• By EMILY SHAPIRO

An Ohio Grand Jury has declined to indict two police officers in the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot dead by a Cleveland police officer last year, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said today.

McGinty said he also recommended that no charges be filed.

After the Grand Jury "heard all the evidence and the applicable law, they were told our recommendation," the prosecutor's office said. "But they made the final decision."

Tamir was holding a toy gun when he was shot by officer Timothy Loehmann at a Cleveland playground in November 2014. The grand jury was hearing evidence to determine if any charges would be brought against Loehmann or his partner, Frank Garmback.

McGinty said today that the law gives the benefit of the doubt to officers who must make "split second" decisions when they believe their lives are in danger.

Loehmann "had reason to fear for his life," McGinty said, citing video he said was "indisputable" when it showed Tamir reaching for his gun as the police car approached and Loehmann exited.

McGinty said it would be unreasonable for the law to require the officers to wait to determine if the gun Tamir had was real. "It became clear" that the officers' actions were not criminal, McGinty told reporters.

McGinty called Tamir's death a "tragedy" but not a crime, adding that charges against the officers wouldn't bring justice for Tamir. He called the shooting a "perfect storm of human error, mistakes and communications by all involved that day," but added that "the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police."

While Tamir's family was "disappointed" by the decision, they were "not surprised," attorneys for the Rice family said in a statement following the Grand Jury announcement.

"It has been clear for months now that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty was abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against indictment," the attorneys said.

The family's attorneys claim that McGinty hired "so-called expert witnesses to try to exonerate the officers and tell the grand jury their conduct was reasonable and justified."

"Then, Prosecutor McGinty allowed the police officers to take the oath and read prepared statements to the grand jury without answering any questions on cross-examination," the attorneys said in the statement. "The prosecutor did not seek a court order compelling the officers to answer questions or holding the officers in contempt if they continued to refuse."

Matthew Meyer, chief prosecutor of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s public corruption unit, said the officer who shot Tamir was "tragically mistaken" and didn't know until it was too late that Tamir posed no threat to the officers or the community.

Meyer said the shooting was the result of a "tragic confluence of events": Tamir appeared much older and larger than 12 years old; officers believed it was a real gun; the rec center security monitors were kept in a locked room and were not monitored by the on-duty guard.

Meyer noted that it was debatable whether Loehmann would have had time to issue warnings to Tamir before shooting, but noted that the law requires that warnings be issued prior to use of deadly force only when feasible.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said the city will proceed with an administrative review of the incident now that the criminal process has ended. Jackson reassured the public there "will be due process."

The committee conducting the review is made up of members of the police department and the community. There is no time limit for how long the review can take, according to Calvin Williams, chief of police in Cleveland.

The family's attorneys said they are renewing their request for the Department of Justice "step in to conduct a real investigation."

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio said it will continue its independent review of the case to "determine what actions are appropriate, given the strict burdens and requirements imposed by applicable federal civil rights laws."

(abcnews)

Militant Islamist fighters hold the flag of Islamic State (IS) while taking part in a military parade along the streets of northern Raqqa province in this June 30, 2014 file photo. REUTERS/Stringer/Files

By Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Islamic State theologians have issued an extremely detailed ruling on when "owners" of women enslaved by the extremist group can have sex with them, in an apparent bid to curb what they called violations in the treatment of captured females.

The ruling or fatwa has the force of law and appears to go beyond the Islamic State's previous known utterances on the subject, a leading Islamic State scholar said. It sheds new light on how the group is trying to reinterpret centuries-old teachings to justify the sexual slavery of women in the swaths of Syria and Iraq it controls.

To read the fatwa click: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/doc/slaves_fatwa.pdf

The fatwa was among a huge trove of documents captured by U.S. Special Operations Forces during a raid targeting a top Islamic State official in Syria in May. Reuters has reviewed some of the documents, which have not been previously published.

Among the religious rulings are bans on a father and son having sex with the same female slave; and the owner of a mother and daughter having sex with both. Joint owners of a female captive are similarly enjoined from intercourse because she is viewed as "part of a joint ownership."

The United Nations and human rights groups have accused the Islamic State of the systematic abduction and rape of thousands of women and girls as young as 12, especially members of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. Many have been given to fighters as a reward or sold as sex slaves.

Far from trying to conceal the practice, Islamic State has boasted about it and established a department of "war spoils" to manage slavery. Reuters reported on the existence of the department on Monday.

In an April report, Human Rights Watch interviewed 20 female escapees who recounted how Islamic State fighters separated young women and girls from men and boys and older women. They were moved "in an organized and methodical fashion to various places in Iraq and Syria." They were then sold or given as gifts and repeatedly raped or subjected to sexual violence.

DOS AND DON'TS

Fatwa No. 64, dated Jan. 29, 2015, and issued by Islamic State's Committee of Research and Fatwas, appears to codify sexual relations between IS fighters and their female captives for the first time, going further than a pamphlet issued by the group in 2014 on how to treat slaves.

The fatwa starts with a question: "Some of the brothers have committed violations in the matter of the treatment of the female slaves. These violations are not permitted by Sharia law because these rules have not been dealt with in ages. Are there any warnings pertaining to this matter?"

It then lists 15 injunctions, which in some instances go into explicit detail. For example:

"If the owner of a female captive, who has a daughter suitable for intercourse, has sexual relations with the latter, he is not permitted to have intercourse with her mother and she is permanently off limits to him. Should he have intercourse with her mother then he is not permitted to have intercourse with her daughter and she is to be off limits to him."

Islamic State's sexual exploitation of female captives has been well documented, but a leading IS expert at Princeton University, Cole Bunzel, who has reviewed many of the group's writings, said the fatwa went beyond what has previously been published by the militants on how to treat female slaves.

"It reveals the actual concerns of IS slave owners," he said in an email.

Still, he cautioned that not "everything dealt with in the fatwa is indicative of a relevant violation. It doesn't mean father and son were necessarily sharing a girl. They're at least being 'warned' not to. But I bet some of these violations were being committed."

The fatwa also instructs owners of female slaves to "show compassion towards her, be kind to her, not humiliate her, and not assign her work she is unable to perform." An owner should also not sell her to an individual whom he knows will mistreat her.

Professor Abdel Fattah Alawari, dean of Islamic Theology at Al-Azhar University, a 1,000-year-old Egyptian center for Islamic learning, said Islamic State "has nothing to do with Islam" and was deliberately misreading centuries-old verses and sayings that were originally designed to end, rather than encourage, slavery.

"Islam preaches freedom to slaves, not slavery. Slavery was the status quo when Islam came around," he said. "Judaism, Christianity, Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations all practiced it and took the females of their enemies as sex slaves. So Islam found this abhorrent practice and worked to gradually remove it.”

In September 2014 more than 120 Islamic scholars from around the world issued an open letter to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi refuting the group's religious arguments to justify many of its actions. The scholars noted that the "reintroduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam."

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein in Cairo and William Maclean in Dubai, editing by Ross Colvin)

Authored by Mark St.Cyr,

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were all told by the “experts” and the so-called “smart crowd” ad nauseam the economy and markets of 2015 were “ready for lift off.” Proclamations that GDP and other economic metrics were indeed going to be the unquestionable catalyst to help propel not only the markets themselves ever higher, but also, prove all the nay-sayers as well as data-deniers wrong. The problem? It was the exact opposite.

2015 exposed the sole overarching fundamental principle the “experts” refused to calculate into their qualitative analysis. That fundamental? Without the continuing interventionism of the Federal Reserve – there is no market. Period. i.e., The capital markets today are to a world-class marketplace for capital formation – as a Potemkin village is to any world-class capitol city. Welcome to today’s financial markets brought courtesy of the Fed.

As the year began the markets continued their ascent to increasingly higher and higher historic levels (yes, historic.) It seemed near weekly another headline of “Historic Highs!” were proclaimed across the financial media as the markets zigzagged up and down yet, in effect, actually going nowhere. Here every selloff was met with an ever more forceful BTFD (buy the dip) recovering a prior days triple digit selloff with some stop running, HFT fueled, triple digit rally rewarding the Bulls (as well as the delivering the subsequent headlines) that the markets were indeed “on fire!” For surely it was insinuated; one would be a fool to be on the sidelines and miss out on all these “fundamental” based gains. Another problem? “Fundamental” was no longer anything real. It was only in the eyes of the beholder. And those beholders were and are “the experts.”

Nowhere was this meme more prevalent, or on display, as the example I used earlier in the year in an article titled, “The Coming Credibility Hammer.” In that piece I quoted an exchange I watched on Bloomberg™ in response to an assertion that it was easy to beat tepid earnings estimates. The guest Tony Dwyer responded with the following push-back:

“They haven’t been the entire cycle and we’ve had a 300% gain. Look, I’m trying to understand how we keep coming on every quarter, that the earnings are terrible, revenue growth is terrible, this is going to be bad – and we’re up 300%” He added as to reaffirm he still believes double-digit gains just 6 months out from here.

Just to make it clear; I have no issue with Mr. Dwyer or anyone else. All I’m doing is pointing out glaring examples on the mindset that appeared not only prevalent, but also unquestioned within the rarefied air many still believed they were breathing on Wall Street. What many failed to consider was maybe, just maybe; the opinions of where and how these markets were not only going, or for that matter stayed at these levels, while additionally arguing against any premise as to question the how and why of these ever higher prints; was not actually breathing rarefied air, but had more in common with – inhaling one’s own exhaust. Let me demonstrate this using a more recent example.

Over the past 5 years since the inception and implementation of the Fed’s QE (quantitative easing) programs the markets have done two things that have been extraordinary. One: They have gone up in a near linear fashion. And Two: That progression appeared unshakable if not unbreakable. It seemed no matter what took place in the world, or any economic uncertainties, the markets met it with a rally! So stable was this progression skyward a selloff of 5% (something quite ordinary as well as expected in normal markets) was all but nonexistent. And when there was a selloff for any reason – it was met with a buying frenzy that erased not only the loss but usually propelled the indexes even higher the following day. Selloffs now took on the tagline of Servpro™ “Like it never even happened”®

So ridiculous had the markets acted to what would cause normal concerns one meme encapsulated the lunacy: “Bad news is now good news, and horrible is terrific!”

This was now the only term that could explain just what the heck was going on within the capital markets. For nothing made sense any longer. Now, the only way one could make sense of the markets was to look at just how bad the economy was, and calculate the probabilities that it would force the Fed. to relinquish any thoughts of backing off the stimulus. All other economic principles or calculations were now laid bare. They didn’t matter. The only calculation that mattered was: QE = Investing genius. Buy, Buy, Buy!

Nowhere was this more prominent than what became manifest with another one of Barrons™ now infamous “experts” market calls “Stick With The Bull.”

The issue? Well, as of today if the S&P 500™ were to falter or just tread water for the remaining week of 2015 (a shortened holiday session in fact) all, let me repeat, all as in 10 out of the 10 “experts” polled would be de facto wrong. The average close of the polled is 2209. And if not for the vapid market action that has been taking place since the Fed. actually went ahead and “just did it” (e.g., raised rates) Even the most conservative remain in jeopardy.

It is still quite possible that another out-of-the-blue, HFT fueled, algo-based, headline initiated, stop running mania could indeed be released into this worse than paper-thin market and make all these “experts” correct. (And one should never, ever, underestimate the lengths Wall Street will go to save a year-end bonus) But is that a call of expertise? Or; is it a saved by the cowbell call? That’s an important call you need to make. Remember, none of these experts seemed to had ever contemplated just how ailing these fragile “markets” were in the first place. And after all, if your price target is off – just state it again for 2016. Now that’s analysis you can use, and will pay handsomely (as well as dearly) for, no?

Does anyone remember this past August? (I know I do) If you were to poll many of the so-called “smart crowd” I would wager dollars to doughnuts the response would be to dismiss or, echo that of what many now imply for the Fed’s latest move: “One and done.” You would think a market rout of historic proportions so vehement, and so cascading, that it caused a historic first time ever halting of the three major indexes would be front-of-mind. Nope, just a blip. After all “Just look at the resiliency of these markets” is the usual response. However, there seems to be just a tiny bit more of a quiver in the voice when it’s expressed today, as compared to the all-out snorting one would hear at the beginning of the year. Funny how no QE suddenly brings about a diminished Bull forecast. Or should I say: just plain bull?

Again, who knows where we go from here. After all it seems pretty clear the “experts” don’t have a clue either. Yet, if you want a glimpse of just how ardent this bull—- narrative is going to be spun, it was on full parade this past week.

As I was watching a segment on Bloomberg’s <GO>™ the 22nd of this month. There was an intense discussion forming around the bull narrative and how or why it may not be as fundamentally sound as many imply that it is. During this discussion Barry Ritholtz interjected why he takes umbrage when it comes to “bubble calling.” He goes on to state and imply (I’m paraphrasing): “Those who have called bubble of late have been wrong.” Fair enough. However, the reasoning? I’ll let you be the judge.

He then goes on to explain why those who lived through the last few bubbles yet missed recognizing them while they were happening – are the ones who should be discounted for their possible recognition that we may be in one once again. (No really. I’m not making that up.)

The logic was absolutely breathtaking as I sat and listened. Let me illustrate this absurdity with this analogy for it really does sum it up:

In order to not get burned by the hot stove, what you need to do is not take any advice from people with scars on their hands because, to them, now every stove is hot. And whatever you do, don’t ever bring up the fact that our houses have burned down more than once – for we don’t agree with the fire department’s findings that it was caused by an unattended, speculation fueled stove with visible cracks, leaking supply lines, and no preventive maintenance reviews in years. Remember: we’re the experts in stoves – not the fire dept.

Think I’m kidding? Here’s another as he went on to explain what a “bubble” is as opposed to what it is not. Ready? (I’m paraphrasing – but not by much)

“There is a huge difference between a bubble which is a collective crowd delusion. And parts of the art market that might have got overheated because of a few billionaires competing – that’s not the same as all of the stocks in the U.S. running amok.”

Does not the first line of that statement tell you all you need to know? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, the “collective crowd delusion” might be held by the very one’s stating we’re delusional? And what by-golly fueled the “art market?” You just can’t make this stuff up. Yet, it doesn’t end there, there’s more.

As I iterated if one wanted to see precisely how this “bull” market narrative was going to be conditionally spun the narrative was on full display coming once again from Mr. Ritholtz.

In response to James Bianco (President of Bianco Research™) where Mr. Bianco went on to illustrate why this time it’s different (for the bull narrative that is) he stressed that for the first time in 80 years: Cash beat Asset allocation. Again, for the 1st time in 80 years. The “push back” to this argument was again stunning, as it was revealing. Mr. Ritholtz tried to make the case of… (again I’m paraphrasing)

“Aren’t we due for just a digestion of gains and catching up to valuations? You’re not going to go up every year and blah, blah, blah.(I found it quite illustrative that his “longer view” analysis was 5 years. Funny how that view just so happens to coincide with QE, no? But I digress.)

To which Mr. Bianco responded, “Yes, stocks can correct, but everything is correcting right now, and it’s the reduction of stimulus.”

Remember, Mr. Bianco’s point about “Cash” vs “asset allocation” is a data point derived from over 80 years of backward looking research and this is – a first. Funny how suddenly all these historically bad data points seem to be propagating with more frequency, as well as intensity since the ending of QE. But we’re the one’s called “data-deniers” or “idiots” by people like Mr. Ritholtz. So there’s another really important question that needs to be asked of oneself as we approach 2016 and beyond.

Exactly who is the idiot? Those who question these so-called “experts” or “smart crowd?” Or, the so-called “experts” and “smart-crowd” themselves? You know, the ones that like to tell us “It’s different this time” along with “Everything is awesome!”

For 2016 that answer has never been more important to answer for yourself, honestly.Because, what is glaringly obvious: The “experts” won’t. After all, they think we’re all idiots. Just ask them.

By Jim Finkle and Dustin Volz

(Reuters) - An independent computer security researcher uncovered a database of information on 191 million voters that is exposed on the open Internet due to an incorrectly configured database, he said on Monday.

The database includes names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails of voters in all 50 U.S. states and Washington, researcher Chris Vickery said in a phone interview.

Vickery, a tech support specialist from Austin, Texas, said he found the information while looking for information exposed on the Web in a bid to raise awareness of data leaks.

Vickery said he could not tell whether others had accessed the voter database, which took about a day to download.

While voter data is typically considered public information, it would be time-consuming and expensive to gather a database of all American voters. A trove of all U.S. voter data could be valuable to criminals looking for lists of large numbers of targets for a variety of fraud schemes.

"The alarming part is that the information is so concentrated," Vickery said.

Vickery said he has not been able to identify who controls the database, but that he is working with U.S. federal authorities to find the owner so they can remove it from public view. He declined to identify the agencies.

A representative with the Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment.

A representative with the U.S. Federal Elections Commission, which regulates campaign financing, said the agency does not have jurisdiction over protecting voter records.

Regulations on protecting voter data vary from state to state, with many states imposing no restrictions. California, for example, requires that voter data be used for political purposes only and not be available to persons outside of the United States.

Privacy advocates said Vickery's findings were troubling.

"Privacy regulations are required so a person’s political information can be kept private and safe,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy. The leak was first reported by CSO Online and Databreaches.net, computer and privacy news sites that Vickery said helped him attempt to locate the database's owner.

CSO Online said the exposed information may have originally come from campaign software provider NationBuilder because the leak included data codes similar to those used by that firm.

In a statement, NationBuilder Chief Executive Officer Jim Gilliam said the database was not created by the Los Angeles-based company, but that some of its information may have come from data it freely supplies to political campaigns.

"From what we've seen, the voter information included is already publicly available from each state government, so no new or private information was released in this database," Gilliam said.

(This story has been refiled to correct penultimate paragraph to remove extraneous word "his")

(Reporting by Jim Finkle and Dustin Volz; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

A prominent Syrian journalist and documentary maker known for his anti-Daesh films has been assassinated in Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia region.

Naji Jerf, editor-in-chief of the Hentah monthly, was shot in the head with a silenced handgun by unknown assailants near the Syrian border in the Turkish town of Gaziantep on Sunday and died after being transferred to hospital.

As an investigation was being carried out into the incident, a Daesh supporter reportedly attributed the killing to the terrorist group on social media.

According to New York-based NGO Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Jerf had recently directed and produced a film documenting the killing of Syrian activists by Daesh terrorists during their occupation of the Syrian city of Aleppo in 2013 and 2014.

"We call on Turkish authorities to bring the killers of Naji Jerf to justice swiftly and transparently, and to step up measures to protect all Syrian journalists on Turkish soil," said the nonprofit’s regional coordinator.

The 38-year-old, a father of two, was from the western Syrian city of al-Salamiyah.

Daesh has seized parts of Iraq and Syria, where it carries out the bulk of its activities. It has been engaged in bloody acts of terrorism against people of all communities in the areas under its control.