defending Black Panthers and other violent radicals.”
Kinder’s comments come on the heels of a Justice Department report that concluded officer Darren Wilson had reason to fear Brown when he fatally shot him and would not be charged — a decision President Obama said he fully supported.
“You can’t just charge him anyway because what happened was tragic,” Obama said. “That was the decision that was made, and I have complete confidence and stand fully behind the decision that was made by the Justice Department on that issue.”
The same Justice Department probe found pervasive racial bias on the part of Ferguson’s mostly white police force. Ferguson’s police chief, city manager and a municipal judge resigned in the wake of the findings.
Last week, two police officers were shot during a protest related to the case. Both officers were treated and released by a local hospital.
On Sunday, Jeffrey Williams, a 20-year-old man, was charged with first-degree assault in the shootings.
According to St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, Williams told authorities he was not targeting police but was shooting at someone else.
“This arrest sends a clear message that acts of violence against our law enforcement personnel will never be tolerated,” Holder said in a statement.
Kinder is something of a controversial figure in Missouri. In February, he made headlines for requesting a daily allowance from the state legislature to cover his expenses when he is working in Jefferson City. Kinder, who lives in Cape Girardeau and maintains a second home in the state capital, said he’s experienced “gradual impoverishment” during his decade in public office. He receives an annual salary of about $86,000, according to public records.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Israel’s election has done a lot to reveal the challenges facing the country and the intentions of the men who seek to lead it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s outright rejection of a Palestinian state and his racist rant against Israeli Arab voters on Tuesday showed that he has forfeited any claim to representing all Israelis.
Mr. Netanyahu, with two years to go in his current term, called the election in December for reasons that are still unclear. He expected to win an easy victory and then ended up fighting for his political life in a bitter battle with Isaac Herzog, the leader of the new center-left Zionist Union alliance and son of a former Israeli president. With 99.5 percent of the ballots counted, the YNet news site reported Wednesday morning that Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party had possibly won 30 seats in the Knesset and Mr. Herzog’s Zionist Union had got 24 seats.
While Mr. Netanyahu ended up with more seats, it is Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, who will decide which leader gets to cobble together the next coalition government, the norm in a multiparty state where no one party has ever won an outright majority in the 120-member Knesset. The process could take six weeks, and religious parties are likely to hold the key to victory, an asset for Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Netanyahu showed that he was desperate, and craven, enough to pull out all the stops. On Monday, he promised that if his Likud faction remained in power, he would never allow the creation of a Palestinian state, thus repudiating a position he had taken in 2009.
His behavior in the past six years — aggressively building Israeli homes on land that likely would be within the bounds of a Palestinian state and never engaging seriously in negotiations — has long convinced many people that he has no interest in a peace agreement. But his statement this week laid bare his duplicity, confirmed Palestinian suspicions and will make it even harder for him to repair his poisoned relations with President Obama, who has invested heavily in pushing a two-state solution.
Mr. Netanyahu added to the ugliness of the campaign when, during Tuesday’s voting, he said in a video on social media: “Right-wing rule is in danger. Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.” This outrageous appeal to hard-line voters implied that only he could save Israel from its enemies, including the country’s Arab citizens, who represent 20 percent of the population and have long been discriminated against. There were signs that Arab Israelis were turning out in somewhat higher numbers, apparently to vote for the Joint Arab List, a coalition of four small parties.
Mr. Netanyahu’s demagogy further incites the rage that has torn the country apart. There were other inflammatory moments in recent days. Mr. Netanyahu claimed that nefarious foreign sources were trying to overthrow him and also promised to build more settlements, which most of the world consider to be illegal. Earlier this month, he made a subversive speech before Congress to castigate the Obama administration for seeking a nuclear deal with Iran, but that seems to have done little to enhance his support in Israel.
In his desperation, Mr. Netanyahu resorted to fear-mongering and anti-Arab attacks while failing to address the issues that Israelis said they were most worried about, namely the high cost of housing and everyday living in Israel. Although the economy has grown, the country has experienced widening income disparities and is now one of the most unequal societies in the advanced world.
Mr. Herzog made such domestic concerns a centerpiece of his campaign. While peace talks with the Palestinians were not a major focus of the Zionist Union campaign, or the election generally, he made clear that if elected he would try to restart negotiations.
Late Tuesday, Mr. Rivlin said he would work for a national unity government with Likud and the Zionist Union. It is difficult to see how Mr. Netanyahu could find enough common ground with any moderate faction to govern constructively.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
A Florida music teacher, Christopher Scottlevin Best, is facing charges after his nine-month-long romance with a 17-year-old student came to light.
Miami-Dade Police officials yesterday said the 28-year-old teacher was arrested Friday and charged with 10 counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor.
Best was a teacher at Miami Palmetto Senior High when he started dating the girl.
He confessed that he had a relationship with the girl but said he has never had sex with her since their romance began in September.
Bur in her affidavit, the teenager said they have had sex at least 10 times, at different locations including motels and the school's music room.
The school district released a statement saying he has been relieved of his job.
"The school district was immediately notified of the allegations and based on their clear policies governing staff and students, Mr. Best is no longer employed by Miami-Dade County Public Schools," the statement said.
Miami-Dade Police in a statement published by NBC Miami urged parents to "speak with their children to ensure they were not victimized by Christopher Best."
One of Best's students, Barrera, expressed shock over the teacher’s arrest, describing him as a good teacher.
"I've heard of him and I heard he's a really good teacher," Barrera told NBC.
"So I don't understand, like it doesn't make sense because I heard he's a good guy."
Best was released last Saturday after posting $75,000 bond.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Police have found bomb-making materials in the home of a 16-year-old student who had vowed to cause mass deaths at Edmond North High School, Oklahoma.
Edmond police spokeswoman, Jenny Monroe, said officers also found handwritten and typed plans on how he would execute the death plan in his room, Herald Democrat reports.
“He said he wanted to leave a legacy,” Monroe said.
Fuses, detonation materials and blueprints on how to make bombs were found during their search.
“He was in the building and testing phases,” Monroe said.
“We are going to be testing other evidence we found.”
Police bomb dogs searched the school but found no explosives.
The student's mass death plan was exposed by two of his friends and his therapist last Friday.
Suspecting that their friend was planning to commit suicide, the two students had reported to their school's counsellor.
He was then taken to a mental health facility where he is still being treated.
Edmond schools spokeswoman, Susan Parks-Schlepp, identified the suspect as a former student, suggesting that he has been automatically expelled.
“We are very pleased the (friends) provided critical information that helped the school district and police department investigation,” Parks-Schlepp said.
It is believed that the teenager is working alone.
“We believe this was a legitimate threat,” Monroe said.
Edmond North Principal Jason Pittenger has assured parents of the safety of the students.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
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