New data reflects what many have long said: Poorer areas of LA have most trash on streets https://t.co/8dS0Kr43ZD pic.twitter.com/UAn4FlX67p— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) April 9, 2016
A new database measuring garbage on more than 9,100 miles of Los Angeles streets and alleys shows poorer areas of the city see more illegal dumping and litter than affluent ones.
City officials on Friday released details on the far-reaching study, which is designed to help guide the city sanitation bureau to prioritize the grimiest areas and send clean-up crews there.
More than 370 miles of roads and alleys in L.A. — or 4% of all city blocks — were found to be so dirty that they require immediate cleanup, according to the rating system released by the city Friday. An additional 42% of road miles need some form of service.
A little more than half of the dirtiest streets are in Central, East and South L.A. But pockets of filth were found across the city, including east San Fernando Valley, Venice and Wilmington, the analysis found.
Officials aim to clean all the dirtiest locations by 2018, a spokeswoman for LA Sanitation said.
“Prior to this, we had no data to really look [at] to intelligently deploy resources,” said Leo Martinez, who oversees solid resource operations for the bureau. “This has given us an incredible amount of knowledge.”
A Times data analysis last year found that cleanup of illegal dumping in many poor areas of L.A. lagged behind wealthier neighborhoods.
The findings of the database are not surprising for residents in some working-class neighborhoods, who say that dealing with street trash is a frustrating part of everyday life. Some expressed disappointment about the city's inability to clean up streets...
Read an excerpt from @Regnery's 'Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War' https://t.co/Odvxf9BOJh pic.twitter.com/nkX6EmIj3P
— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 9, 2016
CHICAGO — Late at night this month, the pastor’s phone beeped with a text message from an anguished parishioner. Andre Taylor, the church member’s great-nephew, had been shot and killed.Keep reading.
“Dre had just turned 16,” the message to the pastor, the Rev. Ira Acree, read. “I think that it’s time to call for action and solicit help, have the National Guard to take over and patrol the Chicago streets.”
Four days earlier, he had received another text. A different parishioner’s granddaughter, Daysha Wright, a 21-year-old nursing student, had been shot to death in a car, leaving a 2-year-old son.
At his desk at Greater St. John Bible Church, Mr. Acree said he was bracing for the coming months. “Unless something radical takes place, it’s going to be a blood bath this summer,” he said.
Chicago has long been troubled by violence, but homicides and shootings have risen sharply this year. Violent crime remains below the levels of two decades ago, and criminologists caution against finding trends in only a few months of data. But City Hall, the police and community leaders are alarmed by the surge: As of Friday, 131 people had been killed here in the first months of 2016, an 84 percent rise in homicides from the same period in 2015. There had been 605 shootings, nearly twice as many as at this point last year.
The increase could hardly have come at a more difficult time. The city is at a pivotal moment for law enforcement, mired in a crisis over police conduct and discipline and over distrust of officers, particularly among African-American residents, who make up about one-third of Chicago’s population.
The Justice Department is scrutinizing the patterns and practices of the city’s police force; the mayor on Monday named an interim police superintendent to replace the department’s fired leader; and voters have rejected Cook County’s top prosecutor, defeating her in a primary on March 15. The release in November of a police video that showed a white officer shooting a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, 16 times caused longstanding anger about police conduct to boil over.
And Mayor Rahm Emanuel faces enormous challenges: tamping down a flood of crime while simultaneously repairing frayed relations with the people who live here, as well as addressing low morale among officers.
“Trying to rebuild and do all of that at the same time, when violence is going up, creates all kinds of additional struggles and issues,” said Kim Foxx, who defeated a two-term incumbent in the Democratic primary to be the next Cook County state’s attorney in a race that revolved around the McDonald case.
Weekends and summer nights have often presented the most danger here, but these days shootings feel constant. On March 14, three police officers were shot and wounded in an exchange of gunfire that left a suspect dead. The next day, three people were killed in a single hour. The next, people inside two cars were reported shooting at one another along Lake Shore Drive.
“I’m really tired of it, and tired of worrying,” said Gloria Johnson, 37, who serves food at a restaurant in Austin, a neighborhood where the authorities say violence has been particularly harsh. Like other parts of the West Side, Austin has long wrestled with economic distress, gangs and crime, and Ms. Johnson bears a long scar on her elbow from a bullet fired about a decade ago. “But it seems like this year is just the worst of the worst,” she said.
The police say much of the violence in this city of about 2.7 million people is tied to gangs, which have become disorganized and have splintered into more factions. While shootings along Lake Shore Drive and near a W Hotel not far from Chicago’s Gold Coast have drawn notice, most of those dying are young men on the South and West Sides, the police say...
There had been hope among some Catholics that the pontiff might overhaul its position on gay marriage, but the large document that ends with the hand-written signature of “Franciscus” — the pope’s Latin name — made it clear that would not happen. It said there are “absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar … to God’s plan for marriage and family.”
The document also made repeated references to Christian marriage as a “union between a man and a woman.”
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ plan to attend a Vatican-sponsored conference put him in the middle of a diplomatic row as a senior Vatican official accused the senator of showing “monumental discourtesy” in angling for an invitation that puts a political cast on the gathering.More.
Sanders, whose foreign policy experience is under attack by competitor Hillary Clinton, said Friday he was “very excited” to have been invited to the conference on economic and social issues hosted by a pontifical academy in Rome on April 15. It will put him at the seat of the Roman Catholic Church four days before the New York primary.
It has also inserted Sanders into a dispute among Vatican officials. The president of the academy said Friday that Sanders didn’t follow proper protocol by failing to contact her office, and that his presence threatens to make the event political. The academy’s chancellor said he arranged the invitation and defended the Vermont senator.
“Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is hosting the conference, said in a telephone interview. “I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly -- not that he will.”
Trump is right about Megyn Kelly.https://t.co/srL6BT31w1 pic.twitter.com/qzXmihp3uE— National Interest (@TheNatlInterest) April 6, 2016
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is overrated and treated him unfairly at the first GOP presidential debate last August. Yet with the exception of Trump’s most die-hard supporters, few on the right agree. This is a sign of Trump’s problems with women (73 percent of them currently have an unfavorable view of him), but it is also a symptom of the GOP’s wussiness to ask tough questions about a popular female anchor, as well as of its failure to challenge the insidiousness of the Left’s prevailing narrative about women.Keep reading.
At issue is conservatism’s decades-old battle against identity politics, in which hostility has been declared toward the grievance industry that gins up phony allegations of racial, ethnic or gender injustice.
On the Fox News Channel, Kelly has exhibited a penchant for kissing up to liberal women, fawning over their feminist agenda, berating conservative men and behaving unprofessionally toward guests. No prominent conservative has ever dared to question the perception that Kelly is an exemplary anchor, or to observe that she spends far too much time peddling a softer, kinder version of feminist dogma.
Trump is the only major national figure on the right who has challenged Kelly’s status as a demigod at Fox News. By declaring unabashedly that Kelly is not very good, Trump has—unwittingly—offered conservatives an opportunity to reflect on the grave disservice that a star on the only major conservative television network often does to conservatism.
As it turns out, Kelly’s not being nearly as good as everyone says is directly intertwined with her being not very conservative.
"The demon is a liar. ... The attack is psychological ... and powerful." https://t.co/jgzQDzvCtD @KelKilken pic.twitter.com/ruGYH8mFSM
— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) April 8, 2016
I don't know about that.Keep reading.
But it occurred to me: Why aren't we entitled to a recording of what is said around our body when we're under anesthesia? Why should you have to sneak a recording device into your ponytail? You have to be knocked out for the surgery, and all these people have access to your vulnerable body, why shouldn't you have a right to use an artificial device to do what your senses would normally do — monitor what's happening to you? Do the doctors and nurses have an interest in having a private conversation around your body? I'd say you have the greater interest in finding out what's happening to you when you're unconscious. Anyone who wants to make a recording should be able to do it openly. You wouldn't need to take any additional steps to improve the "bedside manner" of doctors and nurses...
