Police in Karbala said Wednesday that 31 Iraqi policemen have been kidnapped in western Iraq while returning from training in Jordan.
A Karbala police spokesman who spoke under condition of anonymity said that the police officers were ambushed Sunday in the town of Rutba near the Jordanian border.
"There was an attack on a hotel occupied by policemen coming back from training in Jordan," he said.
The spokesman cited a Karbala policeman who returned from Rutba as saying that an armed group had kidnapped the policemen, many of whom were from Diyala province.
The police officer told him that 20 armed men stormed the hotel rooms where the police were staying, covering the captives' heads with black bags
The 20-year-old college student who accused Ben Roethlisberger of assaulting her last month told Milledgeville, Ga., police the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback followed her into a nightclub bathroom, cornered her and had sex with her after she told him "no" more than once.
Hundreds of pages of police documents regarding the case were released Thursday, three days after prosecutors said no charges would be filed against Roethlisberger, who has denied the accusations.
In her statement, the accuser said Roethlisberger encouraged her and her friends to have numerous alcoholic drinks before she was escorted by one of Roethlisberger's bodyguards -- identified by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as Coraopolis, Pa., police officer Anthony Barravecchio -- into a hallway, where Roethlisberger later exposed himself to her.
"I told him it wasn't OK, no, we don't need to do this, and I proceeded to get up and try to leave," she said in her statement. "I went to the first door I saw, which happened to be a bathroom."
But Roethlisberger followed her in and shut the door, she said.
"I still said no, this is not OK, and he then had sex with me," she wrote. "He said it was OK. He then left without saying anything."
Two of the accuser's friends said they saw her being led into the hallway and also saw Roethlisberger follow. Ann Marie Lubatti said she told one of Roethlisberger's two bodyguards, "This isn't right. My friend is back there with Ben. She needs to come back right now."
Lubatti said the bodyguard -- identified by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as Ed Joyner, a Pennsylvania state trooper -- would not look her in the eye and said he didn't know what she was talking about.
I'm sorry, but I have to keep pushing this story because if not, another woman's rights gets thrown under the bus. If these statements are true then Big Ben should be in jail. The young woman refused to press charges because it's a very tough experience to go through.
The woman's lawyer, David Walbert, said in a letter to the US courts that his client was not recanting her accusation. But the letter also stated she did not want to press the issue because it would be "a very intrusive personal experience.
And according to the Georgia DA there isn't enough physical evidence to indict him.
On top of everything else that went on, the police officer on the scene who took Ben's statement resigned from the job because he acted like a petulant--fan adoring asshole instead of a policeman. And I do hold the police in high regard.
Blash reportedly told an off-duty police officer who was a member of Roethlisberger's entourage that the victim was "drunk off her ass" and lied about the alleged assault.
"We have a problem," Blash reportedly said. "This drunken b****, drunk off her ass, is accusing Ben of rape. This pisses me off. Women can do this. It's bull**** but we've got to do this, we've got to do a report. This is BS. She's making s*** up."
TMZ, meanwhile, is reporting that Blash, an eight-year veteran of the department, posed for photos with Roethlisberger outside Capital City before the alleged attack took place.
According to the documents, one of the woman’s sorority sisters told investigators that her friend "was dragged by a bodyguard to the back room in Capital (City, a local nightclub). She was extremely intoxicated and not aware of what was happening."
Nicole Biancofiore told police she asked the owner of the Capital City Club to "unlock the door but he told me that ‘Ben was not going to do anything to ruin his reputation for the Steelers.' " The accuser, who was wearing a sexually explicit T-shirt, then "came out of the back room and told [another friend] that he had sex with her without her consent," Biancotiore said.
I'll repeat what I said in an earlier post. Just because pretty young women like to hang out and party with famous people is not an open invite from that girl to have sex with her. He's a six foot five inch man and that's intimidating for anyone. It looks like he'll skate on this one because the DA doesn't have enough evidence to prosecute if all these statements are accurate, but the league and the Rooney's should suspend him immediately from the Steelers.
On the roundtable discussion via ABC's THIS WEEK, the last few minutes were dedicated to the Gates/Crowley Beer Summit story. If you watched most of the news shows on this issue, they told us that that President Obama was the big loser because more people sided with the police officer. However, Gerald Seib from the Wall Street Journal made the most honest statement about the incident and used the WSJ poll to do so. Seib said what the poll really revealed was the people who are predisposed to have racist tendencies voted against President Obama.
Seib: I don't know whether this opened up any new racial rifts or just showed that they're pretty much the same way they've always been. To go back to our poll again, George, if you look at the question we asked about who's more at fault, the professor or the cop. The people who thought the professor was more at fault tended to be older people, not younger people -- they tended to be people from the South, they tended to be more Republicans than Democrats. A lot of the same divides that you would expect to find ten years ago.
Conservatives had hoped that the Gates/Crowley story would open new wounds for Democrats on the race issue, but all it did was tell us that nothing has changed.
The same people who voted against Obama are the same ones who backed the cop. Wow, what a shocker. You can draw your own, unbiased conclusions on that one. It does help to look at the demographic breakdown of a question that has racial overtones, wouldn't you think? Well, it's the media, so that wasn't the case.
A St. Paul police officer who was dragging an alleged protester down the street was jumped from behind by what I'm assuming is another protester. The officer quickly sprays the surrounding onlookers who are not involved in the incident and is forced to retreat and loses both men in the process. The angle of the video doesn't show what the alleged protester had done to prompt the officer to drag him down the street.
Note: In posting this video I am not advocating attacks on police, or violence of any kind. But as I heard someone say yesterday, the Denver police prepared for protests, the St. Paul police prepared for the Apocalypse. Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher have been documenting the searches and seizures on peace groups. And the Minnesota Independent documents a 17 year old peace protester and community organizer who was beaten and pepper sprayed by the St. Paul police.
June 7 (Bloomberg) -- Taser International Inc., the largest stun-gun maker, lost a $6.2 million jury verdict over the death of a California man who died after police shot him multiple times with the weapon. The defeat is the first for Taser in a product- liability claim.
A San Jose, California, jury yesterday said Taser had failed to warn police in Salinas, California, that prolonged exposure to electric shock from the device could cause a risk of cardiac arrest. The jury awarded $1 million in compensatory damages and $5.2 million in punitive damages to the estate of Robert Heston, 40, and his parents. The jury cleared the police officers of any liability.
His parents sued Taser, alleging failure to warn of the dangers of the weapon, and Salinas police officers, claiming excessive force. The jury ``exonerated the police because they said the police didn't know repeated exposures could kill someone,'' Burton said. Read on...
I understand that law enforcement officials have difficult jobs and often find themselves in life or death situations. There are times where the use of these alternative weapons can save lives, but it seems, as in this case, as withothers, if improperly used or in the wrong circumstances, they are deadly. Amnesty International has laid out some recommendations for the use of tasers, which I quite agree with; law enforcement agencies should treat them as deadly weapons:
Amnesty International calls on all governments and law enforcement agencies to either cease using TASERs and similar devices pending the results of thorough, independent studies, or restrict their use to situations where officers would otherwise be justified in resorting to deadly force where no lesser alternatives are available. Read on...
Hope Steffey's night started with a call to police for help. It ended with her face down, naked, and sobbing on a jail cell floor. Now, the sheriff's deputies from Stark County, Ohio who allegedly used excessive force during a strip search 15 months ago face a federal lawsuit, and recently released video won’t help their case.
Steffey's ordeal with the Stark County sheriff's deputies began after her cousin called 9-1-1 claiming Steffey had been assaulted by another one of their cousins. When a Stark County police officer arrived, he asked to see Steffey's driver's license. But instead of handing over her own ID, she mistakenly turned over her dead sister's license, which she contends she keeps in her wallet as a memento. That's when the situation became complicated. Read on...
Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus and peace activist, announced today that the D.C. Superior Court dismissed charges against him of assaulting a Capitol Police officer while in line to attend a hearing in the House of Representatives. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) represents Rev. Yearwood in his case.
Just when you think they can't be more absurd...don't get me wrong, Katie is hardly capable of the "in the field" coverage that CBS used to be known for, but this angle is just ridiculous.
As ThinkProgress reported today, Fox News attacked CBS rival and single mother Katie Couric for her upcoming trip to Iraq. But while Neil Cavuto, John Gibson and the gang at Fox grew hysterical about Couric, they remained silent about 26 year old Michelle Ring and other single mothers fighting for the United States in Iraq.
The issue for Fox, of course, is that anyone else's coverage of Iraq inevitably brings the facts of Bush's Baghdad fiasco directly to American television screens. But in a new low even for Fox, Couric (whose husband passed away from colon cancer in 1998) was accused of placing her children at risk all in the name of ratings. As guest Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for American put it:
"She's saying my ratings are more important than my children. That's the bottom line."
If only Fox News would focus such concern on all of the American single mothers who are fighting - and dying - for us in Iraq. That would include women like Michelle Ring of the 92nd Military Police Battalion based in Fort Benning, Georgia. Ring, who joined the Army in 2005, recently reenlisted with the hope of becoming a military police officer. Ring was killed by mortar fire on July 5th while on guard duty.
Sergeant: "You are sitting here lying to a police officer." Do you pick up stray pieces of toilet paper from the floors of public restrooms? Was your palm down or up? I could tell it was your left hand...
Craig: "I sit down, um, to go to the bathroom and ah, you said our feet bumped. I believe they did, ah, because I reached down and scooted over and um, the next thing I knew, under the bathroom divider comes a card that says Police. Now, um, (sigh) that's about as far as I can take it, I don't know of anything else. Ah, your foot came toward mine, mine came towards yours, was that natural? I don't know. Did we bump? Yes. I think we did. You said so. I don't disagree with that."
Sergeant: "Okay. I don't want to get into a pissing match here."
Seems that Larry doesn't know what hand his gold ring is on...Sadly, No! has more...
In a political and judicial climate where secretiveness and obfuscation seem to be the order of the day, it's nice to see a score for sunshine and openness.
The salaries of government employees in California, including police officers, are a public record and must be available upon request to "ensure transparency," the state Supreme Court ruled in a decision released Monday.
"Openness in government is essential to the functioning of a democracy," Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in a 30-page opinion, ending a lawsuit the Contra Costa Times filed more than three years ago against the city of Oakland.
Justices found that government employees should not have an expectation of privacy about their gross salaries even if disclosure of the information "may cause discomfort or embarrassment."
The justices wrote that police salaries must also be made public except in narrow circumstances "where an officer's anonymity is essential to his or her safety," the decision states. The justices affirmed that police cannot use broad claims of officer safety to make blanket denials of salary information.
The ruling overturns a 2003 appellate court decision involving five cities in San Mateo County where employee unions blocked the release of salaries to the Palo Alto Daily News.
"Monday's court ruling put Priceless in its rightful place. It's a great win for the First Amendment," Keane said.
