Thursday, 21 August 2014

Nick Cannon confirms Mariah Carey split

Nick Cannon confirms Mariah Carey split

Nick Cannon has confirmed he and Mariah Carey have been living apart ''for a few months.'' The 'America's Got Talent' host has admitted his six-year marriage with the 44-year-old singer has been on the rocks for a while now, but their ''main focus'' is on their four-year-old twins Moroccan and Monroe. Speaking to The Insider With Yahoo, he said: ''There is trouble in paradise. We have been living in separate houses for a few months. My main focus is my kids.'' Friends of the couple believe cracks started to appear in the pair's relationship when Nick, 33, revealed that he'd previously slept with five famous women, including Kim Kardashian, during an appearance on a US radio show in March, and in a subsequent interview admitted Mariah wouldn't sleep with him until they married. The revelations devastated the 'Hero' hitmaker - who married Nick in April 2008 on her private estate in The Bahamas - and left her feeling ''humiliated''. Mariah is also said to be ''angry'' because Nick has taken on so many jobs, but her fury has left the US producer ''incredulous'' after he claimed to have generated $75 million for their family since 2011. The pair, who put their New York mansion up for sale in July, have not been pictured together for months and Mariah hasn't mentioned her spouse since June.

 
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Ferguson shooting: Why hasn’t the police officer been arrested?

Ferguson shooting: Why hasn’t the police officer been arrested?

The death of Michael Brown raises this question: Should there be a different legal standard when it comes to arresting a police officer vs. an ordinary civilian? Law professors are sharply divided on the answer.

Christian Science Monitor
By Max Schindler                                

       

FOX News Videos

St. Louis grand jury convened in Michael Brown case

St. Louis grand jury convened in Michael Brown case
After an autopsy by Michael Brown's family was made public Monday, family attorney Benjamin Crump quoted the bereaved mother as asking: “What else do they need to arrest the killer of my child?”
Just a day earlier, appearing on the talk show "Meet the Press," Harvard Law School Prof. Charles Ogletree said that police officer Darren Wilson should be taken into custody as he shot a man and “no one knows why he did it.”
“I think the first thing that needs to happen: you need to arrest Officer Wilson,” Professor Ogletree said. “He shot and killed a man — shot him multiple times — and he’s walking free.”
Recommended: Race equality in America: How far have we come?
Should there be a different legal standard when it comes to arresting a police officer vs. an ordinary civilian?
Law professors are sharply divided on the answer, especially as it pertains to the shooting of Michael Brown and the available public information. The response to the question isn't simply academic when protestors in Ferguson say they won't go home until they see "justice" done. Might an arrest ease tensions?
While anyone can be arrested, US citizens usually can't be kept in custody beyond 24 hours (depending on circumstances and state laws) unless they are charged with a crime.  For someone to be charged, there must be "probable cause" that a crime has been committed.
In this case, police and prosecutors must decide whether is there "probable cause" to suspect that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson unlawfully killed Mike Brown.
To find the answer, the St. Louis County prosecutor impaneled a grand jury and the F.B.I. deployed almost 50 agents – an unusually high number. When the grand jury completes its investigation, the local prosecutor will decide whether to charge Wilson for a crime, a step that could be as early as this week, Reuters reported.
Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz sides with the St. Louis County prosecutor – not his colleague Ogletree: “We should not arrest [Officer Darren Wilson] until there’s a substantial level of proof of criminality,” even if it appeared that the police acted improperly.
“Based on what I know, I would hold off,” says Professor Dershowitz. “The one thing I would insist on is that you never ever make an arrest because of crowd violence,” he says, alluding to the daily protests and rising political pressure.
Dershowitz compares the Michael Brown case to the 2012 Trayvon Martin incident – when a neighborhood watch volunteer was acquitted of using deadly force against an unarmed black man – saying that the state should not have filed charges against defendant George Zimmerman.
“It was a terrible miscarriage of justice in that case,” he says. “[Mr.] Zimmerman was arrested and prosecuted because of mob violence,” suggesting that the same issue could be at play here.
But Dershowitz starts to waffle a bit as he considers the family's privately contracted autopsy report. He says that law colleague Ogletree may be right in calling for an arrest since the autopsy showed no gunshot residue on Brown’s body. That suggests that Brown was at least two-feet away, undermining the officer’s arguments of acting in self-defense.
Dershowitz’s former student, American University Washington College of Law Prof. Angela Davis, pushes back against her onetime instructor as she asks why the police officer has not been arrested yet. 
“There’s definitely probable cause to believe that he committed some form of criminal homicide,” says Professor Davis.
In this case, at least two witnesses say that Brown was standing in the street with his two hands in the air, and did not pose a danger to the officer or anyone else. In other words, probable cause for arresting Wilson for killing Brown.
It's not uncommon for bystander accounts to be contradictory. “[Police] officers say some witnesses say you did it, others didn’t, but that’s enough so we’re going to arrest you – they arrest you and then you have the jury trial,” says Davis.
Given the eyewitness testimony, Davis suggests that the St. Louis police have not arrested Wilson because they either don’t believe the accounts of certain witnesses or are giving their colleagues preferential treatment.
“Police officers are rarely arrested and indicted for a crime,” she says. “They are never arrested right away,” Davis says, acknowledging that despite the greater legal latitude afforded to police officers, “they can’t use deadly force is in all circumstances.”
Even when someone commits murder in self-defense – the imminent fear or danger of bodily harm and death – the suspect is usually arrested first and then may be acquitted in a trial, she says.
“If the investigation reveals that [Brown] was standing in the street with his hands up not charging at anybody, not posing a danger to the officer or anyone else, that’s more than probable cause that he committed murder,” says Davis.
Davis and Dershowitz do agree on one thing: They're skeptical that the impaneled St. Louis grand jury will reach an impartial decision.
“In theory, it sounds good. The problem is that the grand jury is totally controlled by the prosecutor,” she says, listing problems such as the panel's private proceedings, no defense attorney present, and prosecutors don’t need to offer exculpatory evidence – or facts favorable to the defendant.
In this case, the St. Louis district attorney Bob McCullough has worked alongside Officer Wilson. Davis questions whether he can be impartial in the Brown case.
“[Mr. McCullough’s] father was killed in the line of duty” as a police officer, says Davis, adding, “he wanted to be a police officer himself until health issues intervened” and that he actively supports the local police benevolent association.
Davis also blasts Dershowitz’s remarks on the Trayvon Martin case, saying that comparing the two cases is like comparing apples and oranges.
“There are tremendous racial disparities in our criminal justice system and they have been well documented. Similar individuals in our criminal justice system are treated differently based on race. That racial bias was definitely an issue in the Zimmerman case and I believe that it’s an issue in this case.”
University of San Diego law school Prof. Lawrence Alexander calls it “irresponsible” for other academics to call for an arrest. “Those people don’t know the facts. You can’t just call someone to be arrested when you don’t have evidence that they committed a crime,” he says.
If Wilson is arrested, Professor Alexander weighs in on the possible criminal charges. Because the prosecutor must prove beyond a reasonable doubt – a high legal standard – that Wilson is guilty, he will most likely not be charged with first or second-degree murder.
If anything, he would be charged with voluntary manslaughter or lesser offenses, says Alexander, but added that it was premature to say.
“All I’ve heard is conflicting evidence and the autopsies aren’t completed yet, says Alexander.  “It would be extraordinary to bring charges this early,” and arrest the officer.
Alexander notes that the local investigation could be compromised due to the district attorney’s long-time working relationship with the police, likening it to “prosecuting a member of your family.”
The professor also sounds surprised by the amount of resources and number of FBI agents assigned to the case.
“If you’ve got a complex racketeering or money laundering scheme, that’s when you might need a number of agents. But this is a simple street use of force and it doesn’t take a battalion of investigators,” Alexander says, adding, “I can’t imagine what they would be doing instead of stepping on each other.”
Prof. David Klinger of the University of Missouri-St. Louis also questions Ogletree’s call to arrest the officer.
“What does he know? Has he seen the case file? Is he privy to the investigation,” asks Professor Klinger, saying that unless Ogletree reviewed witness statements, ballistic forensics and the autopsy, he should not call for an arrest. 
Klinger adds that such a demand “provides legitimacy to those in the mob… those who are looting, burning, throwing rocks and bottles at police, at reporters.”
He also cites the recent past of white lynch mobs hanging black men on trees to argue against immediately arresting the officer.
“I find it to be the height of irony that we have a mob mentality demanding that an individual be punished when we don’t even have the facts so far. Let’s allow the process – for which we fought the civil rights struggle – let it run evenly,” says Klinger.
Klinger described how police officers are permitted to shoot in two scenarios, in self-defense or for another person. The second scenario is to prevent a suspect who committed a violent felony from escaping, even if an officer only has probable cause on what happened.
The professor has conducted research on past police shootings and concluded that the “vast majority” are justified, adding that even in a questionable altercation, courts rarely prosecute police officers for using deadly force. 
Before arresting the officer, Klinger reiterates that police officers have the same constitutional rights as anyone else.
But former St. Louis police chief Dan Isom, now a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, agrees with Havard's Ogletree that if Officer Wilson were a typical suspect in a homicide, based on known public evidence, he would have been arrested.
But his status as a police officer –  and not a civilian – explains why Wilson has not been taken into custody.
The key question, is “at what point in time… do you pivot from the police officer acting in the performance of his duty trying to apprehend the subject to the officer being the suspect and the person he shot, the victim,” Professor Isom asks.
Based on the evidence that has already been gathered and the fact that a grand jury was impaneled, a case could be made against the officer but that it’s not overwhelming, says Isom.
He pushes back against the suggestion that police officers should be treated differently than civilians when accused of homicide “Whenever an officer used force, we’d consider him a suspect and we’d arrest him immediately,” the former police chief says.
With President Barack Obama overseeing the racially charged federal investigation and the first black Attorney General visiting St. Louis Wednesday, this incident has raised anew questions about the role of race in the criminal justice system. Are police treated differently by the justice system when they kill a black man than when they kill a white man?
Davis adds: “I don’t agree with people who say “we want a murder conviction.” What you can say is that “we want this person to be treated like everyone else and that a police officer shouldn’t be treated differently.”
She concludes that Ferguson protestors "have a right to demand that the person be charged if everyone else in that situation would be charged. It’s about not giving this white police officer a break when they would not give any other private citizen – or black citizen – a break and this is why people are angry.”
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Beyoncé's Mom Responds To Divorce Rumors

https://celebrity.yahoo.com/video/beyonc-mom-responds-divorce-rumors-203004725.html
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Obama's Mission Against ISIS Just Fundamentally Changed

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obamas-mission-against-isis-just-131607976.html
President Barack Obama surprised many observers Wednesday with his brevity and anger when he  spoke about the brutal murder of American photojournalist James Foley at the hands of militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL).
 
It was Obama as "you've never seen him before," as The Huffington Post put it on the site's banner. Some observers on Twitter said he sounded almost "Bush-ian," a reference to President George W. Bush. And some analysts think it could mean the start of a long, extended campaign against the group, which Obama compared to a "cancer" and said "doesn't belong in the 21st century."
Some analysts think it is likely that Obama will significantly change the mission against ISIS to, in the  words of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry , "crush" the group. For a war-tired American public, the mission will be rebranded as a battle in the "war on terror," rather than in terms of the Iraqi war that the vast majority of Americans, in retrospect, consider a disaster.
"It's a clear escalation of rhetoric — and will lead to an escalation in policy," geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, told Business Insider in an email. "This moves the United States from stopping ISIS gains on the ground (at least against the Kurds and the Yazidis) to active efforts to destroy ISIS. The U.S. has moved from limited military aims and deterrence towards a broader anti-ISIS military campaign.
"ISIS taking the fight 'directly to America' with their statements in the past days and the videotaped beheading of an American journalist was a serious strategic misstep on their part."
Bremmer tweeted Thursday that the U.S. had "moved from constraining ISIS to combating them," which could expand the war across the Syrian border. Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser to Obama, told NPR  on Thursday that the U.S. "would not restrict ourselves ... to geographical boundaries" against ISIS.
The U.S.' current campaign in Iraq began as a humanitarian intervention, providing critical supplies to tens of thousands of religious minorities trapped on a mountain while blunting ISIS advances near areas with a U.S. personnel presence.
Less than two weeks ago, Obama authorized the U.S. military to conduct airstrikes in Iraq to aid Iraqi and Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIS. The Pentagon says the military has conducted 84 such strikes so far, helping the Kurds retake the important strategic mark of the Mosul Dam. The strikes have targeted ISIS security checkpoints, vehicles, weapons caches, and more.
ISIS said its execution of Foley, who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012, came in retaliation for Obama authorizing those airstrikes. ISIS also threatened to kill another journalist it was allegedly holding captive Steven Sotloff, who was kidnapped near the Syrian-Turkish border in August 2013 — if Obama did not draw back U.S. involvement. 
Obama made it clear on Wednesday he was not going to do that.  Michael Cohen, a fellow at the progressive Century Foundation,  tweeted  immediately after Obama's speech that the implicit takeaway was that the U.S. was "at war with ISIS."
"I don't think I've ever heard Obama make a statement like that," Cohen told Business Insider in a subsequent interview. 
"It was unusually tough, but to the point I made below when you describe ISIS as a cancer and evil and a nihilistic actor you're kind of locking yourself into a policy of full versus half-measures. It will be very hard, now, for Obama to finish this mission with anything less than the defeat of ISIS, which is not something that is going to happen overnight."
Bremmer said he expected Obama to remain cautious in how he escalates U.S. military involvement. More "military advisers" and forces to provide "security" to Americans in Iraq could head to the country so that Obama could keep his promise of not allowing any U.S. "boots on the ground" in Iraq. 
But the airstrikes will continue, and they will most likely ramp up significantly with support from allies. Already, in the aftermath of the ISIS video's release, the U.S. conducted at least a dozen airstrikes against ISIS targets. 
The brutal murder of Foley also allows Obama an easier sell for a hard line against ISIS to a war-weary American public. It allows him to reframe the intervention to focus on the "war on terror," where he has had some of his biggest foreign-policy successes, and away from memories of Iraq.
"The days of 9/11 and the war on terror remain an all too visceral part of the American national consciousness," Bremmer said. "It also puts the fight in the context of Obama's successful record against al Qaeda and the killing of Osama bin Laden, rather than the failed war in Iraq. All of which will embolden the president to take a much tougher line."
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Barack Obama white house speech iraq

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
President Barack Obama speaks about the situation in Iraq in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington on Aug. 7.
But defeating, crushing, and destroying ISIS is easier said than done. Many analysts think to completely eliminate the group would require a full-scale war. One former U.S. official told Business Insider a mission to severely blunt ISIS would most likely require much more than 10,000 troops — not to mention many billions of dollars.
It would also probably require a military campaign of some sort in Syria, where ISIS has developed strongholds in a fight against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
>"The last thing the president wants is to widen the scope of overt American operations into Syria and get involved in the war there," Garrett Khoury , the director of research at The Eastern Project, told Business Insider in an email.
Khoury disagreed with the notion that Obama would dramatically alter the campaign against ISIS, because it would take a "massive American military escalation" to even push the group back. The setting in Syria, which is much more unsettled than in Iraq, is a prime factor in his reasoning.

"The situation on the ground there is even more confused and dangerous than it is in Iraq, especially considering that both the Assad government and the rebels are fighting ISIS," Khoury said.
In a briefing with reporters Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf would not rule out a U.S. campaign against ISIS in Syria. And Kerry said in his statement that the U.S. would "confront ISIL wherever it tries to spread its despicable hatred."
The situation in Syria, as it always has, again presents a fundamental problem for the Obama administration. How do you "crush" ISIS if you don't go in?
"That's a great question, and somebody should probably ask the president that," Cohen said. "... It's hard to use the language he used to talk about ISIS and support anything other than wiping these guys out."
But he added: "I'd be surprised to see a move into Syria."
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Brock Lesnar's schedule heading into Night of Champions PPV limits direction, creativity

Brock Lesnar's schedule heading into Night of Champions PPV limits direction, creativity

SB Nation Teamsite
By Jesse Holland 1 hour ago

       

View photo
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Be careful what you wish for (you just might get it).
Somebody call my momma the wahmbulance.
Earlier this week, WWE announced that newly-crowned world heavyweight champion BAH-ROCK, LEZZ-NURRR would be putting his title on the line at Night of Champions (NOC) on Sept. 21 -- in an immediate rematch against John Cena -- following their perfectly-executed angle last weekend at SummerSlam.
That's exactly one month from now.
It feels a little rushed and from a creativity standpoint, it doesn't leave the writers with much wiggle room. You can't book a show named "Night of Champions" and not have the most prestigious title in your company up for grabs. Cena could be replaced, but with the "Beast Incarnate's" part-time schedule, the organization can't afford to burn a Lesnar pay-per-view (PPV) appearance on some random schlub.
Cena it is.
For a lot of us in the "Cena sucks" portion of the stands, that casts a grey cloud over the SummerSlam headliner, which was a big deal, because we don't even have the chance to let it digest. I, for one, am already starting to panic that WWE will have Cena STANDING TALL in Nashville, despite the lopsided ass-whooping he just ate in Los Angeles.
Would WWE have the guts to put Cena into an 0-2 hole?
I doubt it. But you can also argue that Seth Rollins will save that disastrous scenario by cashing in his Money in the Bank (MITB) briefcase to strip Cena of the title. Or maybe I'm way off base and Lesnar leaves "Music City" with his strap intact. That's really not the point.
The point is, it hasn't even been a week and I already have to think about it.
I was hoping to milk this thing for a few weeks but fans -- as well as WWE writers -- don't have that luxury. And a month after NOC is Hell in a Cell, which means Creative is locked into another main event gimmick match with only four weeks to prepare for it.
I guess that was the gamble with putting the belt on Lesnar.
Unless something happened behind the scenes that will keep him around, I just can't see how we get through another six PPV events while leaving the title on Lesnar, who is rumored to be defending it against Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 31.
That means he drops it and wins it back again after the New Year.
I've never been a fan of playing hot potato with the title, but I guess when you consider Lesnar's schedule, as well as the number of upcoming PPV events, Cena's position atop the company, and all the other guys they have to squeeze in between now and then, I suppose we should just be glad we've managed to get this far.
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Genevieve Nnaji

Genevieve Nnaji Takes The Ice Bucket Challenge... Funny!: http://youtu.be/SwgkEPtcadg via @YouTube
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