MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) — A pair of Tennessee girls basketball high school teams have been pulled from the postseason for trying to lose a game to avoid the top-ranked team and improve their chances of advancing to the state tournament.
The programs at Riverdale, a state champion in 2013, and Smyrna were fined a total of $1,500 each Monday and also placed on probation for a year by the Tennessee Secondary School athletic Association.

TSSAA executive director Bernard Childress wrote Monday in letters to the schools' principals that the teams "made a mockery" with intentional turnovers off various violations and missed free throws. The referee also reported he stopped play ordering the coaches not to make a travesty of the game with a Smyrna player about to shoot at the wrong basket.

"Now I think Riverdale was the first team to start, 'let's lose the game,' but both teams obviously didn't want to win and it really showed," the referee wrote in his game report that was included in Childress' letters.
http://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/2-prep-girls-teams-caught-tanking-banned-from-6097241.php

Columba Bush's $42,000 shopping spree could damage husband Jeb's nomination hopes



Jeb Bush’s planned campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has suffered a setback with revelations that his wife Columba spent $42,311 (£27,369) in a single day on jewellery including a Bulgari diamond bracelet.

Mrs Bush, 61, is reported to have taken out a loan of $42,311 from a Florida jeweller in order to buy the bracelet and other items.

Details of the purchases, reported first by the Washington Post, have put a new spotlight on Mrs Bush, who during her husband’s two terms as governor of Florida between 1999 and 2007 kept a notably low profile and is known to have had reservations about his running for president.

Records filed by Mayors Jewellers of Miami showed that Mrs Bush, a Mexican national who met her husband in 1971 when he was an exchange student, took out $90,000 in loans over a 15-year period. Most recently, she bought a $11,700 Rolex watch and a $9,500 pair of earrings. Mr Bush tweeted a wedding photograph today to mark the couple’s 41st wedding anniversary.

Her aversion to publicity was in part born of another episode when she failed to declare $19,000 in purchases made during a shopping spree in Paris in 1999. She was mortified at the political damage to her husband but also felt unfairly treated by the press.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/columba-bushs-42000-shopping-spree-could-damage-husband-jebs-nomination-hopes-10065933.html

Most parents want their children to live in an environment that's clean and sanitary. We all buy home appliances that allow us to keep our homes as spotless as possible with little effort.

But increasingly, research indicates that a little bit of dirt and bacteria may be a good thing. The newest study to lend support for the so-called "hygiene hypothesis" finds children are less likely to have allergies if they live in homes where dishes and food utensils are washed by hand rather than in a dishwasher. The hygiene hypothesis is the idea that early exposure to an array of different microbes is needed to help a child develop a healthy immune system.

"The whole idea is that humans and all mammals live in homeostasis with all their bacteria in their lungs, skin and GI tract," David Rosenstreich, chief of the division of the allergy and immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, told CBS News. "Having a lot of different bacteria growing inside you tends to stimulate the immune system and makes things stronger."

The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, involved 1,029 children aged 7 and 8 from Sweden. Families filled out questionnaires about their children's history of asthma, eczema and rhinoconjunctivitis (mucous membrane inflammation that causes itchy and watery eyes and congested sinuses).

The researchers found that children living in homes where dishes were done the old-fashioned way -- by hand with a sponge -- were far less likely to have these common allergic conditions.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hand-wash-dinner-plates-to-protect-kids-from-allergies/

The homeless 21-year-old has spent the past two years getting high, selling weed to buy crystal meth, shoplifting, stealing and illegally weaving down the 16th Street Mall on his skateboard. At night, he sleeps "anywhere," sometimes curling up in the vestibule outside a Taco Bell or a bank downtown.

This is why he was banned from the mall.

Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people have been banned from the mall, the most densely populated street in all of Colorado and Denver's No. 1 tourist attraction.

The mall is the most densely populated street in Colorado, packed daily with downtown workers, tourists and the homeless. Only when someone is a continual problem do police request an area restriction. (Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post)
The policy — little-known outside law enforcement and the courthouse — raises questions about the balance between public safety and civil rights, and the effectiveness of banning drug addicts, shoplifters and general troublemakers from one area of the city. Authorities do not track area restrictions or study their effectiveness, so it's unclear whether they curb crime or move it elsewhere.

Law officers in Denver and other cities increasingly are using area restrictions to reduce crime in high-traffic areas. In Denver, the practice has spread from banning prostitutes along East Colfax Avenue and heroin addicts from the Cherry Creek Trail to banishing repeat offenders from downtown.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_27575680/banned-from-16th-street-dozens-ordered-by-court
Judges are signing 16th Street Mall area bans at the request of Denver police and the city attorney, marking as off-limits three blocks from 15th to 18th Street on a mile-long stretch from Broadway to Wynkoop. But no one can say how many people have been banished: The Denver Police Department does not keep a list; neither does the city attorney or the district attorney or the courthouse.

The incident happened around 1 a.m when Knaak, who is homeless, was walking along Moulton Street.
Knaak, who had been jaywalking, apparently angered a nearby Uber driver, who “motioned for him to walk in the crosswalk, then extended his middle finger,” said Knaak’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Eric Guttschuss.
He said that when Knaak later walked in front of the Prius at an intersection, the driver smiled and gunned his motor, prompting Knaak to splash soda on the car.
According to the attorney, the Uber driver then started recording the episode as he sped after the homeless man, “at times traveling down the wrong side of a street and forcing him between two parked cars before following him on foot.”
Knaak ducked down an alley flanked by postal trucks but soon spotted the headlights of the Prius coming toward him, Guttschuss said. That’s when Knaak, who feared for his life, hurled his skateboard at the Prius, which was only 30 feet away, smashing the front windshield, the attorney said.
Guttschuss said that even though Knaak called 911 and reported that a man was trying to run him over, police arrived and placed Knaak in handcuffs while “the Uber driver described an unprovoked attack on his vehicle.
http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Homeless-man-acquitted-after-smashing-Uber-Prius-6096572.php

When Long Island businessman Jeff Hirsch stepped up to the bank window to make a deposit one morning in May, 2012, the teller shot him a worried look. “You know, your account has been frozen,” she told Hirsch. “I’m not sure you want to put any money in there this morning.”

In fact, the disbelieving Hirsch soon learned, the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York had, without warning, seized the entire working capital — $447,000 — of Bi-County Distributors in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., the business Hirsch co-owns with his two brothers.
For Hirsch, it was one of those petrifying moments that could only elicit an incredulous, “This can’t be true!”

But it was true. Hirsch and his brothers, like thousands of other Americans in the past 10 years, had been targeted by law enforcement authorities on suspicion of a crime he had never heard of. His money had been seized as part of a federally sanctioned wave of “civil asset forfeitures,” with citizens losing homes and automobiles and life savings merely because they were suspected of some crime.

The subject is likely to come up at U.S. Senate hearings this week to review President Obama’s nomination of Loretta Lynch to replace Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General, staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee say. It was Lynch’s office that inflicted the nightmare of disappearing funds on the Hirsches and refused to release the money even after overwhelming evidence that the brothers were innocent of wrongdoing.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/loretta-lynch-civil-forfeiture-hirsch/

Last week Lynch gave the money back to the brothers

Thomas Williams was alone that November morning in 2013 when police raided his rural St. Joseph County home, wearing black masks, camouflage and holding guns at their sides. They broke down his front door with a battering ram.

"We think you're dealing marijuana," they told Williams, a 72-year-old, retired carpenter and cancer patient who is disabled and carries a medical marijuana card.

When he protested, they handcuffed him and left him on the living room floor as they ransacked his home, emptying drawers, rummaging through closets and surveying his grow room, where he was nourishing his 12 personal marijuana plants as allowed by law. Some had recently begun to die, so he had cloned them and had new seedlings, although they were not yet planted. That, police insisted, put him over the limit.

They did not charge Williams with a crime, though.
Instead, they took his Dodge Journey, $11,000 in cash from his home, his television, his cell phone, his shotgun and are attempting to take his Colon Township home. And they plan to keep the proceeds, auctioning off the property and putting the cash in police coffers.

---!

Among the cases tracked by the Heritage Foundation: Krista Vaughn of Detroit was working for the American Red Cross in 2004 when she dropped a fellow worker off at a local bank and promised to swing back around and pick her friend up once the friend finished her banking. They were both wearing their Red Cross badges, according to published reports.
A Detroit police squad working on prostitution in the area determined that Vaughn's friend was "making eye contact" with motorists in an attempt to solicit them.
Police ticketed the friend and confiscated Vaughn's 2003 Sebring, claiming that it was being used as part of a prostitution ring. They eventually dropped the charges against her friend, but Vaughn had to pay $1,800 in fines, towing and repairs to her car in order to get it back.

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/02/22/civil-asset-forfeiture-michigan-seizures-aclu-heritage-foundation-institute-justice/23737663/

The Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill studies, among other things, the depths of poverty in a state with severe pockets of urban distress, the impact of foreclosure clusters on minority neighborhoods there, and the economic impact of legal aid for North Carolina's low-income residents.

Now the center may be shutting down, the target of a Republican-appointed committee recently charged with reviewing the state university system's research centers. The panel's recommendations, announced this week, have caused an uproar in the state over political retaliation against academia — and, more specifically, over the areas of research curiously singled out by the panel. As Inside Higher Ed points out, the three centers the committee wants to ax "reflect scholarly interests in poverty, the environment and social justice."

Conservative officials in the state have long groused that academics from North Carolina's public universities have attacked conservative politicians over policies such as the state's stringent voter ID law. Since 2010, Republicans have controlled both houses of North Carolina's state legislature, and the vast majority of the university board's members have been appointed by the legislature since then. Last year, the New York Times reports, legislators asked the board to reexamine funding for the more than 200 research centers affiliated with state schools.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/21/republicans-want-to-shut-down-poverty-research-in-north-carolina/

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Growing numbers of men in Azerbaijan have been posting Twitter selfies while wearing mini-skirts to show their support for a woman murdered after she resisted rape.
Ozgecan Aslan, a 20-year-old Turkish student, was killed after reportedly resisting being raped while on a minibus in Mersin, in southern Turkey.
She is believed to have tried to defend herself with pepper spray before being stabbed and then beaten with an iron bar.
Her body was found two days later in a creek.
The murder has prompted outrage and protests across Turkey and in neighbouring countries, with calls for more to be done to protect women against violence.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11427072/Men-pose-in-mini-skirts-to-show-support-for-murdered-Turkish-woman.html

Men pose in mini-skirts to support social media campaign in wake of rape and murder of Turkish student, 20
Ozgecan Aslan, 20, was found burned in woodland near Tarsus in Turkey
Student allegedly resisted a sexual assault by a bus driver and was killed
Her death has outraged people in Turkey over the unequal status of women
Thousands have staged days of protests following Miss Aslan's murder
Men from Azerbaijan have now joined the campaign, posing in miniskirts
They have posted pictures on Twitter calling for other people to do same
Campaign calls for equality in Turkey where women have a low status


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2963869/Men-pose-mini-skirts-support-social-media-campaign-wake-rape-murder-student-20.html#ixzz3SVd8LDHL

It even comes with a warning, featured prominently on the “Open Carry T-Shirts” website.

“At a short distance the gun looks real! Law enforcement officers may overreact to your shirt! Be responsible! Obey all orders! Halt! Freeze! Stop! Immediately!” the webpage states.

The disclaimer goes on from there: “Do not reach towards the holster and gun! Your actions could get you injured or even killed.”

Still there's more. "This could be you,” the site states, indicating a picture of three grave markers.


http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/open-carry-t-shirts-look-so-much-real-guns-you-just-might-get-shot