[AutoBlog] Florida man is at it again, this time going one-on-one with a tow truck to prevent his Ford Super Duty from being repossessed. The video above speaks for itself (including some mild swearing), leaving both the Super Duty and the hauler that was towing it away substantially worse for wear. The incident took place this month in Homestead, Florida, and resulted in the arrest of Yohanys Lopez, the F-250's driver.
From what we can piece together from the Orlando Sentinel and Carscoops, Lopez was behind on payments on the F-250. He saw the truck pulling away and ran to catch up in order to retrieve a few personal items. The tow truck driver saw Lopez enter the F-250, so he parked his F-450 and approached Lopez. He also began filming the incident on his phone. Lopez fired up his truck and made an unsuccessful attempt to free it from the tow truck. As the rear wheels were already in the air, it was never going to end well.
If you notice, the F-450 never really fights back as there isn't anyone behind the wheel. The F-250 is in four-wheel drive, so it does have a bit of pull from the front end. There are some gnarly snapping and grinding sounds as the F-250 struggles to free itself. The rear end of the truck is a hot mess by the end of the footage. The truck made it to the ground but couldn't break free from the safety chains.
Police arrested Lopez soon after the video ended. He's facing grand theft and criminal mischief charges.
[People] Two weeks after being reported missing, the body of a popular big wave surfer was found in Mexico.
Adam Francis D’Esposito, also known as Biff, was discovered by Mexican officials near Rosarito, just over the U.S. border near San Diego, earlier this month but family members only learned of his death Wednesday, according to Fox 5 San Diego.
The local outlet also reported a coroner determined the 39-year-old’s cause of death was drowning. How exactly the accomplished water sportsman drowned remains unclear.
D’Esposito’s sister Briana D’Esposito confirmed the news on Facebook writing, "It is with great sadness and the deepest sorrow that we have confirmed the death of my brother, Adam Francis Kennedy D’Esposito also known as ’Biff.'"
"The details of my brother’s death are still being sorted out, we kindly ask for your respect during this confusing time. Our hearts are heavy as we come to terms with the fact that he is no longer with us," Briana continued.
"He was a very charismatic person with a big heart, passionate personality and a deep love for surfing."
"He had a huge heart for his young daughter and enjoyed spending so much time with her in his last few months. The impact that he had on so many was incredibly evident to my family through your support, love and efforts to help us during this highly stressful & worrisome time."
[Boston Herald] Former state Sen. Brian Joyce, facing a federal trial on charges he took bribes and kickbacks while in office, was found dead in his Westport home yesterday afternoon, officials said.
Gregg Miliote, a spokesman for the Bristol District Attorney’s Office said Joyce was found by his wife and no foul play is suspected.
The office of the chief medical examiner took custody of the body and an autopsy will be conducted in the coming days. The investigation is active and ongoing, Miliote said.
Officials reported that Joyce was involved in a car crash on Wednesday in Westport, but it is not related to his death.
Joyce, a Milton Democrat who served for nine terms, was awaiting a trial on federal corruption charges. He was arrested by federal authorities last year on 113 charges including racketeering, extortion, wire fraud and money laundering.
The 104-page, December 2017 indictment listed additional charges including mail fraud, embezzlement and conspiracy to impede and impair the functions of the IRS. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges, was ordered released on a $250,000 bond and was forced to surrender his passport.
Joyce allegedly used his state Senate office to take bribes and kickbacks as well. The kickbacks ranged from pounds of free coffee to a car. In all, the feds say it totaled about $1 million.
Joyce, 56, was first elected to the Senate in 1998 and announced in 2016, while under federal investigation on corruption charges, that he would not run for re-election.
Senate President Karen Spilka tweeted her condolences yesterday saying, "As authorities handle the appropriate investigations, my thoughts are with his family." The Massachusetts Democratic Party also released a statement, saying, "During this difficult time, our thoughts are with Senator Joyce’s family and friends."
Joyce was a graduate of Boston College and Suffolk University Law School. He and his wife, Mary, had five children.
... or there's a lot of people disguised as empty seats!
[American Mirror] - The revenues for Fahrenheit 11/9 are dropping faster than filet mignon down Michael Moore’s gullet.
A review of numbers published by Box Office Mojo shows the revenues from Saturday’s peak ‐ the second day of the film’s release ‐ plunged 80 percent just four days later.
On September 22, Fahrenheit 11/9 brought in $1,187,602, according to the movie tracking site.
On Wednesday, September 26, it grossed only $240,718.
One of the handful of people who saw the anti-Trump screed that day posted a sad picture on Twitter of all the empty seats in his theater.
[Outside Magazine - 2016 Article] Team Rubicon began in 2010 with a unique dual mission: providing disaster relief and giving struggling American veterans a vital sense of purpose. The program has a reputation for ignoring best practices and obliterating red tape, and it has already disrupted the aid industry. Now founder Jake Wood wants to take on the Red Cross.
Jake Wood founded Team Rubicon a year after returning from Afghanistan, where he served as a Marine sniper. It was January 12, 2010. Wood, then 26, was in boxers on his couch in Burbank, California, when, 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a previously unmapped fault line ruptured. The resulting 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed at least 160,000 people and displaced one million more. By week’s end, Wood was in the disaster zone, helping to splint the compound fracture of a 14-year-old girl and curing his post-deployment boredom with the comfort of chaos.
Wood didn’t go to Haiti alone. He spent the first four days after the quake assembling a team of eight volunteers, including two doctors, Team Rubicon cofounder William McNulty, a former intelligence contractor in Iraq, and Mark Hayward, a retired Army Special Forces medic. While Wood hustled in Burbank, McNulty, a compulsive and gifted organizer who lived in Washington, D.C., got permission from a contact at the Haitian embassy for the loose-knit team to transport medical narcotics and perform what amounted to a special-ops aid mission. McNulty, then 32, also used his connections as a Jesuit to set up a base of operations at a seminary in the disaster zone.
#3
I suppose every American born charity has an effective life span. The Red Cross hit its high point years ago. CARE is now an international operation and basically ignores its American birth. Catholic Relief is not what it was, and is now supports illegal immigration to fill the pews. Perhaps there are just too damned many charities fighting for a limited buck.
#4
Back in the day, before interwebs and smart phones, it was necessary to have that centralized planning and HQ. Nowdays, not so much. Groups of people can move at once, separately but stay in touch and coordinate their actions without an HQ.
[BBC] A passenger aircraft has come down in a lagoon off Chuuk International Airport in Micronesia after it overshot the runway, say airport officials.
Images circulating online showed the Air Niugini plane, from Papua New Guinea, sitting in shallow water just off the coast.
None of the 35 passengers and 12 crew onboard flight ANG73 suffered serious injuries.
The cause of the crash is unclear, but investigations are due to begin soon.
"The plane crashed in the lagoon, about 160 yards away from the runway," Chuuk airport manager Jimmy Emilio told the BBC.
"Right now we don't really know what happened. Investigations will start earliest tomorrow, but [for now], operations are starting again as usual in the airport."
Mr Emilio said all those onboard the Boeing 737-800 aircraft were taken to hospital for checks, saying he believed some suffered from "minor injuries".
The aircraft was flying from the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, stopping at Micronesia's Weno island on the way.
A powerful 7.5 magnitude earthquake shook Indonesia on Friday, hours after several tremblors struck the country, officials said.
The most intense quake struck the central Sulawesi region at around 6 p.m. and was centered at a depth of 6 miles about 35 miles northeast of Donggala, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The quake briefly triggered a tsunami warning that was later lifted.
It wasn’t immediately clear if there were any deaths as a result of the quake, but an official with Akris – the local disaster agency – told the Associated Press, “many houses have collapsed.”

“It happened while we still have difficulties in collecting data from nine villages affected by the first quake,” the official said. “People ran out in panic.”
Sutopo Purow Nugroho, a National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman, said communications with the earthquake-stricken region were disrupted.
“Our early estimation, based on experience, is that it caused widespread damage, beginning from Palu northward to Donggala,” he told MetroTV.
Earlier Friday, Indonesia was struck by multiple earthquakes. At least one person was killed and dozens of homes were damaged.
A 'death comet' will be zipping passed earth just after Halloween this year. The sketch is creepy.
The asteroid with a skull-like face will make its second trip near earth in three years after flying a worrisome 302,000 miles from our planet on October 31, 2015.
This year, the comet will be a much more comfortable 24 million miles away on November 11, Mother Nature Network reported. We're doomed!
The comet, officially recognized as 2015 TB145, has a few nicknames including 'Halloween asteroid', 'death comet' and 'The Great Pumpkin' by NASA. The 2000-foot-wide rock gets the name 'death comet' not only because of its human skull face, but because it's believed to have been long-dead. Alas, poor Orik. I barely knew you.
Numerous passes around the sun likely stripped the comet of its volatiles, according to Mother Nature Network. Volatiles are things that go BOOM.
'We found that the object reflects about 6 percent of the light it receives from the sun,' said Vishnu Reddy, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona said in 2015. 'That is similar to fresh asphalt, and while here on Earth we think that is pretty dark, it is brighter than a typical comet which reflects only 3 to 5 percent of the light. That suggests it could be cometary in origin ‐ but as there is no coma evident, the conclusion is it is a dead comet,' Reddy said. It's dead, Jim.
The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia captured the asteroid in the early morning hours of Halloween 2015 during a different period in its rotation.
The 2015 flyby was the closest the eerie comet has come to earth.
In this lifetime, the comet's next closest visit will occur on November 1, 2088, at an even more comfortable distance of just over 5 million miles from earth.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
09/28/2018 08:05 ||
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We're doomed by the death star? Good. For awhile, I thought we were going to be doomed by the Senate.
[IsraelTimes] Zeinoun al-Maqari died a day before he was scheduled to speak to prosecution about St. Macarius monastery leader killed amid power struggle
An autopsy on a Coptic Orthodox monk who had until recently belonged to a monastery northwest of Cairo whose abbot was killed in July showed clear signs of poisoning, Egyptian security and medical officials said on Thursday.
They said the autopsy was performed late Wednesday, hours after the monk was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital at Assiut, the closest city to the al-Muharraq monastery where the monk has lived since last month. He was buried Wednesday night in St. Macarius monastery, where he joined as a novice more than a decade ago and the scene of the killing of the abbot, Bishop Epiphanius.
Zeinoun al-Maqari died a day before he was scheduled to testify for the prosecution in the trial of two monks ‐ one of whom has been defrocked ‐ charged with the killing of the abbot.
Hearings were adjourned until October 27.
Zeinoun was among six monks from St. Macarius who were banished to different monasteries across the country as part of disciplinary action taken by the church following the death of Epiphanius. The officials said questioning of witnesses and monks following his death showed that Zeinoun might have been an accomplice in the killing, but did not explain why he has not been placed in durance vile Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up! The officials said the autopsy showed signs of an agricultural insecticide commonly used in southern Egypt, where al-Muharraq monastery is located. The insecticide is sold in tablets, which are diluted in water before it is manually sprayed on crops.
Zeinoun was dying when monks went to his cell early Wednesday to fetch him for the traditional pre-dawn prayers. He was rushed to a hospital but died before he arrived there, they said. He is believed to have been in his early 40s, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media.
Epiphanius’ killing has shaken Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, one of the oldest in the world and the one that gave monasticism to the faith. The church’s monastic desert traditions had largely vanished before being revived over the past century. Its monks, mostly university graduates, are now the face of the church and that is why, together with the fact that the main suspects are monks, the killing took on added significance.
It also exposed a side of the church that few in Egypt ‐ Moslem or Christian ‐ knew existed, including the growing power and independence of monks in remote monasteries who appear to be at odds with Tawadros II, the church’s spiritual leader, and the top holy manal leadership.
Egypt’s Christians, about 10 percent of the country’s 100 million people, have long complained of discrimination, such as rigid regulations on building new churches or restoring existing ones. They also complain they are denied some jobs, like in security and intelligence agencies, and that their homes and businesses are frequently targeted by Moslem mobs in rural regions.
[BBC] Kelly Lyee Chigumbura was 17 years old when, she says, she was raped near her family’s home in Zimbabwe’s Lower Zambezi Valley. After realising she was pregnant with her rapist’s child, Chigumbura dropped out of school and put aside her dream of becoming a nurse. "My goals had been shattered," she says. "It was like I couldn’t do anything more with my life."
Chigumbura was jobless, with no skills and no prospects. Cultural norms among the Shona dictate that, should a mother lack the resources to take care of her child, it’s given to the father’s parents. So against Chigumbura’s wishes, the rapist’s mother took the baby ‐ a little girl Chigumbura named Yearn Cleopatra ‐ to raise as her own. Chigumbura was not even permitted to visit her daughter. When she came by, the grandmother would spin stories to shoo her away, telling her that her baby was in Mozambique, for example.
"Everything was misery," Chigumbura says with a sigh.
It went on like this for three years, until one day, when Chigumbura was 20, the village head pulled her aside. An Australian named Damien Mander was looking for female recruits to become wildlife rangers, and the village head thought Chigumbura was an excellent candidate. If selected, she would be responsible for patrolling and protecting the nearby Phundundu Wildlife Park: a 115 square mile former trophy hunting area that is part of a larger ecosystem home to some 11,000 elephants.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir demanded an apology from Canada on Wednesday, denouncing an "outrageous" tweet by Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland directed at the kingdom last month, and accusing them of treating the kingdom like "a banana republic."
"What are we? A banana republic? Would any country accept this?" al-Jubeir said at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "You owe us an apology. It is very easy to fix -- apologize, say you made a mistake."
Jubeir’s comments cast doubt over rumors that both countries would reach a quick resolution. Freeland had mentioned that she intended to speak to Jubeir on the sidelines of the UN meetings this week.
However, some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them... Jubeir said that Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... ’s stance in the dispute remains the same, and that Canada did not change its stance either.
"We did not do this, you did. Fix it. You owe us an apology. Apologize, say you made a mistake," he said. "In Canada we became a political football. Find another ball to play with, not Saudi Arabia."
Jubeir also criticized Canada for making such demands, adding that many countries like the US, UK and Germany have criticized Saudi Arabia over similar issues before, but never made demands.
"It is outrageous from our perspective that a country will sit there and lecture us, and make demands. ’We demand the immediate release’.. Really? We demand the immediate independence of Quebec and the equal granting of rights to Canadian Indians," Jubeir said.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/28/2018 00:00 ||
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[Al Jazeera] Guatemalan judges have unanimously ruled that the country's military carried out genocide and crimes against humanity, but in a 2-1 decision acquitted former intelligence chief Jose Mauricio Rodriguez of all charges.
According to the decision, handed down late on Wednesday, there was no evidence Rodriguez was involved in or ordered others to take part in the genocide during the country's decades-long armed conflict.
Over the course of the war, which began in 1960 and formally ended in 1996, more than 200,000 people were killed and another 43,000 were forcibly disappeared. More than 80 percent of the victims were indigenous Maya people. The worst of the atrocities took place in the Maya Ixil region, 225km northwest of Guatemala City.
"Inhuman acts were committed against the civilian population," said tribunal president Maria Eugenia Castellanos.
"We are moved," she added, referring to the countless survivors' testimonies of military forces carrying out killings, massacres, rape, theft of children, bombing, displacement and forced starvation.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/28/2018 00:00 ||
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The first Peace Corps volunteers to Guatemala who arrived in early nineteen seventies were aware of the burgeoning land problem in lowland Guatemala, the home of the "Ladino". They worried that sooner or later they would invade the Indian highlands and would do so with the support of the military. Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened, and the tragedy has yet to be played out in full.
[Al Jazeera] India's top court has ruled that adultery is no longer a crime, declaring the colonial-era law that punished the offence unconstitutional and discriminatory.
The court ruled unanimously on Thursday that Section 497, a 158-year-old law, "perpetuates the subordinate status of women, denies dignity and sexual autonomy, and is based on gender stereotypes".
The law criminalised consensual sexual relations between a man and a married woman without the consent of her husband.
Under the law, a man convicted could have faced up to five years in prison and women could neither file a complaint nor be held liable for adultery.
Section 497 has been criticised by rights groups for depriving women of dignity and individual choice, and treating them as the property of men.
Posted by: Fred ||
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Desperate attempt to keep out the sex robot brothels.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[People] Two weeks after being reported missing, the body of a popular big wave surfer was found in Mexico.
[BBC] A passenger aircraft has come down in a lagoon off Chuuk International Airport in Micronesia after it overshot the runway, say airport officials.
[IsraelTimes] Zeinoun al-Maqari died a day before he was scheduled to speak to prosecution about St. 
[BBC] Kelly Lyee Chigumbura was 17 years old when, she says, she was raped near her family’s home in Zimbabwe’s Lower Zambezi Valley. After realising she was pregnant with her rapist’s child, Chigumbura dropped out of school and put aside her dream of becoming a nurse. "My goals had been shattered," she says. "It was like I couldn’t do anything more with my life."
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir demanded an apology from Canada on Wednesday, denouncing an "outrageous" tweet by Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland directed at the kingdom last month, and accusing them of treating the kingdom like "a banana republic."
[Al Jazeera] Guatemalan judges have unanimously ruled that the country's military carried out genocide and crimes against humanity, but in a 2-1 decision acquitted former intelligence chief Jose Mauricio Rodriguez of all charges. 
[Al Jazeera] India's top court has ruled that adultery is no longer a crime, declaring the colonial-era law that punished the offence unconstitutional and discriminatory.
(Yahoo) What is a rocket doing in the Bay Area? A mysterious missile has been spotted in Alameda.
