It don’t get no lurider than this. This is the luridest.
[FoxNews] Aaron Spencer killed Michael Fosler while retrieving his 13-year-old from Fosler's truck
A travesty of justice is unfolding in Arkansas, but it isn’t too late to stop it.
At 1:12 a.m. on the morning of Oct. 8, 2024, Aaron Spencer and his wife awoke to find their 13-year-old daughter missing from her bed. Spencer’s wife called 911, while Spencer jumped into his vehicle and sped off into the night, desperate to find any trace of his missing child. He hadn’t gone far when he spotted the truck of Michael Fosler, with his daughter inside.
Fosler was no stranger to the Spencers. In July of that year, Fosler allegedly raped Spencer’s daughter, resulting in his indictment for 43 separate counts including sexual assault of a minor, internet stalking of a child and possession of child pornography. The Lonoke County prosecutors handled the case, with it landing on the desk of Circuit Judge Barbara Elmore. It’s a little unclear who dropped the ball — Lonoke County, Judge Elmore, or some combination of both — but what we know for sure is that this dangerous abuser of children was released from custody on a $5,000 bond, with a no contact order in place to prevent further abuse of Spencer’s daughter. Then Oct. 8 came, and neither the bond nor the no contact order was worth the paper it was printed on.
Spencer’s actions in that moment were nothing short of heroic. He ran Fosler's truck off the road, and firearm in hand, ordered him to release his daughter. Instead, Fosler fought back, and the struggle ended with Spencer emptying his firearm into Fosler. Spencer then rescued his daughter from the truck and called 911.
Spencer never should have been in this situation. He shouldn’t have had to save his daughter from a monster. But because local elected prosecutors and judges failed him, that was the position he was put in. Astonishingly, the prosecuting attorney not only failed to take any responsibility for what had transpired; he charged Aaron Spencer with second-degree murder. And wouldn’t you know it, the judge on the case was none other than Circuit Judge Barbara Elmore.
Judge Elmore immediately took action to hide this affair from the public eye, dropping a gag order on everyone in any way connected with the case, preventing them, on penalty of contempt of court, from speaking with the press or the public about the case. Gag orders are not that unusual, but this one was so expansive and so obtrusive that the Arkansas Supreme Court stepped in and declared it unconstitutional, finding that it "was on its face a plain, manifest, clear, and gross abuse of discretion and in excess of its authority."
Judge Elmore was undeterred. Despite the constitutional right every defendant has to a public trial, she essentially closed the trial to the public, greatly limiting the seats available to the public, media, and even Spencer’s own defense team. Elmore did this without providing any alternative means of viewing the trial, and without any evidentiary hearing or judicial findings justifying it. For the people of Arkansas, it seemed like the fix was in. The judge who had once failed Aaron Spencer’s daughter was now committed to ensuring that his trial would happen in as close to secrecy as she could muster.
Fortunately, the Arkansas Supreme Court stepped in, again, vacating the judge’s order. But they didn’t stop there. The high court took the extraordinary step of removing Judge Elmore from the case. The unusual remedy showed just how egregious her behavior had become. Should remove Elmore from the Bench and disbar her
This is the first step toward justice, but it shouldn’t be the last. The prosecuting attorney should drop this case altogether.
Not that the prosecution’s behavior up to this point has been indicative of good judgment. Statements from the prosecutors in this case are not only embarrassing; they should trouble the people of Arkansas. Prosecutors suggested that Spencer’s angry comments from July—when he discovered that his daughter had been raped by Fosler—were somehow evidence of his intent in October. Never mind that such anger would be the natural reaction of any father. And never mind that Spencer didn’t hunt down Fosler and murder him in the weeks or even months that followed; he shot him while rescuing his daughter from another kidnapping by Fosler.
Prosecutors also suggested that Spencer should have just called 911 when he saw his daughter in the truck with Fosler. That a father should give up the pursuit of his daughter’s kidnapper and rapist in the hopes that the police could arrive in time to save her is so astonishingly absurd it boggles the mind that any prosecutor charged with protecting and defending citizens and victims of crimes would countenance it.
But the removal of Judge Elmore and the attendant delay in Spencer’s trial provide an opportunity to end this farce. The local prosecutors should drop this case. The state attorney general should refuse to defend any conviction, in the unlikely event a jury returns one. And the governor should promise to do everything in her power to pardon Spencer, if she must. To do otherwise is to turn justice on its head and to leave every person in Arkansas at the mercy of the predators who would victimize them and their children.
#2
Gag orders are supposed to prevent the government from smearing the defendant and tainting the jury pool. Gagging a defendsnt is a civil rights violation. The judge should be disbarred.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/24/2026 13:17 Comments ||
Top||
#3
From when I lived in New Orleans, Gary Plauche shot and killed Jeffrey Doucet at the Baton Rouge airoort as the police returned the alleged kidnapper of Gary's son. Though clearly guilty the jury and the rest of the legal system let Gary off without serving a sentence.
[Contrarian via SCC] What has emerged in Chicago is a culture of lying
2025 was another banner year for Chicago media. Over the past year, what news consumers experienced in Chicago was more overt political bias in ostensibly neutral news media. Business as usual for Chicago’s print, television, radio, and digital media figures, in 2025, reporters continued to demonstrate their utter intolerance with opposing views and became less trusted to separate fact from fiction in the delivery of the news.
Whether it was covering up or whitewashing Mayor Brandon Johnson’s incompetence and mammoth failures as mayor or throwing a tantrum at Department of Homeland Security agencies enforcing immigration law in Chicago, in 2025, Chicago media confirmed their intent to serve as a protective chrysalis for politicians and groups they favor.
It was once a non-negotiable duty to maintain a strict pose of neutrality in the reporting of the news. However, instead of asking questions and learning a story, media figures in Chicago persist in their habit of creating news. With Chicago media simply disinclined to fulfill the core journalistic duty of telling the truth or holding powerful people accountable for their actions, contributors to Contrarian have collected some of the most egregious examples of biased journalism in Chicago for 2025. While some reporters profiled here are regulars, in this installment of "Worst in Chicago Media," there are some new arrivals, including our worst journalist for the year:
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/24/2026 05:50 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[1765 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
When it comes to dumb corruption, Chicago is still "Second City" given the putz in NYC.
STOP what you're doing - we have a pretty huge update and confession about this whole "Report ICE activity hotline" situation.
By about 1am, we had reports come in from numerous states that there had been "incidents" at a number of biker bars last night. 🇺🇸
It turns out that "report ICE activity hotlines" had received "tips" about "off-duty ICE agents" drinking at dozens of bars. Those bars just so happened to be biker bars owned or frequented by individuals who haven't always been on the right side of the law.
ICE protestors were alerted and given the addresses of these bars. According to friends of ours across the country, beta soy boy, gender-fluid communist Meal Team Sixers showed up with their "F-ICE" flags and tried barging into the bars.
Except... there were no ICE agents drinking there. As a wise man once said... "now you's can't leave".
To clarify, WE absolutely did NOT report those addresses to the "Report ICE activity hotlines". That's ridiculous, guys. What kind of people do you think we are?
Nah. We simply provided the "Report ICE activity hotlines" to the good ole' boys that DRINK at those bars and asked them if they wanted to have a fun night.
Hey leftists... we've been warning you... there would be a time when the people who just wanted to be left alone get off the sidelines.
Keep going, children. We're in this for the long haul... and we're really, really good at it.
If you have a phone or fingers to type... you can get in the fight and help protect ICE and law enforcement. Below you'll find the "report ICE activity" hotlines.
Have fun and blast this thing all over the internet.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Denis Davydov and Taisiya Svetlichnaya
[REGNUM] Since the Sea of Azov became Russia's internal sea, the question has arisen of how to properly develop this vast macroregion, which unites seven federal subjects.
Developing it means solving a huge number of problems that, over 30 years of Ukrainian economic development, have transformed this beautiful region and the most productive sea on the planet into a place unsuitable for life, recreation, and economic activity. This primarily concerns the northern coastline, which lies within the DPR, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The Strategy for Sustainable Development of the Azov Region through 2040, signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on New Year's Eve, is rather sparse in its assessment of the current state of affairs. However, it paints a bleak picture: beginning with the fact that the new regions are significantly lagging behind both the "old" regions integrated into the national economy and Crimea.
Theoretically, the Azov region can be considered a territory with a high level of economic development. It is home to a concentration of industrial enterprises and a well-developed transport infrastructure, including major seaports, highways, railways, and airports. It also boasts extensive agricultural production, with 30 million hectares of arable land.
There is no through rail service: west of Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don, the major settlements have only inland railway lines. The airports of Donetsk and Mariupol are destroyed, and it's hard to say for sure what remains in Berdyansk (near which is a former Soviet airbase).
However, this infrastructure is potentially in high demand: plans for the near future include creating a year-round seaside resort in the city of Primorsk in the Zaporizhzhia region. Not to mention the development of coastal tourism infrastructure itself.
For example, in the Kherson region, access roads to the resort area have already been repaired, and in the DPR, the creation of five new tourist clusters has begun, providing for children's and family vacations, as well as the development of routes to places of military glory and pilgrimage tourism.
A total of 21 potential tourism clusters have been identified in the Azov Sea regions, combining various forms of activity for visitors—from simple beach recreation to the construction of water parks and oceanariums.
As noted in the strategy, “thanks to the creation of modern transport, utilities, recreational and other types of infrastructure, and the expansion of the area of equipped beaches, <…> the number of tourist trips could increase to 23.6 million people by 2030, and to 25.3 million people by 2040.”
So airports alone are unlikely to be enough.
There are eight seaports in the Azov Sea basin, between which there is no passenger service, and the only berth for receiving passenger ships is in Taganrog.
The ports of Yeysk and Mariupol have lost this capability, and the coastal infrastructure is generally obsolete. All this requires capital investment to restore maritime service—previously, for example, a ferry even ran from Mariupol to Batumi.
As for highways, the most important of them in the Azov region is currently the federal highway R-280 "Novorossiya" (Rostov-on-Don - Mariupol - Melitopol - Simferopol), better known as the "land route to Crimea."
So far, the reconstruction of the exits from populated areas has been underway, but in the future, the strategy specifies the strategically important task of constructing a 1,400-kilometer transport ring around Azov, connected to the Tavrida highway in Crimea.
A railway line is planned to be built along the highway on the northern coast of the sea. Together with high-speed water transport, this will connect Crimea with the Azov regions of Russia, creating a comprehensive logistics network.
"This is a significant incentive for increasing tourism, developing coastal areas, and modernizing resort infrastructure on the Azov coast. The development of an extensive network of roads and sea links strengthens Crimea's transport security, ensuring uninterrupted connections with mainland Russia even during peak traffic or unforeseen circumstances. For Crimeans, this means increased mobility, more jobs in logistics, construction, and services, and an improved quality of life thanks to the creation of modern infrastructure," Sergey Aksyonov, Head of the Republic of Crimea commented to Regnum News Agency.
According to him, the peninsula's shipbuilding companies are ready to fully utilize their production capacities to develop the cruise and fishing industries.
Incidentally, the small fishing fleet in the region is in dire straits—the average age of vessels is over 30 years. But this is generally consistent with the situation: three decades ago, catches were quite different and have steadily declined since then, reducing fishermen's earnings.
Rampant poaching, soil and water pollution from heavy industrial waste from Ukrainian enterprises (primarily the Azovstal plant), ill-conceived land reclamation and barbaric agricultural practices, the destruction of forest belts, riverbeds choked with trash and overgrown with vegetation, and a chaotic resort industry…
All this led to Azov becoming almost lifeless.
In the middle of the last century, the fish density here was 80 times higher than in the Caspian Sea, and 300 times higher than in the Mediterranean Sea.
Now, however, the sea's salinity has increased significantly, significantly reducing or completely eliminating sturgeon populations, including the mullet introduced during the Soviet era, the famous Azov pike-perch, herring, and flounder. Even the goby, of which there were approximately 20 species, has declined sixfold.
Instead, jellyfish have appeared in huge numbers, making normal recreation problematic at the end of the season, and seaweed has clogged the coastline with tons of rotting matter.
Therefore, it can be said that the first and foremost priority, from which everything else “dances,” is the improvement of the Azov Sea – reducing salinity levels (primarily through systematic clearing of riverbeds), cleaning wastewater, eliminating spontaneous and poorly organized dumps, and systematic stocking of the lake with fish.
Research by the Azov-Black Sea branch of the All-Russian Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography shows that the sea's resources allow for the release of up to 78 million Russian sturgeon fry, 204 million stellate sturgeon, and 1.3 million beluga sturgeon.
During tsarist times, the Sea of Azov accounted for almost 40% of the sturgeon and caviar catch. This continued during the Soviet era, right up until the construction of industrial giants in Mariupol and other cities in the Azov region. As recently as the early 1990s, the official sturgeon catch was almost 1,000 tons, and full-scale fishing could return within 10-15 years.
And if other fish species are restored, the sea will once again become a source of food: in fact, already at the turn of 2017, 99% of the modest commercial catch consisted not of valuable species, but of sprat, anchovy, and goby.
With a reduction in water salinity of just 0.5–0.6 ppm, the Azov Sea's economic potential would increase by 32%—it is also capable of self-restoration. Increasing the percentage of protected areas to 10% of each region's total area would also significantly contribute to this.
"By the time the idea for developing a strategy matured, it was clear that each region and each ministry were already taking disparate steps to address marine environmental issues, develop tourism, expand infrastructure, fish farming, and so on. And it was equally clear that all these efforts needed to be unified, coordinated, and directed, creating a comprehensive vision for the macroregion's development to avoid inconsistency, entropy, and unnecessary waste of resources on duplication."
"This will be correct from the standpoint of overall logistics, unified infrastructure, use of resources, and load distribution for greater efficiency," explains Dmitry Vorona, a senator from the Zaporizhzhia region who is directly involved in the project's development and implementation, to the Regnum news agency.
Indeed, even before the document was adopted, certain works had already been carried out or even completed.
For example, in the DPR, riverbed cleanup began due to the urgent need to find additional freshwater sources. In the Zaporizhzhia region, among other things, cleanup work on the Obitochnaya River in Primorsk was completed: over 585 tons of waste, including tires, construction waste, and household waste, were removed.
The Molochnaya River estuary is the main spawning ground for the mullet, its "native home." In the 1970s, the adaptation of this highly promising Far Eastern fish began in this very spot, where the first stock of fry was released. The growing mullet preferred to overwinter in the rivers it entered from the freezing sea.
So everything here is interconnected, and it is no coincidence that the Luhansk People's Republic, which has no coastline, is included in the Azov regions.
The entire Azov region—Krasnodar Krai, Crimea, Rostov, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, the LPR, and DPR—is united by similar natural and climatic conditions, key agricultural principles, and a unified tourism and fisheries sector.
Rivers flowing into the Sea of Azov flow through their territories, and all these regions use the sea as a common transportation corridor. The unified environmental requirements and economic conditions for the entire macroregion also necessitate the development of a unified, specific approach to decision-making regarding the management of the entire Azov region.
And for him, the future looks optimistic: if five global areas (industry, recreation, transport, ecology, and sea stocking) are successfully implemented, developed regions with a high standard of living could emerge by 2040.
Specifically, the strategy assumes that by this time the population will increase to almost 9 million people, the average salary will increase from 42.3 thousand rubles to 138.4 thousand rubles, and the gross regional product of the macro-region will increase from 1.3 trillion rubles to 16.8 trillion rubles.
The actual calculation is currently based on an increase in tourist flow to 15 million people, and plans are underway to create more than 650,000 hotels and, accordingly, more than 170,000 jobs in the service sector.
As experts explain, the main purpose of adopting the strategy was to stop viewing territories in isolation and move to a model of a single macro-territory.
"Previously, attempts by individual entities to address environmental, social, and economic challenges had not yielded the desired results, so state-led coordination of interactions among all seven regions, linked by shared natural resources and transport and logistics systems, was required.
This decision is critically important for creating a unified infrastructure and environmental safety system, as the regions face common challenges—developing transport and tourism complexes, maintaining ecosystem functions, preserving biodiversity, adapting to climate change, and others,” one of the experts who developed the strategy explained to Regnum News Agency.
The deplorable state of the sea's ecology cannot be the problem of a single region; its use is also shared, and the economy is practically identical. Therefore, ensuring balanced development, balancing agricultural development, boosting horticulture and viticulture where favorable conditions exist, and building a unified transportation network means finding common benefits.
That's why the problem was elevated to the national level, receiving the approval of the president and the government: the strategy consolidated all finances, national programs, and socioeconomic development programs—all the resources that each agency, ministry, and region had been spending independently.
In other words, the entire country will be involved in the Azov region, as this project is of global significance. And the first stage, when the foundation for completing all tasks must be laid, is scheduled for 2028, when the first results will be visible.
[YouTube] Sam Altman said ads in ChatGPT would be a “last resort.” That was just over a year ago. Now OpenAI is burning billions monthly, sitting on $1.4 trillion in commitments, with only 5% of users paying. Turns out the last resort came fast when people can’t afford yet another subscription.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
