gAlienLifeform

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241220132915/https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bill-of-the-month-surprise-medical-bills-crowdsourced-investigation-npr-sunset/

Also at https://tidal.com/browse/track/111769350

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241219131335/https://www.wired.com/story/intel-officials-police-us-cities-drones-dhs/

Archived at https://archive.is/szbZJ

Important bit of context, "How an early Biden crime bill created the sentencing disparity for crack and cocaine trafficking", archived at https://archive.is/igf3a

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/YACvN

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241219130811/https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/culpeper-county-ex-sheriff-convicted-in-bribes-for-badges-case/3795146/

Harris was chased, pinned face-down and held in a carotid-artery chokehold by then-St. Louis police officer Steven Pinkerton, who thought he matched the description of a robber-at-large.

Another officer used a Taser to shock him six times.

When officers finally handcuffed him and rolled him to his back, Harris’ body was limp. Police couldn’t find a pulse. Soon after midnight on Dec. 23, 2012, Harris — a Black 39-year-old father of two — was declared dead.

The police later concluded he wasn’t involved in the robbery.

The St. Louis medical examiner’s office eventually ruled Harris’s death was an accident caused primarily by heart disease.

The death didn’t spur protests, lawsuits or media scrutiny.

The Independent began looking into the 2012 death as part of a months-long investigation into the case of another Black man from St. Louis, Kurtis Watkins, who was convicted of charges related to a shooting based on the testimony of a single eyewitness: Officer Steven Pinkerton.

Watkins and his lawyers never learned about Pinkerton’s involvement in Harris’ arrest and death, which legal experts agree could have been used to challenge his credibility at trial.

Harris’ family, too, was largely kept in the dark about the circumstances of his death. They were suspicious of the police account but had no evidence to the contrary. They were never given the medical examiner’s report or the police report.

Three longtime forensic pathologists who agreed to review the records for The Independent said Harris’ death should have been ruled a homicide, not an accident.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/LpdV8

This spring, the Justice Department announced a major victory against a drug firm that manufactured billions of opioid painkillers. Endo Health Solutions, the agency said, would face $1.5 billion in fines and forfeitures and plead guilty to a corporate criminal charge.

...

But in the end, federal prosecutors offered far friendlier terms than those trumpeted by the agency.

Endo would not have to pay the $1.5 billion in criminal penalties, which was already a deep discount from the billions federal officials said Endo owed for dodging taxes and driving up Medicare costs.

In what amounted to a liability fire sale by the Justice Department, the company’s woes with the federal government would all be resolved by a $200 million payment.

In sentencing Endo in federal court in May, Judge Linda Parker wondered how the amount paid to the U.S. could be so low.

“I don’t understand. I really don’t understand,” Parker said. “I just don’t understand how it went from $1 billion to $200 million.”

Federal prosecutor Benjamin Cornfeld explained: Endo was broke.

“The reality is that there are limited funds available because the debtors were in bankruptcy,” Cornfeld said.

But a fuller explanation, drawn from corporate filings, interviews, and criminal court and bankruptcy records, shows how the DOJ, after years of aggressively prosecuting opioid companies, delayed for a decade a winning criminal case against Endo. In the intervening years, Endo vastly expanded its narcotic-pill empire before executing a corporate escape plan.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241219130828/https://www.propublica.org/article/endo-settlement-opioids-justice-department

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241218131254/https://elpasomatters.org/2024/12/15/el-paso-district-attorney-prosecutorial-misconduct-ruling/

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241213171443/https://www.wgal.com/article/former-luzerne-county-judge-involved-in-kids-for-cash-scandal-has-sentence-commuted/63177355

Two days before the November election, a rogue team of campaign organizers for Vice President Kamala Harris turned a Dunkin’ Donuts in Philadelphia into their secret headquarters.

Their mission was simple: Knock on the doors of as many Black and Latino voters as they could in neighborhoods that they believed the Harris campaign had neglected in its get-out-the-vote-operation. And they could not let their bosses find out.

They called it Operation Dunkin’kirk, a gallows-humor joke about the desperate World War II mission to save Allied troops trapped by Nazi armies in France.

Fueled by boxes of coffee in their impromptu boiler room, the small team of operatives crunched internal campaign data beneath purloined Harris-Walz signs and directed dozens of volunteers across the city’s core Democratic wards. Many of the thousands of Black and Latino voters they talked to said they had never heard from the campaign, a stunning breakdown so close to Election Day.

“I was the first one knocking on these doors,” said Amelia Pernell, a Harris campaign organizer involved in setting up the clandestine Dunkin’ Donuts field office in North Philadelphia. “They hadn’t talked to anybody. It was like: ‘Hey, nobody has come to our neighborhood. The campaign doesn’t care about us.’”

The Dunkin’ Donuts office and several similar efforts in Philadelphia, often funded independently by Democratic donors through nonprofit voter-education groups, reflected deep frustration within the campaign. Numerous Harris organizers believed it was failing to invest in mobilizing Black and Latino voters in the nation’s sixth-largest city, the biggest prize in the election’s most populous battleground state.

This article is based on interviews with 11 Harris campaign staff members and volunteers who were directly involved in organizing the stealth efforts in the weeks before the election, most of whom insisted on anonymity to talk candidly about internal campaign matters. The New York Times also spoke with more than 20 other campaign officials, volunteers, Democratic Party operatives and elected leaders who were involved in voter outreach around the country and described how it fell short.

The covert operations, many of them led by Black organizers, represented extraordinary acts of insubordination against the Harris campaign.

Campaign organizers in Philadelphia said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods, such as attending community events, registering new voters, building relationships with local leaders and calling voters.

Instead, they said, they were instructed to spend most of their days phoning the same small pool of volunteers and asking them to knock on voters’ doors and help run field offices. The strategy essentially turned experienced organizers into glorified telemarketers making hundreds of calls daily, with some harried volunteers begging to be taken off call lists.

Staff members also said that the campaign did not hire enough Black and Latino campaign workers or political consulting firms that were owned by people of color and had expertise in reaching such voters — a source of continuing frustration among Democratic operatives that they say has contributed to the erosion of the party’s multiracial base.

Archived at https://archive.is/NClEe

Related reading,

• "Everyone is taking their skim": How Democratic consultants cashed in on Harris' losing campaign (arc'd)

• "How Much of the Harris Campaign Was a Scam?" (arc'd)

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241211132310/https://ipmnewsroom.org/illinois-law-requires-transparency-police-killings/