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Judge Says She Is “Concerned” Detective May Have Lied To Get Breonna Taylor Search Warrant

by | Oct 2, 2020 |

Cops Lie – Judge concerned

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The Louisville judge who signed a search warrant for Breonna Taylor’s home that ultimately led to her death said Thursday she is concerned that the detective may have lied to obtain the warrant.

But Jefferson Circuit Judge Mary Shaw told The Courier Journal that she will defer to the FBI, which has been investigating the search warrant application for Taylor’s apartment that led to the fatal raid.

The Courier Journal asked Shaw if she intended to demand that Detective Joshua Jaynes show why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for swearing in an affidavit that he “verified through a U.S. Postal Inspector that suspected drug dealer Jamarcus Glover has been receiving packages” at Taylor’s home.

Joshua Jaynes

Records obtained by The Courier Journal and first reported by WDRB show that Louisville police were told before the March 13 raid that no packages “suspicious or otherwise” had been delivered to Glover at Taylor’s residence in the months before she was shot and killed by police executing a no-knock search warrant.

More here

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron is Guilty Accessory to Murder of Breonna Taylor

by | Oct 1, 2020 |

He should be imprisoned for the rest of his life along with his co-conspirators, the trigger-men, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove.

New York magazine:

It’s getting harder to deny the likelihood that Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron lied, and lied multiple times, when he explained why a grand jury decided not to charge any police officer with a crime for killing Breonna Taylor. Cameron’s office presented evidence to the jury, but the only criminal charges he announced last week were against Brett Hankison, the Louisville officer who fired blindly into Taylor’s apartment on March 13 and accidentally sprayed ammo into a neighboring unit. The “wanton endangerment” charge he’s facing means that the only officer who will suffer legal consequences for the events surrounding Taylor’s death, at least for now, is the only one who didn’t have a direct hand in killing her. The other officers involved, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, shot Taylor six times out of more than 30 rounds fired between them.

When Cameron announced this decision to the public, he characterized it as a just resolution to a universally accepted set of facts. “The warrant [that the police used to enter the apartment] was not served as a ‘no-knock’ warrant,” he claimed, rebuking witness accounts that officers had failed to announce their presence before bursting into Taylor’s home, causing her boyfriend Kenneth Walker to think they were being burglarized and shoot one of them in the leg. Walker’s bullet was the police’s justification for opening fire, which killed Taylor, who was unarmed. But failing to announce themselves as police would undermine that defense: Under Kentucky’s “castle doctrine,” law-enforcement officers are the only home invaders that residents aren’t allowed to use deadly force against, but only if they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement.

This wasn’t the only dubious claim that Cameron expected the public to take at face value. He also said that the grand jury agreed that Taylor’s death was justified. “While there are six possible homicide charges under Kentucky law,” he explained, “these charges are not applicable to the facts before us because our investigation showed — and the grand jury agreed — that Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in the return of deadly fire after having been fired upon.” But the grand jury may not have actually agreed.

On Monday, one of the jurors took the extraordinary step of filing a court motion to make transcripts of the grand jury deliberations public and allow its members to speak publicly about how they unfolded, according to the New York Times. Grand jury deliberations are subject to strict secrecy, and the evidence they consider usually only becomes public in court if there’s prosecution. The unnamed juror claimed that Cameron had misrepresented the jury’s case to the public, and that the jurors were never given the option to indict officers Mattingly and Cosgrove. If true, this would appear to undermine Cameron’s claim that the jury was unanimous that Taylor’s death was legally justified.

It also casts more doubt on his earlier accounts. Cameron’s claim that the officers clearly identified themselves — and therefore weren’t executing a no-knock warrant — is supported by the testimony of the officers themselves and one witness, a neighbor of Taylor’s. But roughly a dozen other neighbors claim not to have heard anything until the police battered in Taylor’s door. And investigative documents recently obtained by the Louisville Courier-Journal show that the AG’s lone nonpolice witness originally said they heard nothing, only changing their story months later when investigators circled back for another interview.

Read the rest here.

The ‘Black Bloc’ Anarchists Who Might As Well Be Working For the Republicans

by | Oct 1, 2020 |

I feel sorry for the black people from the neighborhood who just want the cops to stop murdering them but who — at least in many major cities — cannot have a peaceful protest without white anarcho-communists coming and turning the place into a live-action Trump commercial.

I used to know some of the left-anarchists who went to Seattle in 1999 for the WTO protest and such. They were good kids mostly, but they don’t know what they’re talking about or what role they’re really playing. But they never started major riots or set fires the way these people are now.

And of course the worse the crazy Twitter-style PC Commissars go after decent people and these kids keep hijacking BLM protests and turning them to destruction (not that it’s been all anarchists rioting and looting), the worse the right wing gets in response. You think conservatives were authoritarian? The radical right is, how should we say, much more radical. And they are changing fast in reaction to all this overreach by these supposed revolutionaries. When true Fascism comes to America it will be in the name of stopping the left anarchists and communists from their violence.

Study Shows Vitamin D Supplement Protects Against Covid-19

by | Sep 28, 2020 |

From Genetic And Engineering News

“According to Holick, the newly reported study provides a simple and cost-effective strategy to improve the body’s ability to fight the coronavirus and reduce the adverse clinical outcomes of COVID-19, including requiring ventilator support, and overactive immune response leading to cytokine storm and death. “Because vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency is so widespread in children and adults in the United States and worldwide, especially in the winter months, it is prudent for everyone to take a vitamin D supplement to reduce the risk of being infected and having complications from COVID-19,” he stated.”

Full Article Here:

The results of a study by researchers at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, and Boston University Medical Center, suggest that improving vitamin D status in the general population, and in particular in patients hospitalized with COVID-19, could help to reduce the severity of COVID-19 disease and associated deaths. The study, reported in PLOS ONE, found that hospitalized COVID-19 patients who had sufficient vitamin D—i.e., they had blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D of at least 30 ng/mL—had a significantly lower risk of adverse clinical outcomes, including becoming unconscious, hypoxia, and death, than patients who were vitamin D deficient.

In addition, patients who were vitamin D sufficient had lower blood levels of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein, and higher blood lymphocyte levels. “This study provides direct evidence that vitamin D sufficiency can reduce the complications, including the cytokine storm (release of too many proteins into the blood too quickly) and ultimately death from COVID-19,” commented Michael F. Holick, PhD, MD, professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics and molecular medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

Holick is corresponding author of the investigators’ published paper, which is titled “Vitamin D sufficiency, a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at least 30 ng/mL reduced risk for adverse clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19 infection.”

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus causes respiratory and systemic disease that ranges in severity from mild respiratory symptoms to severe lung injury, multi-organ failure, and death. The total number of confirmed cases in Iran, by May 20, 2020, was 126,949, with 7,183 deaths, equivalent to 86 deaths per 1M population, the authors wrote.

Vitamin D [1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D; 1,25(OH)2D] has been shown to have immunomodulatory activity, and it has previously been suggested that the vitamin could have a protective effect against COVID-19, the authors noted. Vitamin D interaction with its receptor in immune cells modulates the innate and acquired immune systems in response to invasion of bacterial and viral pathogens. Vitamin D also modulates the renin-angiotensin pathway and downregulates ACE2. “Therefore, vitamin D might help in treatment of COVID-19 by preventing the cytokine storm and subsequent ARDS [acute respiratory distress syndrome] which is commonly the cause of mortality,” the authors commented.

The team noted that while Iran is a sunny country, the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency is high, especially in older people who present with more severe clinical manifestations after exposure to SARS-CoV-2. The researchers hypothesized that vitamin D sufficiency might reduce the risk of severe COVID-19 and adverse clinical outcomes, including death associated with COVID-19 infection.

For their study, they analyzed data from 235 hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Vitamin D status was assessed by taking a blood test to measure serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D. The patients were followed for clinical outcomes, including clinical severity of infection, becoming unconscious, difficulty in breathing resulting in hypoxia, and death. Patient blood was also analyzed for C-reactive protein and for lymphocyte count.

The researchers compared all of these parameters in patients who were vitamin D deficient, to those who were vitamin D sufficient. The results found that among patients who were older than 40 years, those who were vitamin D sufficient were 51.5% less likely to die from the infection compared with patients who were vitamin D deficient, or insufficient, with a 25-hydroxyvitamin D blood level of less than 30 ng/mL. “Only 9.7% of patients older than 40 years who were vitamin D sufficient succumbed to the infection compared to 20% who had a circulating level of 25(OH)D< 30 ng/mL,” the scientists noted. Vitamin D sufficiency was also linked with much lower serum CRP levels, and increased lymphocyte numbers.

“The present study revealed an independent association between vitamin D sufficiency [25(OH)D ≥30 ng/mL] and decreased risk of adverse clinical outcomes from COVID-19,” they further stated. “After adjusting for confounding factors, there was a significant association between vitamin D sufficiency and reduction in clinical severity, inpatient mortality serum levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), and an increase in lymphocyte percentage.”

The team suggested that the significant reduction in serum CRP, together with increased lymphocytes percentage, indicate that vitamin D sufficiency also may help to modulate the immune response, possibly by reducing risk for cytokine storm in response to the SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. “This beneficial effect on the immune system may also reduce the risk of acquiring this insidious potentially life-threatening viral infection,” they wrote.

Holick previously published a study suggesting that a sufficient amount of vitamin D can reduce the risk of catching coronavirus by 54%, and he believes that being vitamin D sufficient helps to fight the consequences from being infected not only with the coronavirus, but also other viruses that cause upper respiratory tract illnesses, including influenza. “There is great concern that the combination of influenza infection and a coronal viral infection could substantially increase hospitalizations and death due to complications from these viral infections,” he said.

The investigators are recommending that additional, controlled studies should be carried out to evaluate the role of vitamin D status on the risk of developing COVID-19 infection and mitigating complications and mortality in those with SARS-CoV-2 infection. They acknowledge that just how high a blood level of vitamin D is needed for optimum immune system effects isn’t known—“it remains debatable as to what the optimum serum level of 25(OH)D should be for maximizing its effect on the immune system.” Nevertheless, they concluded, “… based on the available literature and results from this study it is reasonable to recommend vitamin D supplementation, along the guidelines recommended by the Endocrine Society to achieve a blood level of 25(OH)D of at least 30/mL, to children and adults to potentially reduce risk of acquiring the infection and for all COVID-19 patients especially those being admitted into the hospital.”

According to Holick, the newly reported study provides a simple and cost-effective strategy to improve the body’s ability to fight the coronavirus and reduce the adverse clinical outcomes of COVID-19, including requiring ventilator support, and overactive immune response leading to cytokine storm and death. “Because vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency is so widespread in children and adults in the United States and worldwide, especially in the winter months, it is prudent for everyone to take a vitamin D supplement to reduce the risk of being infected and having complications from COVID-19,” he stated.

Breonna Taylor: The Stupid Cop May Have Shot Partner in the Leg

by | Sep 27, 2020 |

Ballistics report doesn’t support Kentucky AG’s claim that Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend shot cop

A Kentucky State Police ballistics report does not support state Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s assertion that Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot a Louisville police officer the night she was killed.

Cameron told reporters Wednesday the investigation of Taylor’s death March 13 had ruled out “friendly fire” from ex-officer Brett Hankison as the source of the shot that went through Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly’s thigh, prompting him and Officer Myles Cosgrove to return fire, killing Taylor.

The KSP report says “due to limited markings of comparative value,” the 9-mm bullet that hit and exited Mattingly was neither “identified nor eliminated as having been fired” from Walker’s gun.

Cameron said Hankison had been eliminated as the shooter because the three officers were all carrying .40 caliber handguns, while Walker had a 9.

But appearing later that night on CNN, Steve Romines, one of Walker’s attorneys, said he had obtained a Louisville Metro Police Department record showing Hankison had been issued a 9 mm weapon as well.

Read the rest here.

 

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