SAPPORO — A Shiba Inu dog that “manages” a baked sweet potato store alone in a residential area of this city is building a loyal following that matches the breed’s faithful reputation.
Ken, the 4-year-old Japanese hunting dog in Sapporo, the capital of Japan’s northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido, is also warming foreign visitors’ hearts as the story of the dog’s unique work has been spreading through social media. Other canines are also benefiting from his activities as part of the store’s profits are donated to an organization that works to prevent the culling of pets.
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The handmade store contains a heater and opens at 11 a.m. on weekdays. The store is closed for an hour at noon and resumes operations at 1 p.m. until 3 p.m. Payment is through an honesty box where customers place 200 yen per potato into a hole in the wall of the store.
Murayama [Sonoto Murayama, who had the idea for the stand] thinks that the store has gained popularity among foreigners as unmanned stands are rare abroad although they are a common sight in rural areas in Japan. Messages in foreign languages including English, Chinese and Thai are seen written on a notebook placed in front of the shop.
There are important steps ahead in the Whitewater Schools’ search for a new district administrator. (A link on the district webpage has information about the process. I’ve reproduced key information below.)
Tonight, at 6:30 PM in the Whitewater High School library, there will be an open forum where residents can share their views on what they’d like to see in a district administrator.
(I’ve written before about sound practices for a public forum. Those who are unaffiliated, and are new to a public forum, should have pride of place. Those who are accustomed to public participation should wait their turn. Whitewater has too many of the same people who sit up front and speak as though they were in a private audience.
As for bloggers – who are modern-day versions of eighteenth century pamphleteers – we have ample means of expression. There will be time to write about the search process.)
Through Monday, February 24th, there is an online survey that respondents can complete about the search. (The survey is, as it should be, in English & Spanish. A link on the page allows for language selection.)
The district website also has a tentative hiring timeline that I have reproduced below, and that can be clicked for a larger image. (HYA refers to the search consulting firm — Hazard, Young, Attea.)
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 5:30 PM, for 10h 43m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 23.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Calendar Committee meets at 3:45 PM, and Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission at 7:30 PM.
On this day in 1920, Janesville, Wisconsin allows billiards and bowling on Sunday (but proprietors would be ‘fined $15 each for staying open longer than allowed’).
The head of the Federal Judges Association is taking the extraordinary step of calling an emergency meeting to address the intervention in politically sensitive cases by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, the Philadelphia-based judge who heads the voluntary association of around 1,100 life-term federal judges told USA Today that the issue “could not wait.” The association, founded in 1982, ordinarily concerns itself with matters of judicial compensation and legislation affecting the federal judiciary.
On Sunday, more than 1,100 former Justice Department employees released a public letter calling on Barr to resign over the Stone case.
A search of news articles since the group’s creation revealed nothing like a meeting to deal with the conduct of a president or attorney general.
Rufe, appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, could not be reached for comment late Monday.
The action follows a week of turmoil that included the president tweeting his outrage over the length of sentence recommended by career federal prosecutors for his friend Roger Stone and the decision by Barr to withdraw that recommendation.
Author Jean Guerrero has revealed the title and cover art for her forthcoming biography of Trump official Stephen Miller (‘HATEMONGER: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda’):
It will be published by William Morrow, a division of the Murdoch family’s HarperCollins, on May 19. A pre-order page for the book just popped up on Amazon. From the description: “Emmy- and PEN-winning investigative journalist and author Jean Guerrero charts the thirty-four-year-old’s astonishing rise to power, drawing from more than one hundred interviews with his family, friends, adversaries and government officials…”
Christina Koch recently returned from 328 days in space, and was reunited with her family, including her dog, LBD (Little Brown Dog). As one can imagine, LBD was faithfully excited —
We, the undersigned, are alumni of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) who have collectively served both Republican and Democratic administrations. Each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice.
As former DOJ officials, we each proudly took an oath to support and defend our Constitution and faithfully execute the duties of our offices. The very first of these duties is to apply the law equally to all Americans. This obligation flows directly from the Constitution, and it is embedded in countless rules and laws governing the conduct of DOJ lawyers. The Justice Manual — the DOJ’s rulebook for its lawyers — states that “the rule of law depends on the evenhanded administration of justice”; that the Department’s legal decisions “must be impartial and insulated from political influence”; and that the Department’s prosecutorial powers, in particular, must be “exercised free from partisan consideration.”
All DOJ lawyers are well-versed in these rules, regulations, and constitutional commands. They stand for the proposition that political interference in the conduct of a criminal prosecution is anathema to the Department’s core mission and to its sacred obligation to ensure equal justice under the law.
And yet, President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle, most recently in connection with the sentencing of President Trump’s close associate, Roger Stone, who was convicted of serious crimes. The Department has a long-standing practice in which political appointees set broad policies that line prosecutors apply to individual cases. That practice exists to animate the constitutional principles regarding the even-handed application of the law. Although there are times when political leadership appropriately weighs in on individual prosecutions, it is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case. It is even more outrageous for the Attorney General to intervene as he did here — after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a little snow, and a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 5:29 PM, for 10h 41m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 33.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1801, an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr is resolved when Jefferson is elected President of the United States and Burr, Vice President by the United States House of Representatives.
NO ONE disputes that Secret Service protection is essential and expensive. But revelations about exorbitant rates that the Secret Service has been charged to protect President Trump at his private properties raise the question of what interest is being furthered. Is it the safety of the president or the bottom line of his private holdings?
An investigation by The Post’s David A. Fahrenthold, Jonathan O’Connell, Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey found 103 payments from January 2017 to April 2018 from the Secret Service to Trump companies, totaling more than $471,000. Among the charges were $650 per night for agents to use rooms “dozens” of times in 2017 at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida and $17,000 a month to rent a three-bedroom cottage at Trump National Golf Club Bedminister in New Jersey for three months in 2017.
The full extent of what the Trump Organization is charging the government is not known because the Secret Service has not listed them in public databases, even though it is typically required for charges in excess of $10,000. Nor has the agency filed the required twice-yearly reports on its spending to Congress. Since 2016, it has filed just two reports and those were not complete; the lines for Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago were both left blank. Post reporters were able to provide a glimpse into the arrangements by compiling documents that came out piecemeal from public records requests of other news organizations and watchdog groups and by talking to people who have seen some receipts.
This will only get worse as the Trump administration’s budget proposal, released Monday, lays bare the lies he told during the State of the Union. On Trump’s watch, the federal debt is up $3 trillion. Since budgets don’t lie, the folks crunching the numbers at the White House had to acknowledge there is no plan to get America out of the red anytime soon. They hang their economic hopes on long-term growth projections that make the failed projections of Trump’s first three years seem modest. But they also make clear that Trump wants poor and low-income Americans to pick up the bill for his shortcomings in the meantime.
Bill Barr has now been Trump’s attorney general for a full year.
He’s spent that year helping Trump weaponize the Justice Department for his personal benefit—showing that, like the man who appointed him, Barr is an urgent threat to American democracy.https://t.co/Xtr0BE6fVJ
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 5:27 PM, for 10h 38m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 43.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, Grant is victorious at the Battle of Fort Donelson: “The capture of Forts Henry and Donelson were the first significant Union victories in the war and opened two great rivers to invasion in the heartland of the South. Grant was promoted to major general of volunteers, second in seniority only to Henry W. Halleck in the West.”
Two candidates in the race for circuit judge want the job badly enough that they say they’re living in Milwaukee County apart from their families, and a third has exploited that fact as he campaigns.
For more than 20 years, incumbent Paul Dedinsky and his family lived in Waukesha County. His wife and children still do, but he says he has relocated to his parents’ home in Whitefish Bay, on Milwaukee County’s north shore, since former Gov. Scott Walker appointed him to the bench in late 2018.
Brett Blomme’s husband and two children live in Dane County but Blomme says his domicile is a home the couple also owns near North 68th and West Burleigh streets in Milwaukee.
At a recent candidates’ forum, Zach Whitney said he lives in Milwaukee because he “loves it, not because I’m running for judge.”
“Within months, technologists say, it will be impossible…to detect deepfakes” with counter-technology, says Danielle Citron, a [Boston University] School of Law professor of law, a MacArthur Fellow (an award commonly called a genius grant), and vice president of the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). The sheer volume of different ways to make deepfakes will confound efforts to detect them “and therefore to filter and block them,” she says. So Citron has devised an eight-point plan for political campaigns this election year, from president to dogcatcher, to protect against this cyber-sabotage.
The plan includes campaigns pledging not to disseminate deepfakes knowingly; designating a rapid-response team of media and legal staffers to manage a deepfake incident (something few campaigns have done); establishing “points-of-contact” both at technology companies whose platforms might be used for deepfakes and with media fact-checkers, to understand their verification procedures; and preparing “contingency web content” to counter and correct a deepfake attack.
Distinguishing between deepfakes and other forms of political lies is important, Citron says. The video of Nancy Pelosi released last year, where the US Speaker of the House appeared to speak haltingly, as if cognitively impaired, was a real video that was altered and slowed down. While damaging and misleading, that’s not a deepfake, where the video is a manufactured avatar of the person it impersonates.
Technology is coming that will enable manufactured sex videos of people who never did what’s depicted in the videos, Citron warns. BU Today spoke with Citron about her eight-point plan, the 2020 campaign, and the perilous state of technology.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 5:26 PM, for 10h 35m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1898, the battleship USS Maine explodes and sinks in Havana harbor, killing 274.
Through the Trump Era, it’s been fashionable for some of his critics—especially on Twitter—to assail his actions as the coming of kleptocracy, autocracy, authoritarianism, and, yes, fascism to the United States. Recently, in an airport, an elderly women stopped me to say that she survived the Holocaust in a camp and now fears she is experiencing what her mother went through eighty-five years ago as the catastrophe approached in Germany. I tried to persuade her that as bad as things are now, there remains institutions, organizations, and millions of people who will not accept what is happening to the nation’s democratic institutions and who can oppose a complete power-grab from Trump and his cult (a.k.a. the Republican Party).
I still believe that. But Trump’s hostile take-over of the Justice Department this week is yet another sign that the task of countering Trump’s extremism is becoming both harder and more crucial.
By now, you know the basics: After the Justice Department requested a seven-to-nine years sentence for Roger Stone, a longtime Trump intimate who was convicted of lying to Congress and witness-tampering (to protect Trump in the Russia scandal), Trump tweet-whined that this sentence would be too harsh, and the DoJ dutifully rescinded it. Four federal prosecutors, apparently in protest, withdrew from the Stone case, with one quitting the department. Then Trump attacked the federal judge handling the case. Still on the rampage the next day, Trump—again in a tweet—threatened to withhold assistance for New York State if it did not smother investigations related to Trump.
On Thursday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr seemed to rebuke Trump by saying he would not “be bullied or influenced by anybody,” including the president. But Barr has already done so much of Trump’s bidding—undermining the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, opening investigations that appeared designed to unearth information that support Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories—his declaration of independence was too late, if not ludicrous.
A jury late Friday found a former federal agent not guilty of sexually assaulting two women after a nine-day trial that featured explicit testimony from three former girlfriends, but guilty of assaulting a third.
David Scharlat, 55, of Oconomowoc, was charged in April 2018 with five counts of sexual assault against the three women over five years. Scharlat, who had steady dating relationships with all of the women, says the charged incidents were all consensual.
His attorney, Paul Bucher, called the conviction inconsistent with the other verdicts and said Scharlat will appeal. “The fight is not over,” he said.
In her closing argument, Assistant District Attorney Michele Hulgaard said the evidence showed Scharlat to be a predator who had no regard for the women in his life and took what he wanted from them, emotionally and physically. He used the authority of his badge and gun to intimidate them, she said.
So, Donald Trump had a deal in mind when wrote about a meeting with the governor of New York. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, had a reply for him —
