Georgia police chief defends tasering a grandmother

Police in Georgia were right to electrocute an 87-year-old woman who didn’t understand that they wanted her to drop the knife she was using to cut dandelions, their boss says.

“In my opinion, it was the lowest use of force we could have used to simply stop that threat at the time,” Chatsworth Police Chief Josh Etheridge told the local Daily Citizen-News last week. Martha Al-Bishara, a grandmother who doesn’t speak English, “still [had] the ability to hurt an officer,” he said.

Boris Johnson Refuses To Share A Platform With Nigel Farage On Ukip MEP's Brexit Tour

Boris Johnson has ruled out sharing a platform with Nigel Farage as the former Ukip leader tours the country to fight against the government’s plan for Brexit.

HuffPost UK has been told the former foreign secretary will not join forces with the MEP, despite both being opposed to Theresa May’s negotiating stance with Brussels.

Farage announced over the weekend he would join a battle bus tour organised by the Leave Means Leave campaign group, as he feels May’s Chequers agreement “is nothing less than a direct betrayal of everything people voted for.”

Ten Years After the Crash

The financial crisis that broke out a decade ago was a long time in the making, and a long time in the playing out. Over just a few days in September, 2008, Lehman Brothers essentially ceased to exist, the Federal Reserve took over American International Group to prevent a wider collapse, and commercial banks and mortgage lenders around the country failed. The speed and the scale of destruction were so breathtaking that only the direst analogies seemed adequate—the stock market crash of 1929, or an economic 9/11. Citigroup appeared poised to go down next, with General Motors and Chrysler to follow. Everything solid in the American economy turned out to be built on sand. But the crisis took years to emerge. It was caused by reckless lending practices, Wall Street greed, outright fraud, lax government oversight in the George W. Bush years, and deregulation of the financial sector in the Bill Clinton years. The deepest source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times and bad, no matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever further into debt.

Is Democracy Really Dying?

In the middle of the 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski approached his friend, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, with a question: Is democracy in crisis? It was a subject of much concern at the Trilateral Commission, a kind of Rotary Club for members of the international power elite that Brzezinski had co-founded in 1973 with David Rockefeller, head of Chase Manhattan and grandson of the famous robber baron. With the Trilateral Commission’s backing, Huntington and two co-authors produced a survey of democracy’s health in the United States, Europe, and Asia. They found that faith in government had nosedived, political parties were fracturing, and efforts to pacify voters through more public spending had sent both inflation rates and deficits soaring. Too many people—Huntington’s list included “blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women”—were demanding too much from politics, rendering the entire system ungovernable.