China warns U.S. of 'serious consequences' over Washington plaza name

China's Foreign Ministry warned the United States on Tuesday there would be "serious consequences" if a plaza in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington was named after a pro-democracy dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

By unanimous voice vote, the U.S. Senate on Friday backed a plan to name the plaza after Liu Xiaobo, jailed for 11 years in 2009 on subversion charges for organizing a petition urging an end to one-party rule.

China views Liu as a criminal.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the move ran "contrary to the basic norms of international relations" and China was resolutely opposed to it.

"If the relevant bill is passed into law it will cause serious consequences. We demand the U.S. Senate stop promoting the bill and hope the U.S. executive authorities put an end to this political farce," Hong told a daily news briefing, without elaborating.

On Sunday, the Global Times, an influential Chinese state-run tabloid, said the naming scheme was "futile".

"The U.S. has been at its wits' end in dealing with China as it is reluctant to employ military threats or economic sanctions that may backfire. The only option for Washington seems to be petty actions that disturb China," it said in an editorial.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-diplomacy-congress-china-idUSKCN0VP0SG


Keep crying, China

WATER DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY

Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

Atlanta — IN winter 1916, several hundred black families from the Selma, Ala., Cotton Belt began quietly defecting from the Jim Crow South, with its night rides and hanging trees, some confiding to The Chicago Defender in February that the “treatment doesn’t warrant staying.” It was the start of the Great Migration, a leaderless revolution that would incite six million black refugees over six decades to seek asylum within the borders of their own country.

They could not know what was in store for them or their descendants, nor the hostilities they would face wherever they went. Consider the story of two mothers whose lives bookend the migration and whose family lines would meet similar, unimaginable fates. The horrors they were fleeing would follow them in freedom and into the current day.

The first was Mamie Carthan Till, whose parents carried her from Mississippi to Illinois early in the 1920s. In Chicago, she would marry and give birth to a son, Emmett. In the summer of 1955, she would send him to visit relatives back in Mississippi. Emmett had just turned 14, had been raised in the new world and was unschooled in the “yes, sir, no, sir” ways of the Southern caste system. That August, he was kidnapped, beaten and shot to death, ostensibly for whistling at a white woman at a convenience store. His murder would become a turning point in the civil rights movement.

Around that year, another woman, Millie Lee Wylie, left the bottomlands of Sumter County, Ala., near where the migration had begun, and settled in Cleveland. There, more than half a century later, just before Thanksgiving 2014, her 12-year-old great-grandson, bundled up in the cold, was playing with a friend’s pellet gun at a park outside a recreation center. His name was Tamir Rice. A now familiar video shows a police officer shooting him seconds after arrival, and an officer tackling his sister to the ground as she ran toward her dying brother. Tamir’s became one of the most recognizable names in a metronome of unarmed black people killed by the police in the last two years, further galvanizing the Black Lives Matter movement.

Tamir Rice would become to this young century what Emmett Till was to the last. In pictures, the boys resemble each other, the same half-smiles on their full moon faces, the most widely distributed photographs of them taken from the same angle, in similar light, their clear eyes looking into the camera with the same male-child assuredness of near adolescence. They are now tragic symbols of the search for black freedom in this country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/emmett-till-and-tamir-rice-sons-of-the-great-migration.html

Cleveland Mayor Drops Ambulance Charge to Tamir Rice's Estate

Cleveland's mayor and other city officials apologized Thursday for asking for reimbursement from Tamir Rice's family for the medical services he received after he was fatally shot by a police officer.

But Tamir's family wasn't buying it, calling the incident "deeply disturbing."

The claim, filed Wednesday in probate court, sought $500 for the ambulance ride and treatment provided to Tamir, the 12-year-old boy who was shot by Cleveland police in November 2014 while in possession of a pellet gun.

Tamir's family on Wednesday slammed the city's "callousness, insensitivity and poor judgment" in sending the bill.

"I want to start off again apologizing to the Rice family if this, in fact, has added to any grief or pain that they may have," Mayor Frank Jackson said at a news conference Thursday.

City Finance Director Sharon Dumas said the city never actually billed Tamir's family for the medical services and has no intention of doing so.

She and Richard Horvath, the city's chief corporate counsel, said the claim filed Wednesday was a "routine" result of the probate process, in which Tamir's estate asked for a billing statement for services rendered to identify any potential creditors.

"Because of that process being routine, none of the managers" — including Jackson or other city leaders — "were notified of this before it was filed," Horvath said in announcing that the claim would be withdrawn.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cleveland-mayor-apologizes-drops-ambulance-charge-tamir-rice-s-estate-n516846

Former Texas prosecutor disbarred for sending innocent man to death row

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A Texas legal panel voted on Monday to disbar a former prosecutor for sending an innocent man to death row by presenting tainted testimony and making false statements that undermined the defendant's alibi.

The Board of Disciplinary Appeals appointed by the Texas Supreme Court upheld a state licensing board's decision to disbar Charles Sebesta for his conduct in convicting Anthony Graves, who spent 18 years in prison on charges of setting a fire that killed six people before being freed.

Graves, who spent 12 of those years on death row, had sought to have Sebesta disbarred.

Sebesta had convicted Robert Carter for the murders and tried to get Carter to say Graves was an accomplice. But the day before he was to testify, Carter told Sebesta he acted alone and Graves was not involved, the board said.

"Sebesta never disclosed this information to the defense," the board said.

Sebesta then presented false testimony implicating Graves, crucial in a conviction since there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, it said.

Before Graves' attorney was to present the alibi witness, Sebesta falsely stated in court that the witness was a suspect in the murders and could be indicted. The witness refused to testify and left the court, it said.

http://news.yahoo.com/former-texas-prosecutor-disbarred-sending-innocent-man-death-225026879.html?nf=1

How Julian Assange Is Destroying WikiLeaks

Hamburg, Germany — LAST week a United Nations panel ruled that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who has been living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, had been arbitrarily detained, and called for his immediate release. Though Mr. Assange says he will remain in the embassy, the ruling was hailed by his legions of supporters, who saw it as a rare instance of justice for a man they believe has been persecuted for exposing government secrets.

There’s no doubt that WikiLeaks, which Mr. Assange founded in 2006, has been a boon for global civil liberties. The problem is that the project is inseparable from the man. Mr. Assange has made little secret about his skepticism toward Western democracy and his willingness to work with autocratic governments like Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. His personal politics undermines WikiLeaks’ neutrality — and the noble cause for which WikiLeaks used to stand. What we need is a WikiLeaks without the founder of WikiLeaks.

The idea behind WikiLeaks is simple, and ingenious: an online drop box that provides maximum security for whistle-blowers in the digital age. Anyone determined to disclose corporate or government misbehavior — from tax fraud to war crimes — can be sure that the heavily protected WikiLeaks’s submission system ensures their emails and uploads cannot be traced.

The idea to unmask lies and reveal illegitimate secrets has worked well. Whistle-blowers submitted material that proved corruption of the former Kenyan president, tax-avoidance strategies employed by big European banks, and indiscriminate killings of civilians by an American attack helicopter in Iraq. News outlets, including The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times, helped Mr. Assange spread the scoops.

Yet, even back then, observers and media partners felt that Mr. Assange had more in mind than transparency, that there was an ideology behind his idea. Over time, that ideology has become increasingly apparent, through his regular public statements and his stint as a host for a Russian state-controlled TV network...

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/opinion/how-julian-assange-is-destroying-wikileaks.html?_r=0


Been pointing this stuff out for a long time now...

Is there a thread for discussion of "The Expanse"?

Because I can't find one...

And don't tell me you all aren't watching...

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, 85, dies in West Palm Beach

Source: Palm Beach Post

Astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, who was part of the Apollo 14 space crew that flew to the moon in 1971, died late Thursday in West Palm Beach, according to his family.

Mitchell, 85, lived in suburban Lake Worth and died at a local hospice at about 10 p.m. Thursday, his daughter, former West Palm Beach City Commissioner Kimberly Mitchell told The Palm Beach Post.

Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the moon. He was part of a three-man crew, with Alan Shepard Jr. and Stuart Roosa, who took part in the Apollo 14 space mission. It was the eighth manned mission in the United States Apollo program and they became the third ever to land on the moon. Mitchell was the lunar module pilot on the mission.

Apollo 14 launched just over 45 years ago, on Jan. 31, 1971. The nine-day mission ended Feb. 9 when the crew landed in the South Pacific Ocean.

Read more: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local/apollo-14-astronaut-edgar-mitchell-85-dies-in-west/nqKdg/

Never forget...

Doesn't work like that chief, and you damn well know it

And that's the exact fucking mindset which justifies them staying home... If morons could only be moved to get off their asses when a candidate really "excites" them (which I guess would be once every 6-8 years), then they have dishonored what it means to have the right to vote, and their respective constituency deserves exactly what it fucking gets...

No, gubernatorial/state house and off-year congressional races are rarely sexy, but they need voter turnout nonetheless... In case nobody noticed, this is why almost every statehouse is filled to the brim with brain-dead yokel rednecks or religious fanatics who are barely literate...

The future belongs to those who show up for it.