Richard Osborn-Brooks, the 78-year-old London man we told you about last week who was being held on suspicion of murder over the death of an alleged intruder he stabbed to death in his own home, has been cleared by the Metropolitan Police:
Detective Chief Inspector Simon Harding, of the Met’s Homicide and Major Crime Command, said: “This is a tragic case for all of those involved. As expected with any incident where someone has lost their life, my officers carried out a thorough investigation into the circumstances of the death.
“We have approached the CPS for early investigative advice, as required under the guidance. We have received and considered that advice, and, at present – on the evidence available – we will not seek a charging decision. Therefore, no further action will be taken against the man.
Apparently, though the old man and his wife are not out of the woods. The deceased came from a family of criminals who are thought likely to come after them seeking revenge. This being Britain, there is no way Mr. and Mrs. Osborn-Brooks can arm themselves for self defense.
A letter newly released from the FBI’s archives may prove that DB Cooper – the 1971 hijacker last seen leaping out of a plane with a fortune in cash – survived his apparent death.
The letter, which was sent 17 days after the hijacking appears to contain information that was not released into the public domain until 13 years later.
If that’s the case it might reveal not only that Cooper lived to tell the tale of his extraordinary heist, but that the FBI covered it up to hide their embarrassment at his escape.
VDare is Nativist, which seems ironic to me considering the fact that its run by a Limey immigrant, and it very obviously relishes indulging in the sort of divisive rhetoric characteristic of less savory elements of the Alt-Right. But… we are living in a time when only the likes of John Derbyshire has guts enough to speak the obvious truth out loud.
Last night Tucker Carlson did a segment on looting in the flooded city of Houston; or rather, on the outraged reaction to ABC journalist Tom Llamas, who had calmly and factually reported the looting.
“What about our society has changed so much that noting that you’re watching [the looting] is somehow a thoughtcrime?†asked Carlson. …
The segment was decorated with video clips showing the actual looting. So far as I could tell, the looters were all black.
Yet this did not come up. In a 4m37s segment, the word “black†did not occur. Nor did any of the common euphemisms for “black†or “blacks.â€
Why not? Because, as the late Larry Auster told us, blacks are sacred objects in our state religion. Criticism of them is received as a species of blasphemy.
As I watched these two talking heads blathering on about “nihilism†and “the destruction of objective values,†I kept hearing, in my mind’s ear, the voice of my old South African colleague cutting through the baloney: “It’s the blecks, dear fellow, it’s the blecks.†That was, in fact, the answer to all the questions they were chewing over so earnestly.
It’s a bit depressing to see that even Tucker Carlson, one of the more fearless of our heterodox commentators, believes he has to cleave to convention on this. …
So here’s my question: When a person inside the state religion observes the orthodoxies like this, is he at all aware how deeply weird it looks to us outside?
If you cannot bring yourself to mention, perhaps even to think, obvious true facts, then the world you are living in is to some degree a make-believe world, and you yourself are, to that same degree, slightly nuts.
A Victorian diary found in a suburb of Liverpool may have established the identity of history’s most infamous serial killer. Telegraph:
[T]he true identity of Jack the Ripper may have finally been confirmed, after researchers said they had proven the authenticity of a much disputed Victorian diary.
Twenty five years ago ‘Ripperologists’ around the world were stunned by the discovery of a previously unknown memoir, claiming to have been written by Liverpool cotton merchant, James Maybrick.
In the 9,000 word volume, Maybrick confessed to the brutal murders of five women in the East End of London, as well as one prostitute in Manchester.
He signed off the diary: “I give my name that all know of me, so history do tell, what love can do to a gentleman born. Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper.”
CHICAGO—Promising that every effort would be made to limit the impact on residents’ day-to-day lives, Chicago officials announced Wednesday that a fleet of plows was working around the clock to clear more than 18 inches of fresh bullet casings that had blanketed the metropolitan area overnight.
Sources at the city’s Department of Streets and Sanitation confirmed that over 250 ammunition-removal vehicles had been deployed to deal with the knee-deep layer of spent cartridges, which have been steadily accumulating on Chicago’s streets, alleys, and pedestrian walkways since the previous evening.
“Our crews have been out there all night trying to make our roadways passable, but given how quickly the handgun and semi-automatic shells have piled up, it’s going to take some time,†DSS commissioner Charles L. Williams told reporters, thanking the public for its patience while crews made their way across the stricken municipality. “We’re making good headway, but as you can imagine, it’s not an easy job, especially with casings continuing to fall throughout the city.â€
“So unless you have an emergency, we’re urging all citizens to stay put for the time being,†he added. “Right now, it’s just not safe to be out in such treacherous conditions.â€
Williams stated that as casing levels surpassed 12 inches, scores of extra workers from outside the city were called in to help keep pace with the buildup. In addition, numerous dump truck crews have reportedly been tasked with carting off entire trailers full of cartridges from the hardest-hit areas and depositing them in nearby landfills before circling back to pick up more.
Six men were killed and at least 35 other people were wounded in shootings across Chicago between Friday night and Monday morning.
The most recent deaths were the latest of 364 people fatally shot in the city this year, according to data maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times. In all, more than 2,075 people have been shot since the start of the year.
Chateau Heartiste, one of those unabashedly politically incorrect Alt-Right blogs, has the story of a car jacking in Baltimore.
In March of this year, I was attacked by a shining example of Diversity! (Inc.) in Baltimore, Maryland. I had returned to my car after having a few drinks with friends in a recently gentrified artsy fartsy part of town– don’t ever let that fool you in Baltimore or any other major city with a significant black population where recently converted ghettos may have been sold to productive human beings for fire-sale real estate prices. There is no part of this city where a “good†neighborhood is less than 500 to 1000 meters from a slice of Mogadishu. Predators learn the travel patterns of its prey. I see it every day when I drive to work through Liberty Heights and other squalid hells. Since the attack I moved to Annapolis, the last big town in Maryland not connected to the others by way of subsidized transportation in the form of the Light Rail network, Amtrack-MARC lines, or regular bus shipments of the third world. To live in Annapolis largely means to work elsewhere, and to work elsewhere means to have the capacity to own, register, inspect, and insure a private motor vehicle for which you are responsible for maintaining. The automobile may be our salvation if we let the cattle cars crumble, as at least then we can largely immobilize the third world into their respective islands whilst we build walls around them with the machine gun sectors pointed in.
More on the Great British Book Heist that took place last January in Daily Beast:
Late in the night on Jan. 29, three still-unknown thieves drilled through the skylight of a building near Heathrow Airport and rappelled 40 feet to the floor, bypassing the security alarms.
They went straight to six specific crates that contained three dealers’ worth of books that were en route to the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Oakland.
Over the course of several hours, they unloaded the books they wanted into duffel bags, belayed their loot to the roof, and took off in a waiting van. The haul totaled nearly $2.5 million.
“Behind these books there is a lot of work because we have to search to try to find out where the books are—auction houses, collectors, colleagues—and there’s big research behind these books,†Alessandro Meda Riquier, one of the affected dealers, tells Sky News. “They are not only taking money away from me but also a big part of my job.â€
Riquier was the owner of several of the most noteworthy tomes that were taken in the heist. The most expensive book was a second edition of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres from 1566 in which the astronomer introduced his revolutionary theory that the sun—not the Earth—is the center of the universe.
That book alone is worth over $250,000. Among the rest of the trove are several rare editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy and a smattering of Galileos, Newtons, and da Vincis, among other titles from the luminaries of the early sciences.
All in all, it is the quantity of books stolen rather than the individual titles that make this heist so significant.
“The books were there for only a short time in that warehouse, and this is a very exotic commodity so this is not something that the average person thinks that they can sell,†Jeremy Norman, a rare book dealer with a specialty in the early sciences, tells The Daily Beast. “I think it’s a real mystery. You really wonder how they knew the stuff was there, and the timing of it, and how they were shipped off, and what the real motivation was.â€
Several theories have been offered as to why the thieves went after this quarry. One suggests that this may have been a “made to order†theft, one in which a buyer specifically commissioned the thieves to take these titles.
Similar to fine art, stolen antique books are very difficult to sell on the legitimate market—and thereby net the title’s full value. When a rare book crime becomes known, organizations like the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) quickly take action to alert their members to the volumes that were stolen so dealers can be on the lookout for anyone trying to offload a tainted treasure.
The Guardian reports on a highly unusual case of burglary.
Antiquarian books worth more than £2m have been stolen by a gang who avoided a security system by abseiling into a west London warehouse.
The three thieves made off with more than 160 publications after raiding the storage facility near Heathrow in what has been labelled a Mission: Impossible-style break-in.
The gang are reported to have climbed on to the building’s roof and bored holes through the reinforced glass-fibre skylights before rappelling down 40ft of rope while avoiding motion-sensor alarms.
Scotland Yard confirmed that “a number of valuable booksâ€, many from the 15th and 16th centuries, were stolen during the burglary in Feltham between 29 and 30 January.
According to the Mail on Sunday, one dealer lost £680,000 worth of material. Experts said the most valuable item in the stolen haul was a 1566 copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, worth about £215,000.
Among the other books stolen were early works by Galileo, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci and a 1569 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Alessandro Meda Riquier, a rare book dealer, said a number of his volumes had been taken. He told Sky News: “I’m very upset because this is not something you can buy everywhere. Behind these books there is a lot of work because we have to search to try to find out where the books are – auction houses, collectors, colleagues – and there’s big research behind these books.â€
He added: “They are not only taking money away from me but also a big part of my job.â€
Brian Lake, of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, said: “Nothing like this has hit the rare books trade before.†Authorities have not yet ascertained what will become of the books but it is thought that the most likely scenario is that they were stolen to order.
Black people are always shooting one another in Chicago, thousands of times a year in their own neighborhoods. The numbers get into the papers and the level of violence is mentioned on the news.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the creation last December 1st of a Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, which predictably issued a blistering report finding that the cats were hostile toward rats and mice and prone to treat them roughly.
So, the Chicago Police, long noted for their toughness, have obviously been obliged to take a step back and avoid provoking complaints from the urban underclass population.
Whoever could have imagined that the next thing we read in the papers would be the shooting death of middle-aged white Chicagoan at what would previously have been considered a location totally safe from street crime in the very heart of downtown Chicago?
Jeffrey Carter, a blogger and upper middle-class resident of downtown Chicago, was naturally shocked and alarmed.
Yesterday, we drove back from Minnesota. As I pulled down Wabash an unmarked police car raced down the street in front of me. A policeman got out, left the door to his car open, and drew his gun. He started running.
We wheeled our way into our garage. There were police cars all over Michigan Avenue. That’s where the shooting was.
This looks to be a random act of violence, not a gang crime or terrorism. No law in the world would have stopped it.
My neighborhood has the usual city crime. It has a lot of it-but it’s crimes of opportunity. Shoplifting. Stealing personal items from people. Small time robbery. Never shootings. There are bums on every street corner panhandling and many of them have gotten very belligerent. I saw that they are having similar problems in New York City. I have seen the same people panhandling in the same spots for years and years and years. …
The police force in Chicago is overtaxed. They are under assault from independent groups, and from politicians. Certainly, there are some bad apples and they can be taken care of. But, it feels like it’s a part of a much broader organized top down movement. Many of the arrests in Charlotte, NC were not local people. They were imported from out of state. No doubt, it’s because North Carolina is a state in political play. I noticed there were no protests in Oklahoma.
The shootings that go on in other neighborhoods are part of a broader gang war. If the US would change drug policy, the violence would decrease. Milton Friedman was right about the War on Drugs. There is only so much a city government can do to stop that kind of violence, although very liberal gun laws might help. Changing educational policy to allow for school choice would help. Lowering minimum wage and mandatory union laws so people could have better opportunities to find work would help.
Politicians say they want to do something-but their solutions are always the same. More laws, more regulations, higher taxes. At the same time, the gang leaders help them get out the vote, so there is little incentive to change when politicians are just interested in power and not helping the electorate.
If you lose the lakefront and the Loop, you will lose Chicago. My wife and I have always said, upper middle class and wealthy people will put up with a lot to live in a city. They’ll pay taxes to a point and absorb the increased cost, to a point. It is convenient and all the things that come with city living are great. But, as soon as they don’t feel secure, they are out.
We haven’t reached that tipping point, but that’s the way momentum is going right now.
The shooting victim, Peter Fabbri age 54, died on Sunday. (Chicago Tribune)
Chicago is a one-party city, and its democrat rulers are dependent on votes from minorities. If those pols continue to represent preferentially that particular constituency and to address its grievances, Chicago police will continue to be handcuffed, crime will increase dramatically and violent crime will expand into good neighborhoods. The inevitable consequence will be white flight, the collapse of commerce and real estate values, and the transformation of Chicago into Detroit.
