Apr 13
Umbra’s Aquala Bath Caddy has a ventilated soap dish, wine glass holder, book rack, and accessory hooks. Oh, and plenty of space for your laptop.
Apr 13
The temptation to use the anonymous online commenting for the purpose of telling other people how stupid they are is strong. But one judge in England has learned the hard way that giving yourself a pseudonym doesn’t mean that no one will ever find out who’s talking shit.
Apr 13
Motorola has a hit on its hands with the Moto smartphone lineup, and a few new models are about to be announced for it. Among those phones is a newly leaked Moto Z2 Force, an Android handset that — per the press photo that has surfaced — features a dual-camera setup on the back, as well as what appears to … Continue reading
Apr 13
Bus driver, Rex Freitas continues to recover from an injury to his neck and back, suffered in a pothole incident. But he is also still wrestling with the pain of remembering his parents decline into poor health.
“We grew up with very little money to spare,” he said. “But my parents always had plenty of love to share. They believed in hugs, not handshakes. I feel very lucky that in their final years I was able to give back some of that love by taking good care of them,” he says. “More than anything, I wanted them to have dignity. They were too proud to go on welfare. Too proud to ask for help. So I took care of everything. And if they were still here, I would do it all over again. I wish I could have them again even for just for 10 minutes. They were everything to me.”
Freitas mother’s health began to decline seriously in 1986, when she was rushed to the hospital in great pain. “We learned that she had probably been suffering from lupus for years but it had not been diagnosed properly and therefore she did not get the treatment she needed early,” he said.
That was the beginning of a series of medical challenges: kidney failure, gallstones, thyroid surgery, two brain aneurysms. “She wanted to be in her own home. So my father and I looked after her better than any nurse could, and don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of ups and downs,” he says. “My friends helped me renovate her bathroom so that she could sit and take a nice, long shower. We used to spirit her out of the hospital to enjoy that shower at home, and then take her back,” he recalls with satisfaction.
As the driver of the No. 6 Bus through Pauoa, Freitas was able to manage his schedule in such a way that he could stop by to visit his mother, change her dressings, help his father tend to her needs, make sure his parents were doing all right, and return to work.
“I am grateful to my company and the type of job I have, because of the flexibility of scheduling, I could run in on my five minute breaks to check in on her and my dad,” he says. “Most people have to struggle to hang on to their jobs while caring for their kupuna and not many are able to manage their responsibilities the way I could and still keep working and drawing a salary,” he said.
“If we had had the Kupuna Caregivers Assistance then, we could have used it to hire a trained female caregiver. I am sure my mother appreciated everything we did for her, but she would have welcomed having a woman to help her shower and dress. But we did the best we could to preserve her dignity,” he said.
Freitas took care of the bills his parents incurred as first his mother, then his father succumbed to illness. “My father became very ill shortly after my mother died, so my caregiving responsibilities continued even after my mother passed away. Dad did his best for my mom for as long as he could despite being ill–and nine months later, he was gone too.”
“I wish I had received better advice along the way,” he said. “For example, we did not know we could take advantage of a special fund set up at the hospital by a donor to help native Hawaiians until my mother passed away. I did not know what I had to pay and what I was no longer responsible for. So, I kept paying and paying, until long after she died,” she added.
Early habits of thrift and savings served him well. “Ever since I was little, I learned to save my lunch money. I used to caddy and instead of accepting a free lunch as a reward, I would ask for the cost of the lunch in cash instead and add that to my savings,” he explains. Those savings over many years allowed him to buy the comfortable, squeaky clean bungalow in Pauao that he lived in with his parents until they passed away. “I didn’t want to make my dad feel bad. So I did not tell him that I bought the house from my grandparents. But doing so meant they had no rent to pay and could spend their Social Security on other necessities. Their combined total social security was $538, and that’s all they got every month” he added.
Rex Freitas’ story is the story of thousands of unpaid family caregivers across Hawaii. Like so many others, Freitas was driven by the desire to do the best he possibly could for his parents.
Freitas’ caregiving story is the story of the search for dignity and respect and solidarity as we age that Ai-jen Poo writes about movingly in her book, The Age of Dignity. In arguing for the urgent necessity to build an infrastructure of care to support the swelling ranks of the elders in America, she says:
Turning to one another means rendering visible how we are already, and have always been, interconnected through care. Nearly as invisible as the oxygen we breathe, and yet just as essential, care is the beating heart of our nation.
Rex Freitas has not read the book. But he has lived its lessons. He looks forward to legislators in Hawaii feeling the same urgency to support caregivers who stretch themselves to perform well in their paid jobs while doing as well at their unpaid labor of love. He hopes fervently that SB534/HB607 will make it through the legislature this year.
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Apr 13
Prosecutors charged a Florida police officer on Wednesday in the shooting last July of an unarmed black man who was seen on cellphone video lying in a street with his hands in the air at the time he was shot in the leg.
North Miami Police Department officer Jonathan Aledda was charged with attempted manslaughter, a felony, and culpable negligence, a misdemeanor, according to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office.
The shooting of behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey, who was with and caring for a severely autistic man when he was shot, was one in a series of police shootings of black men across the United States to raise questions about police use of force and civil rights.
Aledda defended his actions last July, saying “I did what I had to do in a split second.” The Miami-Dade Police Benevolent Association, which is representing Aledda, was not immediately available for comment.
The officer was responding to reports of a man with a gun and apparently was aiming at the autisic man when he shot Kinsey, according to an affidavit supporting the arrest warrant filed with the state court for Miami-Dade County.
Kinsey had followed police commands and was lying on the ground at the time he was shot. He had been trying to get the autistic man back to a nearby group home from which he had wandered. Hilton Napoleon, a lawyer for Kinsey, was not immediately available for comment.
Initial calls to 911 emergency dispatchers reported a man, possibly suicidal, with a gun in his hand, which led to the arrival of 16 police officers, including Aledda. What a caller thought was a gun turned out to be a toy tanker truck held by the autistic man, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit said the autistic man, who is now 27 and has an IQ of 40, needed around-the-clock supervision.
In a video widely shared on social media, Kinsey can be heard yelling, “All he has is a toy truck in his hands.”
The affidavit said Aledda fired three shots using his personally owned Colt M4 Carbine rifle from about 150 feet (45 meters) where Kinsey lay.
“No other officer on the scene observed (the autistic man) exhibit any behavior that compelled them to shoot,” the affidavit says.
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Apr 13
A woman and her Bernese mountain dog became the unwitting stars of a furry convention this weekend after the woman mistook the gathering as an event for pets.
Cheryl Wassus of Monroe, Michigan, is a volunteer with Pets for Vets, a nonprofit that matches therapy dogs with military veterans. When Wassus learned that Motor City Furry Con in Novi, Michigan, was raising money for the organization, she assumed it must be a pet-themed convention.
It was a reasonable mistake. For those unaware, furries are people who enjoy dressing up in anthropomorphic animal costumes and role-playing. That’s not what Wassus or Link — who has training as a therapy dog — expected.
Wassus’ son, New York Media producer Kenny Wassus, tweeted some incredible photos of the mix-up on Saturday.
“This is just a whole subculture I wasn’t even aware existed,” Cheryl Wassus told New York magazine. “When we set up tables and do promos and educate the public and do outreach, I had no idea the outreach was going to be other human … furry people. I guess you’re never too old to learn.” (Read her full interview with NYMag, which is amazing, here.)
Wassus told Cosmopolitan that the convention’s organizers had invited her to do a presentation about Pets for Vets, and that it just never became clear what a “furry con” was.
“I usually try to do some research the night before I go to these events but the website was pretty obscure,” she said.
But the surprise worked out for the best. Wassus, Link and the furries got along famously. Link was a little confused at first, Wassus said, and did some “serious tail-sniffing” at the sight of all the two-legged animals. But it all ended up being no big deal.
“They weren’t offended, though. They just embraced him,” she told NYMag. “It was all good. Just a real interested community.”
Plus, the event was a big win for Pets for Vets ― Motor City Furry Con raised $10,000 for the group.
The media tends to associate being a furry with a sexual fetish, but most furry fans say it’s really not about that.
“In reality, furries are fans of a concept: ‘What if intelligent animals lived among us, or replaced us?’” Laurence Parry, editor-in-chief of furry-centric news site Flayrah, told The Huffington Post in 2014. “From this, all else flows — art, crafts, stories, role-playing and costuming.”
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Apr 13
ICE May Deport More People With U.S. Ties If Border Crossings Keep Dropping
Posted in: Today's ChiliSAN ANTONIO, Texas ― The plummeting number of unauthorized crossings from Mexico may allow the Trump administration to focus more energy on deporting undocumented immigrants already living here, former immigration officials say.
Since President Donald Trump took office, the number of unauthorized crossings have dropped to a 45-year low. If those numbers stay down, it could mean that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will see a sizable chunk of its workload evaporate, even as the White House demands the agency hire another 10,000 agents.
With less work at the border and a mandate to enforce immigration law more aggressively, ICE’s former deputy director for congressional relations, Kate Christensen Mills, says agents will increasingly target people with stronger ties to the United States.
“If you’re going to have a decrease of people coming across the border, you’re going to have an increase in interior enforcement,” Mills said, speaking at a panel at the Border Security Expo Tuesday. “You’re also going to see an increase in detention…. Some are going to have ties to the community. So processing them is going to take a little bit longer.”
Bureaucratic constraints will continue to undermine Trump’s efforts to boost deportations, Mills added. The lack of judges in immigration courts has contributed to a years-long backlog. The immigrant detention system has run over capacity in recent months. And the White House has proposed to gut the State Department’s budget by around 30 percent, despite the fact that ICE heavily relies on the department to secure the travel documents deportees need to be removed from the country.
But if illegal border crossings keep dropping, Mills expects ICE to detain and deport more people with long ties to the United States and without criminal records ― exacerbating a trend the Trump administration has established within weeks of his inauguration.
“There’s only so many criminal aliens,” Mills said. “So ICE is going to go after people living illegally in the United States. And some of them will not be criminal aliens.”
ICE distinguishes between two types of deportees: those caught while trying to cross the border illegally and those arrested in the interior of the country. For decades, those caught at the border made up the majority of removals, though not everyone was formally deported by ICE.
Since 2014, however, deportations from the border zone have become increasingly complicated because most of the people crossing come from Central America rather than Mexico. In many cases, the Border Patrol itself can return Mexican nationals arrested for jumping the border within 48 hours and without getting ICE involved.
The Border Patrol can’t fly people to countries beyond Mexico, however. And people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are often fleeing violence and routinely ask for asylum or other humanitarian exemptions from deportation. That kicks off a lengthy legal process that puts the case in ICE’s hands.
“If these declining numbers are sustained and the era of large migration from Central America has in fact ended, yes ― I expect you’ll see a big uptick in interior removals,” John Sandweg, who headed ICE for part of Obama’s second term, said.
Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, expected a less drastic effect, pointing out that in order for ICE to take full advantage of the change, the agency would have to relocate people previously tasked with working at the border.
“Unless you start detailing all kinds of people into the interior area, it’s not an entirely transferrable workforce,” Meissner, who now serves as a fellow with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, told HuffPost. “But it probably is true that it allows for more resources to be directed toward people in the interior of the country.”
Many immigration analysts already expected a pronounced jump in the level of interior deportations. Within weeks of taking office, Trump eliminated Obama-era deportation policies that had required ICE to focus its attention on recent border crossers, people with criminal records and those who’d been deported before.
Under a January executive order, Trump issued a new set of deportation priorities that include virtually the entire undocumented population of 11 million – though in practice, people who are arrested by local law enforcement or who’ve had prior orders of deportation are the most likely to be detained by ICE.
In his first year in office, Obama deported nearly 238,000 people from the interior of the country. Thanks largely to those deportation priorities, first implemented in 2011, that number dwindled every year of his presidency. Last year ended with 65,332 interior deportations ― about a quarter of ICE’s total deportations, with the rest coming from the border zone.
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Apr 13
Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition lands on May 11th, bringing the world’s most popular sandbox to yet another gaming platform. Minecraft on Switch supports the Pro controller and up to eight players online, or four locally in split-screen mode. Plus…
Apr 13
If you were hopeful that the Nintendo Switch’s Splatoon 2 Global Testfire event was indicative of an early launch, have a seat: today Nintendo announced that the game’s official release date as July 21st. That’s smack dab in the middle of the Summer…
Apr 13
Nintendo Switch titles ARMS and Splatoon 2 headlined today’s Nintendo Direct presentation, but they weren’t the only games with news to reveal. The studio has a solid lineup of games coming to the 3DS this year.
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