https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/30/police-blew-up-an-innocent-mans-house-search-an-armed-shoplifter-too-bad-court-rules/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1



When they were finished, it looked as though the Greenwood Village, Colo., police had blasted rockets through the house.

Projectiles were still lodged in the walls. Glass and wooden paneling crumbled on the ground below the gaping holes, and inside, the family’s belongings and furniture appeared thrashed in a heap of insulation and drywall. Leo Lech, who rented the home to his son, thought it looked like al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s compound after the raid that killed him.

But now it was just a neighborhood crime scene, the suburban home where an armed Walmart shoplifting suspect randomly barricaded himself after fleeing the store on a June afternoon in 2015. For 19 hours, the suspect holed up in a bathroom as a SWAT team fired gas munition and 40-millimeter rounds through the windows, drove an armored vehicle through the doors, tossed flash-bang grenades inside and used explosives to blow out the walls.

The suspect was captured alive, but the home was utterly destroyed, eventually condemned by the City of Greenwood Village.

That left Leo Lech’s son, John Lech — who lived there with his girlfriend and her 9-year-old son — without a home. The city refused to compensate the Lech family for their losses but offered $5,000 in temporary rental assistance and for the insurance deductible.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/30/economy/us-gdp-third-quarter/index.html

New York (CNN Business)The US economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.9% in the third quarter, the Commerce Department announced Wednesday.

This is the preliminary reading of US gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the American economy. The Commerce Department will update its estimate twice more.

Although the economy's growth is slowing, it remains relatively strong. However, the third quarter marks the first time since the final quarter of 2018 in which the US economy has grown at a rate slower than 2%.

The economy was helped by growing consumer and government spending, but the pace of growth decelerated. Americans spent less on cars, continuing a trend that has been ongoing for a year.

But Americans also spent less on clothing and footwear. The Trump administration hit some Chinese imports of clothes and shoes with tariffs during the summer.
Nevertheless, the report beat analyst expectations. Economists polled by Refinitiv expected growth to be as slow as 1.6% ahead of the release.

Both the GDP report and ADP private payrolls report exceeded investors' expectations ahead of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decision at 2 pm ET Wednesday. But neither data point "will be able to move the needle for the Fed," wrote Todd Schoenberger, senior research analyst at Wellington & Co. Schoenberger agrees with the majority of investors, who expects the Fed to cut rates by another quarter percentage point today.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/boston-college-suicide-manslaughter-charges-girlfriend

Prosecutors say former Boston College student Inyoung You was so physically, verbally, and psychologically abusive that she caused her boyfriend to kill himself.



A former Boston College student has been charged with involuntary manslaughter over her boyfriend's suicide in May, Massachusetts officials announced Monday, in a case that has parallels to the Michelle Carter trial.

Inyoung You, a 21-year-old from South Korea, was so "physically, verbally, and psychologically abusive" toward Alexander Urtula during their 18-month relationship that she caused the 22-year-old to kill himself, Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins told reporters at a press conference.

"[The investigation] also determined that abuse became more frequent and more powerful and more demeaning in the days and hours leading up to Mr. Urtula's untimely death," Rollins said.

Urtula, himself a student at Boston College, died just 90 minutes before his graduation ceremony on May 20. His family had traveled from New Jersey to attend the event.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/isis-eyes-breakout-opportunity-as-turkish-forces-batter-us-allied-kurds/2019/10/17/b68c6358-f048-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html



The Islamic State is racing to capitalize on the deteriorating security situation in northern Syria, stepping up attacks on prisons as well as on the now-weakened Kurdish militia that served as the vanguard in the U.S.-led war against the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate, intelligence officials and terrorism experts say.

Despite Thursday’s announced cease-fire, Turkey’s week-old incursion into northeast Syria is already proving to be a propaganda windfall for the extremist group, which in recent months had been making faltering attempts at a comeback in parts of eastern Syria controlled by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, the analysts said.

The Islamic State’s official ­media arm taunted the SDF on Thursday, calling it an abandoned American ally and warning that further attacks were coming.

“The withdrawal of the U.S. from northern Syria and the destabilization that has ensued has created a perfect situation for ISIS to capitalize on,” said Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, a private firm that tracks online extremist activity.

An editorial in the Islamic State’s al-Naba newsletter said the Kurds were only the latest of Washington’s allies to be dumped after they were no longer needed.

“Once they [Americans] attained what they sought from them, they handed them over to the Rafidha,” the essay said, “so we took vengeance on them.” Rafidha is a pejorative term used by Sunni extremists for Shiite Muslims in general, and most particularly for predominantly Shiite Iran, which was among the winners in the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria’s northern border region.

https://www.boredpanda.com/incredible-not-photoshopped-photos/

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, some photos are so astounding that a thousand questions bubble to the surface of our thoughts the moment we see them. In the 21st century, one of the first questions usually is: “Was this photoshopped?”

Whether you think that Photoshop should never be used to edit pictures ever or you believe that it’s an inseparable part of a photographer’s existence in the digital age, the fact is, more and more pictures are being post-processed than ever before. Simply because of how easily accessible cameras and editing software is nowadays. However, once in a blue moon some very intriguing photos pop out from the woodwork. Photos that look photoshopped, but that aren’t.

We love collecting stunning eye-candy for you to gaze at all day long. And today’s no exception. We’ve gathered the finest examples of fascinating pictures that definitely weren’t photoshopped. Grab a cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa, get your scrolling finger ready, and enjoy what our team of hard-working Pandas prepared for you. Upvote your favorite photos, share this post with your buddies, and let us know in the comments what you think of each picture. And check out our previous posts about incredible photos that weren't photoshopped right here and here.

Scroll down for Bored Panda’s exclusive and in-depth interview with professional photographer Anna Chii about the ‘morality’ of editing pictures, her take on ‘all-natural’ photos, her philosophy of photography, what clients usually expect, as well as the importance of trust between a photographer and their clients.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-base-is-smaller-than-he-thinks/2019/10/06/0826a842-e6dd-11e9-a6e8-8759c5c7f608_story.html?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1



The debate over impeaching President Trump reveals an irony: Those who favor it have far more respect for the president’s supporters than those who oppose it.

Critics of impeachment argue that the effort to remove Trump from office over his open invitations of foreign meddling in our elections will only ignite the Trump “base.” Those who say we should let this all go see his backers as an excitable immovable bloc of people closed to reasoned argument or new information.

Thus are roughly 40 percent of our fellow citizens cast as an unthinking blob that will embrace anything Trump says and turn out in droves in 2020 to beat back the elitist fake-newsers and deep-staters no matter what the facts are.

Those of us who support impeachment don’t deny that there is a “Trump base” but insist that mountains of polling evidence show that it amounts to 25 to 30 percent of voters at most. The rest of the 46 percent who voted for Trump have real doubts about who he is, how he behaves and what he is doing to our country. Even those of us who disagree with them on a variety of issues see this substantial part of Trump’s constituency as made up of rational and engaged citizens open to persuasion.