A woman reported her stalker to the police five times in six months.

And then he murdered her.

Officers are facing disciplinary action after Shana Grice was fined for wasting police time before she was murdered by her stalker.

Two police officers, one of whom has retired, will face gross misconduct proceedings in front of an independent chairman at public hearings on 7 and 10 May, Sussex Police confirmed. Another police officer will face internal misconduct proceedings, which are carried out in private.

Several others will get retraining, while others still get no further action.

The 14 were investigated by the police watchdog after 19-year-old Miss Grice was murdered in Portslade, near Brighton, East Sussex, in 2016. Michael Lane slit her throat in her bedroom then tried to burn her body.

She had previously reported her ex-boyfriend to officers five times in six months, but was fined £90 for wasting police time.

…

Lane’s trial prompted widespread calls for action to ensure victims are taken seriously by police. He pursued Miss Grice by fitting a tracker to her car, stole a house key to sneak into her room while she slept and loitered outside her home. It later emerged 13 other women had reported him to police for stalking.

…

At Lane’s sentencing, Mr Justice Nicholas Green said officers “jumped to conclusions” and “stereotyped” Ms Grice.

It’s almost as if the cultural messages about women have real world effects.

The news comes on the same day the IOPC announced a police call handler from the force was given “management advice” after failing to record a woman’s reports of escalating violence by her ex-husband who shot her dead eight days later.

Michelle Savage spoke to Sussex Police three times before she was murdered alongside her 53-year-old mother Heather Whitbread in an execution-style killing at almost point-blank range in St Leonards on March last year.

She had told officers former soldier Craig Savage was dangerous and she feared for her life.

Sarah Green, co-director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said of both cases: “The police watchdog findings that Sussex Police failed and that there will be misconduct hearings are welcome, but much more is needed.

“Numerous inquests and inquiries have found that multiple police forces have failed to protect women who were murdered. There is a massive failing in police leadership on domestic and sexual violence which is not simply about cuts. The Home Secretary should call time on the promises to do better and require improvement or removal of leaders in forces where women are not being protected.”

Oh well, it’s only women.

Speaking of Republicans and pharmaceutical corporations and filthy practices…

The real winners of Trump's tax cuts:
Pfizer: $2.8B
Johnson & Johnson: $2.5B
Merck: $1.2B
Abbott Labs: $473M

Meanwhile, Pfizer, J&J, and Merck all *raised* prescription drug prices last year. So much for trickle-down benefits…https://t.co/7I0rUBxq8H

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 9, 2019

Opens Axios article:

Four pharmaceutical companies — Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck and Abbott Laboratories — collectively kept $7 billion in tax savings in 2018 due to Republicans’ 2017 corporate tax overhaul, according to a new Oxfam report.

The bottom line: Oxfam’s results mirror our reporting, which shows pharmaceutical companies in particular have benefited from bringing back billions of dollars in overseas profits that have sat untaxed. However, this report says the tax savings have not led to other social goods, like more research investment in new drugs or lower drug prices.

Of course not. That’s not what money is for. Money is for buying bigger and bigger houses, cars, yachts, private jets.

Profits first! Profits first, Republicans second, people last. Take prescription drugs for instance…

In an unusual move, House Republicans are warning drug companies against complying with a House investigation into drug prices.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent letters to a dozen CEOs of major drug companies warning that information they provide to the committee could be leaked to the public by Democratic chair Elijah Cummings in an effort to tank their stock prices.

Or perhaps in an effort to inform the public on a subject they badly need to be informed about: why prescription drugs are so eye-wateringly expensive.

Cummings requested information from 12 drug companies such as Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson, and Novartis AG in January as part of a broad investigation into how the industry sets prescription drug prices.

In their letters, Reps. Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows — leaders of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus — imply that Cummings may be attempting to collect the information in order to bring down the industry’s stock prices.

Yeah, or maybe he’s doing it to help the lizard people team up with the illuminati to take over our precious bodily fluids. You just never know.

Democrats expressed bafflement at the letters. While politicians routinely spar over committee work, warning companies not to comply with an investigation is unconventional — perhaps even unprecedented, Democrats say.

Heh heh heh, “unconventional” – they’re such kidders. They mean contemptibly filthy and low.

Saudi Arabia responds to international criticism of its bullying of women by bullying more women’s rights advocates.

Saudi Arabia jailed another group of women’s rights advocates on Thursday.

The advocates and writers weren’t politically active, but they had opposed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s regime and expressed public support for reforming gendered laws, according to the Associated Press. The 12 people arrested — 11 men and one woman — reportedly have loose connections with a group of activists who were arrested in 2018 for campaigning to end the country’s ban on women driving and its male guardianship system.

Most of the activists were arrested in the country’s capital city, Riyadh, on Thursday, though one was taken by authorities in the city of Dammam. Among them are two US-Saudi dual citizens — Badr al-Ibrahim, a writer and physician, and Salah al-Haidar, whose mother is prominent women’s rights activist Aziza al-Yousef.

Officials also detained married writers Khadijah al-Harbi, who is pregnant, and Thumar al-Marzouqi, along with writers Mohammed al-Sadiq and Abdullah al-Dehailan, and women’s rights activist Fahad Abalkhail.

…

The Saudi government imprisoned the activists for being “traitors,” alleging that they conspired with international media and human rights groups, and spread “bad morale.” The government denies the activists were tortured or harassed, despite accusations of abuse.

Prince Jared’s buddies.

CNN is live updating on Barr’s conversation with Congress.

Attorney General William Barr just echoed one of President Trump’s recent talking points, highlighting what the two men view as Democratic hypocrisy when it comes to releasing the Mueller report.

That’s because some of the Democrats who want Mueller’s full report released actually spoke out against the full release of the Starr report in the late 1990s. Ken Starr’s investigation led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings.

“Many of the people right now who are calling for the release of this report were basically castigating Ken Starr and others for releasing the Starr report,” Barr said.

Like Dario Angulo, for example.

At his home on the misty slope of Costa Rica’s tallest mountain, Dario Angulo keeps a set of photographs from the years he tended the rolling fairways and clipped greens of a faraway American golf resort.

Angulo learned to drive backhoes and bulldozers, carving water hazards and tee boxes out of former horse pastures in Bedminster, N.J., where a famous New Yorker was building a world-class course. Angulo earned $8 an hour, a fraction of what a state-licensed heavy equipment operator would make, with no benefits or overtime pay. But he stayed seven years on the grounds crew, saving enough for a small piece of land and some cattle back home.

See this is why Trump and guys like Trump love people from points south who come up here to work for Trump and people like him: they cost a fraction of what state-licensed heavy equipment operators cost. He calls them animals but he wants them to work for him – and then go sharply away when he’s through with them.

It’s a common story in this small town.

Other former employees of President Trump’s company live nearby: men who once raked the sand traps and pushed mowers through thick heat on Trump’s prized golf property — the “Summer White House,” as aides have called it — where his daughter Ivanka got married and where he wants to build a family cemetery.

“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Angulo said. “This golf course was built by illegals.”

Of course Princess Ivanka got married in a place built by people working for her daddy for cut-rate wages. Of course she did.

The brightly painted homes that line the road in Santa Teresa de Cajon, many paid for by wages earned 4,000 miles away, are the fruits of a long-running pipeline of illegal workers to the president’s course, one that carried far more than a few unauthorized employees who slipped through the cracks.

Soon after Trump broke ground at Bedminster in 2002 with a golden shovel, this village emerged as a wellspring of low-paid labor for the private club, which charges tens of thousands of dollars to join. Over the years, dozens of workers from Costa Rica went north to fill jobs as groundskeepers, housekeepers and dishwashers at Bedminster, former employees said. The club hired others from El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala who spoke to The Post. Many ended up in the blue-collar borough of Bound Brook, N.J., piling into vans before dawn to head to the course each morning.

But he doesn’t want us to know that.

The company’s recent purge of unauthorized workers from at least five Trump properties contributes to mounting evidence that the president benefited for years from the work of illegal laborers he now vilifies.

What illegal laborers? Do you see any illegal laborers?

Oh gee will you look at that, a federal judge says Trump doesn’t have total absolute power after all.

A federal judge today halted the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy, which forces certain non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico during their court proceedings.

The plaintiffs — a group of asylum seekers and organizations represented by the American Civil Liberties Union — argued the policy violates U.S. asylum law, international treaty obligations and federal regulatory requirements.

But doesn’t Trump have the absolute right and power to ignore all that? No? Huh.

ACLU asserted in a February court filing that the policy — formally known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” — put migrants at risk of kidnapping, sexual assault, trafficking and murder in Mexico.

Seeborg, nominated to the district court in 2009 by former President Barack Obama, found the policy was not supported by federal immigration law and did not sufficiently safeguard the lives and freedom of migrants.

Well no, that was the point. Trump wants bad things to happen to them, so that they’ll go away…or else become temporary workers at one of his golf resorts, subject to deportation at any time. One of those.

Prosecutor in the house.

You seem confused, Mr. Mulvaney.

When the law says the IRS “shall” provide tax returns upon the request of the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, it doesn’t mean:

Unless the President fears it,

Tweets about it,

Or his lawyer complains about it.

Shall means shall. https://t.co/CoNsZthgE9

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) April 8, 2019

Trump just really really really wants to take children away from people who try to move to the US without his permission.

President Donald Trump has for months urged his administration to reinstate large-scale separation of migrant families crossing the border, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of meetings at the White House.

Trump’s outgoing Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, resisted — setting her at odds with the president.

According to two of the sources, Nielsen told Trump that federal court orders prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from reinstating the policy, and that he would be reversing his own executive order from June that ended family separations.

Federal court orders, pah! Why should Trump care about that? He’s the president, remember? He can do whatever he wants to. Presidents have absolute and total power, except when they were born in Kenya and are smarter than Trump.

Three U.S. officials said that Kevin McAleenan, the head of Customs and Border Patrol who is expected to take over as acting DHS secretary, has not ruled out family separation as an option.

The policy McAleenan would consider, according to the officials, is known as “binary choice” and would give migrant parents the option between being separated from their children or bringing their children with them into long-term detention.

If he does he’ll be violating both international law and US law, plus it’s disgusting. The nightmare deepens by the hour.

The @NewYorker on cats and dogs. pic.twitter.com/bnHsdumPZm

— Martin O'Neill (@martin_oneill) April 8, 2019

More firings from the White House:

United States Secret Service director Randolph “Tex” Alles is being removed from his position, multiple administration officials tell CNN.

President Donald Trump instructed his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to fire Alles. Alles remains in his position as of now but has been asked to leave.

The USSS director was told two weeks ago there would be a transition in leadership and he was asked to stay on until there was a replacement, according to a source close to the director.
Secret Service officials have been caught by surprise with the news and are only finding out through CNN, according to the source.

Like the day Trump fired Comey and the first Comey knew of it was a chyron on CNN.

The Secret Service director reports directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, who resigned on Sunday amid growing pressure from the President. The director oversees the Secret Service’s work on both protection and investigations.

“There is a near-systematic purge happening at the nation’s second-largest national security agency,” one senior administration official says.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services director Francis Cissna and Office of the General Counsel’s John Mitnick are expected to be gone soon, and the White House is eyeing others to be removed.

The President in recent weeks empowered Stephen Miller to lead the administration’s border policies “and he’s executing his plan” with what amounts to a wholesale decapitation o[f] the Department of Homeland Security leadership, the official says.

Now that’s what I call burying the lede. Trump has handed over control of national security to Stephen Miller of all people.

That’s frightening.

Be careful not to complain of noise if you’re in Indonesia:

The Supreme Court has upheld a blasphemy verdict against a Buddhist woman convicted for complaining about the volume of adzan (call to prayer).

In a ruling dated March 27 and posted on the court’s website on Monday, the panel of justices rejected the appeal by Meiliana, a women of Chinese descent and resident of Tanjung Balai, North Sumatra, and upheld her 1.5-year prison sentence.

A year and a half in prison for objecting to a loud “call to prayer.” Too bad for people who work the night shift or the swing shift in Indonesia; they just have to put up with being woken up a lot.

Meiliana’s case dates back to 2016 when she reportedly said an adzan was “too loud” and “hurt” her ears. She is the first person to be sentenced to prison for complaining about the volume of a mosque’s speakers.

Her alleged remarks were believed to have triggered the worst anti-Chinese riot in the country since 1998, with Muslims who claimed to have been offended by her words setting fire to several Buddhist temples.

It’s a good thing religion makes people nicer, because otherwise we might think it did the exact opposite.

Lucy Bannerman reports that five specialists have quit the Tavistock for reasons of conscience over the past three years.

The clinic used to get about 50 referrals a year, mostly boys, but now thousands of girls are turning up wanting to change their sex.

Until now the specialists struggling to keep up with caseloads have stayed silent, but alarm over the number of adolescents being prescribed body-altering drugs, has prompted five former clinicians to speak out for the first time.

All five have resigned from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in the past three years as a matter of conscience.

“This experimental treatment is being done not only on children, but very vulnerable children, who have experienced mental health difficulties, abuse, family trauma, but sometimes those [other factors] just get whitewashed,” one female clinician said. “If someone was suggesting plastic surgery or any other permanent change we’d be saying, hang on a minute.”

The Times (the London one):

As a self-proclaimed “leftie liberal”, Tracy Shaw, 44, a mother of three, had not taken much notice of the rise of transgender activism — but that all changed in the space of a few weeks last summer.

Her nine-year-old daughter brought home a notice from her gymnastics club in south Oxfordshire informing her that she would have to share changing rooms with trans children. Then a friend, who had to attend a rape crisis centre, was told that she had to be prepared to share details of her assault with self-indentifying women.

The final straw came when another friend’s teenage daughter, who has short hair and wears trousers, was approached by a teacher who asked if she wanted to join a support group for gender-questioning children.

So she set up a parents’ group with another woman, and they learned that the county’s schools were following guidelines created by trans activists.

Oxfordshire county council had issued a 50-page Trans Toolkit for Schools, subtitled “Gender is not just pink and blue”. The booklet had the support of 12 county, borough and metropolitan councils and was created with the involvement of a trans support group, Gendered Intelligence, and Allsorts Youth Project.

Andrews was particularly concerned by a section on breast binding, a controversial technique used by transgender men to create a flatter chest. The document urges teachers to be sensitive to the hygiene needs of pupils wearing binders on school trips. “It may be that pupils wash their binders every night at home and this will need to be considered on a residential trip,” it states.

Schools should not be treating binders as normal or encouraging their use.

The group got the council to agree to review the use of the guide.

Other groups of parents have been lobbying their local councils, which have also begun to make changes. Warwickshire county council has formally suspended use of the toolkit, and Sefton council, on Merseyside, which uses similar guidance, is reviewing its rules.

Parents spoke to The Sunday Times to share their stories, all insisting on anonymity. A mother in London said a teacher had concluded that her seven-year-old daughter was gender dysphoric as she was getting teased for having short hair and wearing boys’ clothes.

The teacher suggested the class read a book called 10,000 Dresses, in which the central character is a boy whose dreams of magical dresses help establish his true identity as a transgender girl.

A boy who likes dresses does not have a “true identity” as a transgender girl. This stuff is all such baby talk – it’s bizarre that so many people decided to believe it in such a mad rush.

The myriad ways women are treated differently from men, not in a good way, are so myriad they’re hard to exhaust. We keep learning of new ones. Jill Filipovic points out that young men have promise while young women are incompetent.

There are several youngish men jostling for the presidential slot, and maybe this is why.

But whether a youngish candidate is bright, brilliant and promising or inexperienced, off-putting and ruthlessly ambitious depends on whether the young thing in question is male or female.

“Promise” itself is gendered. Research consistently shows that in American workplaces, women tend to be promoted once their managers see them perform well; men are promoted if managers believe in their potential to do well. We’re running the same experiment in politics: Voters, donors and journalists are all excited by the great leadership potential of young men who leapfrog up the political ladder. They expect women to prove themselves before they move forward.

And so women don’t move forward as quickly. Women are more likely than men to enter politics later in life, having spent years shoring up the experience, accomplishments and recognition necessary to be considered credible contenders for higher office. Women start low and climb up, which means they may not climb as high. Women also tend to run for more collaborative legislative positions (school board, state legislature, Congress) rather than executive ones (mayor, governor, president). Men do the opposite, seeking executive roles, starting early and skipping ahead.

That’s interesting. I’ve just written a column for Free Inquiry arguing that we should value those collaborative positions more and not be so obsessed with the executive ones, because focusing on the One Top Dude gets us atrocities like gods and criminal presidents. (I’m not expecting the idea to catch on.)

Unfortunately for women, age poses an unsolvable problem: They are seen as too young and inexperienced right up until they are branded too old and tedious. Ms. Warren, for example, finds herself put in the same “old” category as Mr. Sanders and Joe Biden, even though both men are nearly a decade older than she is.

Men who are more or less the same age as Ms. Warren — Sherrod Brown (66), John Hickenlooper (67), Jay Inslee (68) — are not lumped in with the white-hairs. If women in their 40s are “in a hurry,” and women in their 50s are old news, and women in their 60s are just old, when, exactly, is a woman supposed to go to the White House?

Oh, we all know the answer to that one.