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“We opened an email account at TALKtoCOMELEC and you can also tag us on social media and we will get the directive to the election officer and act on the complaint,” she said.
Candidates who were not able to remove their campaign materials within three days after receiving a notification from the Comelec may face disqualification.
According to her, there are currently two pending cases in Pasay City still awaiting the decision of the court for violating rules on campaign materials.
Arabe added that COMELEC was currently conducting “Operation: Baklas,” aimed at removing illegal campaign materials.
Microsoft has agreed to buy Skype for $8.5 billion, the companies announced Tuesday.
The companies' CEOs, Steve Ballmer and Tony Bates, will host a press conference later today to give details of the acquisition.
Founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Skype was bought by eBay in 2005. After that company failed to figure out how to integrate it with its online auction business, it sold a majority stake to an investment consortium including its founders and Silver Lake.
BOSTON (AP) - Attorney General Maura Healey is challenging a proposal by Eversource to increase customer electricity rates by $96 million.
The company filed a request Tuesday with the Department of Public Utilities seeking to raise the price of electricity delivered by NSTAR Electric Company by $60 million and Western Massachusetts Electric Company by $36 million.
An Eversource spokesman says the proposed rate hikes are based on operation and maintenance costs and are part of a longer-term plan to modernize the electric grid.
Healey says Eversource should be returning profits to customers, not raising rates. The Democrat is urging the public utilities department to reject the rate increase request.
The Democrat has called on the DPU to investigate why the allowed profits for Massachusetts utility companies are higher than profits in neighboring states.
The U.S. Justice Department has launched a civil-rights investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office after months of mounting complaints that deputies are discriminating in their enforcement of federal immigration laws.
Officials from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division notified Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Tuesday that they had begun the investigation, which will focus on whether deputies are engaging in "patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures."
An expert said it is the department's first civil-rights probe related to immigration enforcement.
Arpaio vehemently denies that deputies are illegally profiling as part of his immigration crackdowns. He said Tuesday that he welcomes the investigation and intends to cooperate fully.
"We have nothing to hide," he said.
Although Arpaio's illegal-immigration crackdowns have broad public support, they also have led to calls for an examination of his tactics.
Last year, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon asked for a federal investigation of possible civil-rights abuses. Last month, four key Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee asked Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to investigate Arpaio.
The lawmakers said Arpaio had exceeded the limits of a federal program that gives local police federal immigration-enforcement powers by ordering deputies to "scour" Latino neighborhoods looking for illegal immigrants based on skin color.
Arpaio, who was easily re-elected to a fifth term in November, called the investigation politically motivated and vowed to continue to arrest illegal immigrants.
"I am not going to be intimidated by the politics and by the Justice Department," Arpaio said. "I want the people of Arizona to know this: I will continue to enforce all the immigration laws."
Arpaio uses the sweeps to enforce the state's employer-sanctions and anti-smuggling laws. He also participates in a federal program that lets local officers enforce federal immigration laws. The sweeps have taken place in mostly Latino neighborhoods or near where day laborers congregate. They have sparked two racial-profiling lawsuits.
The Justice Department frequently receives racial-profiling complaints against police departments, but investigations are rare, said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and racial-profiling expert.
"The fact that this has come to their attention and they have announced their intent to investigate is highly significant," Harris said. "It says there is enough there to be investigated. It's not an iffy case that (can be ignored)."
Harris said this is the first civil-rights investigation stemming from immigration enforcement. The probe could last several months.
In a two-page letter dated Tuesday, Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general, said that if the investigation uncovers violations, her office will work with Arpaio to find remedies.
But Arpaio said he will battle the Justice Department in court if he disagrees with any of the changes the department tries to impose.
In the 1990s, the department conducted similar civil-rights investigations and found patterns of police discrimination in about 20 cases, including in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. In those cases, law-enforcement agencies agreed to significant changes aimed at preventing discrimination or face a court injunction, Harris said.
"Once the Justice Department finds violations, the threat of going to court is usually enough to encourage them to agree to change," Harris said. Changes have included increased supervision and changing policies, Harris said.
Investigations into patterns of police discrimination are "not about punishing individual officers; they are about changing the fundamental" way an agency operates, he said.
Gordon, who met with King and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Wodatch on Tuesday in Washington, praised the investigation.
"We should all be encouraged that our new attorney general is taking these issues seriously," he said.
Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, the board's lone Democrat and most vocal critic of Arpaio's immigration policies, had planned to help deliver a petition today with 35,000 Internet signatures calling for a Justice Department investigation.
"I think they're going to find racial profiling, which is a civil-rights abuse," said Wilcox, who was in Washington for a National Association of Counties conference. "It's time to put a stop to them. It may cost us millions in lawsuits."
Board Chairman Max Wilson, one of the board's four Republicans, said he was surprised by the investigation.
"I know there's been some accusations made," he said. "I don't know if there's any merits to them. I've almost had my hands full of people making accusations without people having some solid, hard evidence to back it up."
Republic reporters Dennis Wagner, Yvonne Wingett and Scott Wong contributed to this article.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio talks Tuesday in Phoenix about the U.S. civil-rights inquiry into his sweeps.
It's a well established fact that racial bias is prevalent in the U.S. judicial system.
But it's likely that few people have ever heard of the sore loser bias, in which judges dole out harsher sentences because their college football team got spanked by the opposing squad.
The National Bureau of Economic Research this month published findings of a study of judicial data in Louisiana, revealing that judges who are alums of Louisiana State University routinely handed down longer sentences when their precious Tigers lost. And as is almost universally true of the judicial system, black defendants disproportionately bore the brunt of the consequences.
According to the researchers' findings, when the Tigers were expected to win but went on to lose, black juvenile defendants received sentences of about 46 days more than they typically did. That's an increase in sentence severity of almost 9% for blacks, while an upset loss for white juvenile defendants meant an increase of about eight days, or statistically less than 1%.
Does this mean that black defendants received lenience when the Tigers managed an unexpected win?
Not so much, according to the study. A win had "no significant impact on the disposition length set by the judge," the study's authors, Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, wrote. "Although harsher punishment handed down by judges is not deliberate (because it is triggered by an emotional shock), we find some evidence that black defendants bear much of the burden of judges' wrath due to this emotional shock, which hints at a negative predisposition towards black defendants."
Furthermore, the study noted, "the fact that there are no race related differences in the disposition length in the absence of judges' emotional stress [over a football team's loss] is suggestive of the existence of a subtle, and previously unnoticed, bias in sentencing."
The study examined a sample of 8,228 juvenile case records from 207 judges. Most of the Louisiana judges they reviewed were white, male, middle-aged and identified as Democrats. As for the defendants, 62% of those convicted were black, while 36% were white.
Though judges are meant to be unbiased, the researchers found it isn't always the case.
Given that "high-stake decisions about punishment severity are nevertheless expected to be free of" bias, it is "noteworthy that the judicial decisions are in fact impacted by emotions that are unrelated to the merits of the case," Eren and Mocan wrote.
In other words, something as seemingly trivial as a loss may be exaggerating the prevailing racial bias that so many are fighting to change.
Ned was put to sleep on medical grounds after owner Vicki Ann Ball allowed him to get into a horrific state. Picture: RSPCA.
A woman from Horncastle has been disqualified from keeping animals for five years after allowing a cockerpoo called Ned to suffer.
Vicki Ann Ball, 37, appeared before Lincoln Magistrates’ Court last week (Monday March 11) for sentencing.
At a previous hearing she pleaded guilty to one offence of causing unnecessary suffering to Ned under the Animal Welfare Act 2006*.
RSPCA inspector Kate Burris said: “On June 24, Ball took Ned to a dog rescue and signed him over to them.
“The dog rescue took him to a vet, where he was found to be suffering and put to sleep immediately on welfare grounds.
In interview, Ball denied that Ned belonged to her. She said she had owned him from 2013 but had given him away in January, February or March last year ‘free to a good home’ on Facebook. She couldn’t provide any evidence of this.
She said she came home on the June 24 to find him on her lawn in a mess, and after trying to wash him and cut out the matts, realised she couldn’t help him and took him to a dog rescue.
When the inspector visited the defendant’s address she observed a run at the side of the house that was being dismantled and had dog faeces in it. A witness gave evidence that they had seen her with the dog recently and the dog was micro-chipped to her.
As well as the disqualification, Ball was sentenced to a 12-month community order with 120 hours of unpaid work and ordered to pay a £500 fine and £85 victim surcharge.
FORT McCOY, Wis. - U.S. Army Central and partner nations from the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility gathered at Fort McCoy, Wis., August, 14 for the four-day Joint and Multinational Global Medic 2017 exercise.
During this exercise, medical officers and NCOs from the partner nations ob-served the full spectrum of medical care from the point of injury through each level of care from triage to evacuation methods (ground, rotary wing and fixed wing). The delegates also observed the medical treatment at various military levels of care, such as the battalion aid station, forward surgical team and combat support hospital. The delegates are medical personnel responsible for the education, training and employment of health services support personnel and resources for their respective nations' armed forces organizations.
"We try hard to bring folks from other countries in the CENTCOM AOR, so that we can showcase all the different capabilities that we have," said Col. Ned Bailey, the command surgeon for USARCENT. "My role really is to be the senior subject matter expert on all the different Army systems, so that when questions arise, I can help the individuals from other countries understand how our systems operate."
The first day of the exercise, the delegates toured the Effects and Enablers Center, where they observed simulated patients preparing for their insertion into the battle-field. They also toured the Regional Training Medical Site to see its training resources and aids.
On Day Two, the delegates visited the Medical Simulation Training Center and Re-configurable Vehicle Tactical Trainer sites for one of the most realistic simulation trainers for training convoy operations. This center allows commanders to replicate realistic environments for any theater of operation. The MSTC conducts sustainment and enhanced med-cal training for combat medics and combat lifesavers, and it provides hands-on instruction in the latest battlefield trauma and critical care techniques based on U.S. Army Medical Department doctrine.
The third day was a deep dive into the equipment, personnel and rapid deployment capabilities of an Army Forward Resuscitative Surgical Team and how it's employed in a field environment. Following the deep dive, the delegates toured Medical Field Units where they saw U.S. and Coalition medical units practicing their missions on the battlefield.
On the final day, delegates viewed airfield medical-related activities of the U.S. Air Force Reserve and U.S. Transportation Command moving patients out of theater.
Qatari Brig. Gen. Ibrahim Al Hor, the Head of Military Field Medicine for the Qatari Armed Forces, was one of the delegates who observed the event. He said he believed this was a great opportunity for different nations to learn from each other and find a common ground.
"It's not about military or civilian in these days' conflicts, usually we see ourselves as a different being, which you're not," Al Hor said. "All human beings should be seen as the same as each other; it's not about race, religion or color. We all have same feelings, same ambition, same hope, so the basic human need should be looked after."
Next year, Global Medic 2018 will be held at Fort Hunter Liggett, Calif., and it may include more involvement from partner nations. The delegates all expressed an interest in actually participating next year and having their forces be part of the exercise, not just be observers. Bailey echoed their interest.
"The next step is we want to be able to operate with them and help them under-stand how we can develop training opportunities to work (together) in the future," he said.
USC quarterback Cody Kessler looks to pass during a game against Arizona in October.
Cody Kessler, who led USC to 10 victories last season, was named the Trojans' starting quarterback, Coach Steve Sarkisian announced Tuesday.
Kessler, a fourth-year junior from Bakersfield, held off a challenge from redshirt freshman Max Browne.
Kessler passed for 20 touchdowns, with seven interceptions, last season. He finished the season with four touchdown passes in the Trojans’ 45-20 victory over Fresno State in the Las Vegas Bowl.
USC opens the 2014 season against Fresno State on Aug. 30 at the Coliseum.
Sarkisian has installed a fast-paced no-huddle offense this spring.
Browne showed great improvement from last season but could not unseat Kessler.
Freshman Jalen Greene will be the No. 3 quarterback.
Kara Tointon says that she would relish the chance to return to EastEnders.
Kara Tointon has revealed that she would love the chance to return to EastEnders.
The actress, who left the BBC One soap earlier this year, said that she would "absolutely" be interested in reprising her role as Dawn Swann.
"I would sign on the dotted line now!" she told PA, before adding: "Well, I wouldn't go back now because I've only just left, but one day I'd love to go back."
The 25-year-old, who has spoken before about her desire to return to the programme, continued: "Even if it was just for one episode or something, but in years to come I'd love to."
Dawn departed the series in August, when she was seen sailing off with husband-to-be Garry Hobbs (Ricky Groves), after he let her join him on the vessel despite having learned of her affair with Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden).
President Barack Obama named Vice President Joe Biden as the head of the Middle Class Working Families Task Force today.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama signed a series of executive orders Friday that he said should "level the playing field" for labor unions in their struggles with management.
Obama also used the occasion at the White House to announce formally a new White House task force on the problems of middle-class Americans. He named Vice President Joe Biden as its chairman.
—Require federal contractors to offer jobs to current workers when contracts change.
—Reverse a Bush administration order requiring federal contractors to post notice that workers can limit financial support of unions serving as their exclusive bargaining representatives.
—Prevent federal contractors from being reimbursed for expenses meant to influence workers deciding whether to form a union and engage in collective bargaining.
"We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests," Obama said during a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House.
"I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, it's part of the solution," he said. "You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement."
Signing the executive orders was Obama's second overture to organized labor in as many days. On Thursday, he signed the first bill of his presidency, giving workers more time to sue for wage discrimination.
"It's a new day for workers," said James Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who attended the ceremony with other union leaders. "We finally have a White House that is dedicated to working with us to rebuild our middle class. Hope for the American Dream is being restored."
Of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families, Obama said, "We're not forgetting the poor. They are going to be front and center, because they, too, share our American Dream."
He said his administration wants to make sure low-income people "get a piece" of the American pie "if they're willing to work for it."
"With this task force, we have a single, highly visible group with one single goal: to raise the living standards of the people who are the backbone of this country," Biden said.
Obama set several goals for the task force, including expanding opportunities for education and training; improving the work-family balance; restoring labor standards, including workplace safety; and protecting retirement security.
The president and vice president said the task force will include the secretaries of commerce, education, labor, and health and human services because those Cabinet departments have the most influence on the well-being of the middle class. It also will include White House advisers on the economy, the budget and domestic policy.