Categories
Sports

Mets outlast Jake Arietta and the Cubs

The Mets overcame an onslaught from Jake Arietta to notch a 2-1 win on Tuesday over the Cubs at Wrigley Field.

The Cy Young Award winner held the Mets to five hits and one run in seven innings. But Rene Rivera notched a single to right field in the ninth inning that scored Neil Walker from second base to put the Mets ahead.

Half an inning later, Jeurys Familia walked two en route to loading the bases before the Mets forced an out at the plate and Familia got Kris Bryant to ground into an inning-ending double play.

The Mets (50-32) earned their third win in five games. The victory, together with a loss by the division-leading Nationals in Los Angeles, moved the Mets to within 5.5 games of first place.

Categories
News

Mets end winning streak against Cubs

The Mets finally lost to the Cubs, who on Monday night ended an eight game losing streak to New York with a 5-1 win at Wrigley Field.

Mets starter Steven Matz allowed eight hits, including a home run to Anthony Rizzo in the third inning, and struck out five. Jon Lester allowed half as many hits in seven and two-thirds innings for Chicago. The Mets (49-43) scored when Wilmer Flores homered to lead off the seventh.

Yoenis Cespedes, back for his second game after missing nine days to nurse a strain in his right quadriceps, prevented another run from scoring when he threw out Willson (with two l’s) Contreras at the plate as Contreras attempted to score from second on a single by Matt Szczur.

The loss, coupled with a win by Marlins, left the Mets in third place, 6.5 games behind Washington.

Categories
Sports

DeGrom revives Mets’ playoff run

Jacob DeGrom may have pitched the Mets back into the playoff hunt.

The right-hander gave up one hit over nine innings on Sunday to lead the Mets to a 5-0 shutout and series win over Philadelphia. The victory left the Mets (49-42) six games behind the Nationals, who lost to Pittsburgh.

“It was a lot of fun,” DeGrom told reporters afterward.

The Amazins started the game amid calls to reinforce their injury-plagued starting rotation.

DeGrom, who struck out seven hitters, became the first Met pitcher to record a shutout since Bartolo Colon last September. Phillies pitcher Zach Elfin recorded the one hit that DeGrom yielded.

https://twitter.com/ESPNStatsInfo/status/754822413116932096/photo/1

Curtis Granderson had a solo home run in the third inning. Asdrubal Cabrera added a two-run shot in the eighth. Juan Lagares tripled to drive  in a run in the first. Four innings later, a double by Jose Reyes scored DeGrom.

On Monday, the Mets will play the first of three games against the Cubs in Chicago.

Categories
Sports

Mets fall seven games behind Nationals

When James Loney singled with two out in the Mets half of the eighth on Saturday night, it seemed as if the Amazins, who trailed by one, might erase the deficit.

The rally ended and then a comeback did, too. Carlos Ruiz singled to lead off Philadelphia’s half of the inning, then advanced to third on an out by Freddy Galvis. Ruiz later scored on a wild pitch by Erik Goeddel. That put the Phillies up by two and the win out of reach for the Mets.

The Mets (48-42) fell seven games behind the Nationals, who blanked the Pirates. That’s the most the Mets have trailed Washington this season. The Marlins also lost, which left the Mets tied for the second wild card.

“We are not driving in runs when we need to,” Manager Terry Collins told reporters after the game.

The Mets need pitching, too. Which has led to rumors the team might make a deal for the return of Jonathon Niese, a left-hander whom the Mets traded to Pittsburgh in December for Neil Walker. Niese has struggled in Pittsburgh, where he leads the league in wild pitches. Pirates general manager Neil Huntington told a Pittsburgh radio program on Thursday that the Pirates might have been better off had they traded for “two fringe prospects.”

The Mets reportedly aren’t ruling out a reunion.

Categories
Sports

The Mets look to October

Sirius will appear in the night sky over New York City between now and Wednesday, which means the dog days have arrived. But we know that already from the Mets, who have emerged from the All-Star break in a scramble to win the World Series.

The Amazins started the season’s second half with a win over Philadelphia that featured homers by Juan Lagares and Neil Walker and a performance by Bartolo Colon that held the Phillies to four hits over five and two-thirds innings.

“We feel we are a playoff team,” Walker told reporters afterward.

The win leaves the Mets with 48 wins, six games behind Washington and in possession of the third of three spots for a wild-card berth. That’s one more win than the Mets had at this spot last season, when they finished as runner-up to the Royals.

And again this season, the odds of the Mets playing in October seem likely to to depend on the health of their lineup. At last year’s midpoint, injuries had sidelined David Wright (a narrowing of the spine), Steven Matz (torn back muscle) and Travis d’Arnaud (elbow sprain).

A year later, both David Wright (recovering from surgery to repair a herniated disk in his neck) and Matt Harvey (slated for season-ending surgery to correct a compression of blood vessels between his collarbone and first rib) are out for the season. Yoenis Cespedes is nursing a strained quadriceps.

Noah Syndergaard, whose E.R.A. of 2.56 ranks him eighth in the majors, is monitoring a bone spur in his throwing elbow. Lucas Duda, who has been on the disabled list since May with a stress fracture in his lower back, is slated to resume activity next week.

In the meantime, the Mets will look to a mix of players to propel them into playoff contention. “We still think we are going to have a big second half, but we have to have some different people step up,” manager Terry Collins told the Post. “We don’t have Harv, so somebody else has to step up. We don’t have David, and Duda is out, we’ve got to have other people step up.”

So for the Mets, the second half of summer may be a story of stepping up. If that happens, they may be in contention come the harvest moon.

Categories
News

News quiz, week ending July 15

About 35,000 people from what country streamed into Colombia to buy food and basic goods?

Who won the Wimbledon women’s and men’s singles titles?

Which nation won soccer’s European Championships?

What is Pokémon Go?

Which U.S. senator said the following on Tuesday in Portsmouth, New Hampshire: “There is no doubt in my mind that as we head into November, Hillary Clinton is far and away the best candidate.”

Who became U.K prime minister?

How many women have served in that post?

An international tribunal ruled that China’s claims to historic and economic rights in the South China Sea have no legal basis. What country brought the legal challenge against China?

Who called Donald Trump a “faker”?

What app did President Recap Tayipp Erdogan of Turkey use to broadcast messages urging the public to resist a coup attempt?

 

 

 

 

Answers

Venezuela

Serena Williams, Andy Murray

Portugal

The first mobile edition of a video game that launched in 1996. The mobile version lets you interact with and catch Pokémon that are integrated into your real-world view via your phone’s camera.

Bernie Sanders

Theresa May

Two

The Philippines

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

FaceTime

 

 

Categories
Law

The deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile remind us of the stakes of being stopped

I started writing this post before the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, black men who were fatally shot last week by police in the name of public safety. But their deaths underscore the subject, which is the high stakes of unlawful stops by police.

Sterling appears to have been pinned to the ground by officers in Baton Rouge when one of them shot him. The circumstances of his death resembled those of Eric Garner, a black man who died two years ago in a police chokehold while being arrested on Staten Island.

Garner died at the hands of police while being arrested for selling loose cigarettes. Sterling was selling CDs outside a food mart. The store’s owner reportedly considered Sterling a friend.

As Emily Badger at Wonkblog notes, both men died while hustling. “In the days after Garner’s death,” writes Badger, “mourners kept juxtaposing the scale of that misdemeanor with what happened next: How could a few loosies justify a response so forceful it snuffed out a grown man’s life?”

The deaths of Garner, Sterling, Castile and too many others, underscores the stakes for all of us, but particularly for people of color, of being stopped by police.

Three years ago, Judge Shira Scheindin of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan invalidated a program of the city’s police department that authorized officers to stop mostly black or Latino residents of the city who happened to be leaving privately owned apartment buildings in the Bronx.

The stops lacked a legal basis, ruled Judge Scheindlin, who observed that the consequences of a conviction, which, after all, can follow from an arrest, have become more severe over the nearly 50 years since the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment applies to so-called stop-and-frisk procedures. A criminal record can render you unable to obtain a job, rent an apartment, obtain government benefits or, in some states, serve on a jury or vote, she noted.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor reminded us of that recently when she dissented from a ruling by a majority of the court that evidence discovered by police during an illegal stop can nevertheless be admitted in a subsequent criminal trial of the person stopped if the person happened to have an outstanding warrant for his or her arrest.

In short, you can be stopped illegally – in violation of your constitutional rights – and if there happens to be a warrant pending for your arrest, the law will overlook the unlawfulness of the stop.

The case before the court concerned an appeal by Edward Strieff, a white man from Salt Lake City, who six years ago left a house that was under surveillance by police who had received a tip that the occupants were dealing drugs. Detective Douglas Fackrell watched Strieff walk toward a convenience store nearby. In the store’s parking lot, Fackrell stopped Strieff, identified himself and asked Strieff what he was doing at the house.

As part of the arrest, Fackrell asked Strieff for identification, which Strieff produced. Fackrell relayed the information to a police dispatch, who reported that Strieff had an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic violation. Fackrell then arrested Strieff for that violation. When the officer searched Strieff incident to the arrest – a basic precaution when arresting someone – he discovered a baggie of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.

The state charged Strieff with unlawful possession. Strieff sought to suppress the evidence, which he asserted was inadmissible because it was derived from an unlawful stop – that Fackrell had no legal basis for detaining Strieff in the first place. At a hearing on whether to suppress the evidence (because of the illegal stop), the prosecution conceded that the stop was unlawful, but argued that the evidence should be admitted because the existence of a valid arrest warrant lessened the connection between the unlawful stop and the discovery of the drugs.

A trial judge agreed with the state, ruling that the short time between the illegal stop and the search weighed in favor of suppressing the evidence but that the existence of a valid warrant constituted an extraordinary intervening circumstance. The judge also noted that Fackrell, who had been conducting a legitimate investigation of a suspected drug house, had not engaged in flagrant misconduct.

The Utah Supreme Court reversed, holding that the evidence was inadmissible because only a voluntary act by Fackrell – such as his confessing or consenting to the search – could have severed the connection between an illegal search and the discovery of evidence.

A majority of Justice Sotomayor’s colleagues disagreed, holding that the evidence discovered on Strieff was admissible because the unlawful stop was sufficiently weakened by the preexisting warrant. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas explained:

“The outstanding arrest warrant for Strieff’s arrest is a critical intervening circumstance that is wholly independent of the illegal stop. The discovery of that warrant broke the causal chain between the unconstitutional stop and the discovery of evidence by compelling Officer Fackrell to arrest Strieff. And, it is especially significant that there is no evidence that Officer Fackrell’s illegal stop reflected flagrantly unlawful police misconduct.”

Reread that last sentence. There is no evidence that the officer’s illegal action was flagrantly unlawful.

Huh.

According to Justice Sotomayor, the decision raises a principle at the core of the Fourth Amendment: that two wrongs don’t make a right. The alternative – that the warrant somehow rights the wrong – she wrote, is “a remarkable proposition.”

What’s more, she noted, the reasoning by the majority threatens to give police an incentive to stop suspects illegally because outstanding warrants are common.

Citing the Justice Department’s investigation of the town of Ferguson, Missouri following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, by a white police office who had stopped him (and who may or may not have had probable cause to stop Brown), Justice Sotomayor noted that Ferguson, with a population of 21,000, had 16,000 people with outstanding warrants against them. In one year in New Orleans, she observed, officers made nearly 60,000 arrests, of which about 20,000 were of people with outstanding traffic or misdemeanor warrants from neighboring parishes for such infractions as unpaid parking tickets. She cited data from Utah that shows the state lists more than 180,000 misdemeanor warrants in its database.

Unlawful stops “have severe consequences much greater than the inconvenience suggested by the name,” she wrote. “Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more,” she added. And, she explained:

Even if you are innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest record and experience the ‘civil death’ of discrimination by employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check… And, of course, if you fail to pay bail or appear for court, a judge will issue a warrant to render you ‘arrestable on sight’ in the future.

Think about how fortunate you are if you’ve never been arrested. Even if you’ve never so much as jaywalked, you might have stood in the wrong place at the wrong time, or been mistaken for someone else and arrested by accident. And that alone might change the trajectory of where you work or where (or whether) you live.

As Justice Sotomayor, who grew up in public housing in the Bronx, noted, the appeal by Strieff involved a stop in which the officer, by arresting Strieff without justification, set in motion a series of events that led to Strieff’s conviction.

“The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner,” she wrote. “But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny.”

She continued, “For generations, black and brown parents have given their children ‘the talk’ – instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger – all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.”

The majority’s ruling, wrote Justice Sotomayor:

“… legitimizes the conduct that produces this double consciousness” and “tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.”

To Justice Sotomayor, the people who are targeted routinely by police are “canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil, and literal, warn us that no one one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.”

Categories
News

News quiz, week ending July 8

Elie Wiesel died last Saturday. What is the title of his autobiographical account of life in Auschwitz?

On Monday, NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit. When did Juno leave Earth?

What is Diet Pepsi Classic?

Who is Irvine Randle and why did he gain internet fame?

Who was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information, according to the FBI?

What soccer star from Argentina was hit by a Spanish court with a 21-month prison sentence and a 2 million euro fine?

What is the Chilcot report?

The U.K. will soon have a female prime minister. Who is she likely to be?

In separate incidents, police in Baton Rouge and St. Paul fatally shot black men. What were the men’s names?

At least 11 police officers were injured, five fatally, in a sniper attack in which city?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers

“Night”

August 2011

Diet Pepsi with Aspartame. The company revived the recipe to halt a slide in sales after removing the artificial sweetener last summer.

A 54-year-old teacher from Houston who became an Internet sensation for being an insanely hot granddad

Hillary Clinton

Lionel Messi

A report by Sir John Chilcot, a former British civil servant, that found misjudgment by former Prime Minister Tony Blair in the run-up to war in Iraq

Either Home Secretary Theresa May or Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom

Alton Sterling and Philando Castile

Dallas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
U.S.

Read Etgar Keret this July Fourth

In his story “Throwdown at the Playground,” Etgar Keret tells about a visit to Ezekiel Park in Tel Aviv with Lev, his 3-year-old son.

There a question from a mother of another boy surprises Keret. “Tell me something,” asks Orit, the mother. “Will Lev go to the army when he grows up?”

Keret replies that he and his wife haven’t talked about it. “We still have time,” he adds. “He’s three years old.”

That night, Keret relays the incident to his wife.

“Isn’t that weird,” he asks her. “Talking about recruiting a kid who still can’t put on his underpants by himself?

No, she answers. “All the mothers in the park talk to me about it. I’ve been dealing with it from the day Lev was born. And if we’re already discussing it now, I don’t want him to go into the army.”

“I think it’s very controlling to say something like that,” Keret replies.

“I’d rather be controlling than have to take part in a military funeral on the Mount of Olives fifteen years from now,” she counters.

The exchange edges toward an argument.

“You’re talking as if serving in the army is an extreme sport,” Keret says. “But what can we do? We live in part of the world where our lives depend on it. So what you’re actually saying is that you’d rather have other people’s children go into the army and sacrifice their lives, while Lev enjoys his life here without taking any risks or shouldering the obligations the situation calls for.”

“No,” he wife says. “I’m saying that we could have reached a powerful solution a long time ago, and we still can. And that our leaders allow themselves not to do that because they know that most people are like you: they won’t hesitate to put their children’s lives into the government’s irresponsible hands.”

Keret is about to answer when Lev appears. “Daddy, why are you and Mommy fighting?” the boy asks.

“It’s not a real fight,” Keret tells him. “It’s just a drill.”

Keret and his wife manage to end their argument. Keret suggests that when Lev is 18, Lev can decide for himself whether to serve in the army. But his wife disagreees, contending that Lev would be unable to make a free choice with all the social pressure that would surround him.

“In the end,” writes Keret, “out of exhaustion, and in the absence of any other solution, we decided to compromise on the only principle we both truly agreed on: to spend the next fifteen years working toward family and regional peace.”

Categories
News

News quiz, week ending July 1

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down parts of a law in what state that imposed limits on abortion providers?

What automaker agreed to pay $15 billion to settle claims stemming from a diesel emissions cheating scandal?

Pat Summitt died Tuesday at 64. What record did she hold?

On July 4, a NASA spacecraft is expected to complete its journey to what planet?

Following Brexit how many countries will remain in the European Union?

What leaders attended the summit of the three amigos?

What furniture retailer recalled 29 million dressers sold in the U.S. since 1989?

What country lifted its ban on transgender members of the armed forces?

Which former London mayor bowed out of the race to become the U.K.’s next prime minister?

Friday marked the 100th anniversary of which battle from World War I?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers

Texas

Volkswagen

She won more national basketball championships than any other Division I college coach

Jupiter

27

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and President Barack Obama

IKEA

The U.S.

Boris Johnson

The Battle of the Somme