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Arizona Man Is Accused of Faking Own Kidnapping to Evade Work

When the police arrived, they found the man with his hands bound behind his back by a belt and a bandanna “stuffed in his mouth” in Coolidge, Ariz.

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Brandon Soules was arrested after the police say he falsely claimed that he had been abducted outside his home in Arizona. Credit...Coolidge Police Department
Johnny Diaz

By Johnny Diaz

Feb. 23, 2021Updated 2:18 p.m. ET



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When the officers arrived, they found a man, later identified as Mr. Soules, with his hands bound behind his back by a belt and a purple bandanna “stuffed in his mouth,” according to the police. A photo from the Police Department showed the man with his hands tied while lying on his side on the ground.

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The men, according to Mr. Soules, “drove him around in a vehicle before they left him in the area where he was found,” the police said. Mr. Soules was taken to a hospital, where he was evaluated and interviewed by the police. According to the department, he told investigators that he had been kidnapped because his father had a large amount of money hidden throughout the desert.

For days, detectives tried to investigate his account including by reviewing surveillance video of the area and interviewing people he mentioned. Hospital records showed that Mr. Soules had no concussion or injury to his head, a police report said, and text messages reviewed by the detectives did not show messages or phone calls that had been described.

Eventually, and after repeatedly confronting Mr. Soules with problems in his account, the detectives concluded that “his story was fabricated and no kidnapping or assault occurred,” the police said. They also determined that the account of hidden treasure was false.

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Texans Needed Food and Comfort After a Brutal Storm. As Usual, They Found It at H-E-B.

As state government flounders, has a beloved grocery store chain become “the moral center of Texas”?


By David Montgomery, Rick Rojas and Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio

Feb. 22, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

AUSTIN, Texas —

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H-E-B branded foods are seen at a distribution center set up by the San Antonio Food Bank.Credit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times

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“It’s like H-E-B is the moral center of Texas,” said Stephen Harrigan, a novelist and journalist who lives in Austin. “There seems to be in our state a lack of real leadership, a lack of real efficiency, on the political level. But on the business level, when it comes to a grocery store, all of those things are in place.”

As frustration swelled among residents trapped in their homes without power or water, some started to remark, half-jokingly, that H-E-B should just take over. The chain has become known for its logistical prowess — in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and to hurricanes, with stockpiles of water and emergency supplies ready to be deployed. “So many Texans look to H-E-B almost as a de facto arm of government,” Greg Jefferson, the business editor of The San Antonio Express-News, wrote in his column.
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Allegiances to brands are often about more than just the product; they can be a proxy for consumers to telegraph their stances on political or social issues. Yet H-E-B reflects another kind of virtue signaling, one that often supersedes race, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation: a display of Texan identity.

H-E-B falls into a class of companies that Texans instantly identify with their state in a way that transcends commerce, particularly for expatriates outside state lines. There is Whataburger, the fast food chain; Blue Bell ice cream; and Buc-ee’s supersized convenience stores. Many a Texan in New York City has spotted an orange-striped bag from Junior’s Cheesecake and thought someone stepped on the E train with a Whataburger.

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David Montgomery reported from Austin, Rick Rojas from Nashville, and Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio from San Antonio. James Dobbins contributed reporting from San Antonio.



“That’s what we’ve come to expect of H-E-B,” Professor McAlister added.

... but is there any significant aid going to Puerto Rico yet?

... for me since about a year before the last election. It got even harder after Jan 6.

A lot of here need to look onto the meanness some of us (me to my shock) have allowed to develop inside us from the ex-President* and his basket of deplorables and their disaster.

I do not want to turn into the Democratic version of them to fight them.

https://www.rawstory.com/ted-cruz-cancun-2650611169/

Ted Cruz asks Houston cops to help him get out of airport as Texans rage over Cancun trip: report

Brad Reed

February 18, 2021

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is flying home amid widespread outrage over his decision to fly to Cancun while millions of his residents are freezing amid mass power outages.

Now ABC News reporter Ben Siegel brings word that Cruz's staff reached out to the Houston Police Department to see if they could supply personnel to help the senator make his way out of Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

"Cruz's staff contacted HPD personnel at IAH on Wednesday... and requested assistance upon the Senator's arrival at the airport," Siegel reports. "HPD officers monitored his movements through the terminal."

It is unclear about what assistance Cruz needs to get out of the airport, although his trip to Cancun in the midst of a statewide crisis has outraged many Texas residents who want their elected officials to be working full time to restore power and provide relief.

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The Government Has Not Explained How These 13 People Were Selected to Die

The federal death penalty cannot be fixed. It’s time to end it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/federal-death-penalty.html

By Elizabeth Bruenig

Ms. Bruenig is an Opinion writer.

Feb. 18, 2021



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It turned out that the pause in executions would last only until the government had the will to end it. A few months into Mr. Trump’s term, his Justice Department began taking steps to cloak the identities of pharmaceutical manufacturers and testing laboratories. With their brand names hidden — and their profits protected — those companies set about compounding and testing pentobarbital, a drug commonly used to euthanize animals. By summer of 2020, the government was ready to deploy its new stock of poison.

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“Rather than permit an orderly resolution of these suits,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent issued before the execution of the last to die, Dustin Higgs, “the government consistently refused to postpone executions and sought emergency relief to proceed before courts had meaningful opportunities to determine if the executions were legal. Throughout this expedited spree of executions, this court has consistently rejected inmates’ credible claims for relief. The court has even intervened to lift stays of execution that lower courts put in place,” she added, “thereby ensuring those prisoners’ challenges would never receive a meaningful airing.”

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Random chance plays an enormous role in capital punishment, from the makeup of juries (one study found that majority female juries are much less likely to sentence defendants to death than juries with equal numbers of men and women) to the immigration status of defendants (liberals and conservatives alike are less likely to sentence U.S.-born individuals to death than authorized or undocumented immigrants.)

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Bernard Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia who has defended clients on death row, told me: “Basically we value less the life of an African-American person than we do the value of a white person, because we impose the death penalty so many times more” — four to seven times as often — “on people who are accused of killing a white person.”

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