Fogbow

Isn't insurance usually for accidents?

Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 12:31 am

Isn't insurance usually for accidents?

Hmm. You have a point. Maybe it went something like this:
The couple is changing places in the car.

She: Oops, I slipped and landed on the gear shift knob!

He: Oh, baby, that’s not the gear shift knob!

(Shall I show myself out?)

Former judges who sent kids to jail for kickbacks must pay more than $200 million

August 18, 20227:48 AM ET
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Two former Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are "the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions."

In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.

Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to put up a defense or even say goodbye to their families.

"Ciavarella and Conahan abandoned their oath and breached the public trust," Conner wrote Tuesday in his explanation of the judgment. "Their cruel and despicable actions victimized a vulnerable population of young people, many of whom were suffering from emotional issues and mental health concerns."




https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/11181080 ... s-for-cash

Here’s Why The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz Is Suing The FBI Over The Agency’s File On The Band

Appeals court rules two Trump administration Gulf lease sales unlawful

BY ZACK BUDRYK -
08/30/22 2:10 PM ET

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled two Trump-era Interior Department oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico were unlawful.

In the ruling, Judge Gregory C. Katsas of the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals found the department in 2018 leased more than 150 million acres for oil exploration without properly analyzing the risk under the National Environmental Policy Act. The lease sales, 250 and 251, were among 11 proposed by the department in its 2017 five-year plan.

In a lawsuit following the sales, a coalition of environmental groups argued the Trump administration’s evaluation had erroneously presumed adequate endorsement of safety and environmental procedures in the Gulf. A D.C. court sided with the Interior Department on April 20, prompting an appeal by the plaintiffs.




https://thehill.com/policy/3621252-appe ... -unlawful/

Wells Fargo ordered to pay $22 million for firing executive who alleged financial misconduct

The Labor Department ordered Wells Fargo to pay more than $22 million after ruling that the company retaliated against an executive who alleged financial misconduct.

According to a Thursday release, the department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that Wells Fargo violated whistleblower protection laws for "improperly terminating" an unnamed senior manager.

The Chicago area-based manager, who worked in commercial banking at Wells Fargo, was fired after voicing repeated concerns about what they believed to be violations of financial law – including allegations of wire fraud, price fixing and being instructed to falsify customer information, the Labor Department said.

"Even though the manager believed the conduct was illegal based on company-required training, they were terminated in 2019," the Labor Department wrote – adding that Wells Fargo later claimed the executive was fired "as part of a restructuring process."

Investigators later found that this termination "was not consistent" with that of other managers removed at the time, the Labor Department said. Alleging retaliation and violation of whistleblower protections under federal the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the executive then filed a complaint with OSHA.

‘Nirvana Baby’ Loses Child Pornography Lawsuit Against Band for Use of Naked ‘Nevermind’ Album Photo

The federal lawsuit accusing Nirvana of using “child pornography” on the cover of their groundbreaking album “Nevermind” has come to a final end with a denial. The so-called “Nirvana Baby” will not be permitted to go forward against the band or its late frontman now that a federal court has ruled against the plaintiff multiple times.

Spencer Elden, who was four months old in the disputed photo, but is now 30-years-old, was given one last chance to fix his complaint last January when a federal judge in California dismissed the lawsuit alleging that Elden had been subjected to “commercial child sexual exploitation.” Elden, who appeared as a naked baby chasing a one-dollar bill underwater on the album cover Nirvana’s iconic 1991 album “Nevermind,” called the cover photo “shocking” and “sexually seductive” and said he will continue to suffer lifelong damages from its use.

pipistrelle wrote: ↑Mon Sep 05, 2022 1:26 pm I'd never have known about the album, the cover, the depiction, or the person if it hadn't been for this lawsuit. Well done.

For the first time in US history, victim and killer identified through relative's DNA

This is a historic case. The FBI said this is the first time in the country when both the victim and the killer have been identified by forensic genealogy.

"It was overwhelming," Agent Montgomery said.

"To me, it's incredible. Because as an agent, you live with these cases," he said.

Stacey was 19 years old when she went missing.

A body was found in December of that year, but law enforcement weren’t able to identify it.

In 2005, the DNA was entered as a Jane Doe into the missing person's database.

In 2015, her murder was assigned to the cold case unit.

In March of this year, Agent Montgomery finally got to call Stacey's family and tell them she had been identified through forensic genealogy, nearly 34 years after her death.

Late last month, her killer was identified the same way.

Law enforcement identified the killer as Henry Fredrick Wise – who went by Hoss and drove a truck all over the southeast.

He also worked as a stunt driver in South Carolina.

"He was killed in a stunt accident at myrtle beach speedway in 1999 and burned to death," Montgomery said.

Wise died before he could face justice for killing Stacey. He died 23 years before Stacey was ever identified.

raison de arizona wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 2:25 pm OK, this one is a doozy. Last thing first, here is the complete ruling: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... 1.92.0.pdf

(I'm stealing quotes of texts from tweets below without directly attributing them to build the narrative, I'll link the twitter threads at the end.)
The crux of this case is whether requiring employers to provide coverage for PrEP drugs (preventing the transmission of HIV) violates the religious rights of employers under federal law (RFRA). So what happened? The judge is suggesting that the entire apparatus that governs health insurers is unlawful. This means health insurers could decline to cover a huge range of preventive care, including vaccines, cancer screenings, STI tests, pregnancy care, etc. The judge ruled that claims backed by zero evidence must be honored if religious people believe them to be true. This is a Big Problem.

Anyway, hopefully I haven't screwed up the explanation too much. Here are two twitter threads that explain it much better than I can.
https://twitter.com/chrisgeidner/status ... 6451614720
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1567536173853151232

pipistrelle wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 10:35 pm Keeping people healthy violates religious rights?

Steven Mazie @stevenmazie wrote: BREAKING: Supreme Court gives temporary win to Yeshiva University in its refusal to recognize an LGBT student organization

raison de arizona wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 2:25 pm The judge ruled that claims backed by zero evidence must be honored if religious people believe them to be true. This is a Big Problem.

raison de arizona wrote: ↑Sun Sep 11, 2022 4:22 pm Thanks for the analysis! In my mind, the base problem here is that our health insurance in the US is tied up with our employers. It shouldn’t be.

The plaintiff is seeking declaratory relief according to Rule 57 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in the sense that the plaintiff is looking for the court to issue a statement of law regarding free speech and racial profiling as it relates to The World Factbook (CIA Almanac in the public domain), "There's Something Rotten in Denmark" (by Jeremy Kuzmarvov of Tulsa Community College and uploaded in digital commons of Florida International University (FUI), and Bloodlines of Illuminati, i.e. a book by Fritz Springmeier which is also in the public domain as protected free speech as it is available for sale on Amazon.

In addition, the publication known as The World Factbook has been outsourced to a private company "doing business as" (d/b/a) Skyhorse Publishing which reminds the plaintiff of the Horsehead Nebula, Cat's Eye Nebula, Tarantula Nebula, and Crab Nebula which has a crab pulsar, i.e. a neutron star that is formed when a white dwarf star reaches its Chandrasekhar Limit of 1.4 solar masses and can no longer withstand gravity notwithstanding the electron degeneracy pressure keeping the star from collapsing. In the field of marine biology, a seahorse has been known to change its gender and the plaintiff had a seahorse screensaver on his computer in Bowie, Maryland around 2005.

Like the case of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish which ended the Lochner era of economic due process and laissez-faire economics, the plaintiff could not work very long for Win Kelly Buick Pontiac GMC due to the fact that he was being paid a "draw" or salary which was lower than the minimum wage and was only being paid according to commission without a base salary. The plaintiff could not work for the Central Payment Corporation of Larkspur and San Rafael, California for the same reason that he could not work for Win Kelly Buick Pontiac GMC, i.e. the plaintiff was considered to be an independent contractor or 1099 employee who was not paid a base salary and received no commission. Nevertheless, the plaintiff reached a settlement and/or stipulation with Central Payment Corporation on or around 2014. The Central Payment Corporation would sell Magtek Readers and other credit card processing equipment that would necessarily involve Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR).

The plaintiff mailed a letter to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Office of Public Affairs while he was working for Win Kelly Buick Pontiac GMC in Clarksville, Maryland and the plaintiff also received an email from george10@ucia.gov about a plaintiff's inquiry about the role of CIA in building the Panama Canal.

To clarify, the plaintiff had to go to the U.S. Embassy in Panama City, Panama because of the fact that he and his friend Edna Carrasco Caballero were having disagreements and Edna no longer wanted the plaintiff to stay at her apartment complex.

Furthermore, the plaintiff is trying to get a design patent or utility patent for the idea that all four forces in nature are unified at the gravitational singularity of the supermassive black hole in the region of Sagittarius A* at the active galactic nucleus (AGN/ACN) at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Earth and solar system are in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way Galaxy far from the active galactic nucleus of Sagittarius A* in which the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy in the Hubble Sequence and Galaxy Morphological Scheme which includes lenticular galaxies and elliptical galaxies in addition to spiral galaxies (not barred) like the Sombrero Galaxy.

The plaintiff argues that the sole defendant CIA committed the intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED) by racially-profiling the plaintiff as Al Queda and ISIS/ISIL without any reasonable suspicion or probable cause other than the fact that the plaintiff's middle name is "Satish" which is Hindu and not Arabic.

The plaintiff argues that the sole defendant has committed the wrongful institution of legal proceedings or malicious prosecution even though the plaintiff has never been indicted before a grand jury or by information by a U.S. attorney, district attorney, or attorney general because of the fact that "racial profiling" a black man as an Arab or Muslim is enough to commence an action for the tort of the wrongful institution of legal proceedings and/or malicious prosecution.