90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, November 6, 2022

Brutal Murders, Rotting Corpses, Broken Elevators: Inside Raphael Warnock’s Secret Low-Income Apartment Building, Vol. 2.

Emergency services have been called to MLK Village in Atlanta hundreds of times since 2020

A maintenance man charged with brutally murdering a tenant. A sex offender who slept in the hallways. A dead body left in an apartment for days, found covered in flies.

These are just a few disturbing tales of the living conditions in apartments owned by Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D., Ga.) church, gathered from interviews with residents and hundreds of pages of Atlanta Police Department, Fire Department, and court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Atlanta police and firefighters have been called to Columbia Tower and the Columbia Senior Residences at MLK Village in Atlanta hundreds of times since 2020, the records show. Responding officers have been met with corpses and people trapped in elevators, as well as fights, burglaries, and car thefts. Both buildings are owned by the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock serves as senior pastor.

The Free Beacon also learned that Columbia Tower management hired a convicted murderer now charged with killing a female tenant who lived with him at Columbia Senior Residences, which is just across the street from the apartment building.

"They hired a guy who killed his girlfriend. He was the maintenance guy who was living in the senior building and he had a record already," a resident told the Free Beacon in October. "Why would you hire a person like that who has keys to the building? I understand second chances, but this person already had a background in murdering someone, and you give him keys to our apartment?"

The records could pose problems for Warnock, who is seeking to defeat Republican challenger Herschel Walker amid rising crime. Crime is one of Atlanta voters' main concerns heading into next week's midterm elections, polls show. Homicides have increased in Atlanta by at least 60 percent since 2019, according to 11Alive News, citing Atlanta Police Department crime data.

Warnock has advocated for softer crime policies, including ending cash bail. He has criticized the American prison system as a "scandal on the soul of America," and called to end "mass incarceration." Warnock has also championed safe housing during his time in the Senate, saying earlier this year that "housing is dignity."

But records tell another story. Police have been called to Columbia Tower and the Columbia Senior Residences over 150 times since January, in response to allegations of larceny, fighting, and criminal trespassing. The Fire Department has been called to Columbia Tower 153 times since January 2020, sometimes to rescue people trapped or stranded due to broken elevators.

Firefighters also reported making gruesome discoveries at the apartment building.

"The person was stiff as a board and his jaw was locked," firefighters reported in April 2020 upon conducting a welfare check on a resident who was missing for three days. "Engine 10 crew checked for a pulse and there was no pulse. The person appears to have been dead for a couple of days because there were a lot of flys [sic] around the person. This was an elderly male."

Firefighters discovered another dead body at the apartment complex in January 2021. "E10 investigated and checked for a pulse, no pulse was found," an incident report states.

In August, a man reported that his car was stolen from the back parking lot. In July, Atlanta police detained a man who "continues to trespass on the property by sleeping in the hallway of the building on the third floor," according to a police report. The man, a sex offender with a history of violence and an outstanding warrant, had been subject to a no-trespassing court order by Columbia Residential months earlier, but continued to enter the building, an employee told police.

In the spring of 2020, Columbia Residential hired a new maintenance man named Anthony Bernard Stokes, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison two years earlier after serving decades for a 1992 homicide. Fulton County prosecutors allege that just months after he started the job, Stokes killed his 56-year-old girlfriend, Sean Macklin, in the apartment they shared at Columbia Senior Residences.

Stokes had a key to every room in Columbia Tower when he worked at...

US-funded upgrade of Tindal airbase in Northern Territory will allow it to house up to six B-52s, as minister says Australia must remain ‘vigilant’

An expanded Royal Australian Air Force base in the Northern Territory will have space for up to six American nuclear-capable B-52 aircraft as part of a US-funded project that is likely to fuel tensions with China.

Officials in Canberra confirmed that the US-funded aircraft parking apron at RAAF Base Tindal, 320km south-east of Darwin, would be capable of accommodating up to six B-52 aircraft, but said it could also house other aircraft types.

They said the project was currently in the design phase, and played down the significance of the development, saying US bomber aircraft had been visiting Australia since the early 1980s and conducting training in Australia since 2005.

But the detailed plans – first reported by the ABC on Monday – suggest the new Labor government has locked in plans initiated under the former Coalition government to expand visits to Australia by US aircraft.

The B-52 is a long-range, heavy bomber that can carry out ocean surveillance and anti-ship operations and “can carry nuclear or precision guided conventional ordnance”, according to a US government summary.

Four Corners reported the US Department of Defence had budgeted $US14.4m ($A22.5m) for squadron operations and maintenance facilities at Tindal.

It cited US documents as saying: “The [squadron operations] facility is required to support strategic operations and to run multiple 15-day training exercises during the Northern Territory dry season for deployed B-52 squadrons.”

The minister for defence personnel, Matt Keogh, said Australia must remain “vigilant” amid regional tensions, but he did not think the B-52 rotation plans would inflame tensions with China.

“I don’t think so at all,” he told reporters in Hobart.

“I think what’s really important here is that the more we are able to build interoperability with the Americans, growing on that very strong alliance.”

The Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, told reporters at a regular briefing that China “urges the parties concerned to abandon the outdated Cold War and zero-sum mentality and narrow minded geopolitical thinking, and to do something conducive to regional peace and stability and enhancing mutual trust between the countries.”

He said defence and security cooperation between countries should “not target any third parties or harm the interests of third parties.”

The US ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, avoided commenting directly on the B-52 plans on Monday, but said the US was determined to support “peace and stability throughout this region” through diplomacy, dialogue and deterrence.

In an interview with ABC News Breakfast, Kennedy said the Indo-Pacific was facing “increasing tensions” and the US would “work with our partners and allies to...

Visage à trois #576

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #752

Corruption: Beijing Nancy: Pelosi Shifted Her China Stance as Her Family Scored Beijing Deals

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi softened her previous criticisms of China’s communist regime as her husband and son scored big business deals in China, Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer’s new book reveals.

The bombshell revelations about Pelosi in Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win also come as the Democrat stalwart is under fire for stock trading returns made by her and her husband that regularly outperform the market. Now, it appears as though her family’s business opportunities in China have influenced her policy views on America’s chief adversary, something sure to fuel the fire to rein in corruption in Congress.

Pelosi’s family, Schweizer reveals, has had millions of dollars on the line when it comes to China, and the Speaker seems to have altered her positions on China’s communist regime from a policy perspective as these investments grew and took shape.

Pelosi began her career as tough on China and still occasionally rips the Chinese Communist Party for human rights abuses.

“The longtime member of Congress and Speaker of the House was, early in her career, a particularly harsh critic of China’s human rights practices,” Schweizer writes. “She continues to be vocal about some issues, but her positions have softened as her family has sought and received lucrative commercial opportunities in mainland China.”

In the early 1990s, Schweizer recounts how she even pulled off a protest in Tiananmen Square that infuriated Chinese officials:

In 1991, as a junior member of Congress, Pelosi found herself in Tiananmen Square. She was part of a congressional delegation visiting Beijing barely two years after the horrific events had un- folded. Pelosi had been in meetings with Chinese officials, but with a couple of colleagues, she covertly carried a banner into the middle of the square and unfurled it in front of a small crowd and the media. “To those who died for Democracy in China,” it read. The Chinese police were furious. They pushed through the crowd to seize the banner. “I started running,” Pelosi recalled. “And my colleagues, some of them, got a little roughed up. The press got treated worse because they had cameras, and they were detained.” The Foreign Ministry denounced the event as a “premeditated farce.

This move was not an isolated incident; Pelosi actually was tough on China for years.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) with Rep. Ben Jones (D-GA), left, and Rep. John Miller (R-WA), right, hold a banner in Tiananmen Square on September 4, 1991, to honor the pro-democracy protesters slain by China’s communist regime in the 1989 massacre. (AP Photo)

Schweizer also recounts how Pelosi fought against giving China most-favored-nation trade status and against allowing China entry into the World Trade Organization. He also noted that in 2005, Pelosi spoke on the House floor in support of an amendment to block the Chinese National Overseas Oil Company (CNOOC), a Chinese government-backed entity, from purchasing Unocal, a California-based...