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President Trumps long national nightmare the ongoing scandal over Russias meddling into the campaign for the White House may have grown worse last night with the revelation that former National Security Adviser and Gen. Mike Flynn has a story he very much wants to tell, according to his lawyer.

Trump has been facing incoming from all sides ever since the now seemingly ancient high point of his presidency, his speech to a joint session of Congress.

His approval ratings have dipped to an all-time low for first-year presidents, 35 percent, according to Gallup. He was dealt a major legislative blow last week when Republicans failed to pass a replacement plan for Obamacare.

Yesterday, Trump engaged in a Twitter battle against some of his most loyal Republican supporters during the campaign, the House Freedom Caucus members.

And now Flynn, another one of his key campaign backers, has come forward seeking immunity in exchange for his story, though neither Flynn nor his attorney are revealing whether his story will help or hurt the president.

But for Trump, the black cloud of the Russia probe continues to hang over the White House with no signs of breaking anytime soon. There have been no smoking guns, but a lot of unanswered questions that have provided a steady drip of bad news and unwelcome distractions from Trumps agenda for his first 100 days seen as a defining period in any presidency.

The prospect of a once-loyal Trump foot soldier turned rogue if indeed Flynn has information that could damage Trump will dominate 24-hour cable news coverage and overtake everything else happening in Washington.

But Flynns testimony could also turn out to be more bust than bombshell, just like Trumps tax returns unearthed on MSNBC by Rachel Maddow earlier this month. It may simply be a bid by Flynn to save himself.

Trump also has the proven track record of being able to somehow emerge from shocking scandals, including his Access Hollywood tape and controversial comments and tweets during the campaign.

But for now, Flynns eagerness to step forward only ensures there will be more media attention, public intrigue and Washington drama for a president who campaigned on cleaning up Beltway corruption.

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Analysis: Ex-NSA aide's tale a headache for Donald Trump - Boston Herald

Your guide to the best PDF editors of 2017. Check out our latest reviews and buyer's guide to the top PDF editors of this year.

We test and rate the best PDF editors you can get, including packages from Adobe, Foxit, Nuance, Nitro and more. Most of the packages here cost money but it is possible toedit PDFs for free.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most popular types of document for sharing as most devices and computers can open a PDF for the recipient to read. It doesn't matter whether you're using a laptop or a smartphone, nor which software was used to create it.

But while some PDF reader software allows you to annotate or add comments, such as the free Foxit Reader, sometimes you need to edit the actual PDF itself. This is possible with the tools below, even if a different program was used to make the file in the first place. Such programs allow to to do things like convert a PDF to Wordformat.

All software below lets you create PDFs from other files - including .doc - but they also allow you to edit PDF files so that you don't need to track down the original source file in its native format. In addition, most of them also provide advanced features such as form creation, digital signature and ID certification, and collaborative review and commenting, that you generally dont get with free PDF packages. We also take a look at one free package - AbleWord PDF editor - to see just how much you can get without spending a penny.

If you don't want to install any software, you can edit up to three PDFs online using PDF Pro for free, and there's also FormSwift PDF editor online.

Overall, we found Nuance Power PDF 2 to be intuitive and easy to use, especially if you're familiar with Microsoft Office. We have little doubt that most users will be able to quickly get up and running with it. We found the reviewing features particularly comprehensive, proving means of annotating, marking text in various ways and drawing attention to parts of a document, and it's great that there's now support for touchscreens. Given that it's so much cheaper than Acrobat, it makes a lot of sense for small business use.

Read our full Power PDF 2 review.

This is a fully featured PDF editor that's very easy to use and represents good value for money.Like other editors, itprovides facilities for PDF creation and editing, form creation, digital signatures and commenting, plus integrated optical character recognition (OCR) so that scanned paper documents can be turned into truly editable PDFs.

Version 11 adds various improvements including more performance enhancements compared toversion 10. it also adopts an Office 2016-style interface and it's possible to customise the Home tab at the top so it contains your most used options and tools. For those new to Nitro, there's a new Product Tour which walks you through the main features.

We like the integration with Box, Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox which makes it very easy to open and save files directly to those cloud storage services.

When it comes to editing PDFs, Nitro makes it a breeze to change text, rearrange images, add forms and more. You can change the order of pages in a document simply by dragging and dropping. And it's also easy to sign a PDF using the QuickSign shortcut.

At133.99 for the Personal version it's not the cheapest, but you do get a lot of features.

Wondershare's PDFelement takes a lot of inspiration (as do other PDF editors) from Microsoft Office, so if you're used to Office 2007 or later, you'll instantly feel at home with PDFelement.

The interface is clean and intuitive and the tools are easy to use and do what you'd expect. You can create a PDF from scratch, but can also import a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document.

We found this worked well, except for large Excel sheets since there's no option to select just a portion of the sheet you want to import: it's all or nothing.

On unprotected documents you can click the 'Edit text'button and do exactly that. Unlike some PDF editors, which force you to 'Tippex' over text and then type over the top, PDFelement allows you to select and modify text just as you can in Word. Plus, you can select and move images around at will, delete elements and import new images.

As you'd expect from a paid-for product, it allows you to protect documents, create forms and sign documents.

It costs $69.99, which works out at exactly the same in Great British Pounds once VAT is added on. And at that price, it's good value.If you need OCR - the ability to convert scanned text documents into editable text - that version costs an extra20.

Foxit PhantomPDF Business 7 provides the level of functionality that the professional user has come to expect at a keen price. The user interface is modern and easy to use (mainly because it borrows heavily from Microsoft Office) and Foxit provides no shortage of tutorial videos and easy access to support options to get you up to speed in record time.

Plus, if you only need very basic editing options such as annotation, highlighting and signing PDFs, then Foxit Reader is totally free.

Read our full Foxit PhantomPDF review

Adobe invented the PDF, and so you'd be right to expect that it has the best - or at least very good - PDF editing software. These days, of course, Adobe wants you to pay a subscription to access the latest version of Acrobat Pro. The DC stands for Document Cloud, and hints at the fact that you can store your PDFs in the cloud and collaborate on them with others.

If you don't need many editing features, you can just use Acrobat DC, which is the standard version. However, while this works out at 11.42 per month ($15), the Pro version ishardly any more expensive at 13.33 per month.You can find out more at Adobe's website

However,unless you really need its features (or you can get it for education prices) then it's hard to justify the expense when other PDF editors do a lot of what Acrobat can do for a considerably smaller outlay.

Although primarily a word processor, the fact that the free AbleWord can read and write PDF files means that its more than capable of acting as a PDF editor, thereby suggesting comparison with some seriously expensive competition. While the professional aspects of professional PDF editors are missing, for simply editing PDF documents, AbleWord is perfectly capable.

Here's our full AbleWord review.

Costing significantly less than virtually all other business-oriented PDF editors, yet providing the functionality youd expect, Tracker PDF XChange Pro is well worth trying out (there's a trial option on the website). The down-side is that some of the functions youd expect to find in the main package are in separate utilities but this is only a minor inconvenience, given the price.

Read our full PDF XChange Pro review

Able2Extract Pro 11 may have an odd name, but this is a fully fledged PDF creator and editor.

It can also take a PDF and convert it to various formats including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. When converting to Excel, you can select only the content you want to extract (the name is relevant here) and see a preview of what it will look like before actually exporting it.

Editing functions include being able to highlight and replace text (fonts cannot always be matched of course), remove pages and annotate and redact text. And as with other paid-for packages, you can protect a PDF with a password and differing file permissions.

At $149.99 (approx 143 inc VAT), this is one of the more expensive options, so if you don't need all its features, you can save money and opt for one of the cheaper packages here.

See more here:
The best PDF editors for 2017 - PC Advisor

Ill give the mainstream media this much: Its absolutely consistent in its inability to understand or explain use-of-force law generally and Stand-Your-Ground laws in particular.

The most recent example comes out of Tulsa, Okla., where this past Monday a 23-year-old staying at his fathers home encountered three armed assailants who had forcibly entered by kicking in the back door.

Unfortunately for these home invaders, the 23-year-old possessed a loaded AR-15 rifle, and he knew how to use it. All three suspects ended up dead. A fourth, the getaway driver, would later turn herself into police. The shooter immediately called 911 to report the incident, a call which is remarkable in its own right. (Seriously, go listen to it.)

As seems inevitable in any media coverage of a self-defense shooting, news reports of the incident routinely made reference to Stand-Your-Ground:

The homeowners son who shot them has not been arrested while police investigate whether he acted in self-defense under the states Stand Your Ground law. CBS News

[Assistant District Attorney Jack ] Thorp told reporters that investigators will help his office determine whether Oklahomas Stand Your Ground law applies in the case of the triple shooting. Fox News

Killing of 3 teens during burglary may test Oklahoma stand your ground law Yahoo News

As also seems inevitable, these references to Stand Your Ground laws betrayed a shocking inability to understand what such laws actually mean.

The first thing to know about Stand Your Ground is that traditional self-defense law often imposed a legal duty to retreat before using defensive force if a safe avenue of retreat was available. Stand Your Ground serves to relieve a defender of that duty to retreat in cases where it would previously have existed and that is all that Stand Your Ground does.

This means, of course, that in circumstances in which no legal duty to retreat exists, Stand Your Ground is entirely irrelevant, because no one needs to be relieved of a legal duty he never had in the first place.

If no safe avenue of retreat is available, then there is no legal duty to retreat, even in the absence of a Stand Your Ground law. If there exists a safe avenue of retreat for the defender, but that path of retreat is not safe for a person accompanying the defender (e.g. a small child or elderly parent), the defender is not required to leave the other behind, and thus there is no legal duty to retreat, again rendering any Stand Your Ground law irrelevant.

And then there is the universal exception to any legal duty to retreat: the so-called Castle Doctrine, which holds that even in cases when one would otherwise have a legal duty to retreat, that legal duty doesnt apply if they are in their castle meaning their home and sometimes their business or vehicle and they are facing armed intruders who have forcibly entered. In such a home-invasion, there is no legal duty to retreat, so Stand Your Ground laws do not apply.

This last circumstance is precisely what that 23-year-old Oklahoman faced on Monday, and there is no state in the country where he would have had a legal duty to retreat, meaning his actions were not governed by Stand Your Ground law. Instead, he found himself in a very straightforward defense of dwelling scenario. Under Oklahoma law, as in many states, a home defender in this situation is also favored by the creation of certain legal presumptions that strengthen the legal defense for their use of force.

The relevant Oklahoma law is easily found in Oklahoma Statute 1289.25, Physical or Deadly Force Against Intruder, which creates two legal presumptions in defense of dwelling cases.

The first is that the defender had a reasonable fear of death or grave bodily harm:

A person...is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another when using defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm to another if...the person against whom the defensive force was used...had unlawfully and forcibly entered, a dwelling, residence, occupied vehicle, or a place of business...

The second legal presumption created by the statute is that the home invader intends to commit an act of violence:

A person who unlawfully and by force enters or attempts to enter the dwelling, residence, occupied vehicle of another person, or a place of business is presumed to be doing so with the intent to commit an unlawful act involving force or violence.

It is true that 1289.25 elsewhere contains references to Stand Your Ground, self-defense immunity, and reimbursement of a defenders legal expenses in a civil suit. But each of these is an entirely distinct legal concept, and may or may not apply to a particular defensive force event depending on the facts of the case. As explained above, the statutes Stand Your Ground provisions dont remotely apply to the Tulsa shooting, as the long-standing provisions of the Castle Doctrine already relieved the defender of any legal duty to retreat even if such a duty existed under Oklahoma law.

In short, this was a defense of dwelling scenario which raised a legal presumption of reasonable fear on the part of the defender and of intent to commit violence on the part of the home invader. Stand Your Ground has nothing whatsoever to do with this case but no one should hold their breath waiting for the mainstream media to realize it.

Andrew F. Branca is an attorney and the author of The Law of Self Defense: The Indispensable Guide for the Armed Citizen.

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See more here:
The Mainstream Media Gets 'Stand Your Ground' Laws Wrong Again - National Review

Either Oklahomas implementation of castle doctrine and stand your ground laws are substantially different than that of the rest of the country, or the assistant district attorney could use a refresher on the laws of self defense.

The nearly eight-minute 911 call begins about 12:44 p.m. on Monday.

Ive just been broken into. Three men, two Ive shot in my house, the caller says. Ones down, ones still talking. You need to get here now.

The caller doesnt sound panicked, and waits for the operator to ask him questions.

Wagoner County Chief Deputy Les Young said a deputy arrived two minutes after the 911 call was initiated. The operator keeps the caller a 23-year-old who lives at the home on the phone until you hear the deputy talking to him.

A probable cause affidavit alleges Elizabeth Marie Rodriguez, 21, planned the burglary and waited in the car while the masked intruders broke into the home.

In a news release Wednesday, the sheriffs department said Rodriguez waived her right to an attorney and told them she determined the residents had money and expensive belongings, and that was why she selected his home to hit a lick a term some criminals use to describe getting a significant amount of money in a short period of time.

Authorities said the suspect became aware of the homeowner, but did not know him or his son, the shooter.

Rodriguez and the three slain intruders burglarized a spare apartment at the residence earlier in the day and returned to rob the main house, the news release said. The three teens, dressed in black and covering their faces, kicked in the door, encountered the resident and were shot inside the house.

One of the injured suspects exited the home and tried to get back in to Rodriguezs vehicle, but she told investigators she drove away and left him in the driveway, the release said.

Rodriguez allegedly fled and later went to the Broken Arrow Police Department.

Does Stand your ground law apply?

Young said she was arrested and was being held on suspicion of three counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree burglary and one count of second-degree burglary.

Assistant District Attorney Jack Thorp said Tuesday that Rodriguez could be formally charged with murder if the suspects were killed while she was involved in a felony. But formal charges wont come until later in the week, at the earliest.

It is unclear whether Rodriguez has an attorney.

The deceased suspects were Jaycob Woodruff, 16; Jacob Redfern, 17; and Maxwell Cook, 19, the sheriffs office said. One suspect had a knife, and another carried brass knuckles, authorities have said.

Thorp told reporters that investigators will help his office determine whether Oklahomas Stand Your Ground law applies in the case of the triple shooting.

The 911 call and all publicly available information suggests that the shooting occurred during a home invasion attempt in which the suspects were armed with a knife and brass knuckles. One of the dead burglars was found dead inthe driveway after running from the home. The others were found inside the home.

This sounds like a textbook castle doctrine case under Oklahoma law.

21-1289.25 PHYSICAL OR DEADLY FORCE AGAINST INTRUDER

A. The Legislature hereby recognizes that the citizens of the State of Oklahoma have a right to expect absolute safety within their own homes or places of business.

B. A person or an owner, manager or employee of a business is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another when using defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm to another if:

1. The person against whom the defensive force was used was in the process of unlawfully and forcefully entering, or had unlawfully and forcibly entered, a dwelling, residence, occupied vehicle, or a place of business, or if that person had removed or was attempting to remove another against the will of that person from the dwelling, residence, occupied vehicle, or place of business; and

2. The person who uses defensive force knew or had reason to believe that an unlawful and forcible entry or unlawful and forcible act was occurring or had occurred.

Stand your ground laws (including Oklahomas) are an expansion of castle doctrines protections to apply to places other than in the home or business. As this was unquestionably a burglary/home invasion,Assistant District Attorney Jack Thorp is mistaken in suggesting that 21-1289.25 D, the stand your ground provision, should apply.

D. A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

I fully expect the mainstream media to misapply and misconstrue the laws regarding self defense cases in order to make lawful self defense seem bad or evil. They are, after all, typically strong supporters of gun control.

Its infuriating, however, for prosecutors not to know the laws regarding self defense in their jurisdictions.

This is clearly a castle doctrine case where a man was confronted by armed home invaders who came into his residence. Stand your provisions are not relevant, and the prosecutor should explain that to the media, as the case has now gained national attention.

Author's Bio: Bob Owens

Originally posted here:
Okie District Attorney Incorrectly Cites Stand Your Ground Law In Triple Homicide - Bearing Arms

Lucy McBath, Guest columnist 12:06 a.m. ET March 30, 2017

A framed copy of the Jet magazine cover story on Jordan Davis, son of Ron Davis and Lucy McBath, is pictured the law office of their attorney, John Phillips, in Jacksonville. Jordan Davis,17, was shot to death by Michael Dunn, of Satellite Beach, on Nov. 23, 2012.(Photo: Tim Shortt, FLORIDA TODAY)Buy Photo

The Florida House will soon vote on a bill that would expand the states already-deadly Stand Your Ground law. These laws embolden individuals to shoot first and ask questions later rather than encourage people to de-escalate their conflicts through peaceful means and walk away when safe to do so.

Research shows that Floridas current iteration was associated with an increase in firearm homicides, and while these types of laws put all of us at risk, they have a disproportionate impact on communities of color.

I understand this painful reality all too well. My son, Jordan Davis, was just 17 years old when he was shot and killed by an older white man during a dispute over loud music at a Jacksonville gas station. Jordan and his friends were all unarmed. My sons killer was not.

Michael Dunn murder conviction upheld in loud-music fatal shooting

Research shows that when white shooters kill black victims, the resulting homicides are deemed justifiable 11 times more frequently than when the shooter is black and the victim is white. Additionally, Florida Stand Your Ground cases with minority victims are half as likely to lead to conviction, compared with cases that involve white victims.

Since Jordans murder, Ive dedicated my life to honoring his memory by telling his story and working to make sure no other parent experiences the pain of having a child stolen from them through gun violence. I, along with Florida members of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and other gun violence survivors, will continue to speak out against this bill and all other dangerous bills that put our communities at risk.

Floridas Stand Your Ground already gives untrained civilians more leeway to shoot than the U.S. military gives its soldiers in war zones. Now, SB 128 would expand the law by effectively requiring criminal defendants who raise a Stand Your Ground defense to be convicted twice once by a judge and once by a jury.

This new bill would shift the burden of proof in Stand Your Ground pretrial hearings from defendants to prosecutors, forcing the state to prove a shooter acted unlawfully before it even brings a case to trial. This would make it easier for gun criminals to elude justice. It would also create an insurmountable backlog of cases for prosecutors, and stretch already-thin resources without allocating any more funding to that state agency.

Video: Loud-music shooter Michael Dunn gets life in prison

Simply put, these types of laws do not deter crime. They allow individuals to shoot and kill others in public places even when they can clearly and safely walk away from the conflict.

We should focus on keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people not passing laws that turn everyday confrontations into deadly shootouts.

Floridians deserve better than this. Jordans memory deserves better than this. Trayvons memory deserves better than this. Our lawmakers should remember that the dangerous proposal theyre supporting today can and will have irreversible and even deadly consequences for many Floridians for years to come.

Lucy McBath is the Faith and Outreach Leader for Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

Read or Share this story: http://on.flatoday.com/2nCbk8v

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Victim's mother: Stand Your Ground emboldens shooters - Florida Today