Review justifies firing of ex-LAPD officer Dorner

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? An internal review by the Los Angeles Police Department concluded that rogue ex-officer Christopher Dorner was justifiably fired, a lawyer who reviewed the findings told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Civil rights attorney Connie Rice said the lengthy examination found no basis for allegations of racism and bias that Dorner made in a manifesto vowing revenge on his former colleagues and their families.

Authorities said Dorner killed four people, including two law enforcement officers, during a weeklong rampage in February that involved a massive manhunt and ended with his apparent suicide in a mountain cabin following a gunbattle with police.

The findings, which are expected to be made public this month at a Los Angeles Police Commission meeting, concluded that Dorner had a history of embellishing stories, misperceiving slights and making bogus complaints against his fellow officers, Rice said.

He took more than twice as long as most officers to complete his training, was nearly incomprehensible during the hearing over his firing, and only filed a complaint against his training officer when he learned she gave him a bad performance review, Rice said.

The department said in a statement the review had not been finalized.

"Any comments or conclusions about the contents of the review are premature," it said. "The LAPD will announce the review once finalized."

Police Commission President Andrea Ordin said the report still needed to go to the inspector general for review and then to the Police Commission.

Chief Charlie Beck ordered the review as Dorner was on the run after being accused of killing the daughter of his former union lawyer and her fiance and releasing the manifesto saying he would get even for being unfairly fired because he was black.

Rice, a longtime department watchdog and frequent critic, was allowed to review the findings.

"The firing was justified and his allegations are completely unfounded," said Rice, who spent two weeks reviewing the findings. "This guy needed to go. And the question was, even if he needed to go, did the LAPD get rid of him in a way that was illegitimate? And the answer for me was no."

The roughly 40-page report relied on about 80 documents, including 900 pages of transcripts from the Board of Rights hearing that concluded Dorner lied when he claimed a training officer had brutally kicked a mentally ill man during an arrest. He was fired for making a false report and a Los Angeles Superior Court judge sided with the department during a 2010 appeal.

The internal LAPD review conducted by Gerry Chaleff, the department's special assistant for constitutional policing, also re-examined at least 10 complaints Dorner officially lodged with the department while he was an officer, Rice said.

In his manifesto, Dorner said the LAPD had tarnished his reputation, ruined the former Navy reserve's military career, and destroyed his life.

"He raised all that racism stuff in my mind because he knew he'd get a rise out of them," Rice said. "He did everything he could to hurt the department."

The department is also conducting a review of the overall discipline system and will also review the cases of a handful of former officers who have since formally requested reviews of their firings.

Rice said she spoke with many black officers in the department who said that though the department still had issues with racism, it had changed a great deal over the past decades.

"Just because racism didn't play a leading role in what happened to Dorner doesn't mean the LAPD is now an inter-racial nirvana," Rice said. "It does still have serious problems like every department does and we shouldn't forget that."

___

Follow Tami Abdollah at http://www.twitter.com/latams

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/review-firing-ex-lapd-officer-dorner-justified-221400939.html

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Home prices up 10.8% in Colorado - Inside Real Estate News

Highlights:

• Colorado ranked No. 11 by CoreLogic.
• Colorado showed 10.8% jump in April.
• Distressed properties appreciating more than market-rate homes.

Single-family home values in Colorado rose 10.8 percent on a year-over-year basis in April, according to a report released today by CoreLogic.

Ten states ranked higher than Colorado, according to the report by the Irvine, Calif.-based real estate data company, which tracked homes including and excluding distressed properties.

When distressed properties were excluded, Colorado showed a 10.5 percent increase. A recent March report by Case-Shiller shows a 9.8 percent year-over-year increase.

Overall, Colorado trailed the national percentage gain of 12.1 percent and 11.9 percent, respectively, for sales including and excluding distressed properties.

Nevada led the nation, with a 24.6 percent year-over-gain when distressed properties were included and a 22.6 percent increase excluding distressed properties.

?What this says, again, is that the state of Colorado, overall, is showing a good response to the housing market,? said Gary Bauer, an independent real estate broker, who releases his own analysis of Metrolist data for the Denver area on a monthly basis.

?We are showing double-digit appreciation, and overall, this shows how positive our housing market is in the state,? Bauer said.

However, he said he is glad that Denver is not ranked at the very top of the states.

?At this point of time, we don?t want to be ranked No. 1, 2 or 3,? Bauer said. ?That is just too high. It is is not good for the market to see home prices rise so much, so quickly. It hurts affordability.?? During the Great Recession, distressed properties dragged down the overall market, but now are seeing bigger percentage gains than non-distressed properties.

?Distressed properties, by their very nature are more volatile,? according to a CoreLogic spokesman.

?They fell further and lagged in recent gains,? he continued. ?Now as that the market is rebounding and people are looking for bargains, distressed properties have had more appeal and their gains have outpaced non-distressed.? Remember, they fell further, so a bounce back will be more pronounced.?

The overall 12.1 percent gain was ?impressive? and a ?surprise to the upside,? according to Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic.

?Increasing demand for new and existing homes, coupled with low inventory, has created a virtuous cycle for price gains, most clearly seen in the Western states with year-over-year gains of 20 percent or more,? Fleming said.

?The pace of the housing market recovery quickened in April as home prices rose across the U.S.,? said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic.

?For the second consecutive month, all 50 states registered year-over-year home price gains excluding sales of distressed homes,? Nallathambi said. ?We expect this trend to continue, bolstered by tight supplies and pent up buyer demand.?

State	1-year change, single-family, including distressed homes	1-year change, single-family, excluding distressed homes.
National	12.1%	11.9%
Nevada	24.6%	22.6%
California	19.4%	18.3%
Arizona	17.3%	15.3%
Hawaii	17.0%	13.3%
Oregon	15.5%	13.6%
Georgia	14.5%	11.8%
Idaho	13.2%	16.4%
Washington	13.2%	13.9%
Utah	12.0%	12.9%
Wyoming	11.9%	12.1%
COLORADO	10.8%	10.5%

Source: CoreLogic

Have a story idea or real estate tip? Contact John Rebchook at? JRCHOOK@gmail.com. InsideRealEstateNews.com is sponsored by Universal Lending, Land Title Guarantee and 8z Real Estate. To read more articles by John Rebchook, subscribe to the Colorado Real Estate Journal.

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Source: http://insiderealestatenews.com/2013/06/home-prices-up-10-8-in-colorado/

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Cosmic CSI team focuses on burned-out stars

June 4, 2013 ? Like a CSI unit, a team of astronomers at observatories worldwide has been digging around in the innards of dead stars, collecting evidence on how they died. One of the dead stars actually ate part of its neighbor; another has a history of other astronomical hijinks.

The Whole Earth Telescope (WET), a worldwide network of observatories with its command center at the University of Delaware, periodically focuses on stars of scientific interest in the galaxy's stellar graveyard.

Working together like a relay team, observers in 17 countries, from the U.S. to China, Brazil to Ukraine, have been focusing their lenses on these target stars whenever they appear in their nighttime sky, effectively operating as a single telescope.

With a marathon two-month-plus observing campaign set to finish up on June 10 -- the longest in WET's history -- the collaboration expects to yield new insights into the astrophysics of white dwarfs, which are dense stars that have burned up their nuclear fuel and are now cooling.

"White dwarfs are so dense that one tablespoon of their matter would weigh as much as five elephants," says Judi Provencal, director of the Delaware Asteroseismic Research Center at the University of Delaware. Provencal operates the WET command center at Mount Cuba Astronomical Observatory in Greenville, Del.

The WET team hopes to shed light on the inner workings of these stars, which naturally pulsate, or vibrate.

The team's primary target, the extremely low-mass white dwarf known as WDJ1518, was once part of a two-star or binary system, before eating its companion -- or at least part of it. Discovered only about a year ago by doctoral student J.J. Hermes at the University of Texas at Austin, WDJ1518 is now in a 14-hour orbit around something that is probably another white dwarf or a brown dwarf, according to Provencal. While a white dwarf is massive, a brown dwarf is so light that it can't sustain the nuclear fusion that fuels other stars.

WET's second target star, GD358, waxes and wanes in brightness as the star pulsates, just as other white dwarfs do.

"If you tried to stand on the surface of a white dwarf, you would be squished because it is so dense," Provencal explains. "So, since it would take a large amount of energy to actually expand and contract, white dwarfs slosh from side to side, like an energy wave traveling along the surface."

Astronomers record changes in a white dwarf's luminosity in graphs of light intensity over time called light curves. These graphs typically show regularly repeating sinusoidal waves like a patient's heartbeat or the sound of a ringing bell.

Nearly 20 years ago, in August 1996, GD358 committed what astronomers refer to as a "whoopsie," a period of extreme oscillations that, plotted on a light curve, mimics the track of a monster rollercoaster gone wild.

After two days of giant peaks and dips, the star stopped pulsating for a month, according to Provencal, who began studying it when she was in graduate school.

"It quivered like a bowl of Jell-O for a month," she says. "'Why did it do that, we wondered -- did an asteroid hit it?"

When the WET campaign officially concludes in mid-June, nearly 200 gigabytes of images will have been gathered. Over the next several months, the photos will be stitched together digitally and analyzed to help uncover what's really going on inside these dead stars as they continue to cool down, a mystery that astronomers would like to solve.

"This Whole Earth Telescope run has produced the best investigation of extremely low mass white dwarfs, a newly discovered class of objects," Provencal says. "We have also gathered the best light curve of GD358 ever obtained, and we have seen the star alter its pulsations as we watched. All of this will yield new insights into the structure of white dwarfs and help us understand the future of our own sun, which is destined to become a white dwarf in about 4 billion years."

Such research achievements underscore how the Whole Earth Telescope can help fill a void in astronomy, according to Provencal.

While sophisticated instruments such as the Kepler spacecraft can take detailed images of cosmic phenomena on its hunt for habitable planets, the Whole Earth Telescope offers scientists another avenue for exploration right here from Earth.

"Kepler is looking at one little bit of sky near the constellation Cygnus, so if you want to look somewhere else, you're stuck," she explains. "Kepler covers 0.1 percent of the sky, and we've got the rest of it."

And that "we" includes several amateur astronomers in Texas and Delaware, who are contributing to the WET observing run for the first time.

"Anyone with a telescope and a camera can monitor the brightness of stars right from their backyard," she says.

Participating observatories

These observatories are participating in the current Whole Earth Telescope observing campaign:

Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory -- South Korea Canakkale Astrophysics Observatory -- Turkey Kitt Peak National Observatory -- Arizona, U.S. Krakow Observatory -- Poland Laboratorio Nacional de Astrofisica (LNA) -- Brazil Lulin Observatory -- Taipei, Taiwan McDonald Observatory -- Texas, U.S. Paul and Jane Meyer Observatory -- Texas, U.S. Moletai Observatory -- Lithuania Mount Cuba Astronomical Observatory -- Delaware, U.S. Mt. John Observatory -- New Zealand Mt. Suhora Observatory -- Poland National Astronomical Observatory -- Nanjing, China Peak Terskol Observatory -- Ukraine, Russia PROMPT (Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes), LCOGT (Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope network) -- Australia, South Africa, Chile, U.S. San Pedro Martir Observatory -- Mexico South African Astronomical Observatory -- South Africa Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope -- Chile Thai National Observatory -- Thailand Tien Shan Observatory -- Kazakhstan Tubitak Observatory -- Turkey Tuebingen Observatory -- Germany

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/uoMD9KiXHvg/130604153334.htm

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Who's Kanye West Sampling In Retro Yeezus Preview?

MTV News digs deep into Yeezy's snippet to find out what his June 18 album will be like.
By James Montgomery

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1708420/kanye-west-yeezus-sample-ponderosa-twins.jhtml

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What the New WWDC App Tell Us About iOS 7

Apple's new WWDC app, meant to guide developers through next week's mega-conference, is up in the App Store today. If you look closely, you can see bits of iOS 7 in it. While it's exceedingly easy to overvalue just how much this app means?Apple surely doesn't want to tip its hand before the event?there are still some obvious visual clues as to what awaits us in iOS as a whole. Let's take a look.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/XWSL9IHZdOc/what-the-new-wwdc-app-tell-us-about-ios-7-511115621

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'Fast & Furious' rolls over Will Smith's 'After Earth'

By Lisa Richwine and Andrea Burzynski

(Reuters) - Car chase sequel "Fast & Furious 6" kept racing at U.S. and Canadian box offices, outpacing rival movies for a second straight weekend and finishing far in front of Will Smith's new sci-fi film "After Earth."

"Fast & Furious" racked up $34.5 million from Friday through Sunday, according to studio estimates. The sixth installment in the billion-dollar franchise takes the action to London, where stars Vin Diesel and Dwyane Johnson lead their crew on a mission to take down an international ring of mercenary drivers.

Comedy heist caper "Now You See Me" yielded a stronger-than-expected $28.1 million in its debut at U.S. and Canadian theaters, finishing second.

The post-apocalyptic "After Earth," starring Smith and his teenage son, Jaden Smith, placed third with $27 million. Analysts had expected a $35-million to $40-million opening.

"Fast & Furious" maintained its speed after a roaring debut over Memorial Day weekend. Worldwide ticket sales reached $480.6 million through Sunday, according to Universal Pictures, the Comcast Corp unit that released the movie.

Distributor Universal said that "Fast 6" has outearned international lifetime totals for each of the first four films in the franchise, and was on track to surpass the fifth.

Critically panned "After Earth" settled for a third-place debut.

The $130-million production takes place 1,000 years after an apocalypse forced humans to abandon Earth. A boy and his father become stranded on the planet after a crash landing and look for help.

Critics assailed "After Earth," with just 12 percent recommending the film on Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates movie reviews.

Distributor Sony Pictures, a unit of Japan's Sony Corp, said it expects the film to do well internationally.

"This has always been a worldwide play," said Rory Bruer, Sony Pictures' president of worldwide distribution. "We would have liked the movie to have done better domestically and I think people will be pretty happy about it when they see the international rollout."

Bruer said the studio expects well over half of the film's gross to come from international sales. "After Earth" will open in 60 countries next week, and several more throughout June.

"Now You See Me" beat projections for weekend sales of up to $20 million. The film stars Jesse Eisenberg in the story of street magicians who stage large-scale shows during which they rob banks and distribute money to the audience.

It cost $75 million to produce, according to the website Box Office Mojo.

Tied for fourth were the sci-fi sequel "Star Trek Into Darkness," and animated family film "Epic," each of which took in $16.4 million in domestic sales.

"The Hangover Part III" took in $15.9 million to capture fifth place.

"Epic" was distributed by 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp. "Star Trek Into Darkness" was released by Viacom Inc's Paramount Pictures. "Now You See Me" was distributed by Summit Entertainment, a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment. "The Hangover Part III" was distributed by Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc.

(Additional reporting by Ronald Grover,; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Xavier Briand)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fast-furious-rolls-over-smiths-earth-154838442.html

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Get Over It Already! Bouncing Back from Your Past | World of ...

You?re upset about something that happened to you. It?s not easy for you to get beyond it. It could have happened today or decades ago. It could be what others consider a big thing (a death) or a small thing (a slight). No matter. What happened to you still triggers emotional pain.

Others are sympathetic at first, offering empathy and support. But it?s not long in our fast-paced society until people begin to lose patience with you. ?Get over it already!? is their new message.

Not a bad idea, you think. But how do you do this? If you could get over it already, wouldn?t you have done it?

You?re right. Lots of people don?t know how to create closure after a hurtful blow. They don?t know how to move on. They don?t know how to let go. They don?t know how to bounce back from a psychic injury.

If this describes you, see if these guidelines might be helpful:

1. Wounds take time to heal. So, be gentle with yourself.If you find yourself being judgmental for what you did or didn?t do, take a deep breath. Let go of your judgments. Let yourself be.
2. You may want nothing more than to be left alone with your hurt and anger. Do that. But not for too long. Take a nap. But do not spend the day in bed.
3. Summon up the courage to start the day anew.Get out of bed. Let go of the anger. Be open to what a new day might bring.
4. Talk to someone who understands, not just what happened, but what the event means to you. If someone starts ?Yes, Butting? your experience, that?s not the right person.
5. Life often is a harsh teacher. Be aware of what you?ve learnedfrom the hurtful experience ? about yourself, about the other person, and about life itself.
6. If what you learned seems to be all negative (you can?t trust anyone, life stinks), think outside the box to find something positive. It may take time to realize what this might be.
7. Focus on what?s important to you now.What do you truly appreciate now? Despite the loss, despite the hurt, despite the disappointment, what?s still good about life?
8. Reflect on what you can do now. You can?t undo the past. But possibly, you can make this very next day a better day for you.

Creating closure doesn?t mean repressing your feelings. It doesn?t mean forgetting about what happened. It simply means that you put less emphasis on the past in order to create a future. You let today in. And tomorrow in. And next week in. And next year in. Then one day, you recognize that you have indeed ?gotten over it.?

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Dr. Sapadin is a psychologist, author and success coach who takes joy in helping people reach their potential, enhance their relationships and overcome self-defeating patterns of behavior. To subscribe to her free E-newsletter, go to www.PsychWisdom.com. To learn about her newest publication, How to Beat Procrastination in the Digital Age, go to www.SixStylesofProcrastination.com. You may contact her at DrSapadin [at] aol.com

Like this author?
Catch up on other posts by Linda Sapadin, Ph.D (or subscribe to their feed).

????Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 1 Jun 2013
????Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.

APA Reference
Sapadin, L. (2013). Get Over It Already! Bouncing Back from Your Past. Psych Central. Retrieved on June 3, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/06/03/get-over-it-already/

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Source: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/06/03/get-over-it-already/

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