US NEWS
Law& Disorder
Law & disorder: April 17, 2016
POSTED: 04/16/16
The following items are based on information provided by officials in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
ELLENVILLE
• Hypodermic instrument: Brian J. Babcock, 24, of 62 Houtman Drive, Walden was arrested at 9:05 p.m. Friday by Ellenville village police on a misdemeanor charge of criminal possession of a hypodermic instrument. He was released with a ticket to appear in Ellenville Village Court.
• Drugs: Thomas P. Rebis, 43, of 59 Center St., Ellenville was arrested at 7:22 p.m. Friday by Ellenville village police on a misdemeanor charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance. He was released with a ticket to appear in Ellenville Village Court.
• Aggravated family offense: David M. Mattison, 25, of 137 Center St., Ellenville was arrested at 1:53 a.m. April 12 by Ellenville village police on a felony charge of aggravated family offense. He was also charged with criminal mischief and assault, both misdemeanors. Mattison was arraigned in Ellenville Village Court and sent to Ulster County Jail pending a court appearance. His bail amount was not immediately available.
• Obstruction: Francis P. Dombroski, 72, of 15 Spring St., Ellenville, was arrested at 5:28 p.m. April 9 by Ellenville village police on misdemeanor charges of criminal obstruction of breathing/blood and resisting arrest. He was released with tickets to appear in Ellenville Village Court.
• Drugs: Oscar A. Correa, 24, of 12 Clayhill Road, Kerhonkson, was arrested at 6:37 p.m. March 31 by Ellenville village police on a misdemeanor charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance. He was released with a ticket to appear in Ellenville Village Court.
HYDE PARK
• DWI: Michael C. Larsen, 30, of Palenville, was arrested by state police at Rhinebeck at 9:55 p.m. Friday on Old Post Road on felony charges of aggravated drunken driving, drunken driving and aggravated unlicensed driving. He was also charged with the infractions of insufficient tail lamps, failure to keep right and illegal signal. He was held pending arraignment.
POSTED: 04/16/16
The following items are based on information provided by officials in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
ELLENVILLE
• Hypodermic instrument: Brian J. Babcock, 24, of 62 Houtman Drive, Walden was arrested at 9:05 p.m. Friday by Ellenville village police on a misdemeanor charge of criminal possession of a hypodermic instrument. He was released with a ticket to appear in Ellenville Village Court.
• Drugs: Thomas P. Rebis, 43, of 59 Center St., Ellenville was arrested at 7:22 p.m. Friday by Ellenville village police on a misdemeanor charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance. He was released with a ticket to appear in Ellenville Village Court.
• Aggravated family offense: David M. Mattison, 25, of 137 Center St., Ellenville was arrested at 1:53 a.m. April 12 by Ellenville village police on a felony charge of aggravated family offense. He was also charged with criminal mischief and assault, both misdemeanors. Mattison was arraigned in Ellenville Village Court and sent to Ulster County Jail pending a court appearance. His bail amount was not immediately available.
• Obstruction: Francis P. Dombroski, 72, of 15 Spring St., Ellenville, was arrested at 5:28 p.m. April 9 by Ellenville village police on misdemeanor charges of criminal obstruction of breathing/blood and resisting arrest. He was released with tickets to appear in Ellenville Village Court.
• Drugs: Oscar A. Correa, 24, of 12 Clayhill Road, Kerhonkson, was arrested at 6:37 p.m. March 31 by Ellenville village police on a misdemeanor charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance. He was released with a ticket to appear in Ellenville Village Court.
HYDE PARK
• DWI: Michael C. Larsen, 30, of Palenville, was arrested by state police at Rhinebeck at 9:55 p.m. Friday on Old Post Road on felony charges of aggravated drunken driving, drunken driving and aggravated unlicensed driving. He was also charged with the infractions of insufficient tail lamps, failure to keep right and illegal signal. He was held pending arraignment.
The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet
Is the Republican race slipping away from Donald Trump?
For the first time since November, it feels like the Republican nomination might be slipping away from Donald Trump.
Back then, no one really believed Trump could win, and the man who threatened to eclipse him was Ben Carson. These days, with most of the primary calendar in the past, Trump is the clear leader—and Ben Carson has dropped out and endorsed him, becoming a loyal if sometimes unhelpful surrogate. But the last few days and weeks have made very clear how hard it will be for Trump to turn his lead into a nomination. With the July GOP convention nearly in sight, the entertainer still hasn’t locked down the delegate total he needs, while the fact that he has alienated a vast swath of the Republican Party is finally starting to seem like a problem for him.
For months, Trump defied political gravity, as his delight in thumbing his nose at party bosses and people who did politics the old-fashioned way seemed to benefit him. But in a series of recent contests, Ted Cruz has beaten him, and Trump seems unprepared for a bareknuckle brawl over delegates.
Cruz won by a large margin in Wisconsin on April 5, taking 36 delegates—six times as many as Trump. He swept the 40 delegates on the board in Utah on March 22. In Colorado, Cruz dominated the local and state conventions held over the weekend, taking all 34 available delegates. Meanwhile, state-level conventions have been hostile territory for Trump. The primary process is arcane: Voters or caucuses elect delegates who go to the Republican National Convention. Depending on state rules, those delegates are required to vote for the candidate who won the state (or a specific district) on the first ballot, and sometimes on subsequent ones. But if no candidate wins the requisite 1,237 delegates through those ballots, delegates are often freed up to support whomever they want on later ballots.
That makes it essential for Trump to place delegates who are truly Trump supporters and will stick with him—and offers an opportunity for his rivals, but especially Cruz, to place delegates who will defect as soon as possible and hand a contested convention to a different candidate. So far, that’s not going well for Trump. Over the last few days, he was pounded in South Carolina ,
Iowa, Michigan, and Indiana. Earlier, he struggled in Georgia and Louisiana.
Early in the campaign, reporters and political insiders insisted that Trump simply didn’t have the smarts and the staffing to win a presidential campaign, and that he would quickly falter. For the most part, they’ve been made to look silly. But Trump has shown that he’s very weak in caucuses, which require superior organization and turnout efforts, and in the delegate fights, which are similar. It doesn’t help Trump that state conventions tend to be run by party insiders who dislike him. He can’t simply rely on ginning up turnout among disaffected voters. (Following the Colorado convention, the state Republican Party’s official account tweeted, “We did it. #Never Trump,” then deleted the message .)
Trump lashed out on Monday. “The people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself," Trump said on Fox and Friends on Monday. “They're going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. This was given by politicians—it's a crooked deal.” On Sunday, an aide accused the Cruz campaign of “Gestapo tactics” during Meet the Press. Though Trump complains that he’s being taken for a ride, his cries ring a little hollow. For one thing, as Ari Melber points out, he’s taken a greater proportion of delegates than he has of the popular vote—talk about a crooked deal. For another, Trump is a man who has throughout his business career defended the concept of taking full advantage of rules to benefit himself, notably in the case of corporate bankruptcy .
Besides, he’s clearly aware of the problem and is trying to fix it. Trump hired Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican operative who helped run the convention-floor fight for Gerald Ford in 1976, where the president defeated a challenge from Ronald Reagan. (Manafort is also a former partner of Trump friend and master of skullduggery Roger Stone.)
So far, however, the Manafort hire doesn’t seem to helped. In addition to the troubles in Colorado, South Carolina, and elsewhere, the Trump team bungled its Washington state operation, sending out a plea for supporters to register as potential delegates after the deadline had already passed. Meanwhile, Manafort’s hire seems to have sown discord within the Trump campaign. His aides, led by controversial campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, have created a surprisingly tight-knit and leak-proof unit that’s very loyal to its leader. (Where the campaign has gotten into trouble is when Trump shoots his mouth off publicly, not when staffers do privately.) But Lewandowski has been increasingly sidelined since being charged with battery for grabbing a reporter in March, and Manafort’s increasing power has
rankled the existing staff .
Adding insult to injury, with the New York primary approaching on April 19, it turns out that Trump’s children Ivanka and Eric failed to register as Republicans in time to vote for their father.
In short, it’s all a mess, and could get messier. Trump could still finish the campaign strong and win the nomination ahead of the convention, obviating all of this. That doesn’t seem likely— as Harry Enten points out, Trump is the weakest presidential front-runner in recent history. Then again, nothing about Trump’s campaign has seemed likely so far. Republican insiders have incentives to portray Trump as getting weaker, and previous predictions of doom have proved badly wrong. Right now, however, things look headed toward a contested convention.
That’s created an opening for Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. Whether he wants it is a different story. Influential voices, like the D.C. tipsheet Playbook, are circulating his name as the likely consensus nominee out of a convention fight. (Liam Donovan lays out a persuasive case against it.) Ryan, the youngish Wisconsinite, insists he has no interest in the job, but he said the same thing about becoming House speaker. We’ll see. The Ryan buzz is loud enough that we’re adding him to the Cheat Sheet.
Meanwhile, the Democratic side of things remains deadlocked: Hillary Clinton can’t shake Bernie Sanders, but he can’t overtake her, either. The Wyoming caucuses on April 9 demonstrate the problem. The state is classic Sanders territory: smaller, whiter, and with a caucus rather than a primary, just the sort of state he has dominated. True to form, he beat Clinton by more than 11 percent in the popular vote. But thanks to delegate-allocation rules, that big win won’t help him make up ground in the race: They each leave the Equality State (that’s really its official nickname) with seven pledged delegates.
The next big contest for both parties is New York on April 19. Clinton is hoping for a big win in the state she represented in the Senate. But Sanders, who grew up in Brooklyn and has kept the accent through his Vermont years, has worked to make a race of it. The two Democrats went through their most acrimonious tangle of the campaign last week, with Sanders saying Clinton was not “qualified” to be president . He later walked that back, under pressure, and said instead over the weekend that her judgment was questionable.
There’s some evidence to support that view.
Trump remains favored to win in New York, his own home state. The question is how much he wins by. To make 1,237 delegates before the convention, he’ll need some commanding performances, including in the Empire State. John Kasich’s and Ted Cruz’s goal is to hold down his margins and snag a few delegates. New York could be the last best hope for Kasich, who is still in the race, to Cruz’s increasing frustration. Kasich’s rationale remains the same as it has always been. He can’t win the nomination outright, but believes that he should be the consensus nominee at the convention, since he’s the only candidate who beats Clinton in head-to-head polling at this point.
Back then, no one really believed Trump could win, and the man who threatened to eclipse him was Ben Carson. These days, with most of the primary calendar in the past, Trump is the clear leader—and Ben Carson has dropped out and endorsed him, becoming a loyal if sometimes unhelpful surrogate. But the last few days and weeks have made very clear how hard it will be for Trump to turn his lead into a nomination. With the July GOP convention nearly in sight, the entertainer still hasn’t locked down the delegate total he needs, while the fact that he has alienated a vast swath of the Republican Party is finally starting to seem like a problem for him.
For months, Trump defied political gravity, as his delight in thumbing his nose at party bosses and people who did politics the old-fashioned way seemed to benefit him. But in a series of recent contests, Ted Cruz has beaten him, and Trump seems unprepared for a bareknuckle brawl over delegates.
Cruz won by a large margin in Wisconsin on April 5, taking 36 delegates—six times as many as Trump. He swept the 40 delegates on the board in Utah on March 22. In Colorado, Cruz dominated the local and state conventions held over the weekend, taking all 34 available delegates. Meanwhile, state-level conventions have been hostile territory for Trump. The primary process is arcane: Voters or caucuses elect delegates who go to the Republican National Convention. Depending on state rules, those delegates are required to vote for the candidate who won the state (or a specific district) on the first ballot, and sometimes on subsequent ones. But if no candidate wins the requisite 1,237 delegates through those ballots, delegates are often freed up to support whomever they want on later ballots.
That makes it essential for Trump to place delegates who are truly Trump supporters and will stick with him—and offers an opportunity for his rivals, but especially Cruz, to place delegates who will defect as soon as possible and hand a contested convention to a different candidate. So far, that’s not going well for Trump. Over the last few days, he was pounded in South Carolina ,
Iowa, Michigan, and Indiana. Earlier, he struggled in Georgia and Louisiana.
Early in the campaign, reporters and political insiders insisted that Trump simply didn’t have the smarts and the staffing to win a presidential campaign, and that he would quickly falter. For the most part, they’ve been made to look silly. But Trump has shown that he’s very weak in caucuses, which require superior organization and turnout efforts, and in the delegate fights, which are similar. It doesn’t help Trump that state conventions tend to be run by party insiders who dislike him. He can’t simply rely on ginning up turnout among disaffected voters. (Following the Colorado convention, the state Republican Party’s official account tweeted, “We did it. #Never Trump,” then deleted the message .)
Trump lashed out on Monday. “The people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself," Trump said on Fox and Friends on Monday. “They're going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. This was given by politicians—it's a crooked deal.” On Sunday, an aide accused the Cruz campaign of “Gestapo tactics” during Meet the Press. Though Trump complains that he’s being taken for a ride, his cries ring a little hollow. For one thing, as Ari Melber points out, he’s taken a greater proportion of delegates than he has of the popular vote—talk about a crooked deal. For another, Trump is a man who has throughout his business career defended the concept of taking full advantage of rules to benefit himself, notably in the case of corporate bankruptcy .
Besides, he’s clearly aware of the problem and is trying to fix it. Trump hired Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican operative who helped run the convention-floor fight for Gerald Ford in 1976, where the president defeated a challenge from Ronald Reagan. (Manafort is also a former partner of Trump friend and master of skullduggery Roger Stone.)
So far, however, the Manafort hire doesn’t seem to helped. In addition to the troubles in Colorado, South Carolina, and elsewhere, the Trump team bungled its Washington state operation, sending out a plea for supporters to register as potential delegates after the deadline had already passed. Meanwhile, Manafort’s hire seems to have sown discord within the Trump campaign. His aides, led by controversial campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, have created a surprisingly tight-knit and leak-proof unit that’s very loyal to its leader. (Where the campaign has gotten into trouble is when Trump shoots his mouth off publicly, not when staffers do privately.) But Lewandowski has been increasingly sidelined since being charged with battery for grabbing a reporter in March, and Manafort’s increasing power has
rankled the existing staff .
Adding insult to injury, with the New York primary approaching on April 19, it turns out that Trump’s children Ivanka and Eric failed to register as Republicans in time to vote for their father.
In short, it’s all a mess, and could get messier. Trump could still finish the campaign strong and win the nomination ahead of the convention, obviating all of this. That doesn’t seem likely— as Harry Enten points out, Trump is the weakest presidential front-runner in recent history. Then again, nothing about Trump’s campaign has seemed likely so far. Republican insiders have incentives to portray Trump as getting weaker, and previous predictions of doom have proved badly wrong. Right now, however, things look headed toward a contested convention.
That’s created an opening for Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. Whether he wants it is a different story. Influential voices, like the D.C. tipsheet Playbook, are circulating his name as the likely consensus nominee out of a convention fight. (Liam Donovan lays out a persuasive case against it.) Ryan, the youngish Wisconsinite, insists he has no interest in the job, but he said the same thing about becoming House speaker. We’ll see. The Ryan buzz is loud enough that we’re adding him to the Cheat Sheet.
Meanwhile, the Democratic side of things remains deadlocked: Hillary Clinton can’t shake Bernie Sanders, but he can’t overtake her, either. The Wyoming caucuses on April 9 demonstrate the problem. The state is classic Sanders territory: smaller, whiter, and with a caucus rather than a primary, just the sort of state he has dominated. True to form, he beat Clinton by more than 11 percent in the popular vote. But thanks to delegate-allocation rules, that big win won’t help him make up ground in the race: They each leave the Equality State (that’s really its official nickname) with seven pledged delegates.
The next big contest for both parties is New York on April 19. Clinton is hoping for a big win in the state she represented in the Senate. But Sanders, who grew up in Brooklyn and has kept the accent through his Vermont years, has worked to make a race of it. The two Democrats went through their most acrimonious tangle of the campaign last week, with Sanders saying Clinton was not “qualified” to be president . He later walked that back, under pressure, and said instead over the weekend that her judgment was questionable.
There’s some evidence to support that view.
Trump remains favored to win in New York, his own home state. The question is how much he wins by. To make 1,237 delegates before the convention, he’ll need some commanding performances, including in the Empire State. John Kasich’s and Ted Cruz’s goal is to hold down his margins and snag a few delegates. New York could be the last best hope for Kasich, who is still in the race, to Cruz’s increasing frustration. Kasich’s rationale remains the same as it has always been. He can’t win the nomination outright, but believes that he should be the consensus nominee at the convention, since he’s the only candidate who beats Clinton in head-to-head polling at this point.
Japan news
Bad weather hits Japan quake survivors
Tens of thousands of people forced into shelters by two deadly tremors in Japan endure heavy rain and cold temperatures, as rescue efforts continue.
17 April 2016 Asia
Bangladesh news editor was arrested
Police say he is being held after the discovery of evidence linking him to a conspiracy to murder the son of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
The leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party, Khaleda Zia, demanded his unconditional release.
Mr Rehman is the third pro-opposition editor to be detained since 2013.
The editors of the leading Bengali and English newspapers have both recently been accused of similar crimes.
Mahfuz Anam, editor of the respected English-language Daily Star newspaper, faces charges of treason for accusing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of corruption in 2007 when the country was run by a military government.
Freedom of press 'under threat' in Bangladesh
The prime minister's son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, has claimed that the articles were an attempt by Mr Anam and the Daily Star to "support a military dictatorship in an attempt to remove my mother from politics".
Similar allegations are now being levelled against Mr Rehman, 81, who was arrested by plain-clothed policeman on Saturday morning.
He was at one time the speech writer for Khaleda Zia, the prime minister's arch-rival.
"He has been arrested over sedition charges filed by police in Dhaka in August 2015," police spokesman Maruf Hossain Sorder told the AFP news agency.
Mr Rehman was the long-time editor of Jai Jai Din, a mass-circulation Bengali daily. He now edits a popular Bengali monthly magazine called Mouchake Dhil.
In recent months Mr Rehman convened the international affairs committee of the BNP and headed a pro-opposition think-tank called G-9.
BBC South Asia correspondent Justin Rowlatt reported in February that both The Daily Star and its sister publication Prothom Alo - the most widely read Bengali newspaper in the country - are being subjected to a clandestine attempt to undermine their finances and stifle their operations.
The latest media uncertainty comes amid growing concern about freedom of speech in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, which in recent months has suffered a series of Islamist killings of secular bloggers and publishers.
The leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party, Khaleda Zia, demanded his unconditional release.
Mr Rehman is the third pro-opposition editor to be detained since 2013.
The editors of the leading Bengali and English newspapers have both recently been accused of similar crimes.
Mahfuz Anam, editor of the respected English-language Daily Star newspaper, faces charges of treason for accusing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of corruption in 2007 when the country was run by a military government.
Freedom of press 'under threat' in Bangladesh
The prime minister's son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, has claimed that the articles were an attempt by Mr Anam and the Daily Star to "support a military dictatorship in an attempt to remove my mother from politics".
Similar allegations are now being levelled against Mr Rehman, 81, who was arrested by plain-clothed policeman on Saturday morning.
He was at one time the speech writer for Khaleda Zia, the prime minister's arch-rival.
"He has been arrested over sedition charges filed by police in Dhaka in August 2015," police spokesman Maruf Hossain Sorder told the AFP news agency.
Mr Rehman was the long-time editor of Jai Jai Din, a mass-circulation Bengali daily. He now edits a popular Bengali monthly magazine called Mouchake Dhil.
In recent months Mr Rehman convened the international affairs committee of the BNP and headed a pro-opposition think-tank called G-9.
BBC South Asia correspondent Justin Rowlatt reported in February that both The Daily Star and its sister publication Prothom Alo - the most widely read Bengali newspaper in the country - are being subjected to a clandestine attempt to undermine their finances and stifle their operations.
The latest media uncertainty comes amid growing concern about freedom of speech in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, which in recent months has suffered a series of Islamist killings of secular bloggers and publishers.