From the start:
"Boston tries to boost local contract numbers" by Milton J. Valencia Globe Staff, June 1, 2019
When Ronnette Taylor founded Fire Code Design in Roxbury 13 years ago, she became the first black woman to run a plumbing and fire protection company in Massachusetts. She was also the first to receive a master plumber’s license from the Local 12 gasfitters union. She has shown she can do the work, too, recently outfitting the sprinkler system for an 80-unit housing development in Roxbury.
Despite her credentials, Taylor said she still struggles to win contracts from the City of Boston, and has watched the business go to out-of-state companies.
“What am I doing wrong?” she asked.
Despite Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s promises to use more women and minority vendors, and to diversify city construction contracts, Boston awarded less than 1 percent of $664 million in government work to such companies in 2018 — the first year the city was required to report such data under a new ordinance. That amount is far below what other big cities have awarded to businesses owned by women and minorities.
Released in early May, the statistic shocked many in the business community and may force City Hall to reassess the efforts that Walsh has championed since early in his first term.
“People knew it was a low number; they just didn’t know how low it was,” said Segun Idowu, executive director of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, who has since met with city officials to brainstorm new ways to diversify city contracting.
Part of problem appears to be Boston’s inability to make it easier for these businesses to navigate a process that includes a complex application system and burdensome paperwork.....
That's their own doing in the name of controlling corruption, and what this all comes down to is an argument over the $poils and who gets the contracts.
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At least you still have your church.
Related:
At Harvard Business School, diversity remains elusive
Boston Teachers Union contract deal garners praise and criticism
Controversy derails New Bedford charter school expansion plan
Also see:
Two men shot in separate Boston incidents
Too bad there isn't any body camera to look at.
"Virginia Beach officials say weapons used in mass shooting were purchased legally" by Laura Vozzella, Ian Shapira and Justin Jouvenal The Washington Post, June 1, 2019
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Virginia Beach Police Chief James Cervera pointedly denied at the news conference that DeWayne Craddock, 40, of Virginia Beach, who was an employee of the Department of Utilities, had been fired before he gunned down colleagues. Some media outlets reported Craddock’s employment had been terminated citing unnamed sources.
‘‘Make no mistake, we are a heartbroken city,’’ said Julie Hill, communications director for the city. ‘‘We lost 12 people who did nothing more than go to work.’’
Craddock, an engineer, was a 15-year employee of the city’s Department of Public Utilities.
Virginia Beach City Manager Dave Hansen solemnly read the names of each victim at a news conference Saturday morning.
Cervera declined to discuss a motive for the spree at the news conference but said Craddock used a city-issued badge to gain entry to a public works building in the sprawling municipal complex.
He shot people on all three floors of the building and shot one person in a car outside, police said.
Cervera said city officers, along with the FBI and Virginia State Police, worked through the night to identify the victims of the shooting.
‘‘This is a horrific crime scene,’’ Cervera said. ‘‘It took a physical, emotional, and psychological toll on everyone who spent the night in that building.’’
Cervera said investigators found weapons at the scene of the shooting, as well as at Craddock’s home, in addition to the .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun outfitted with a sound suppressor and extended magazines that is believed to have carried out the shooting. Cervera declined to say what the additional weapons were.
The gunfire erupted shortly after 4 p.m. in Building 2 of the complex, Cervera said.
Four officers arrived on the scene within minutes of the shooting, since the police department is located less than 150 yards from the center, Cervera said. Two detective supervisors and K-9 handlers quickly found Craddock. The gunman opened fire on the officers and the officers shot back. Craddock did not say anything to the officers.
‘‘This was a long-term, large gunfight,’’ Cervera said.
Cervera said one of the officers was hit by a bullet, but a bulletproof vest saved his life. Cervara said Saturday morning that the officer was ‘‘doing well.’’ Craddock was eventually shot and the officers rendered aid, Cevera said. Craddock later died.
It's the same old script, and I tend to doubt the mass casualty event; however, I'm withholding judgement for now. I suppose this one is plausible so far, if nothing else.
The shooting sent employees fleeing the building, while others froze in place.
Bob Montague, the director of the public utilities department, had just wrapped up a meeting and was settling into his second-floor office to take care of some work when a burst of alarming, yet faint sounds began penetrating the air.
‘‘I heard rapid pop-pops, but they weren’t very loud, and then suddenly a kind of hole exploded in my wall, and I had bits of drywall and dust hit me,’’ Montague recalled. ‘‘That’s when I made the connection of what was happening. There was a series of gunshots, it was all very quick, a whirlwind coming through. You’re frightened and your adrenaline is up and you’re thinking about what you’re going to do if you encounter someone. I had no idea what was going on other than realizing these were gunshots.’’
‘‘There is no answer to explain an event like this,’’ Montague said.
Afterward, Cervera said officers methodically checked every room, closet, and desk in the building before determining it was free of danger. The building is workplace to roughly 400 employees for Public Works, Public Utilities, and other city agencies.
I will say this, if you are going to do a crisis drill, this is the perfect setting. It's a government-controlled setting, and perhaps the controllers jumped the gun on the narrative a bit (like calling the WTC collapse a half-hour before it happened) by leaking it to the pre$$.
On Saturday, Craddock’s family members had posted a note on their door in Newport News, Va., that read they were sending ‘‘heartfelt condolences’’ to the victims.
Amanda Archer, 22, and Cassetty Howerin, 23, said they were shocked to learn that the man who lived in their cul-de-sac had allegedly committed the mass shooting.
They always are!
They described Craddock as a quiet, reserved man who rarely said much to them when they passed outside the gray duplex they shared with him.
Governor Ralph Northam said Saturday morning that he ordered flags to fly at half-staff on government buildings. President Trump tweeted he had been in contact with local and state officials. ‘‘The Federal Government is there, and will be, for whatever they may need. God bless the families and all!’’ Trump tweeted.
Friday’s mass shooting was the deadliest rampage in the United States this year. It was the worst since a gunman opened fire at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, Calif., last November, killing 12 before fatally shooting himself.....
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Here is the alleged shooter's profile:
"City employee turned gunman reportedly had ‘scuffles’ with his colleagues" New York Times News Service, June 1, 2019
Before DeWayne Craddock stormed a Virginia Beach municipal complex on Friday, where law enforcement officials said he slaughtered a dozen people and injured several others, he had made his living in public service.
Craddock, 40, who was killed during a protracted shootout with the police, had been an engineer with the Department of Public Utilities, the city’s water and sanitary sewer services branch.
Nothing had seemed amiss when he entered the agency’s building on Friday because he had worked with the department for about 15 years, officials said. No one had suspected that he was armed. Many of the people he would kill or wound that afternoon were his colleagues.
At a Saturday morning press briefing, Dave Hansen, the Virginia Beach city manager, said that the suspect “was still employed” by the city at the time of the attack.
“He had a security pass like all employees had and he was authorized to enter the building,” Hansen said.
This will be turned into a call for more metal detectors as the police state advances yet again.
City officials declined to discuss a possible motive for the attack, but they did say that there was no immediate indication that the suspect had targeted anyone in particular.
A person close to Virginia Beach’s city government, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Craddock had no history of behavioral problems until recently, when he had begun acting strangely and getting into physical “scuffles” with other city workers.
Looking like an MK-Ultra situation.
The person said that tensions had escalated in the past week, adding that the suspect had gotten into a violent altercation on city grounds and was told that disciplinary action would be taken.
Officials on Saturday said that the suspect was armed with two .45-caliber guns, at least one of which had a sound suppressor attached to it. He used extended magazines, which hold more ammunition than standard models, and reloaded several times in what the Virginia Beach police chief called “a long-term” gun battle. At least one officer was wounded in the exchange, and his bulletproof vest, the chief said, had probably saved his life.
I'm sure that is going to be a component of law that will be pushed in response to this event.
Officials said that additional weapons had been found at the scene and at the suspect’s home.
It's not like government ever planted anything.
The suspect had no obvious criminal history, court records show, although he did have several traffic violations over the years.
So now a speeding ticket makes you suspect.
He earned a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from Old Dominion University in Virginia.
In 1996, he enlisted in the Virginia National Guard, where he was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 111th Field Artillery Regiment, in Norfolk as a cannon crew member, according to a state National Guard spokesman. He was discharged in 2002 at the rank of specialist.
Before his job with the city, the suspect worked for private firms specializing in site planning and infrastructure. Employment listings also showed that he had worked for the Army Training and Support Center.
Now it is looking like a DIA psyop, and this guy may have just vanished for his next mission.
Several news releases issued by the department this year about road closings because of utility work listed a DeWayne Craddock as the contact person for further information. According to records, he had held a professional engineer license from the state since 2008.....
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Let the debate begin:
"Birthplace of American slavery debated abolishing it — 3 decades before the Civil War" by Gregory S. Schneider Washington Post, June 1, 2019
WASHINGTON — The first thing white people did after Nat Turner’s violent slave insurrection in 1831 was round up more than 120 black people and kill them, but the next thing white people did was surprising.
Scheider(!) of the Washington ComPost exposes his anti-white bigotry, prejudice, and hatred.
In other words, the insurrection almost worked. More than 50 white men, women, and children had died in the bloodiest slave revolt on US soil. It forced Virginians to confront the evil that was at the root of their society, and it just plain scared a lot of people.
The day Israel starts to genuflect is the day I will take notice; otherwise, can the supremacism as you gin up a race war!
Thanks to public pressure, the General Assembly considered taking radical action, but the votes fell short. Instead, lawmakers passed harsher laws that made African Americans’ lives even worse, and they aggravated divisions that erupted, 30 years later, in the Civil War.
‘‘It’s like one of the saddest moments in American history,’’ historian Erik S. Root said, ‘‘because of the missed opportunity.’’
Look at the Globe refighting the origins of the Civil War, which are not as black and white (pun intended) as in the history books.
This year, Virginia marks the origins of slavery in the English colonies. The first captured Africans arrived at Virginia’s Point Comfort in August 1619. Though few remember them now, the debates prompted by Turner’s insurrection were ‘‘the most public, focused, and sustained discussion of slavery and emancipation that ever occurred in . . . any . . . southern state,’’ historian Eva Sheppard Wolf wrote.
The process laid bare how deeply conflicted white Southerners were about the topic.
In Charles City County, between Williamsburg and Richmond, a group of Quakers sent an eloquent plea for Virginia to remember the ideals that sparked the Revolution.
Slavery was ‘‘a system repugnant to the laws of God, and subversive of the rights, and destructive of the happiness of man,’’ the Quakers wrote.
In Loudoun County, a group of women wrote that they were now afraid for their safety, with so many slaves around who might mean them harm. They called for a gradual end to slavery, but also the removal of all blacks from Virginia, free and enslaved. A group in Buckingham County wanted an end to slavery out of fear that blacks would soon outnumber whites.
How little has changed, and yet how much has changed.
About 30 of the petitions aimed to get all people of color out of Virginia, Root found as he researched his dissertation on the subject. Not all of them wanted to end slavery; several called for purging the state only of free blacks so that enslaved workers wouldn’t be influenced by them.
What isn't commonly known is that the Great Abe had all the black leaders at the time to the White House and told them they had to go somewhere else. The Great Emancipator was also a segregationist.
Beyond that, the real root of the Civil War was slavery, but not in the way you think. Lincoln was prepared to let slavery continue in states where it was an institution. It was his insistence that any new states would all be free states, thus upsetting the balance of power in the Senate and putting the South at an extreme disadvantage.
Sentiments were so strong and so numerous that the General Assembly appointed a select committee to consider them. Pro-slavery legislators fought to keep the committee from taking up the issue of abolition, and tried to stop the Quaker petition, in particular, but the House of Delegates voted 93 to 27 to refer the Quaker petition to the committee. So for two weeks in January 1832, the Virginia Legislature toyed with the idea of abolishing slavery and emancipating people of African descent.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, a delegate from Albemarle County, invoked his famous grandfather in calling for a plan to resettle freed slaves in Liberia. President Jefferson, of course, had been shamefully contradictory on the subject. His first act as a young Virginia delegate had been to seek an end to slavery, but he later wrote that blacks were an inferior race; while he maintained in letters that slavery was wrong, he deferred action to future generations.
Look, the guy was a product of the times. I certainly don't feel that way. People must be evaluated on their own without all the other qualifiers. It's behavior that matters most.
Randolph proposed letting the people of Virginia (well, the white males) vote on whether to consider abolition. His plan called for a gradual emancipation; the first slaves wouldn’t go free until 1858, but as Wolf noted in her book ‘‘Race and Liberty in the New Nation,’’ the emancipation would begin on July 4, a proposal that ‘‘unmistakably recalled Virginians’ attachment to the ideal of universal liberty and the glowing words of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.’’
One Jeffersonian sentiment that carried power during the 1832 debates was the idea that bondage corrupted master and slave alike. Many of the calls to end slavery argued that it had weakened the work ethic among whites and that it hamstrung Virginia’s economy.
William Roane, a delegate from Hanover County and the grandson of Patrick Henry, argued that slavery was an inescapable fact of human society. ‘‘I think slavery [is] as much a correllative of liberty as cold is of heat,’’ he said. Or if that’s not stark enough for you: ‘‘The torch of liberty has ever burnt brightest when surrounded by the dark and filthy, yet nutritious atmosphere of slavery.’’
Root, the historian, said that kind of sentiment was what drew him to study the debates. In Virginia ‘‘in this one moment you had a prime chance to do something that may have staved off the Civil War.’’
Or not (they really are behind every war), and they also brought the racial hatred as a wedge of division. Nothing has changed at all.
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Why can't everybody win?
"As candidates descend on California, Kamala Harris struggles to defend her home turf" by Liz Goodwin Globe Staff, June 1, 2019
OAKLAND, Calif. — Senator Elizabeth Warren attracted the largest crowd of her presidential campaign so far Friday night in an unusual location — the hometown of rival Senator Kamala Harris.
The crowd for Warren’s speech — as well as those at the many other well-attended glitzy fund-raisers and campaign events held by other Democratic candidates in the Bay Area this weekend — sent a clear message to Harris, the state’s junior senator: Her home state is still very much up for grabs as her campaign for the Democratic nomination has yet to take off.
I wonder who will steal it.
Across the bay, more than a dozen presidential candidates descended on downtown San Francisco to pitch themselves to what California Representative Barbara Lee called the “wokest Democrats in the country” at the state’s annual party convention. Harris’s many rivals wooed California’s hordes of enthusiastic Democrats and deep-pocketed donors in the days before and after the gathering, fighting to poach her support.
Avoid the needles and pooh stench, and poaching implies those votes are already hers!
Do they never learn?
After bringing up impeachment, the Globe moves on to Biden:
Former vice president Joe Biden was one of the few candidates to skip the convention, which several Democratic strategists derided as a bad move, but the other front-runner in early California polls, Senator Bernie Sanders, spent days on an intense spree of campaign events in California before his scheduled convention address Sunday.
Sanders’ campaign set up a “Bernie Lounge” for delegates to mingle with staff and announced eight new California hires. Sanders also had encouraged his supporters in the 2016 California primary — which he lost by 7 percentage points to Hillary Clinton — to become involved in the Democratic Party.
Yeah, because “once you break a boundary, you learn how to break more boundaries.”
“Thousands of Sanders’ grass-roots activists got elected as Democratic delegates,” said Rose Kapolczynski, a Democratic consultant who managed former California senator Barbara Boxer’s campaigns. Their enthusiasm was evident Saturday at the convention, where Sanders’ delegates held up an oil painting of him and chanted his name in the hallways.
Uh-oh.
Other candidates are also making inroads in California. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has been feted at swanky fund-raisers in Silicon Valley, thanks in part to connections he made as a Harvard undergraduate, and Warren, who unlike Sanders and Harris has no paid staffers in the state, has attracted some of the largest crowds of her campaign in California.
Better take Mayor Pete seriously.
Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California who is backing Harris, made a confident prediction: “If Kamala wins South Carolina, she wins California on March 3,” but that won’t stop other candidates from trying. Warren, seemingly in awe of her crowd Friday night, sent her fans a message.....
Oh, voters are "fans" now.
You know of whom I am not a fan?
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Yeah, the messenger.
Related:
A journalist’s long pursuit of justice for R.Kelly’s accusers
A horror informed by the years before Roe v. Wade
Does she know Sanger was a racist eugenicist!
"Catholics in Kenya rebel against celibacy vow for priests" by Max Bearak Washington Post, June 1, 2019
NYERI COUNTY, Kenya — He was a priest just out of seminary. She was a nurse. They were both from the slopes of Mount Kenya, but their paths improbably crossed in Rome.
He became unshakable in his desire to marry her, even though he had taken the Catholic Church’s mandatory vow of celibacy for priests.
When he returned to preach in Kenya, Peter Njogu was shocked when fellow priests told him that many of them had broken that vow, marrying and having children. In hushed tones, they spoke of their ‘‘secret families,’’ kept hidden in distant homes. The thought of doing so pained him.
As the Catholic Church goes through a global crisis brought on in part by the revelation of widespread sexual misconduct by its clergy, self-proclaimed Bishop Njogu believes he has figured out how to save Christianity’s largest church from its own sins: Let priests marry and raise families.
Njogu’s breakaway faction, the Renewed Universal Catholic Church, is Catholic in every way except in having optional celibacy for its priests. Its growth in Kenya is rooted in opposition to the practice of keeping secret families but reflects a growing worry among some Catholics that the celibacy requirement — to many an nonnegotiable tenet of the priesthood — creates a harmful culture of sexual secrecy.
The Vatican has shown no interest in reexamining the issue, but the pontiff has also signaled that he is open to ordaining married men in remote parts of the world with a severe shortage of priests.
While Catholicism has declined in numbers in some former bastions in the West, such as Ireland, it is growing more rapidly in Africa than anywhere else. Africans make up nearly a fifth of the world’s Catholics. Njogu’s sermons hark back to Catholicism’s pre-celibacy era while appealing to the faith’s future in Africa, where he believes it will have to reconcile with local customs as it grows.
‘‘No one in the Vatican understands the African soul. They do not understand that for the African man, priest or not, the worst sin is to leave this world without siring a child,’’ Njogu said. ‘‘Mandatory celibacy is thus the root of priestly sin, but they pretend all is well while their house is burning to the ground.’’
‘‘These priests are not sincere, they are pursuing personal interests,’’ said Father Daniel Kimutai Rono, general secretary for the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops. ‘‘The vow of celibacy, he said, ‘‘is about the vocation, about the call to serve God and the sacrifice which entails in serving God.’’
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Related:
"Pope Francis braved a rain-soaked, twisting drive through the mountains of Transylvania on Saturday to visit Romania’s most famous shrine, urging Romanian and ethnic Hungarian faithful to work together for their future. Storms forced Francis into a three-hour car rider a trip he had planned by helicopter. The showers let up as Francis arrived, but the 82-year-old seemed unsteady and held the arms of aides on a mud-slicked path to the altar. He urged Romania to put aside past divisions (AP)."
You ever think God is trying to tell him something?
Be careful taking the flight out or you could end up dead.
"A late design change in automated flight system doomed Boeing’s 737 Max" by Jack Nicas, Natalie Kitroeff, David Gelles and James Glanz New York Times, June 1, 2019
SEATTLE — The fatal flaws with Boeing’s 737 Max can be traced to a breakdown late in the plane’s development, when test pilots, engineers, and regulators were left in the dark about a fundamental overhaul of an automated system that would ultimately play a role in two deadly crashes.
Uh-oh.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said a former test pilot who worked on the Max. “I wish I had the full story.”
While prosecutors and lawmakers try to piece together what went wrong, the current and former employees point to the single, fateful decision to change the system, which led to a series of design mistakes and regulatory oversights. Many of the employees described a compartmentalized approach, each focusing on a small part of the plane.
“Boeing has no higher priority than the safety of the flying public,” a company spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said in a statement. “The Federal Aviation Administration considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during Max certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements.”
I didn't know you could drop bull$hit from that high.
At first, MCAS — Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System — wasn’t a very risky piece of software. The system would be triggered only in rare conditions, nudging down the nose of the plane to make the Max handle more smoothly during high-speed moves, and it relied on data from multiple sensors measuring the plane’s acceleration and its angle to the wind, helping to ensure the software wasn’t activated erroneously.
Then Boeing engineers reconceived the system, expanding its role to avoid stalls in all types of situations. They allowed the software to operate throughout much more of the flight. They enabled it to aggressively push down the nose of the plane.
A test pilot who originally advocated for the expansion of the system didn’t understand how the changes affected its safety. Safety analysts said they would have acted differently if they had known it used just one sensor. Regulators didn’t conduct a formal safety assessment of the new version of MCAS.
What the article doesn't tell you is the federal regulators outsourced approval to Boeing itself.
Think fox guarding henhouse.
The current and former employees, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that after the first crash, they were stunned to discover MCAS relied on a single sensor.
“It seems like somebody didn’t understand what they were doing,” said an engineer who assessed the system’s sensors.
“The 737 Max just felt right in flight, giving us complete confidence that this airplane will meet our customers’ expectations,” Ed Wilson, the new chief test pilot for the Max, said in a news release at the time. Wilson had replaced Craig the previous year, but a few weeks later, Wilson and his copilot began noticing that something was off, said a person with direct knowledge of the flights. The Max wasn’t handling well when nearing stalls at low speeds.
Wilson told engineers the issue would need to be fixed. He and his copilot proposed MCAS, the person said. The change didn’t elicit much debate. It was considered “a run-of-the-mill adjustment,” according to the person. The change proved pivotal. Expanding the use of MCAS to lower-speed situations required removing the G-force threshold. MCAS now needed to work at low speeds so G-force didn’t apply.
Now that you brought up G-forces, how did those planes crash the way they did?
The change meant that a single angle-of-attack sensor was the lone guard against a misfire. Although modern 737 jets have two angle-of-attack sensors, the final version of MCAS took data from just one.
Using MCAS at lower speeds also required increasing the power of the system.
The FAA had already approved the previous version of MCAS, and the agency’s rules didn’t require it to take a second look because the changes didn’t affect how the plane operated in extreme situations.
Boeing continued to defend MCAS and its reliance on a single sensor after the first crash, involving Indonesia’s Lion Air. Four months later, a second 737 Max crashed in Ethiopia. Within days, the Max was grounded around the world.....
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As with all plane crashes, I wonder if the alleged equipment failure or human error is simply a cover story for an assassination based on passenger lists.
"Revenge, murder, and an immigrant dream gone wrong in Canada" by Dan Bilefsky New York Times, June 1, 2019
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — After he had chopped up the body into 108 pieces and taken a long nap, Zhao Li cooked himself some noodles for breakfast.
He never ate them.
Instead, Zhao, a soft-spoken Chinese immigrant, found himself surrounded by a SWAT team that had been surveilling the imposing $8 million hillside mansion owned by the victim, Zhao’s cousin by marriage.
The police had been discreetly watching Zhao through the large floor-to-ceiling windows as he calmly washed blood from a hunting knife, according to investigators.
These were some of the details that emerged during lurid testimony offered recently in Zhao’s trial for murder at the Supreme Court of British Columbia.
The case has riveted Vancouver — and attracted headlines in Canada and China — by exposing a wrenching human drama of family ties gone rancid, revenge, and violence, but it also pulls together many strands of the recent changes that have come to Vancouver.
The city, known for its stunning nature and outdoorsy cannabis-fueled culture, has been transformed by an influx of wealthy second-generation Chinese, many of whom have invested heavily in property and view a Canadian passport as a gateway to a glittering and better life.
The victim, Yuan Gang, was a millionaire who gamed the Canadian immigration system — a practice authorities have been trying to stamp out, including in a recent fraud case involving hundreds of wealthy Chinese immigrants who used fake documents to obtain Canadian citizenship or permanent residency while living in China.
The accused killer, Zhao, was his poorer aspirational cousin by marriage, who had come to Canada with his family, hoping for a better life.
Also figuring in the story is Zhao’s 26-year-old daughter, who found fame as a glamorous YouTube celebrity.
“It is a tale about greed, materialism, and the corruptibility of money,” said Chris Johnson, a veteran Vancouver criminal lawyer who represented the victim’s family.
“Everyone wants to know why Zhao Li did what he did,” added Richard Li, a writer for Xing Tao, a popular local Chinese language newspaper in Vancouver.
Really? Everyone?
The victim, Yuan, who died a few weeks before his 42nd birthday, was born in Heilongjiang, a northeastern province in China. He drew on family wealth to invest in coal production and expanded the business.
In 2015, he was implicated in a corruption case in China, accused in a court judgment of bribing a senior communist official, but by then he had moved to Canada, having married a Canadian-Chinese woman in September 2005 who sponsored him to come to Vancouver.
He divorced her in 2007, two months after gaining permanent residency. A Vancouver court later characterized the marriage as immigration fraud.
Yuan spent about $35 million Canadian dollars on property and land investments in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, and he accumulated the glittering trophies beloved of the growing class of “fuerdai,” a Mandarin expression that refers to wealthy second-generation Chinese.
He acquired the $8 million mansion at 963 King George’s Way in British Properties, the most exclusive mountainside enclave in Vancouver, paying for a large part of it in cash.
In 2010, he invited his poorer cousin, Li Xiaomei; her husband, Zhao; and their teenage daughter, Florence, to come live with him. Zhao worked in his businesses, and Li helped with bookkeeping and cooking.
A meek man barely over 5 feet tall, Zhao’s life was ripped apart at age 9 when his father was branded a counterrevolutionary in China and sent to a labor camp, but his fortunes changed after he got married and started a successful printing company.
In 2007, the family moved to Montreal, with the typical ambitions of economic migrants to Canada. When their cousin invited them to Vancouver, offering instant upward mobility, they did not hesitate. They moved into the King George’s Way mansion.
It was not long before things began to sour, according to people who know the family.
Yuan’s businesses in China began faltering, and he resented supporting the Zhao family. And Zhao began bullying employees in Yuan’s businesses in Canada, former employees said.
Zhao’s daughter, Florence, though, found a new kind of prosperity in Canada as “Flo-Z,” an aspiring fashion designer. At 26, she starred in a popular reality show on YouTube, “Ultra Rich Asian Girls.”
On a sunny Saturday in May 2015, Yuan and Zhao had their final disagreement, when Yuan told his cousin he wanted to marry Florence.
Zhao said Yuan became furious and hit him with a hammer. Zhao then shot him twice, according to court testimony. He then set about chopping up the body.
A verdict in the murder trial is expected in the coming months.....
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Did you see the photos?
What was interesting is no reference to Meng, the Huawei executive, as the Globe reads like a tabloid now.
"Church mourns slain Lexington woman" by Laura Crimaldi and Jeremy C. Fox Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, June 1, 2019
LEXINGTON — A week ago Sunday, Shen Cai greeted worshipers and distributed bulletins at Chinese Bible Church of Greater Boston in Lexington with her fellowship group.
Now the congregation is mourning Cai, 49, who was found beaten to death at about 12:30 a.m. Thursday. Friends found her body in the driver’s seat of a white Honda CRV on the side of Worthen Road in Lexington and contacted police, the Middlesex district attorney’s office said.
“It’s really very sad news,” Yuegang Zhang, a minister at the church, said Saturday. “It’s really shocking.”
Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan announced Friday that Cai’s death is being investigated as a homicide, but authorities had made no arrests as of Saturday evening. A spokeswoman for Ryan said Saturday afternoon that there were no updates in the case.
Cai, who moved to the United States from China in 2015, was last seen by her husband and friends on Tuesday evening, Ryan’s office said.
The following day, her friends became concerned. Cai had told friends she was worried about her safety, Ryan said, and had missed two scheduled appointments.
The friends looked for Cai for several hours before finding her body on Worthen Road, which intersects with the street where she and her husband, Hongyan Sun, have owned a home since 2016, according to town records.
Sun had filed for divorce last September, citing an irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, court records show.
Attorney Lei Reilley, who represented Cai in the divorce proceeding, said her client messaged her on Tuesday. Reilley said she responded two days later, but never heard from Cai, who was typically swift to write back.
On Friday, Reilley said she learned Cai had been found dead.
The divorce case focused on dividing the couple’s assets, Reilley said, because there were no custody issues to negotiate.
Reilley said she wasn’t aware of any physical threats against Cai by Sun or anyone else. The estranged couple continued to share their house in Lexington while the divorce case was pending, she said.
Court papers filed last October describe the marital trouble from the perspective of Cai, who alleged that Sun subjected her to “frequent verbal and emotional abuse and other cruelty” and “sometimes made her and her daughter feel unsafe.”
Efforts to reach Sun were unsuccessful on Saturday. He spoke briefly Friday evening with TV reporters after he arrived home dressed in blue scrubs. Sun said he knew little about how Cai died and called her “a great lady.”
Sun’s divorce lawyer didn’t return messages Saturday.
Neighbors on Baskin Road expressed shock at the killing and struggled to make sense of the violence. Some residents said they occasionally saw Cai in the neighborhood, but rarely, if ever, caught a glimpse of Sun.
Steve Clark, 74, said he met Sun once when he bumped into him and Cai, and then walked with the couple to a nearby bus stop.
“It just seemed odd that . . . she’d be around the house, and we never saw him,” said Clark. “Except that one time.”
Cai was a gifted vocalist. Reilley said she saw her sing a Chinese song at a karaoke gathering in Weston and was impressed.
During a Chinese New Year celebration at the church in February, Zhang said Cai performed a song from “Big Fish & Begonia,” a Chinese animated epic fantasy film that was released in China in 2016.
At church last Sunday, Cai was “very joyful,” he said.
“She was very loving, very sweet,” Zhang said.
Juta Pan, senior pastor at Chinese Bible Church of Greater Boston, and Zhang said they are trying to support Cai’s family, members of her fellowship group, and others who knew her.
“We feel sad,” Pan said. “We will try to help this family and show God’s love to them.”
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Also see: Addison Choi pleads guilty
He was sending threats.
Too bad #MeToo has overridden the domestic violence issue:
"UK fashion mogul charged with sexual assault by Ariz. fitness coach" by Palko Karasz New York Times, June 1, 2019
LONDON — A British businessman known as the king of retail fashion but dogged by claims of sexual harassment and racist abuse has been charged in the United States with four counts of misdemeanor assault after a fitness instructor in Arizona accused him of unwanted groping and sexually inappropriate behavior.
Katie Surridge, 37, who teaches Pilates at a luxury resort in Tucson, told the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph that the retailer, Philip Green, whose company, Arcadia Group, is behind such major brands as Top Shop, touched her repeatedly and made sexual comments on several occasions from 2016 to 2018. She said his behavior made her feel “almost like a prostitute.”
A hearing was scheduled for June 19, but Green was not planning to attend, according to an e-mailed statement from Arcadia, which said he denied the allegations.
In Britain, Green, 67, carved out a reputation as a gregarious social force who was often photographed in the company of models, movie stars, and musicians like Beyoncé, but then five former employees accused him of systemic sexual harassment and racist abuse, one of the biggest #MeToo scandals in the country, prompting a debate over press freedom, the right to privacy, and the validity of nondisclosure agreements.
Green had sought to silence the accusations with nondisclosure agreements, but they came to light in 2018, despite a court injunction to block publication of a monthslong investigation by The Daily Telegraph. Green abandoned his legal battle against the paper in February.
The battle led many to question the use of nondisclosure agreements in cases of sexual misconduct. Amid the controversy, Beyoncé ended a venture with Green by buying him out of Ivy Park, the gymwear label they founded, according to the BBC.
Accusations of misconduct are not the only threats to Green’s reign at the top of Britain’s retail industry. Amid reports of increasing troubles for the country’s leading fashion brands, including slipping profits and shuttered stores.
Arcadia’s troubles appeared unrelated to the accusations against Green. Many observers blamed a difficult business environment in which many of Britain’s oldest brands have been shutting stores. Green’s brands also appeared slow to catch up to the move to online retail and were losing the battle against discount brands that offered similar fare for a fraction of the price.
The accusations in Arizona added to Green’s personal woes.
Awwwwwwww, poor elite scum!
“I felt very taken advantage of and like, you know, just a piece of meat there at his disposal,” Surridge told The Telegraph. She said Green’s comments felt “completely sexual in nature” and included noises and remarks like “Oh, you naughty girl.”
In one episode, Surridge said, she was cleaning up her studio when Green walked in and slapped her behind several times. Later, she said, he asked for a private class, saying, “I need you to stretch me.”
Another witness, Kimberly Khoury, said Green had approached Surridge with “octopus-like hands.”
“It was pretty clear to me that she wasn’t welcoming the behavior,” Khoury told the police, according to The Daily Telegraph.....
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Excuse me, where is the loo?
"Something stinks in Parliament (not politics)" by Alex Morales Bloomberg, June 1, 201
LONDON — There’s a stench coming from the UK Parliament — and it’s not the politics.
Complaints of bad smells in the Palace of Westminster and surrounding buildings have surged this year, as the Victorian plumbing gives up under the strain of 14,500 politicians and staff — let alone the hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Many of them have some shocking tales to tell.
‘‘I had a colleague call and say there was water running down his wall,’’ said Mark Tami, a Labour MP who sits on the House of Commons Administration Committee. ‘‘But it wasn’t water, it was urine.’’
On another occasion, a ceiling collapsed on party workers in a staff office.
‘‘They all had to have hepatitis jabs,’’ Tami said. ‘‘There was a toilet above it, and the pipe had broken.’’ Sewage had piled up in the ceiling cavity, he said.
The scale of the problem is well known to Tami. Toilets block up ‘‘all the time,’’ he said. The men’s facilities in the press gallery spring a leak every few weeks, and there’s often a large puddle on the floor.
All this is in addition to the mice and moth infestations and dampness problems to be expected in a 19th-century riverside building.
‘‘The Palace of Westminster is a historic working building in urgent need of restoration and where maintenance issues are identified, we act quickly to address them,’’ the House of Commons communications office said in an e-mail.....
How long can you hold your breath?
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Time to flush this and hope for the best.
