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NEW YORK WAS reeling last night after the murder of two uniformed cops by a man whom investigators say told bystanders to “watch what I’m going to do” just before the killings.
Candles, flowers and an American flag were placed at a makeshift memorial at the scene of the shooting, which apparently was out of revenge for the recent killings of unarmed black men by police.
A sombre mass was held at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and the New York Jets football team held a moment of silence. After nightfall, supporters gathered for a candlelight vigil, singing and saying prayers.
The two officers — Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40 — were shot in the head through the window of their patrol car in broad daylight on Saturday in Brooklyn in an attack that shocked America’s biggest city just days before Christmas.
Police named the shooter as Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28. He fled to a nearby subway station after the attack, where he shot himself in the head on the platform.
Investigators said Brinsley had shot his ex-girlfriend, who survived, at her apartment outside Baltimore before heading for New York.
Just before the shooting, Brinsley spoke with bystanders, asking them about their gang affiliation, urging them to follow him on Instagram and to “watch what I’m going to do,” the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives Robert Boyce said.
“They Take 1 of Ours… Let’s Take 2 of Theirs,” read a comment seemingly written by Brinsley on Instagram just hours before the assault, next to a photo of a silver handgun.
Brinsley had been arrested at least 19 times, Boyce said, mostly while living in Georgia, on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to terror threats.
Boyce said Brinsley’s mother was afraid of her son, who had a “very troubled” childhood, was often violent and had tried to commit suicide.
The double killing, in a city where murders are at their lowest rates in 20 years, further strained the already fraught relations between Mayor Bill de Blasio and police.
A number of officers, in apparent homage to their slain colleagues, turned their backs to the mayor at the hospital where the two cops were pronounced dead.
Police officers accuse de Blasio of failing to support them and of being too sympathetic to demonstrators who, in recent weeks, have been protesting police violence against African Americans.
At a news conference outside Ramos’s childhood home, 75th Precinct Community Council president Juan Rodriguez called for reform.
“Mr Mayor, you need to have a sit down and you need to get everything corrected from the mayor’s office down. This is wrong,” he said.
“Today is the worst day of my life,” he wrote.
A foundation set up by the late owner of the Yankees baseball team said it would pay for the education of Ramos’s children, according to the New York Daily News.
Many in the African American community have been angered by recent killings of unarmed black men by police, which have sparked nationwide protests.
In July, Eric Garner, an unarmed father of six, died in New York after police held him in a chokehold while he was being arrested for illegally selling cigarettes.
Michael Brown, an 18-year-old in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, was shot dead by a police officer in August.
Grand jury decisions not to indict the white officers responsible triggered mass protests in New York and other US cities.
Boyce said Brinsley had specifically mentioned Brown and Garner on Instagram and had made other postings of “self-despair or anger” at the state of his life.
Email “Man who murdered NY police officers told bystanders "watch what I'm going to do"”.
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Cisco, the C-S-C-O kind, which is run by Chuck Robbins and will far more able to navigate the vicissitudes of the moment. Cisco right now is perhaps my favorite stock in the trust. And I can't emphasize enough how the company's being run in uncertain times. And partly because Robbins has taken share and taking names in...
Congressman Tom Emmer, A.J. Kern and Patrick Munro share a Republican primary ballot to represent Congressional District 6. Ian Todd is the lone Democrat.
Experience: District 6 representative since 2015, served as state representative from 2005 to 2010, former conservative radio host, graduated from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and William Mitchell College of Law.
Top issues: Deregulating small businesses, funding transportation, national and border security, replacing the Affordable Care Act, reducing the deficit, trade.
Experience: Veteran of the U.S. Army Reserve, one-term member of the Benton County Planning Commission, worked as a county planner and zoning specialist, conservative writer for the St. Cloud Times Writers Group, earned degrees from Montana State University and the University of Wyoming.
Top issues: Anti-abortion policies, defending gun rights, addressing illegal immigration, moratorum in refugee resettlement and reforming the Refugee Act, addressing fraud in social welfare programs, doesn't support federal education programs.
Experience: A 26-year member of the U.S. Army Reserve, served two years on active duty in the Iraq War as Civil Affairs Team sergeant, owns a small business that includes a lawn care company, works in material handling, earned master's and bachelor's in business administration from Metropolitan State University in St. ...
Top Issues: Immigration reform including an end to "chain migration," construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, small business medical practices, defense of gun rights.
Experience: Former geospatial intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force, graduated high school in Arkansas, managed a Subway restaurant.
Top issues: Campaign finance reform, single-payer health care, environmental protection, labor and union rights, stopping trade with nations that use slave or child labor, investment in science and technology, tax reform, affordable education, restore and expand infrastructure, path to citizenship, gun control.
President Bill Clinton, in an interview with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, said the next 10 days are the most critical for the rescue efforts in Haiti after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake rocked the country Tuesday.
For "three or four more days, we can still find people alive," Clinton, the U.N. envoy to Haiti, said Wednesday. "The most important thing now is we have got to get people out from under this rubble."
Within the next 10 days, Clinton said efforts will focus on "saving every life we can, and treating the dead with respect so they get a decent burial."
He urged Americans to not travel to Haiti in hopes of helping, but instead make donations that will help supply relief efforts with what they need most — food, water, shelter and first aid supplies.
"Every $5 or $10 immediately is moved to buy basic medical supplies and to take care of them," Clinton told Fox News.
Click here for more information on how to help.
We recently reported on how, for startups, design is more important than ever. The same is arguably true for blogs – with so many others out there, giving yours a distinct look that’s pleasing on the eye can be a real advantage.
It’s particularly tricky to make advertising work well with a great blog design, so by way of inspiration, here – in no particular order – are ten blogs run as businesses that rely on advertising revenue. They’ve all got designs that we think work incredibly well, are functional and look gorgeous.
Is advertising industry news site AdWeek a blog per se, given that it started as a magazine? The line’s pretty blurred these days so we’re including it here, not necessarily only for the homepage but for the individual articles. The design here is unconventional and emphasises the article itself, rather than drawing yo...
Often employing an unconventional, full-width headline and text displayed in a central column with few distractions, it encourages you to keep reading and helps AdWeek’s content stand out from the crowd.
With its clean lines and huge photographs, US sports blog Bleacher Report lets images tell the story on its front page. Even on the sub-menus for individual sports’ and teams’ coverage, the photos call at you to click in to read more.
Visiting one of its articles you’ll notice its use of HTML5 to easily swipe between articles. A page view driver and instinctively easy to navigate.
Even if you know nothing about sport, the emphasis on images here make browsing Bleacher Report a pleasure.
CNET covers a wide variety of areas of technology but its sharp new design does a good job of helping you navigate the sprawl while drawing your attention to key articles. A large carousel highlights top stories, while flags ‘draped’ over each image help direct your eyes around the page.
Individual articles are displayed within a neat container that keeps share buttons visible on the left as you scroll.
When Joshua Topolsky and some of Engadget’s top writers left the site to work on a new gadget blog with publisher SB Nation (now known as Vox Media), it was obvious that it would be something to keep an eye on. It wasn’t just the content that got people talking when it launched, however, it was the design.
Huge images – and lots of them – elegantly overlayed with text. That’s the thing that strikes you first about The Verge when you first load the page, but a long front page packed with content, and magazine-style box-out sections highlighting must-read articles add to its appeal.
You’d expect a blog about design to be, er, well-designed, right? Fast Company’s Design blog doesn’t disappoint. It takes similar cues to The Verge, with an emphasis on large images and an eye-catching headline font.
There are some fabulous details, like the 3D effect that makes the blog seem to pop out of the screen, the analog clock displaying the time a post was published, and the multicolored navigation tool to help your access earlier posts. A thin left-hand column on the front page teases you with images which expand when cli...
Despite gaining much criticism, we believe Gawker’s network qualifies for the list. We could have opted for any of Gawker’s main titles as they share a common design, but on Gizmodo it perhaps looks best. With two separate scrolling columns, the design caused a stir when it was unveiled as it looked so different from w...
While the approach, which sees content on the left and all navigation on the right, doesn’t appeal to everyone, it’s a refreshing approach that encourages the user to explore the site without an overload of navigation options. It’s interesting to note, however that Gizmodo’s recently relaunched UK site doesn’t share th...
When designing a professional blog, it can be difficult to keep a unified ‘vision’ once you throw in all the ads and navigation elements that keep things ticking. Gothamist succeeds where other have failed in this respect.
The original New York edition of the city-focused network of blogs has a design that echoes the skyscrapers in its logo, emphasising vertical shapes throughout. Even the placement of the ads fits a homogenous layout in which nothing looks out-of-place. Blogs for other cities in the network succeed to varying degrees in...
The Daily Beast has a lot of content, and it does a great job of highlighting priority stories via a long, visually striking page with stark fonts and large images.
Scrolling through the homepage is a visual pleasure, with plenty of jumping off points into the content, be it via a snappy, all-caps headline or an eye-catching image.
While arch rival The Verge has received praise for its design since it launched, Engadget itself looks great. An attention-grabbing ‘Top Stories’ widget is the start here, but well-chosen fonts and gorgeous photo galleries helps the genre-defining gadget blog stand out.
Design-focused blog Abduzeedo offers inspiration and tutorials with a grid-focused navigation scheme and an appealing ‘glow’ effect on titles when you hover your pointer over them.
The white-on-black design stands out in a world where white backgrounds are currently more common.
Okay, we couldn’t resist – we’re really proud of our design here at The Next Web.
OKLAHOMA CITY – Officials were investigating a suspicious package in northwest Oklahoma City Tuesday evening.
Police were near N.W. Grand Blvd. and N. May Ave.
Authorities say a person received a package they were not expecting.
The package did not have any information on it, police say.
The Oklahoma City Bomb Squad was called to investigate.
The Pentagon stuck to its long-standing position Friday that rising military personnel costs have to be curbed to make the all-volunteer force affordable.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said the Defense Department would take a "smart look" at the recommendations of an independent commission on pay and benefits but added that the rate of growth in the current system was "unsustainable."
At a Pentagon briefing, Kirby said that personnel costs were eating up more than 50 percent of the Defense Department's budget and had to be reined in to maintain readiness and the technological edge over other militaries.
"If we don't get our hands around this now, we could find ourselves in a precarious position," Kirby said. "If we don't do something to stem those costs it will be unsustainable."
Kirby said that DoD was taking no immediate position on the 15 recommendations the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission released Thursday but said "obviously, we have to take a smart look" at the report. "Let's not speculate on what we will or will not" advocate in response, Kirby said.
One of the major recommendations was for the overhaul of the military retirement system. The commission called for ending the current 20 years-and-out at half pay system for future troops and starting 401(k)-style investment funds with government contributions for lower-ranking troops.
The Pentagon has set up working groups to review the commission's report and to make the Defense Department's recommendations to President Obama within 60 days on pay and benefits.
In his first reaction to the report, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the commission's work deserved "thorough review and thoughtful consideration."
McCain said he would be relying on Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, head of the SASC personnel subcommittee, for detailed analysis of the report. Graham recently said he was considering running for the presidential nomination in the Republican primaries.
In a statement, McCain lined up with Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, in saying that "our top priority through this process will be to maintain and enhance our nation's ability to recruit and retain the best" for the all-volunteer force."
Build your dream home on this 1.76 acre lot on a cul-de-sac. Lot is in The Pointe on Haystack development, one of the newest in Cumberland. Conveniently located near Cumberland and LaVale.
The Obama administration formally announced that inspectors general will have to get permission from their agency heads to gain access to grand jury, wiretap and fair credit information — an action that severely limits the watchdogs’ oversight capabilities, independence and power to uncover fraud.
An opinion, issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, says the Inspector General Act of 1978 — which was written by Congress to create the government watchdogs in order to help maintain integrity within their agencies — does not have the authority to override nondisclosure provisions in other laws,...
“In reaching these conclusions, our Office’s role has not been to decide what access [inspectors general] should receive as a matter of policy. Rather, we have endeavored to determine as a matter of law, using established tools of statutory construction, how best to reconcile the strong privacy protections … with the i...
Mr. Horowitz has had to seek former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s permission, and now Loretta E. Lynch’s, to gain access to such material. The approval process in obtaining the materials delayed review of Operation Fast and Furious — the failed Mexican drug cartel sting that lost track of more than 1,000 govern...
At no point has the Justice Department denied any of Mr. Horowitz’s requests, but some in Congress have argued that requiring the inspector general to ask the attorney general for materials represents a direct conflict of interest and impairs the inspector general’s independence.
“The department has long held the position that the inspector general should have access to all the information it needs to perform its essential oversight function,” Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce said. “Consistent with this view, department leadership has implemented procedures to ensure that the inspect...
“Additionally, the department is committed to working with Congress and the inspector general on legislation to address any gaps in the law that may hamper the inspector general’s ability to access such information in a timely manner,” she said.
Still, those assurances don’t sit well with some lawmakers — or the IG community.
“The Office of Legal Counsel’s efforts to reduce transparency will leave the Department of Justice vulnerable to mismanagement and misconduct. This is not the type of government the American people deserve,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Virginia Republican and House Judiciary Committee Chairman, in a statement to The Washi...
“The House Judiciary Committee will work with other committees of jurisdiction to explore a legislative fix to reiterate Congress‘ intent that the Office of the Inspector General is entitled access to all documents and records within DOJ’s possession,” he said.
Mr. Goodlatte, a lawyer himself, argued the reasoning within OLC’s opinion was the same that produced the Department of Justice’s infamous recess appointments memorandum, which was unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court in 2014.
“The prospect of the Obama administration using this opinion to stonewall oversight, avoid accountability and undermine the independence of inspectors general is alarming,” he warned.
Not all the Capitol Hill criticism came from Republicans or had a partisan cast though.
“I suspect that we will work quickly, and likely with overwhelming and bipartisan majorities, to make certain that the Inspector General Act is explicit on this point,” Mr. Conyers said.
As the chairman of the inspectors general council, Mr. Horowitz has been pressing for resolution from either Congress or the OLC in clarifying his and other IGs’ authority in gaining access to agency records — repeatedly saying agencies have proactively tried to stonewall certain investigations by questioning the IG’s ...
In congressional testimony in February, Mr. Horowitz complained the FBI had failed to turn over key records in several whistleblower cases by the deadlines, saying that other laws involving national security and privacy took precedence over his investigation.
Last August, 47 federal inspectors general wrote a letter to Congress complaining about specific cases where some federal agencies such as the Peace Corps and the Environmental Protection Agency refused to hand over documents critical to their independent oversight.
Last year, Kathy Buller, the Peace Corps IG, testified to Congress her agency was refusing to hand over information related to sexual assault investigations, which she’s legislatively tasked with overseeing, because of privacy concerns.
And at the EPA, Inspector General Arthur Elkins Jr. confirmed that an EPA employee, who had been accused of sexual harassment of some 16 women since 2004, as well as the inappropriate handling of classified information, retired on the same day he was asked by EPA officials to talk to the IG staff.
“Over the years, the trust piece has been rocked,” Mr. Elkins told website Government Executive this February. In other examples at the EPA, attorney-client privilege has been invoked to get around the IG’s information request.
“There’s no question an inspector general has a difficult but important job to do, and without access to whatever records are involved in the matter the IG is auditing, it’s extremely difficult for an IG to do a thorough job,” said John Malcolm, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studie...

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