First time I'm hearing this. Sweet zombie Jesus.

Police commissioner: Slain Baltimore detective was to testify in case of indicted officers

The following day. He was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury against corrupt cops the day after he was killed with his own weapon.

How unfortunate.

You're going to like this one:

Attorney Justin Moore said Jones “was dealing with a minor car issue after accidentally triggering his alarm and being unable to disable the security system” when police arrived. According to Moore, Jones was then “commanded to step out of his vehicle.”

When he exited his vehicle he tried to “explain the issue” and he was then “shot once in the stomach” by the unidentified Mesquite police officer, Moore said.

"Several officers then attacked Mr. Jones and attempted to perform an anal cavity search on the streets. Mr. Jones reacted to the unlawful sodomy and was consequently shot a second time in the back,” according to Moore.

Shot, sodomized, shot again, detained, isolated from legal counsel.

Mesquite Police Department. Off to the gulag with everyone involved in this shit.

One for your collection:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/11/08/another-civil-asset-forfeiture-outrage-2/

It's a short one, so no excerpts needed. The url basically speaks for itself.

A different type, but yeah, they can be found under just about every pot these days. Every somewhat covered crevice seems to harbour some, really.

I had only seen singular examples in damp corners until maybe 3 or 4 years ago when they started popping up in ever increasing numbers. Nowadays, go outside and lift any pot, you'll find 5+ of them scrambling. When I pulled up the edge of an old sheet of rolled roofing the other day, there were dozens of them.

The data of the study came out of Germany, where the effects of a change in temperature are much more moderate than in many other areas. Basically, this decline is attributed mostly due to farming, the saturation of everything with pesticides, and, generally speaking, the destruction of the ecosphere. Even worse, this is in a country with comparably extensive regulation on all these matters, unlike, say, India.

As you say, this really is no bueno.

Driving past fields of rapeseed in the late '90s meant a windshield full of bugs. We used to head into the fields wearing yellow shirts just to see who can get the densest armor of bugs. Now, I can walk past the very same fields outside the town I grew up in with less than 5 bugs on a yellow shirt.

Or how about another anecdote: when I grew up, barbecue in my (grand-)parents yard meant paying attention to all the wasps, so that you don't swallow one by accident. I haven't seen a single one over several barbecues this year. Bees and bumblebees are still around, though less plentiful, but wasps are a complete no-show. Haven't seen a hornet in two years.

One for your collection: Recordings Capture Brutal FBI Tactics to Recruit a Potential Informant

For your collection:
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/877916375209181184

Another one for your collection.

"Sheriff Sandra Hutchens claims the veteran officers were unaware they were required to testify honestly during prior court appearances for the death penalty case marred by astonishing degrees of government cheating."

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/orange-county-sheriffs-deputies-refuse-to-testify-under-oath-in-jailhouse-snitch-scandal-8139758

Here's one for your collection:
http://www.11alive.com/news/investigations/the-drug-whisperer/437061710

Nope, me neither.

Which is sort of the point. It's unheard of that all of these agencies came to the same conclusion on a specific matter. Some may take this as an indicator of how damning the evidence really is, others see this as an indicator that the "assessments" were made on hierarchical levels reserved for political appointees.

The absence of dissent supports the second point of view. No group of analysts in their right mind would create a report without also strongly pointing out contradictory facts, inconsistencies, and separating fact from interpretation. That's what Hersh is referring to. This is not an NIE, it's an opinion piece. This memo by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (wierd name) goes down the same route:

As you will have gathered by now, we strongly suspect that the evidence your intelligence chiefs have of a joint Russian-hacking-WikiLeaks-publishing operation is no better than the “intelligence” evidence in 2002-2003 – expressed then with comparable flat-fact “certitude” – of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now, an opinion piece might be sufficient if it came from credible institutions and had a moderatly important subject. But this is throwing serious accusations at a sovereign nation in times when diplomatic relations are stressed as it is. And that's not going into the credibility problem of many of these agencies, who have a very dubious track record on these issues.

Ian Welsh had a piece the other day on the CIA vs Trump, and his take on intelligence agencies is pretty close to what mine has been since I learned about the Stasi some 20 years ago:

The CIA and NSA are not the friend of any left-wing worth having: they are innately anti-democratic, anti-privacy, and anti-rights. Secret agencies are anathema to any open government. At an existential level, intelligence agencies are at best a double edged sword, and by their nature, they always wind up serving the interests of the few, against the interests of the people.

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 <<<< hoooray!
Finally some overlap. Cheers, mate.

One for your collection (nsfw/graphic!):
http://www.nbcnews.com/video/exclusive-video-moments-leading-up-to-charlotte-shooting-of-keith-scott-771901507743

Yap, the cops killed Terrill Thomas.

Here's a good cop for you: https://youtu.be/WTGF0ZyrAjs?t=3m39s

From the looks of it, he could have broken that dude in half, but kept his cool.