CBI Alerts States On Sale Of Methanol

Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) immediately alerted the police authorities to remain vigilant about gangs using the modus operation to make quick money, the officials said.

New Delhi:

The CBI has alerted the state police departments and other law-enforcement agencies about an Interpol input warning on a racket selling fake hand sanitizer, and another racket that poses as PPE and other COVID-19-related medical suppliers, officials said on Monday.

After getting the input, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) immediately alerted the police authorities to remain vigilant about gangs using the modus operation to make quick money, the officials said.

Agency sources said some criminals are approaching hospitals and health authorities posing as representatives of manufacturers of PPE kits and other COVID-19-related protective gear.

Exploiting the shortage of such articles, they take online advance payments from authorities and hospitals but after the receipt of payments, no deliveries are made.

Interpol has also given inputs about fake hand sanitizer being made using methanol, a highly-toxic substance, as the base, the officials said.

Instances have been reported from other countries of use of spurious hand sanitizer during the COVID-19 pandemic, they added.

"Methanol can be highly toxic and dangerous for the human body," an official said.

Source: www.ndtv.com

Black Lives Matter

Activists set out to show that police brutality was pervasive. The police have now made that clear.

       Demonstrators in Minneapolis marched             last Friday to protest the killing of George         Floyd.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Time

It’s wondrous, isn’t it, how the people just keep coming out? Day after day, night after night, in dozens of cities, braving a deadly virus and brutal retaliation, they continue to pack the streets in uncountable numbers, demanding equality and justice and, finally, prompting what feels like real change.

How did this happen? How did Black Lives Matter, a hashtag-powered movement that has been building for years, bring America to what looks like a turning point?

I have a theory: The protests exploded in scale and intensity because the police seemed to go out of their way to illustrate exactly the arguments that Black Lives Matter has been raising online since 2013.

For the last two weeks, the police reaction to the movement has been so unhinged, and so well documented, that it couldn’t help but feed support for the protests. American public opinion may have tipped in favor of Black Lives Matter for good.

By “the police,” I mean not just state and municipal police across the country, but also the federal officers from various agencies that cracked down on protesters in front of the White House, as well as their supporters and political patrons, from police chiefs to mayors to the attorney general and the president himself.

Black Lives Matter aims to highlight the depth of brutality, injustice and unaccountability that American society, especially law enforcement, harbors toward black people. Many protesters set out to call attention to the unchecked power of the police, their military weaponry and their capricious use of it. They wanted to show that the problem of policing in America is more than that of individual bad officers; the problem is a culture that protects wrongdoers, tolerates mendacity, rewards blind loyalty and is fiercely resistant to change. More deeply, it is a law enforcement culture that does not regard black lives as worthy of protection.

And what did the cops do? They responded with a display of organized, unchecked power on camera, in a way that many Americans might never be able to unsee.

To understand why this moment may prompt structural change, it is worth putting the latest protests into a larger context. To me, the past two weeks have felt like an echo of that heady moment late in 2017, after The New York Times and The New Yorkerexposed Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault. At the time, #MeToo, as an online rallying cry against sexual abuse and harassment, was more than a decade old. The Weinstein story didn’t create that movement, just as the videos of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police didn’t create Black Lives Matter.

Image

Police officers confronting demonstrators for violating a curfew during a protest in Brooklyn last Wednesday.Credit...Amr Alfiky for The New York Times

Instead, the Weinstein news broke the dam. Since then, #MeToo activism has gone on to upend society in a way that felt revolutionary.

It feels like the dam is breaking again.

The movement behind Black Lives Matter has taken to the streets before but nothing on this scale, with this intensity. And not with these results. The National Football League was once a powerful and bitter rival; now it has embraced the movement, though it still has not apologized to or signed Colin Kaepernick, the player who first knelt in protest against police brutality.

Politicians at every level are professing newfound support, and, right before our eyes, the Overton window of acceptable public discourse about police reform has shifted to include terms like “demilitarize,” “defund” and “abolish.”

It’s not clear how far the politics will go, but the shifts so far are significant. “Never before in the history of modern polling has the country expressed such widespread agreement on racism’s pervasiveness in policing, and in society at large,” The Times reported last week.

More important, we are no longer just talking about imposing new limits on how the police can operate. We’re finally asking more substantive political questions: What roles should be reserved for the police in our cities, and what roles would better be served by hiring more teachers, social workers or mental health experts?

In Los Angeles, where leaders on the left and the right have long showered resources on the police, the mayor has now proposed spending $250 million more on social services and $150 million less on policing. Last week, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, resisted cutting the $6 billion police budget; on Sunday, he promised future cuts. And in Minneapolis, a veto-proof majority of City Council members pledged to dismantle the city’s police department.

The proximate cause of the latest protests was the horror of George Floyd’s death. But we’ve seen videos of cops killing black men before and they have rarely led to criminal prosecution, let alone broad societal upheaval.

What’s happening now is about more than that video. Just as, after the Weinstein story broke, when women came forward with stories too numerous to ignore or dismiss, what we’ve seen in the last two weeks are episodes of excessive force too blatant and numerous to conclude that the problem is one of a few isolated cases.

The evidence of police brutality has become too widespread even for elected officials to ignore. They can no longer easily coddle police unions in exchange for political support; now ignoring police misconduct will become a political liability, and perhaps something will change.

Alex Vitale, a sociologist and the author of “The End of Policing,” which argues for a wholesale dismantling of American policing, told me that he has high hopes for structural change because organizers had laid the groundwork for it. “My reason for optimism is that before Minneapolis happened, there were already dozens of campaigns to divert police funding,” he said. “So that’s why that demand emerged so quickly people were already doing that work.”

Vitale also suggested that the movement can take hold permanently, that what’s happening now has cracked “the ‘ideological armor’” of policing in America.

I think he’s right.

Image

Police officers waiting for members of the December 12th Movement and other protesters in Brooklyn on June 1.Credit...Anthony Geathers for The New York Times

Source: New York Times.

George Floyd death: 'Stop the pain', brother tells US Congress

The brother of the African American man whose death in police custody has sparked global protests, has urged the US Congress to pass reforms on police brutality and "stop the pain".

Philonise Floyd told a House hearing that his brother George could not become "another name on a list".

"Be the leaders that this country, this world, needs," Mr Floyd said.

George Floyd died in Minneapolis in May as a white police officer held a knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

The final moments were filmed on phones.

• Seven solutions to US police problems
• What Trump states make of unrest
• Why US protests are so powerful this time

Four police officers involved have been sacked and charged over his death.

What was said in the House?

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee have been listening to testimony from civil rights activists and law enforcement officials, a day after the funeral service of George Floyd, 46, in Houston.

The committee plans to send a bill to the floor of the Democrat-led House by 4 July on combating police violence and racial injustice.

It comes amid a nationwide - and in many cases international - debate on police practices and accountability, and more generally on racial inequity

"I'm here to ask you to make it stop. Stop the pain," an emotional Philonise Floyd, 42, told lawmakers. "George called for help and he was ignored. Please listen to the call I'm making to you now, to the calls of our family and the calls ringing on the streets of all the world.

"The people marching in the streets are telling you enough is enough."

Democrat committee chairman Jerrold Nadler said: "We must remember that [George Floyd] is not just a cause, a name to be chanted in the streets. He was a man. He had a family... we mourn his loss."

The Democrat-proposed bill would make so-called police chokeholds illegal, enforce anti-racism training, bar sacked officers from switching to another force and make it easier to prosecute abuse.

Republican committee representative Matt Gaetz said that although elements needed to be "fine-tuned", "you will be able to count on Republican co-operation as we hone these ideas and hopefully pass them and get them to the president's desk".

• Timeline of US police killings

A spokesperson for Mr Trump said on Wednesday that the president would have "proactive policy prescriptions, whether that means legislation or an executive order".

What is happening with the Minneapolis police?

As the House hearing was taking place, the police chief in Minneapolis said that his department "absolutely" could be reformed and vowed not to let George Floyd's death be in vain.

Medaria Arradondo said one reform would be to introduce a new early warning system to identify the conduct of police officers.

On Sunday, a majority of the city council's members vowed to disband the police department and replace it with a new model of public safety.

"Defund the police" has been a rallying call for many protesters nationwide. It has been opposed by both President Trump and his Democratic challenger in November's election, Joe Biden.

What other developments have there been?

• In New Jersey, a FedEx employee and a corrections officer have been suspended from their jobs after a video emerged of two men appearing to re-enact the death of George Floyd in an attempt to taunt people protesting against police brutality
• A New York police officer has been charged with assault after a woman protester was allegedly thrown to the ground during a rally on 29 May in Brooklyn
• Police in Minneapolis are investigating Facebook posts reportedly from an active officer that mocked protesters and encouraged looters to target a neighbourhood popular with Somali immigrants
• Anti-racism protesters continue to target statues they believe glorify imperialist history. A statue of Christopher Columbus was dumped in a lake in Virginia and another had its head cut off in Boston.

Source: BBC News

Limbaugh: How Could CBS News Info Babes Be This Stupid, This Ignorant?

Friday morning, CBS This Morning invited Lesley Stahl to preview an upcoming 60 Minutes piece on how pharmaceutical drugs affect men and women differently. While Stahl and CBS hosts Norah O’Donnell and Gayle King found the FDA’s findings on the matter truly surprising, Rush Limbaugh reacted on his radio show by calling the women “stupid” for not realizing that the sexes are different. “What do you mean, boys and girls, men and women are different?” Limbaugh mocked. “Everybody knows that!”
“How is it that the mainstream media get everything wrong?” Limbaugh asked after playing clips from the CBS segment. “Not just slightly wrong, but major, profound wrong? How is this possible to be this stupid, this ignorant? How is it possible to not know instinctively that men and women are different?” He proceeded to single out “CBS info babe” O’Donnell for being genuinely shocked by the FDA’s study.
“We’re in trouble,” Limbaugh said. “We’re in big trouble. Because these people are the primary source of news for most people the country. We’re in big trouble.”
Of course, Limbaugh’s reaction to this particular bit of news begs the question: If he knew all of these scientific findings already, why didn’t he choose save the FDA a considerable amount of time and money by just telling them what make men and women so different?

This blog is sponsored by: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks

Here Are All of the Black People on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC

February is Black History Month, which is a lot of territory to cover in just 28 days. Begun in 1926 as Negro History Week, Black History Month was first recognized by the U.S. government in 1976, and its purpose has always been to correct the under-representation of black Americans in mainstream historical narratives. As the country observes its 39th Black History Month, we decided to take a look at how black people are represented in our most visible beat, cable news.
This blog is powered by: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks/