Texas man’s sons said their father was pretending to shoot their older sister when the weapon accidentally fired and shot the girl.

Justin Ryan Jones, of Austin, was arrested last week in connection with the Feb. 4 shooting, which left the girl in critical condition, reported the Temple Daily Telegram.

The 30-year-old Jones was watching his three children at their grandparents’ house in Moffat, where they live.

His sons, ages 7 and 6, told investigators that Jones held his handgun in both hands and was pretending to shoot the children while playing in the dining room.

The older boy said his father pulled the trigger to make a clicking sound the boys liked, and the gun fired — shooting their 9-year-old sister in the upper chest.

The girl underwent multiple surgeries to treat her wounds, but Bell County sheriff’s deputies said she was expected to recover.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/texas-dad-pretends-shoot-his-9-year-old-daughter-and-then-accidentally-shoots-her

Renee Rabinowitz is a sharp-witted retired lawyer with a doctorate in educational psychology, who escaped the Nazis in Europe as a child. Now she is about to become a test case in the battle over religion and gender in Israel’s public spaces — and the skies above — as the plaintiff in a lawsuit accusing El Al, the national airline, of discrimination.

Rabinowitz was comfortably settled into her aisle seat in the business-class section on El Al Flight 028 from Newark, New Jersey, to Tel Aviv in December when, as she put it, “this rather distinguished-looking man in Hasidic or Haredi garb, I’d guess around 50 or so, shows up.”


The man was assigned the window seat in her row. But, like many ultra-Orthodox male passengers, he did not want to sit next to a woman, seeing even inadvertent contact with the opposite sex as verboten under the strictest interpretation of Jewish law. Soon, Rabinowitz said, a flight attendant offered her a “better” seat, up front, closer to first class.

Reluctantly, Rabinowitz, an impeccably groomed grandmother of 81 who walks wine a cane because of bad knees, agreed.

”Despite all my accomplishments — and my age is also an accomplishment — I felt minimized,” she recalled in a recent interview in her elegantly appointed apartment in a fashionable neighborhood of Jerusalem.

“For me this is not personal,” Rabinowitz added. “It is intellectual, ideological and legal. I think to myself, here I am, an older woman, educated, I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?”

That is just what many feminists and advocates of religious pluralism in Israel and abroad have been asking in what by all accounts is a growing phenomenon of religious Jewish men refusing to sit next to women on airplanes. Several flights from New York to Israel, on El Al and other airlines, have been delayed or disrupted as women refused to move, and there have been social media campaigns including a protest petition.

__!!!

Now, a liberal advocacy group that had spent two years searching for a test case on switching seats plans to sue the blue-and-white flag carrier on Rabinowitz’s behalf in a Tel Aviv court next week.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2016/02/26/man-asked-airline-move-woman-seat-now-she-suing/FlmeaKPnJXb48hCTeNFWFL/story.html

KENTUCKY NOAH’S ARK PARK MAY CHANGE RULES FOR RELIGIOUS WORKERS

Ken Ham, the founder and leader of Answers in Genesis, announced recently that his religious organization may hire people who are not in complete agreement with his religious beliefs.

Ham is the person who was successful in suing Kentucky so that he can get tax incentives for his Noah's Ark-themed attraction located in Williamstown, a city in Northern Kentucky.
He announced his intention during a tour of the Ark Encounter. His staff is still establishing the criteria for employment for the 510-foot (155 meters) boat.

Ham won a million-dollar religious freedom case against the state Kentucky for his Ark Encounter in January. The federal judge who heard the case ruled that state officials violated Answers in Genesis' First Amendment rights by refusing its inclusion in a sales tax incentive amounting to millions of dollars.

Gregory Van Tatenhove, the U.S. District Judge, ruled that the Tourism Cabinet of Kentucky did not include the Ark Encounter in the tax incentive due to its "religious purpose and message."
http://www.jobsnhire.com/articles/35530/20160222/kentucky-noahs-ark-park-change-rules-religious-workers.htm

Imagine running an errand at a local store and having no way to bring along a disabled family member.
How would you carry them if they could not walk?
This vision for the disabled started with Caroline, who has never spoken a word or taken one step.
“When I would go to the store, I would just use and put her in the traditional carts,” said Drew Ann Long, Caroline’s mother. “I could use what retailers provided. But when she turned about 7 or 8-years-old, she had gotten bigger of course and she just didn’t fit in anything. 15-years-old, I shouldn’t be shoving her in the back of a cart.”
Because the experience was so frustrating, Long sketched out an idea on a napkin and 8 years later, Caroline’s Cart is in stores across the U.S. and four other countries.
“Just through research I realized there was no special needs shopping cart,” said Long. “There had never been a special needs shopping cart and I was really surprised.”
Courtney Jones, a Target store manager said he has seen more special needs families come into the store.



http://wivb.com/2016/02/25/carolines-cart-simplifies-shopping-with-special-needs-family-members/


February 4, 2016
When Adam Standiford’s family got to Target recently, they found something that would make their shopping trip a whole lot easier. A shopping cart with a large seat on the front—the perfect size for their daughter, Savannah, a six-year-old with special needs. It was a Caroline’s Cart, specially designed to help parents and caregivers shop with older kids or adults with special needs, without having to maneuver a cart and a wheelchair through the store at the same time.

“This simple cart literally will change how we can shop, not having to worry as to how we are going to get [Savannah] into a store,” said Adam in this post on our Facebook page.

Target has been testing the award-winning carts in our stores since February of 2015, and many more of our guests (like Brianne Fuller and her son, pictured above) have discovered them and shared their appreciation throughout social media. So much love, in fact, that they’ve been asking when the carts will show up in more of our stores.

https://corporate.target.com/article/2016/02/carolines-cart

the candidates launched personal attacks on one another, CNN subtitle writers struggled to keep up and instead used the caption 'unintelligible yelling'.
At one particularly heated point in last night's Republican presidential race, CNN subtitle writers used the caption 'unintelligible yelling' to capture the fiery exchanges on stage


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3465329/Unintelligible-yelling-CNN-subtitle-writers-t-fiery-debate-candidates-hurl-insults-one-another.html#ixzz41HcM2ya4

Slamming Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and his campaign promise of building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, Fox urged Hispanics to “open their eyes.”

“Please, you Hispanics, Latinos in the U.S., open your eyes. It’s not to defend our race. Not to defend our creed. It’s to defend this very same nation that is hosting you. This nation is going to fail if it goes into the hands of a crazy guy,” warned the former Mexican commander-in-chief.

Fox also assured Ramos, in much more colorful language, there’s no way Mexico is going to pay for Trump’s wall.
http://fusion.net/story/273374/former-mexican-president-to-donald-trump-not-paying-for-that-fucking-wall/

An NYPD captain was stripped of his gun and shield for turning a blind eye to a police-involved shooting that ended in his own precinct, the Daily News has learned.

Capt. Scott Forster, 31, was working in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when an unhinged gunman shot and wounded Officers William Reddin and Andrew Yurkiw less than 3 miles away in Bedford-Stuyvesant early Saturday.

The wounded officers were rushed to Kings County Hospital in the 71st Precinct. Forster is an executive officer under Deputy Inspector George Fitzgibbon — making him second in command in the precinct.

Instead of showing up and helping to organize visits for the wounded cops’ families — who were quickly joined by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor de Blasio — Forster went home, police sources said.


“People told him what was going on and he said, ‘I’m off duty in a few minutes,’” one of the sources said.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nypd-captain-clocked-2-cops-shot-brooklyn-article-1.2544020

"If you’re an executive officer who is on duty when two cops are shot and are being brought to a hospital in your command, you go,” said a high ranking police source with knowledge of the incident. “He had to have rocks in his head not to go.”

Forster “could have showed up and fallen asleep, but he still had to go,” the source said. “This was career suicide.”

Source: la times

county sheriff said Thursday it's possible "as many" as three to four people are dead, including a suspect, and up to 20 people may be injured after a series of attacks in south-central Kansas.

Sheriff T. Walton said at a news conference Thursday evening that there are "a number of crime scenes involved," including the Excel Industries plant in Hesston where dispatchers earlier said they were responding to a shooting.

The suspect was an Excel employee, Walton said.

Walton said the suspect was shot and killed and the scene at Excel Industries has been secured.

"I don't have a lot of answers," Walton said.

He said he couldn't give an exact number of people killed and injured.

"We want to get everybody identified. We're working on that," Walton said.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-shooting-kansas-lawn-mower-business-20160225-story.html

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news says many as 30 may have been injured.

The case revolves around a Dec. 7 incident involving the alleged victim, Olga Cortez, an Alameda County probation officer, who called 911 to say that two men in their 20s tried to force their way into her home in Oakland’s Redwood Heights neighborhood. Cortez, 42, said she heard loud knocking on the door about 9:30 that night, and that when she and her husband, Nemesio Cortez, opened the door, an apparently intoxicated man tried to push his way in, demanding to speak with the residents of the house.

As the Cortezes confronted the man on their stoop, they noticed a second man emerge from behind their home. Olga Cortez said the second man appeared to be holding a gun beneath his shirt.


The men, according to the Cortez family’s attorney, John Burris, were Oakland police officers who had apparently been out drinking and did not appear to be on duty.

“My children were scared,” said Olga Cortez, who explained during a news conference in which she fought back tears that she and her husband were home that Monday night with their two children getting ready for bed.

The man who appeared to be armed fled down the street, while the other man turned toward Olga Cortez, who by then was standing outside her home in her bathrobe. The man, according to a complaint filed by the family against the city, then tackled Mrs. Cortez “in a bear-hug type hold.” According to the complaint he “squeezed Mrs. Cortez’s scantily clad body close to his, and knocked her on to the concrete in only her short bathrobe, exposing her nude lower body.”

Nemesio Cortez pulled the man off of his wife and pinned him down. The man tried to break free but neighbors heard the commotion and helped Nemesio Cortez hold him down until police arrived.

http://m.sfgate.com/crime/article/Four-Oakland-police-officers-placed-on-leave-6852228.php