Media Today

[Rick Plant]

Uvalde schools police chief placed on leave amid fierce criticism of school shooting response

Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police Chief Pete Arredondo has been placed on administrative leave amid criticism of the law enforcement response to the worst school shooting in Texas history.
Uvalde CISD Superintendent Hal Harrell announced the move in a news release Wednesday, just more than four weeks after the shooting.

Arredondo has come under scrutiny for his response to the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School, during which officers took over an hour to enter the room where the shooter killed 19 children and two teachers.

Anne Marie Espinoza, director of communications and marketing for the school district, would not confirm if the leave was paid or unpaid.

An attorney for Arredondo could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/22/uvalde-pete-arredondo-leave/

[Rick Plant]

Largest freshwater fish ever caught hooked in Cambodia

A fisherman caught the 661-pound fish — which measured about 13 feet in length — near a remote island on the Mekong River in the Stung Treng area.



A fisherman in northern Cambodia hooked what researchers say is the world’s largest freshwater fish — a giant stingray that scientists know relatively little about.

The fisherman, 42, caught the 661-pound fish — which measured about 13 feet in length — near a remote island on the Mekong River in the Stung Treng area. A team of scientists from the Wonders of Mekong research project helped tag, measure and weigh the ray before it was released back into the river. The research group believes it was healthy when released and expects it to survive.

The tag — which emits an acoustic signal — will allow researchers to track the fish’s movements and, they hope, learn more about its species’ behavior in the Mekong.

The catch “highlights how little we know about a lot of these giant freshwater fish,” said Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada. “You have a fish that’s now the record holder for the world’s largest freshwater fish, and we know little about it.”

The fisherman, Moul Thun, caught the giant stingray with a hook and line on the evening of June 13, and then contacted researchers the next morning.

Researchers with the Wonders of Mekong were already in northern Cambodia to install underwater receivers as part of a project to track migratory fish in the river.

“It’s a particularly healthy stretch of the river with a lot of deep pools — pools up to 90 meters deep,” said Hogan, who is also the host of National Geographic’s “Monster Fish” television series. “We started focusing on this area as a stretch of river that’s particularly important for biodiversity and fisheries, and as a last refuge for these big species.”

For several months, the research group has been in contact with local fishermen, asking them to get in touch if they landed a significant catch. The group has helped with two other large giant freshwater stingray releases in recent months. The fisherman who caught the record ray was paid market price for his catch.

“It works because the fish is not a highly prized food fish,” Hogan said.

Hogan said little is known about the giant freshwater stingray.  The creature has a mouth about “the size of a banana” with no teeth, but with “gripping pads” used to crush prey.

“They’re on the bottom finding shrimps, mollusks and small fish. They can suck them up with this banana-shaped mouth and crush them,” Hogan said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/largest-freshwater-fish-ever-caught-hooked-cambodia-rcna34152

[Rick Plant]

Tense Trump meeting with DOJ leaders to take center stage at Jan. 6 hearing

The House committee’s fifth public hearing will focus on Trump's effort to draw upon the Justice Department's legal muscle and authority as he tried to overturn the 2020 election

WASHINGTON — The Jan. 6 committee plans to take viewers inside the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, when witnesses describe a contentious meeting in which Justice Department leaders threatened to resign if then-President Donald Trump promoted a political appointee who was prepared to back up his false claims of election fraud.

The committee’s fifth public hearing will focus on the former president’s effort to draw upon the department’s legal muscle and authority as he tried to overturn the 2020 election.

In keeping with a message the committee has been hammering home, the hearing is expected to show how America’s democratic tradition survived largely due to the integrity of a few people who stood up to Trump and refused to go along with his plan to retain power.

Three former senior Justice Department officials who rebuffed Trump at the time will be testifying live: Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general; Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general; and Steven Engel, who led the department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

All three took part in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 3, 2021 — three days before the attack on the Capitol — in which Trump considered ousting Rosen and replacing him with Jeffrey Clark, an environmental official at the department. Although the department had already concluded there was no fraud on a scale that would have influenced the election result, Clark was prepared “to reverse the department’s investigative conclusion … if he was appointed,” a Jan. 6 committee aide told reporters in a conference call Wednesday.

Had Trump fired Rosen, Clark would have sent out “fraudulent letters urging state legislatures to withdraw” their certifications that Joe Biden had won those states, the aide said.

“We’ll see that, again, President Trump only failed here because the senior Department of Justice leadership team stood up and threatened to resign rather than help the president subvert the democratic process,” the aide said.

Trump wanted to deploy the Justice Department in various ways to help him secure a second term. At the hearing, the aide said, the panel will describe how Trump pressed the department to file lawsuits in conjunction with his re-election campaign, which in the wake of the November election tried to contest Biden’s victory through the courts. The committee will also detail how Trump wanted the department to appoint a special counsel to investigate cases of election fraud — a request that officials rejected.

The hearing is scheduled to start at 3 p.m. ET and is expected to last about two hours. More hearings are planned for July and will focus on Trump’s actions when a mob stormed the Capitol, among other issues.

The remaining schedule appears to be in flux, however, in part because of new information and leads that are coming into the committee’s tip line following the first public hearing on June 9.

One fresh piece of evidence the committee is now examining involves footage shot by British filmmaker Alex Holder during the campaign. The video includes interviews with Trump and his family members, along with then-Vice President Mike Pence. The panel is likely to highlight the footage in a future hearing.

Trump has not testified before the committee, and is not expected to do so, but has used his megaphone to undercut the panel’s work. He has accused members of selectively editing testimony to make him look bad. In a speech in Nashville, Tennessee, last week, Trump said: “This is a one-sided witch hunt.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/tense-trump-meeting-doj-leaders-take-center-stage-jan-6-hearing-rcna34803

[Rick Plant]

Trump called former AG "virtually every day" to push DOJ on election fraud

Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said that former President Donald Trump called him or met with him "virtually every day" to pressure the Justice Department to take action on his false election fraud claims.

Driving the news: Rosen said during the Jan. 6 committee's fifth public hearing that the Justice Department declined all of Trump's requests because "we did not think that they were appropriate based on the facts and the law as we understood them."

On various occasions, Trump pushed the Justice Department to create a special counsel for election fraud, file a lawsuit in the Supreme Court, make public statements or hold a press conference, and send a letter to state legislatures urging that they overturn election results, Rosen said.

The former president also requested that Rosen meet with Rudy Giuliani, Rosen said.

"The common element of all of this was the president expressing his dissatisfaction that the Justice Department in his view had not done enough to investigate election fraud," he added.

https://www.axios.com/2022/06/23/rosen-trump-doj-pressure-jan6

[Rick Plant]

UK: Conservative Party loses by-elections to Labour and Lib Dems
https://www.fxstreet.com/news/uk-conservative-party-loses-by-elections-to-labour-and-lib-dems-202206240324

[Rick Plant]

Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending 50 years of federal abortion rights
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/24/roe-v-wade-overturned-by-supreme-court-ending-federal-abortion-rights.html

[Rick Plant]

Johnny Depp & Amber Heard’s Legal Battle Not Over; ‘Aquaman’ Star Formally Announces Appeal, If She Can Pay Up



Johnny Depp's multimillion-dollar defamation suit against Amber Heard is over, but not really over if the Aquaman actress can pay a pricey bond.

In a short and sometimes tense hearing Friday morning in Judge Penney Azcarate’s Fairfax, VA courtroom, a final judgment in the explicit and high-profile civil trial that ended June 1 was presented and entered into the docket (read it here). However, in a contentious back and forth with Azcarate, Heard’s main attorney Elaine Bredehoft sought to set a briefing schedule and more for a proposed appeal for her client.

Azcarate bluntly told Bredehoft that if she wanted to appeal the verdict from the seven-person jury, the lawyer would have to file motions with the court. Azcarate also informed Heard’s attorney that the Aquaman star will have to put up an $8.35 million bond with 6% interest per year for any appeal to formally move forward.

At the start of this month, Depp was awarded $15 million in damages by the jury in his $50 million defamation case. That sum awarded was almost immediately reduced to $10.35 million by Azcarate in accordance with the state of Virginia’s punitive damages limitations. While the jury found almost entirely for the former Pirates of the Caribbean star on June 1, they also awarded his ex-wife and Rum Diary co-star $2 million in damages out of Heard’s $100 million countersuit.

Though they both attended all of the six-week trial, neither Depp nor Heard were in the Virginia courtroom today. A later self-described “heartbroken” Heard had been in the room June 1 when the verdict was read out. Depp was absent for the verdict, choosing to spend his time touring the UK with Jeff Beck instead.

Reiterating what she has said publicly over the past few weeks, Bredehoft made it clear Friday that Heard will be appealing the verdict. Bredehoft has also said that Heard does not have the money to pay Depp or meet the bond. As well as likely challenging the bond issue, Heard’s defense team have about 21 days to file an appeal.

Financial issues notwithstanding, it ain’t over for the Heard team.

“As stated in yesterday’s congressional hearings, you don’t ask for a pardon if you are innocent,” a rep for the actress said in a reference to revelations out of the January 6 Committee hearings. “And, you don’t decline to appeal if you know you are right.”

Before today, it was Bredenhoft’s remarks on early-morning TV that led many to wonder whether the parties would come to a settlement before the final judgment was entered. In fact, it was in the hopes of a settlement that Azcarate paused putting the judgment into the docket. In the end, despite some chatter the past last week from the Depp camp, there was no settlement on the table in court today.

Instead, drafted by Depp lawyer Ben Chew, the judgment was signed by Azcarate as the hearing concluded. Probably preferring to let the judgment do the talking, the Depp team did not make a statement.

Depp sued his ex-wife Heard in March 2019 for $50 million over a late 2018 Washington Post op-ed she bylined about becoming “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” Even though the ACLU-crafted article in the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper never mentioned Depp by name, he claimed it “devastated” his already dimming blockbuster career. Though he said nothing during the couple’s 2016 divorce, on his filings and on the stand in the Virginia trial, Depp has also now insisted he was in fact the one who was abused in the relationship.

Having failed repeatedly to get the case dismissed or moved out of Virginia, Heard in summer 2020 countersued for $100 million. That action came months before Depp’s UK libel case against The Sun tabloid for calling him a “wife beater” proved  unsuccessful.

As appeal paperwork is being prepared, the battle with Heard is not the only legal fight Depp is engaged in.

City of Lies location manager Gregg “Rocky” Brooks’ 2018 assault and battery lawsuit against the star is set to go to trial in Los Angeles on July 25. Depp allegedly hit the crew member repeatedly on April 13, 2017 after being informed that filming on the Brad Furman-helmed pic about the LAPD investigation into the 1997 murder of the Notorious B.I.G. was going to have to wrap late that night in downtown L.A.

https://deadline.com/2022/06/johnny-depp-verdict-amber-heard-appeal-defamation-1235051609/