A man brandishing an assault rifle, shotgun and handgun opened fire Monday inside a building at the Washington Navy Yard — killing at least four people and wounding at least seven more, including two police officers, authorities said.
SWAT officers swarmed the building, the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command, and a shooter there was killed, sources told NBC News.
More than two hours after the first gunfire, there were reports that tactical teams were entering a second building at the Navy Yard, but there was no hard evidence of a second gunman.
Terrie Durham, who works at the Naval Sea Systems Command building, said the gunman appeared to be wearing dark fatigues. Another worker there, Todd Brundidge, said he heard a fire alarm go off, and later saw the gunman come around the corner.
“He turned our way and started firing, and we ran downstairs to get out of the building,” Brundidge said. “No words. He raised the gun and started firing.”
A naval security guard was among those shot and was hit in both legs, U.S. military officials said. Washington city police told WRC, the NBC affiliate in Washington, that one of their officers was also among those shot. It was not clear how many of the others shot were civilian and how many were military.
Nina Davuluri – of Indian descent – was born in New York. For the dumb racists who don’t know where that is, New York is in a country called America. New York is a part of The United States.
That small point is important because after Nina won the Miss America title last night, these dumb racists took to Twitter and questioned, why a foreigner won Miss America?
Here’s a small sample of what the racists had to say.
On Sunday night, Nina Davuluri beat out 52 other contestants to become the first Indian-American woman to seize the Miss America title.
“Thank you so much,” the aspiring doctor, 24, said through tears, as last year’s titleholder Mallory Hagan crowned her in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall.
Competing on a platform of “celebrating diversity,” Davuluri performed a fusion of classical Indian and Bollywood-style dancing in a dazzling red and turquoise ensemble after momentarily missing her stage cue.
During her interview, she was asked about Julie Chen’s decision to have surgery in order to further her career. “Unfortunately, I don’t agree with plastic surgery,” responded Davuluri, who graduated from the University of Michigan. “Be confident in who you are.
In case you missed it, there’s a terrific piece on Governor Christie in the New Jersey media. Written by columnist Tom Moran, it lays bare the basic fact that although Christie has benefited from disaster, he’s actually been a disaster as governor.
The basics:
Essentially, New Jersey has experienced failure at almost every level by which a politician is measured. And the one area where Christie got help from Democrats, on a pension and benefits bill that weakened collective bargaining and will eventually force public workers from their jobs, the economic effects will be devastating. In fact, many teachers will be bringing home less money three years from now than they are today. I’ve done the calculations: My take-home income will be going down over the next three years despite my actually getting a small raise. If you’re a teacher and you want very bad news, input your salary and insurance premiums on this site. Do not have anything breakable nearby when you do.
But the issues go beyond the eventual devastation of a few hundred thousand people. There are millions of people in this state who cannot find jobs because of the governor’s lack of leadership and the property taxes he promised to lower have actually gone up. Why? In the leafy suburbs where I live and work (for now), the governor slashed aid to schools and municipalities. More money has come from Trenton in the past two years, but the rest of the missing money had to be made up by a rise in local property taxes. For this past year, the district in which I work received one dollar ($1) more in state aid than last year. Meanwhile, salaries, supplies, state mandated testing, public safety and public accommodations still had to be paid for, not to mention basic municipal services.
The net effect of all of this is that people are making less money, costs are rising, jobs are not forthcoming and the governor is against common sense items such as raising the minimum wage, recognizing marriage equality, but he is in favor of protecting the wealthy by not asking them to contribute a little more to alleviate the pain.
And for this, Christie has a 20 point lead in the polls.
That’s because many Democrats in New Jersey have sold their souls for the primary reason that they see Christie as their gravy train. Not for state money, mind you, but for personal gain and power. How else to measure the utter lack of support for Democratic candidate, Senator Barbara Buono?
Here is a terrific, personable, dynamic, focused, humanistic candidate who is on the right side of the issues that New Jersey cares about. She stands up for women’s health in the face of Christie’s cuts to Planned Parenthood, supports marriage equality and has a plan to get the economy moving again. I saw Buono and her running mate, Milly Silva, speak at an event last week and I can say from personal experience that these are two highly intelligent, articulate people who act the opposite of the volatile, bullying, inappropriate antics of the present occupant in Trenton.
But the Democrats are split and President Obama is nowhere to be found. Still, Christie is only polling at 50%. Yes, he’s ahead, but if the left can get its act together and highlight what Moran has written, this race could get closer.
Which then brings us to Christie’s dream of a 2016 presidential run. If he wins with close to 50% of the vote, he can’t claim a mandate as a crossover candidate. Further, he won’t get much anything else done with a Democratic legislature. Where does that leave him? To bloviate and fuss about what he would do if he had the means, and that will force him to move farther to the right. The problem is that any right-wing opponent will only have to play the video of Obama and Christie at the shore after Sandy and the magic will seep out of his campaign. Along the way, he’ll also hurt himself by saying things that sound great to his supporters when you see them on YouTube, but will not play well at all with those who want a responsible adult as their leader.
Mark my words: Chris Christie will never be President of the United States. Let’s also try to make sure he isn’t reelected. We can’t afford even two more years of his misrule.
Saturday was a slam dunk for LeBron James, who wed his high school sweetheart, Savannah Brinson, in a super-luxe — and super-secret — ceremony at the Grand Del Mar hotel in San Diego.
The Miami Heat All-Star, 28, and Brinson, 27, exchanged vows in front of a select group of family and friends, including the pair’s two children, LeBron Jr., 8, and Bryce, 6, R&B singer Ne-Yo, Heat teammate Dwyane Wade and his girlfriend, actress Gabrielle Union, who posted a photo from the wedding with a special message to Instagram.
While it wasn’t exactly an intimate affair, the guest roster was rather conservative by celebrity standards. “[LeBron] cut the list down because he didn’t want to have 1,000 people at the wedding,” a source told the New York Post.
And, according to Us Weekly, those who were lucky enough to make the cut were treated to a surprise performance of “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé and Jay Z, complete with a full band!
James, who has been with his lady love since he was 16, finally popped the question at the Shelborne hotel in Miami on December 31, 2011. Though the two had a long engagement leading up to their walk down the aisle, both threw big blowouts this summer to commemorate their last days of being single. He celebrated the end of his bachelorhood with a bunch of pals in Toronto last month, while Brinson hosted a seven-day bachelorette bash in July that started in Las Vegas before jetting off to Anguilla with a bunch of girlfriends.
Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, Addie Mae Collins, 14, and Cynthia Dianne Wesley, 14, were killed 1963 when a bomb was thrown into the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.
Fifty years ago, four little girls went to Church to worship on a Sunday morning. They did nothing wrong, as a matter of fact, going to Church is exactly what most people would consider the right thing to do. But they were murdered in the Church when a hate group bombed the building.
They did nothing wrong. Their only crime? They were black.
This is what the NRA has in mind. If you want to take your AR-15 semi automatic gun to the Farmers Market, then go right ahead. Lots of wild animals there. Great place for hunting.
Two men heading to Appleton’s downtown farmers market with AR-15 rifles slung over their shoulders and handguns in holsters swiftly attracted the attention of police officers last weekend.
Now, they’re attracting attention across the Internet, with some gun rights advocates expressing outrage that the pair were held at gunpoint and handcuffed, while others voice frustration at what they consider a foolish and dangerous stunt.
The men, Charles Branstrom, 27, and Ross Bauman, 22, ultimately were released without tickets or charges.
Gun rights advocates think the police acted inappropriately.
“I would never blame police for following up on ‘man with a gun’ calls, but they still have to behave within the limits of the law and abide by people’s constitutional rights,” said Nik Clark, president of Wisconsin Carry, Inc., a gun rights group. “I believe the police were acting outside of their legal authority when they pointed guns at the individuals and involuntarily detained them.”
Milwaukee’s police chief ridiculed the pair.
“In a post Aurora-Newtown environment, it’s a reckless and irresponsible stunt to strut around in public with an assault-style weapon and think police should assume you’re well-intentioned,” Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn said Thursday, referring to mass shooting incidents in Colorado and Connecticut.
“It’s just absurd,” Flynn said. “This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. These characters and those who support them should be ashamed of themselves.”
Appleton police declined to comment beyond a prepared statement issued after a Journal Sentinel inquiry Thursday. It said police responded after getting calls about the men from concerned citizens, briefly detained the men and released them after determining they intended no harm and were in legal possession of the guns. The department “has no ongoing investigation and considers the issue resolved,” the statement reads.
Tucked up above 42nd Street in Times Square, situated next to advertisements for Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Madame Tussaud’s, is a new political message that feels out of place in a space touting the latest in fashion and entertainment.
The billboard, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, is shaped like a federal tobacco disclaimer and warns New Yorkers about the dangers of Obamacare: “WARNING: Obamacare may be hazardous to your health”:
The message is just the latest political stunt from the organization that first developed the individual health care mandate in 1989 and later touted Obamacare-like reforms in Massachusetts. But this strategy is particularly obtuse. While premiums in the law’s soon-to-be opened health care exchanges have varied throughout the country, New Yorkers will experience savings of at least 50 percent as a result of Obamacare.
This is a big deal! Russia and Syria has not only agreed that Syria has chemical weapons, a huge deal was reached on Saturday calling for these chemical weapons to be accounted for and destroyed by the middle of 2014!
The joint announcement, on the third day of intensive talks in Geneva, also set the stage for one of the most challenging undertakings in the history of arms control.
“This situation has no precedent,” said Amy E. Smithson, an expert on chemical weapons at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They are cramming what would probably be five or six years’ worth of work into a period of several months, and they are undertaking this in an extremely difficult security environment due to the ongoing civil war.”
Although the agreement explicitly includes the United Nations Security Council for the first time in determining possible international action in Syria, Russia has maintained its opposition to any military action.
But George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, emphasized that the possibility of unilateral American military force was still on the table. “We haven’t made any changes to our force posture to this point,” Mr. Little said. “The credible threat of military force has been key to driving diplomatic progress, and it’s important that the Assad regime lives up to its obligations under the framework agreement.”
Republicans however, are not having it. Moment after the news broke that an agreement was reached, Senator John McCain and Lindsey Graham issued a statement saying, the deal allows Syrian leader Bashar Assad”to delay and deceive” while the country’s civil war continued.
The statement said: “It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley, and the Obama administration is being led into it by Bashar Assad and [Russian president] Vladimir Putin.”
Police Chief Steve Bracknell, who is responsible for the Florida town where George Zimmerman resides, agreed in a series of emails that Zimmerman is a “ticking time bomb” and another “Sandy Hook” waiting to happen.
Bracknell expressed his views in response to two emails from Santiago Rodriguez, who reached Bracknell through a contact form on the police department’s website. Bracknell confirmed the emails’ authenticity to ThinkProgress and subsequently tried to distance himself from the remarks.
Rodriguez’s first email was an extended, and sometimes angry, critique of how the Lake Mary Police Department handled their response to the recent altercation between George Zimmerman, his wife and his father in law. Rodriguez told Bracknell that he had a responsibility to charge Zimmerman because he was another “Sandy Hook… waiting to happen.” Bracknell responded with a detailed defense of the police department’s conduct, but explicitly endorsed Rodriguez’s comments on Sandy Hook.
Asked to elaborate on his email, Bracknell attempted to distance himself from Rodriguez’s comments, saying he did not agree and was “referring to the fact that [Zimmerman] seems to be involved in incidents” involving firearms.
In his second email, Rodriguez called Zimmerman a “ticking time bomb” who will snap “sooner or later.” Again, Bracknell agreed.
The full email exchange between Rodriguez and Bracknell is available here.
The police are still deciding whether or not to charge Zimmerman in connection to the incident. They are attempting to recover video of alleged assault that Zimmerman’s wife, Shellie, recorded with her iPad. Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’Mara, acknowledged that Zimmerman broke the iPad into pieces before the police arrived. According to witnesses, Zimmerman also punched his father-in-law in the nose.
The new iPhones look like the old iPhones. They sound like the old iPhones. They do the same things as the old iPhones. Just slightly better, more colorfully, and less expensively than the old iPhones. This might seem disappointing: even Apple’s phones are boring now. But this is an ideal state of affairs.
The original iPhone, released in June, 2007, gave birth to the modern smartphone era: browsing restaurant menus on a sidewalk, watching a movie on a bus, tweeting from the subway and posting photos of a newborn to Facebook the second it opens its eyes. What we can do now, six years later, has not fundamentally changed since then. It’s easier or faster—forty times faster, according to Apple—or higher resolution, or all of the above. To wit, the iPhone 5S has few genuinely new features, and those that it does have are nearly invisible. In order of importance, they are: a built-in fingerprint scanner to replace passwords, faster chips, a higher-quality camera, and a gold body. The iPhone 5C is essentially the exact same as the current iPhone 5, but shoved into a brightly colored plastic, rather than aluminum, shell and sold for a hundred dollars less than before.
Fundamental technology, like manufacturing processes for processors and imaging sensors and displays, have evolved to the point that the basic shape and sense of a phone—a thin rectangle with a four-to-five-inch high-resolution touch screen stuffed with a variety of sensors—is determined now largely based on its merits rather than its outright technical limitations, much the same way that the basic shape of a knife is defined by its function rather than our ability to produce it. (The biggest technical limitation for mobile devices now is battery technology, which has not seen a true breakthrough in decades.)
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