3 men get at least 25 years in prison in Kansas plot to kill Somali Muslims
Article via CNN
Three men were sentenced Friday to at least 25 years in federal prison for attempting to blow up an apartment complex in western Kansas where Somali Muslims lived, a plot that unnerved that refugee community.Patrick Eugene Stein and Curtis Allen of Kansas and Gavin Wright of Oklahoma chose the apartment complex in Garden City, a city of 26,000, partly because it contained a mosque, authorities said.
“Today’s sentence is a significant victory against hate crimes and domestic terrorism,” acting US Attorney General Matthew Whitaker said in a news release Friday from the Justice Department.“The defendants in this case acted with clear premeditation in an attempt to kill innocent people on the basis of their religion and national origin. That’s not just illegal — it’s morally repugnant.” The Somalis — who settled in Garden City because of employment in the meatpacking industry — appreciate the support they’ve received in the town and do not intend to harm anyone, according to one woman who spoke after the sentences were handed down.”Please, we need peace and love,” said Ifrah Farah, a member of the Somali community, according to CNN affiliate KWCH in Wichita. “Because we came here for better lives. We are refugees. We live here. We are not bad people. We love everybody.”
Justice Department: A confidential source saved lives
The three men were found guilty in April on one count of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and one count of conspiracy to violate the housing rights of their intended victims.The jury also convicted Wright of lying to the FBI in a matter involving domestic terrorism.
During the trial, prosecutors said the men began plotting an attack after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, KCWH reported.
The men referred to Muslims as cockroaches and, in the words of prosecutors, “described in the most extreme and violent terms what they planned to do to them.” The FBI conducted an eight-month investigation. The three defendants held several meetings to discuss their plan and took “significant steps — including making and testing explosives,” according to the US government.”
A confidential source, whom the government credited for thwarting the attack and saving the lives of innocent victims, recorded numerous conversations during which the defendants discussed and refined their plan,” the Justice Department said.
“As the plan solidified, the defendants discussed obtaining four vehicles, filling them with explosives, and parking them at the four corners of the apartment complex to create an explosion that would be sure to level the building and kill its occupants.
“Stein met with an undercover FBI agent in an effort to obtain a bomb, the department said. The agent posed as a black market arms dealer.On Friday, Allen was sentenced to 25 years, while Wright got 26 years and Stein 30 years.”
Today’s sentencing speaks to the FBI’s commitment to protect the communities we serve and our continued obligation to disrupt plots where the intent is to commit violence and harm others,” said Darrin Jones, special agent in charge of the FBI Kansas City Division.
Defense attorney points to Trump’s rhetoric
Jim Pratt, Stein’s attorney, had asked for a more lenient sentence for his client because of Donald Trump’s rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign and the public mood against Muslims. Pratt told CNN he’d never seen anything like the lead-up to the 2016 elections.
“It wasn’t just the rhetoric of Trump, who ahead of the election called for a ban against all Muslims entering the US, but it was the rhetoric of everybody that put fear into the system and made people believe that if Trump won, on the first day he’d take office, the world was going to implode,” he said.
“Or if he won, martial law was going to be declared and Hillary (Clinton) was going to be put into office.”
Such language fueled hysteria in people like Stein who had been “lost and ignored,” Pratt wrote in a sentencing memo filed in federal court in October.
The men wanted to time their attack at the Garden City apartment complex for the day after the 2016 election. But because Trump won, the men — who had been arrested a month earlier — may not have gone through with their plan, Pratt said.
“Trump’s win changed everything, and it is reasonable to speculate that it would have changed things among the defendants as well,”the filing said. “The urgency for action would be gone. The feeling of a losing battle would be gone.”
Worker fired from Trump golf course says Trump knew undocumented people were employed
Article via HuffingtonPost
An undocumented worker who was fired from one of President Trump‘s golf courses over the weekend said he believes Trump knew undocumented people worked at his various clubs.
Gabriel Sedano and multiple other undocumented workers spoke to NBC News about their experiences being employed by the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York. It was their first on-camera appearance since they were abruptly fired last week.
Sedano told NBC’s Kate Snow that he believes the Trump National Golf Club employers knew they were hiring undocumented workers.
“That’s what I think, because they need employees and they don’t check really good,” Serano told Snow. “I cannot be sure about that but he gotta know.”
Sedano said that he spoke to Trump multiple times over the fourteen years that he was employed as a maintenance worker at the club. Sedano told The Washington Post on Saturday that he “started to cry” when he was fired.
He is from Mexico and had worked at the club since 2005.
“I told them they needed to consider us,” Sedano said. I had worked almost 15 years for them in this club, and I’d given the best of myself to this job.”
About a dozen employees were abruptly fired last week from the New York golf club because they were found to be in the country illegally.
The firings followed reports last year that undocumented immigrants were hired and subsequently fired at a Trump property in New Jersey.
The workers in New York were told that the Trump company had recently audited their immigration documents, which were found to be fake, the Post reported. Those documents were submitted years prior to their firing.
Sedano and other workers interviewed by NBC said they presented false documents when they were hired by the Trump club. They told NBC they believe they were hired so that the organization could save money by paying low wages with no benefits to the workers, who were vulnerable due to their immigration status.
The president’s son, Eric Trump, in a statement to NBC pointed to the undocumented workers as “one of the reasons my father is fighting so hard for immigration reform.”
“We have tens of thousands of employees across our properties and have very strict hiring practices,” Eric Trump told the news network. “If any employee submitted false documentation in an attempt to circumvent the law, they will be terminated immediately. We take this issue very seriously.”
Trump has made his hard-line immigration policies a central issue of his presidency, most recently triggering the longest government shutdown in U.S. history over his demand for $5.7 billion in funding for a Southern border wall, which Democrats refused.
The attorney representing Sedano and other undocumented workers who were fired told NBC that they are heading to Capitol Hill to meet with Democrats.
Trump claimed women were gagged with tape. Then Border Patrol tried to find some evidence.
Article via Vox
An internal email, sent two weeks after Trump started making the claim, asked agents for “any information” about what Trump was describing.
It’s become a staple of President Donald Trump’s riffs on the horrors of the US-Mexico border, something he knows so well that he doesn’t even need it scripted on a teleprompter: Human traffickers gag women with tape so they can’t breathe before packing them into vans and driving them across the border illegally.
But two weeks after Trump had started talking about tape-gagged women — when a January 17 Washington Post article had questioned the claim — a top Border Patrol official had to email agents to ask if they had “any information” that the claim was actually true.
The email, shown to Vox by a source within Border Patrol, was sent as a “request for information” by an assistant Border Patrol chief, apparently on behalf of the office of Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan (referred to internally as “C-1”). It asked agents to reply within less than two hours with “any information (in any format)” regarding claims of tape-gagged women — and even linked to the Post article “for further info.”
Vox’s source indicated that they and others in their sector hadn’t heard anything that would back up Trump’s claims, but wasn’t sure if agents in other sectors had provided information. However, no one from the Trump administration has come forward to offer evidence for the claim, either before or after the internal Border Patrol email was sent. (Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.)
The text of the email, whose subject line was “Quick Turnaround: RFI taped-up women smuggled into the U.S.,” is as follows:
All,
We require your assistance on a quick turnaround for C-1.
Please forward any information that you may have (in any format) regarding claims “that traffickers tie up and silence women with tape before illegally driving them through the desert from Mexico to the United States in the backs of cars and windowless vans.” Reference the news article below for further info.
We require this information to be submitted to BPHQG2 by 1200 EST.
V/R,
Armando Sianez — Acting Assistant Chief
US Border Patrol Headquarters
It’s not clear where Trump is getting his information — but it doesn’t appear to be through official intelligence
Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the border is built on a lie: the idea that the US-Mexico border is a lawless place where American citizens are constantly in grave danger, and where criminals are able to smuggle drugs and people without any risk of apprehension. That big picture — as Vox and the rest of the media has made clear again and again — bears very little resemblance to the truth.
But the claim about women gagged with tape and packed into vans has attracted particular attention because it’s quickly become a centerpiece of Trump’s rhetoric — according to the Post, as of Friday he’d made 10 references to it in 22 days — without anyone knowing exactly where he got it from.
Border experts have told the Post and other reporters that they’ve never heard of anything like what Trump is talking about.
But it’s extremely hard to prove that such things have never happened — especially because the president has access to classified information that experts speaking to journalists do not.
That’s where traditional fact-checking tends to run into a wall. While journalists might suspect that Trump is making things up, it’s possible that he’s just repeating something he heard in a briefing (or, less plausibly, read in an intelligence report) that wasn’t open to the public.
The internal Border Patrol email provided to Vox, however, makes that seem a lot less likely.
Requests for information to the field usually aren’t made to get information backing up particular claims — much less claims being made by the president, and much less claims the president had been making for, at that point, two weeks. The implication of the email is that — after CBP had already been asked for evidence by the Post and declined comment— high-level border officials didn’t have any evidence they could point to to prove that Trump was telling the truth.
It’s possible that Trump got his intel from another agency — such as Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and that CBP simply didn’t know anything about it (which would raise its own set of questions about inter-agency intelligence-sharing).
But that is much less likely than the possibility that Trump heard something that wasn’t actual intelligence, and repeated it as truth.
As the Post points out, Trump started talking about tape gags the day after a meeting with representatives of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing Border Patrol agents. It’s possible that the claims first came up in that meeting. (NBPC did not respond to Vox’s request for comment.) If that’s true, union officials were talking about things that the management of their agency knew nothing about.
That could mean that Border Patrol management is simply out of touch with the realities of the border.
Or it could mean that one of Trump’s favorite border riffs is a piece of thirdhand gossip that Border Patrol had to scramble to try to back up.
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Young Jeezy & Jeannie Mai Form The Latest Rumored Couple
Jeannie Mai has been living her best life since her divorce.
Article via HotNewHipHop
Young Jeezy may have scooped up the newly-single Jeannie Mai. A recent photo featuring the pair posing with two other couples prompted fans to speculate about their relationship status. It shows Malika, who uploaded the image, sitting in front of her partner O.T. Genasis. Next up are Trey Songz and Lori Harvey, whose relationship has been confirmed publicly. Then, comes Jeannie Mai posing in front of the “Bottles Up” artist. Although Jeezy and Mai could simply be friends, social media users are expressing some excitement at the prospect of romance.
The Real host has previously admitted to dating someone who had been a guest on her show. Young Jeezy is part of that group. This doesn’t prove an actual courtship, but viewers have noticed Mai’s fondness of rappers. Check out the clip below for this take.
Mai recently navigated through a high-profile divorce with Freddy Harteis. Their relationship lasted a decade and came to a bitter conclusion in 2017. “One thing he always said, and I love this quote and I really believe it, my ex said, ‘You don’t truly know a person until they don’t get what they want. That’s when they show you who they are,” Mai recalled during an interview with The Breakfast Club. “You wouldn’t think that the person you were married to and were with for 10 years and taught you the quote would be the best number one example to prove it,” she added.
Former White House insider releases explosive book
Cliff Sims, author of “Team of Vipers,” speaks out on “GMA” about his experiences in the Oval Office with the president and the reaction to the book. (via ABCNews)
Sparkle Slams Erykah Badu, Taraji P. Henson For The R. Kelly Comments
Erykah Badu and Taraji P. Henson were way out of line with their initial public reactions to the R. Kelly scandal … so says one of the first celebs to speak out on R. Kelly’s alleged abuse.
Sparkle, who collabed with R. Kelly on her 1998 hit song, “Be Careful,” has major issues with the way Erykah and Taraji initially seemed to come to R. Kelly’s defense … because Sparkle says weak responses like theirs prevent other victims from coming forward.
Sparkle, who is featured in “Surviving R. Kelly,” says the black community needs to show R. Kelly some tough love … NOT the unconditional love Erykah offered.
As for Taraji comparing the number of people using the #MuteRKelly hashtag with the number of people using similar hashtags for Harvey Weinstein …Sparkle says the comparison is stupid because abusers are abusers. Period.
Watch … Sparkle explains why Erykah and Taraji’s commentaries were disheartening, and why she’s okay with taking down her song with R. Kelly.
Watch Sparkel’s video via TMZ
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R. Kelly Allegedly Threw That 19 Year Old Model Girlfriend Into A Wall In Jealous Backstage Rage
Article via TMZ
R. Kelly chewed out his ex-girlfriend, Halle Calhoun, in a fit of jealousy, which allegedly sparked a physical attack after one of his concerts … but R. Kelly’s camp calls the accusation BS.
The sources connected to Halle say the attack went down sometime in 2017. Halle — a Georgia woman who was 19 or 20 and living with the singer at the time — was attending one of his concerts, and when he came backstage afterward, we’re told he accused her of looking at another man.
We’re told Halle took the first shot, shoving R. Kelly … who retaliated by grabbing her by her clothes “around her neck” and tossing her like a rag doll into a wall. The alleged incident went down in front of multiple witnesses — including Joycelyn Savage and Azriel Clary, we’re told.
Halle was most upset R. Kelly had broken her necklace, a beloved cross that belonged to a family member. Our sources say there were at least 2 other violent incidents, including one where R. Kelly allegedly slapped Halle — again, because he thought she had looked at a group of men as they entered a hotel.
A source close to R. Kelly denies the allegation and claims the singer is not violent. The source says if anything like that had happened, someone would have recorded video and sold it long ago.
Halle had been with R. Kelly for more than a year at the time of the alleged attack, but she ended up leaving him at the end of 2017. She’s now back home in Georgia, and dating rapper Rocko.
One of our Halle sources said they all feel lucky she “got out in time.”
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Social Media VS 49yr old R.kelly~ currently dating 19 yr old Halle Calhoun ? ??
R. Kelly Releases A New 19min Song “I Admit”+Attorney Gerald Griggs & Drea Kelly RESPOND! ?
R Kelly accused of grooming 14-year-old girl~”she’s MY PET I trained her!”
Iowa teen found dead after running away over fight with parents over cellphone
Article via NBCNews
“At this time, there is no evidence or information that indicates criminal activity is connected to this,” according to a statement by Marshalltown police.
A 13-year-old Iowa boy who ran away after his parents took away his cellphone was found dead not far from his home, police said Monday.
Corey Brown of Marshalltown, Iowa, hadn’t been seen since Tuesday night before searchers discovered his body in a “secluded area” of town at about 10:45 a.m. CT (11:45 a.m. ET) on Sunday, according to a police statement.
The spot where Corey was found was less than 1.5 miles away from the boy’s home, Marshalltown Police Chief Mike Tupper told NBC News on Monday.
“At this time, there is no evidence or information that indicates criminal activity is connected to this,” according to a statement by Marshalltown police. “However, this is still an active investigation and all possible scenarios will be thoroughly investigated.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Corey was familiar with the area where he had been found.
“We believe we will be able to accurately account for his steps and whereabouts,” he said.
Tupper told reporters at a press conference Thursday night that Corey left home after the boy got into a spat his parents that ended with them taking away his cellphone.
“Anyone with kids has had discussions with their children about household rules,” Tupper said on Monday. “This was a typical parent-teenager interaction. No anger. Nothing extraordinary.”
Weather complicated the search for Corey, as the high temperature never got above 29 degrees while he was missing. The low over those four-and-a-half days bottomed out at -9 degrees on Friday morning.
More than 6 inches of snow fell on Marshalltown, which is about 50 miles northwest of Des Moines, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
An autopsy had yet to be performed by Monday morning. When surveillance cameras spotted Corey leaving home on Tuesday night, he was wearing a Seattle Seahawks knit cap, a red shirt, black pants, gray tennis shoes and lime green coat.
“He was wearing the same clothes he left home in,” Tupper said of Corey’s condition when he was found.
Azealia Banks Responds To Threats Of Legal Action Over Comments About Ireland
Article via HotNewHipHop
Azealia responds to her latest controversy.
Azealia Banks sparked some more controversy when she made offensive comments about the Irish and Irish women after an encounter on an airplane. She went on to describe Irish people as “a bunch of prideful inbred leprechauns who have ZERO global influence.”
Since her social media rant, an Irish lawyer responded to her words with a statement in which he asserted that Banks’ words are punishable by law apparently, explaining that anything deemed to be hate speech on social media is a crime.
“Hi #azeliabanks [sic] in light of your recent comments on #instagram about Irish women & Irish people generally, perhaps I can introduce you to the #CommunicationsAct2003 (s127) before you land in England,” said Tomas McGarvey.
According to McGarvey, Section 127 of the UK’s Communications Act of 2003 says that it’s an offense to “send a message that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character over public electronic communications network.”
Banks took to Instagram to address Mcgarvey’s new revelation and accused the threat to be spurred form racism, adding that if her actions are punishable by law, then so are the responses that she’s gotten.
“Racism at its finest,” she penned. “The eagerness to put a black woman in a cage. EL OH EL. If I’m gettin arrested then we will have to go through my DM’s and arrest each and every person who said racist things to me, which would mean you’d basically need to arrest the entire country of Ireland. I’m not sure what kind of point these folk are trying to prove but the racism keeps jumping out of them like vomit on a stomach virus. Literally cannot believe the kind of negro-hunt these folk are on about. […]The fact that these people think this should scare me into submission to let people say racist things to me so long as I dont say them back is hilarious. Arrest me and THEN do what?[…] 212 will shoot straight to the top of the charts and I will become a part of UK School curriculum, Feminist Theory, he will literally make me a HUGE star for arresting me. A blessing in disguise.”
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Woman shot after performing sexual act in exchange for $5 and Pringles
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (Meredith) — The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is investigating after a woman told authorities she was shot after she performed a sex act in exchange for $5 and Pringles potato chips.
Police told WJXT, the suspect ran off after the occurred outside a gas station Monday night. The woman was shot in the shoulder and immediately taken to a local hospital. Her injuries were not considered life-threatening.
Investigators say she said she agreed to perform a sex act with a man for a payment of $5 and a couple Pringles potato chips.
Following the act, the man demanded the woman to return the $5 and when she refused, he shot her. WJXT reports the he ran off and police did not have a suspect description.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is currently investigating this case.