Category: People

MC Hammer was arrested in Northern California on Thursday for allegedly obstructing an officer.

The rapper made the arrest known on Saturday with a series of tweets suggesting that he was a victim of racial profiling.

Hammer (who was born Stanley Kirk Burrell) was reportedly sitting in a car outside a shopping center in Dublin, a city east of Oakland, when he was approached by a police officer.

“Chubby elvis looking dude was tapping on my car window, I rolled down the window and he said ‘Are you on parole or probation?’” Hammer recounted on Twitter.

“While I was handing him my ID he reached in my car and tried to pull me out the car but forgot he was on a steady donut diet…. It was comical to me until he pulled out his guns, blew his whistle and yelled for help (MallCop) !!!

But make no mistake he’s dangerous …. only thing more dangerous than a scared man with a gun, is a scared man with an agenda, a gun and a badge. I was citied for obstruction smh.”

According to the Dublin Police, Hammer was in a vehicle with expired registration, and he was not the registered owner.

“After asking Hammer who the registered owner was he became very argumentative and refused to answer the officer’s questions,” police spokesman Herb Walters said.

Hammer was arrested on suspicion of resisting an officer and obstructing an officer in the performance of his duties; he was booked and released on bail from Santa Rita Jail, with a court date set for next month.

Hammer concluded his tweeted account of the incident by describing it as a “teachable moment” and an “eye opener.”

“I will now answer his question,” he wrote. “contrary to his personal beliefs, all people of color are not on parole or probation fat boy!!!”

{MC Hammer in Action}

wirestory

{{Cuban President Raul Castro has unexpectedly raised the possibility of leaving his post, saying Friday that he is old and has a right to retire. }}

But he did not say when he might do so or if such a move was imminent.

The Cuban leader is scheduled to be named by parliament to a new five-year term Sunday, and Castro urged reporters to listen to his speech that day.

“I am going to resign,” Castro said at a joint appearance with visiting Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, an enigmatic smile on his face. It was not clear whether he was joking.

“I am going to be 82 years old,” Castro added. “I have the right to retire, don’t you think?”

When reporters continued to shout questions about his plans for the next five years, Castro replied: “Why are you so incredulous?”
He said to listen carefully on Sunday.

“It will be an interesting speech,” he said. “Pay attention.”

Castro’s tone was light and his comments came in informal remarks at a mausoleum dedicated to soldiers from the former Soviet Union who have died around the world.

The Cuban leader has spoken before of his desire to implement a two-term limit for all Cuban government positions, including the presidency.

He has also alluded to the limited time he has left to overhaul the island’s weak Marxist economy.

That has led many to speculate that this upcoming term would be his last, though term limits have never been codified into Cuban law.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland had no comment on Castro’s remarks.

Most Havana residents had not heard about the comments, which were not shown on Cuban television, although other footage from his appearance with Medvedev was shown. Many reacted with skepticism.

“Who would they put in?” asked Marta Alvarez, a 45-year-old housewife walking through Old Havana. “But I don’t think it would be now. It would happen in five years.”

Castro will be 86 when his next term ends in 2018. Up until now, all eyes had been on who would emerge as Castro’s first and second vice presidents during Sunday’s proceedings.

The positions are currently occupied by two loyal octogenarians who fought in the 1959 revolution.

AP

{{A 10-year-old girl Sara ripped apart her American passport outside the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg.}}

With photo cameras snapping and television cameras rolling, Sara defiantly said she had no intention of living in the U.S.

Standing nearby, her mother, Russian emigre and Harvard graduate Marianne Grin, voiced support for legislation banning Americans from adopting Russian children — the reason for the rally in late December.

“The way that America betrayed us has led us to despair,” Grin said by phone Thursday, explaining her daughter’s actions.

State media lapped up the scene of a child rejecting her father’s U.S. heritage in favor of her mother’s Russian roots.

The image of Sara tearing up her passport — albeit it was expired — appeared on television and in newspapers and blogs as the country debated the Jan. 1 ban on U.S. child adoptions.

Sara’s theatrical gesture, however, casts the spotlight on a less visible sore point in U.S.-Russian relations where children are also suffering: child custody disputes.

A legal battle between Grin and Michael McIlwrath, a U.S. lawyer based in Italy, over Sara and her three siblings is indicative of the fraught nature of international custody disputes.

But what makes this case more distressing are fears that the father is being punished because of a recent upswing in anti-American sentiment in Russia, said Alexander Khazov, McIlwrath’s St. Petersburg-based lawyer.

After the couple divorced, an Italian court initially awarded custody to Grin in 2009.

But another court in Florence, where three of the children were born and raised, ordered psychological tests on all family members and ruled in December 2010 that the children should move in with their father.

That arrangement remained in place until August 2011, when Grin took the children from Florence to St. Petersburg, unbeknown to her former husband.

She has not returned to Italy since and has lodged appeals with Russian courts to overturn earlier verdicts placing the children, now aged 6 to 15, with their father, to deprive him of his parental rights and to secure alimony payments.

On Jan. 25, about a month after Sara defaced her passport, the St. Petersburg City Court sided with Grin, overruling Florentine court decisions and saying that Russia doesn’t extradite its citizens.

The ruling came despite bilateral children’s rights agreements that oblige Russia and Italy to recognize analogous verdicts passed in either country.

In comments to journalists before and after the hearing, Grin described herself as a put-upon Russian mother forced to flee an abusive American husband.

Her ex-husband’s lawyer noted, however, that she only renewed her Russian citizenship in 2007, after letting her Soviet-era passport expire, and has offered no evidence that McIlwrath mistreated their children.

readmore….http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/why-a-girl-tore-her-us-passport/475927.html

{{The execution of a Georgia man who killed a fellow prisoner in 1990 was halted Tuesday at the last minute so courts could consider claims that he’s mentally disabled and other issues.}}

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted its stay of execution as 52-year-old Warren Lee Hill was being prepared for lethal injection.

In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the appeals court said further review is needed of recent affidavits by doctors who changed their minds about Hill’s mental capacity.

“In other words, all of the experts — both the State’s and the petitioner’s — now appear to be in agreement that Hill is in fact mentally retarded,” judges in the majority wrote in their order.

The state court of appeals also issued a stay to allow more time to consider a challenge related to the state’s lethal injection procedure.

Earlier in the day, the state parole board, the Supreme Court of Georgia and the U.S. Supreme Court had all declined to stop the execution.

“We are greatly relieved that the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has stayed the execution of Warren Hill, a person with mental retardation.

All the doctors who have examined Mr. Hill are unanimous in their diagnosis of mental retardation,” defense attorney Brian Kammer said in an email.

A spokeswoman for the state attorney general declined comment.
Hill was sentenced to die for the 1990 beating death of fellow inmate Joseph Handspike.

Authorities say he used a board studded with nails to bludgeon Handspike while he slept and other prisoners pleaded with Hill to stop.

At the time Hill was already serving a life sentence for murder in the 1986 slaying of his girlfriend, Myra Wright, who had been shot 11 times.

Wirestory

{{A mob stripped, tortured and bound a woman accused of witchcraft, then burned her alive in front of hundreds of horrified witnesses in a Papua New Guinea town, police said Friday.}}

It was the latest sorcery-related killing in this South Pacific island nation.

Bystanders, including many children, watched and some took photographs of Wednesday’s brutal slaying.

Grisly pictures were published on the front pages of the country’s two largest newspapers, The National and the Post-Courier, while the prime minister, police and diplomats condemned the killing.

In rural Papua New Guinea, witchcraft is often blamed for unexplained misfortunes. Sorcery has traditionally been countered by sorcery, but responses to allegations of witchcraft have become increasingly violent in recent years.

Kepari Leniata, a 20-year-old mother, had been accused of sorcery by relatives of a 6-year-old boy who died in a hospital on Tuesday.

She was tortured with a hot iron rod, bound, doused in gasoline, and then set alight on a pile of car tires and trash in the Western Highlands provincial capital of Mount Hagen, national police spokesman Dominic Kakas said.

Agencies