LVMPD responded to barricade situation today
LVMPD says they responded to a family disturbance around 9:13 a.m. and were told that a woman was armed with an "edged weapon." LVMPD SWAT and Crisis Negotiation teams were on the scene.
The bill faces an uphill battle in the GOP-run Senate despite Trump's support.
The man responsible for the bomb attack which ripped through Nashville on Christmas Day had told acquaintances he had cancer and began giving away his possessions shortly before the attack, according to reports. Police on Sunday night named Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, as the man responsible for the bomb. Warner was killed in the blast and identified after police used DNA found on the scene to confirm his identity. It was matched with samples found on the motorhome which exploded injuring three people and damaging dozens of businesses. The vehicle was also registered to Warner. Warner, an unmarried IT specialist, had announced his retirement three weeks before the attack, his colleagues told the New York Times. The 63-year-old had also told an ex-girlfriend that he had cancer and given her his car, according to the newspaper. Records show that Warner had also signed away his home the day before Thanksgiving on November 26.
Several Republicans, including Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), have resorted to suing Vice President Mike Pence as part of a "desperate" last-ditch effort to overturn the results of November's presidential election, The Hill reports. The goal of the lawsuit is to get a federal judge to rule that Pence has the exclusive authority to choose electors when he oversees the Electoral College vote certification on Jan. 6.> ⚖️NEW: VP Pence has been sued by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), Kelli Ward and other GOP mbrs in a far-fetched bid to overturn Biden's win> > Plaintiffs ask Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump-appt'd fed judge in Texas, to find that Pence is authorized to pick pro-Trump electors on Jan. 6 pic.twitter.com/BumNwLm5ss> > — John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) December 28, 2020Despite President-elect Joe Biden's victory in battleground states like Arizona and Georgia, Republican electors held their own votes earlier this month in a move to disrupt the official process as Trump and his allies continue to make unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud. The lawsuit urges Pence to recognize the Republican electoral votes rather than the actual Democratic votes.The chances of this lawsuit being successful appear to be negligible. University of California, Irvine, law professor Rick Hasen said flatly "this won't work," while Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis called it "insane." And even if the the plaintiffs do win, Pence — who has not recognized Biden's win, but has generally been quiet about election conspiracy theories — would still have to actually go through with picking pro-Trump electors, a task likely easier said than done. Read the full complaint here.More stories from theweek.com Schumer reportedly abandons fundraising efforts in Georgia's Senate runoffs 2021 might just be incredible Congress is 'laughing' at Trump's 'bizarre, embarrassing' COVID-19 relief capitulation, Politico suggests
A top associate of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was released from detention Sunday and said she was charged with trespassing after entering the apartment building of an alleged security operative who inadvertently revealed details of Navalny’s supposed poisoning with a Soviet-era nerve agent. Lyubov Sobol, a key figure in Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, was detained for 48 hours on Friday after a day of interrogation. The move followed Sobol’s attempt on Monday to enter the Moscow apartment of the alleged operative, whom Navalny had previously duped into revealing details of his alleged poisoning.
Army Col. Owen G. Ray is being held in the Pierce County Jail in Tacoma, according to the Pierce County Jail's website.
Disney employee says in a now-removed Facebook post that husband’s aunt was a ‘big deal’ at Los Angeles hospital
A prominent Saudi Arabian activist who campaigned for the right to drive was sentenced to nearly six years in jail today, despite international criticism of her trial and claims she had been tortured. Loujain al-Hathloul, 31, was arrested with a dozen other women’s rights campaigners in 2018, even as the Gulf kingdom lifted the ban on women driving and pledged to relax patriarchal male guardianship laws. A judge in a Saudi terrorism court in Riyadh on Monday sentenced her to five years and eight months on charges related to her activism, including seeking to change the Saudi political system conspiring with foreign governments and harming national security. The judge insisted that she had confessed to the allegations and rejected Ms Hathloul’s claims that she was tortured with water-boarding, electric shocks and had been threatened with rape after her arrest. She spent eight months in solitary confinement last year and in October went on hunger strike in protest at her treatment. However, the court suspended two years and 10 months of her sentence, which Ms Hathloul’s sister Lina said could see her released early next year, due to time already spent behind bars.
Unsurprisingly, you invested in sleeping, cleaning, and organizingOriginally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Democrats still have a chance to retake the Senate -- but the body's leadership has reportedly all but given up.Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are challenging Georgia GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in races that will determine the outlook of the Senate. But as Ossoff and Warnock scramble to match Republicans' fundraising efforts, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has stopped meeting with donors altogether, a source tells NBC News.Over the past two months, Ossoff and Warnock have each brought in more than $100 million, largely via grassroots donations. Their fundraising totals beat out the Republicans' efforts during the same periods, but outside Republican groups are winning in terms of big-dollar TV ad spending, NBC News reports. This leaves the GOP with plenty of resources to engage in direct voter contact and encourage new or unlikely voters to turn out on their behalf on Jan. 5 -- something Warnock and Ossoff's campaign managers called "essential" in a campaign memo obtained by NBC News. "To win this election in 8 days, we need to continue our historic efforts to turn out every single voter -- but we won't be able to do that if our fundraising revenue continues to fall," the managers wrote.Outside Democratic donors did spend big during the 2020 election cycle in an effort to overturn the Republicans' Senate majority. But after Democrats failed to decisively do so, Schumer has reportedly stopped asking for more support. Despite the fact that President-elect Joe Biden flipped the state for the first time in decades, Schumer is "pessimistic" about Ossoff and Warnock's chances and is no longer meeting with donors to avoid ruining relationships for years to come, the source tells NBC News. But as Ossoff and Warnock's campaigns see it, donations focused on boosting turnout have never been more important. Read more at NBC News. Update 2:30 p.m. ET: A spokesperson for Schumer said NBC News' reporting is "absolutely not true." The representative, Justin Goodman, added that "Schumer has diligently made calls and fundraised for both Georgia candidates and is optimistic about their chances in January."More stories from theweek.com Republicans sue Mike Pence in 'desperate' last-ditch effort to overturn election 2021 might just be incredible Congress is 'laughing' at Trump's 'bizarre, embarrassing' COVID-19 relief capitulation, Politico suggests
The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah said Sunday his group now has twice as many precision-guided missiles as it had a year ago, saying Israel's efforts to prevent it from acquiring them have failed. Hassan Nasrallah, in an end-of-year interview with the Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV, said his group has the capability to strike anywhere in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Nasrallah said that when Israel threatened through a U.S. official to target a Hezbollah facility in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa region, his group warned it would retaliate for any such attack.
Switzerland will return $150 million from blocked Swiss bank accounts by the end of the year to the United States to be given to victims of convicted Ponzi scheme con artist Robert Allen Stanford, the Federal Ministry of Justice said on Monday. Stanford, a former Texas financier known primarily by his middle name, was convicted of fraud by a Houston jury in 2012 in what prosecutors called a $7.2 billion fraud that lasted two decades and which was eclipsed in size only by the Ponzi scheme run by Bernie Madoff. Stanford, now serving a 110-year prison term, had stashed millions from his Antigua-based Stanford International Bank at the Swiss arm of French bank Societe Generale, which he tapped regularly to fund a fleet of private jets and a 100-foot yacht, according to U.S. District Court filings from 2012.
A horrifying new report by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reveals that, for more than a decade, Florida’s political leaders and the state Department of Corrections (FDC) have ignored the sexual abuse by staff, including rape, of incarcerated women at the Lowell Correctional Institution.
Ben Crump does not want the latest ‘Karen’ incident to be just another viral occurrence and is demanding that assault charges be filed against the white woman who attacked a Black teen over an iPhone. As theGrio reported, the 14-year-old son of Grammy-winning trumpet player Keyon Harrold was accosted by a white woman who claimed he’d stolen her iPhone at the Arlo SoHo Hotel in New York over the weekend.
F/A-18 Super Hornets aboard the Nimitz have been providing air support as U.S. troops withdraw from Somalia.
President Trump abruptly reversed course Sunday night and signed a $2.3 trillion package to provide economic relief during the COVID-19 pandemic and fund the federal government though September. Republican lawmakers had spent the weekend publicly and privately urging Trump to reconsider his implicit veto threat, issued after the legislation had passed Congress early last week.Specifically, Trump called for the $600 COVID-19 payments suggested by his negotiator, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, to be increased to $2,000, and for cuts in foreign aid from the $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill. Trump "wants to be remembered for advocating for big checks, but the danger is he'll be remembered for chaos and misery and erratic behavior if he allows this to expire," Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said on Fox News Sunday.Trump, spending the holidays at his resort and golf club in southern Florida, did not entirely give up on his demands. "In a statement he issued after signing the law, Trump released a long list of false claims and grievances," The Washington Post reports. "He said he would be sending a 'redlined' version of the bill back to Congress 'insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.'"Trump also said Congress agreed to vote on upping the stimulus checks to $2,000 — something the House already planned to do Monday and the Senate is unlikely to consider — and start work soon on ending legal protection for tech companies and examine his claims of voter fraud. One person who interacted with Trump in Palm Beach in recent days told the Post that the president had discussed neither the unemployment benefits he allowed to lapse or the looming government shutdown, but instead "has been far more focused on his failed effort to reverse the election result, lashing out at Republicans in Congress and members of his own administration for not joining him in the fight.""The current Congress ends in six days," Politico notes, and Trump leaves office in three weeks. House Democrats and Senate Republicans immediately suggested or stated that Congress will ignore Trump's demands.Trump said he will hold up the foreign aid funds, passed at levels he had already approved in his budget and in many instances requested, using the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, The Wall Street Journal reports. But he can only freeze the funds for 45 days, at which point President-elect Joe Biden will be in the White House.More stories from theweek.com Republicans sue Mike Pence in 'desperate' last-ditch effort to overturn election Schumer reportedly abandons fundraising efforts in Georgia's Senate runoffs 2021 might just be incredible
Some 1,000 girls from religious minorities in Pakistan are forced to convert to Islam each year, according to reporting by the AP.
WASHINGTON -- It was a Saturday in the spring of 2017, and a ninth grade student in Pennsylvania was having a bad day. She had just learned that she had failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad and would remain on junior varsity.The student expressed her frustration on social media, sending a message on Snapchat to about 250 friends. The message included an image of the student and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with text expressing a similar sentiment. Using a curse word four times, the student expressed her dissatisfaction with "school," "softball," "cheer" and "everything."Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesThough Snapchat messages are ephemeral by design, another student took a screenshot of this one and showed it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended the student from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to "avoid chaos" and maintain a "teamlike environment."The student sued the school district, winning a sweeping victory in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia. The court said the First Amendment did not allow public schools to punish students for speech outside school grounds.Next month, at its first private conference after the holiday break, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the case, Mahanoy Area School District v. BL, No. 20-255. The 3rd Circuit's ruling is in tension with decisions from several other courts, and such splits often invite Supreme Court review.In urging the justices to hear the case, the school district said administrators around the nation needed a definitive ruling from the Supreme Court on their power to discipline students for what they say away from school."The question presented recurs constantly and has become even more urgent as COVID-19 has forced schools to operate online," a brief for the school district said. "Only this court can resolve this threshold First Amendment question bedeviling the nation's nearly 100,000 public schools."Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale and author of "The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court and the Battle for the American Mind," agreed with the school district, to a point."It is difficult to exaggerate the stakes of this constitutional question," he said. But he added that schools had no business telling students what they could say when they were not in school."In the modern era, a tremendous percentage of minors' speech occurs off campus but online," he said. "Judicial decisions that permit schools to regulate off-campus speech that criticizes public schools are antithetical to the First Amendment. Such decisions empower schools to reach into any student's home and declare critical statements verboten, something that should deeply alarm all Americans."The key precedent is from a different era. In 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court allowed students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War but said disruptive speech, at least on school grounds, could be punished.Making distinctions between what students say on campus and off was easier in 1969, before the rise of social media. These days, most courts have allowed public schools to discipline students for social media posts so long as they are linked to school activities and threaten to disrupt them.A divided three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit took a different approach, announcing that a categorical rule would seem to limit the ability of public schools to address many kinds of disturbing speech by students on social media, including racist threats and cyberbullying.In a concurring opinion, Judge Thomas L. Ambro wrote that he would have ruled for the student on narrower grounds. It would have been enough, he said, to say that her speech was protected by the First Amendment because it did not disrupt school activities. The majority was wrong, he said, to protect all off-campus speech.In a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the school district's appeal, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association said the line the 3rd Circuit had drawn was too crude."Whether a disruptive or harmful tweet is sent from the school cafeteria or after the student has crossed the street on her walk home, it has the same impact," the brief said. "The 3rd Circuit's formalistic rule renders schools powerless whenever a hateful message is launched from off campus."The student, represented by lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Supreme Court that the First Amendment protected her "colorful expression of frustration, made in an ephemeral Snapchat on her personal social media, on a weekend, off campus, containing no threat or harassment or mention of her school, and that did not cause or threaten any disruption of her school."The brief focused on that last point, and it did not spend much time defending the 3rd Circuit's broader approach.The Supreme Court has a reputation for being protective of First Amendment rights. Chief Justice John Roberts, in an appearance at a law school last year, described himself as "probably the most aggressive defender of the First Amendment on the court now."But the court has been methodically cutting back on students' First Amendment rights since the Tinker decision in 1969. And in the court's last major decision on students' free speech, in 2007, Roberts wrote the majority opinion, siding with a principal who had suspended a student for displaying a banner that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."Driver said that suggested a blind spot."There is at least one major area where Chief Justice Roberts' defense of the First Amendment is notably lax: student speech," he said. "I fervently hope that Roberts will regain his fondness for the First Amendment when the court finally resolves this urgent question."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
The Serum Institute of India, the local maker of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, said on Monday it expected the British and Indian governments to approve shots for emergency use within a few days. "You will be hearing some good news from the UK very soon," Serum's Chief Executive Adar Poonawalla told reporters, adding that approval from the Indian regulator would likely follow shortly. The company has already made 40 million to 50 million doses of the vaccine and will be able to ramp up capacity to around 100 million a month by March when a new facility comes online, Poonawalla said.
The White House will reportedly spend $44,000 on carpet cleaning ahead of Joe Biden's inauguration as part of a deep-clean of the premises amid ongoing coronavirus fears. While it is customary for the White House to receive a thorough clean on Inauguration Day, when one president departs and a new commander-in-chief is installed, this January's turnover is expected to include a much more extensive cleaning process. According to federal financial documents seen by website TMZ, more than $44,000 (£32,700) will also be spent on "Inauguration Carpet Cleaning". It is unclear how many rooms will have fresh carpeting, but the 55,000 square foot mansion boasts 132 rooms including 16 bedrooms and 35 bathrooms. The General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that handles the White House cleaning, was not immediately available to comment on the figure.
Russia's prison service on Monday gave Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny a last minute ultimatum: Fly back from Germany at once and report at a Moscow office early on Tuesday morning, or be jailed if you return after that deadline. Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin's leading critics, was airlifted to Germany for treatment in August after collapsing on a plane in what Germany and other Western nations say was an attempt to murder him with a Novichok nerve agent.