Thursday, February 3, 2022

On Monday, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the U.S. District Court in Brunswick, Georgia rejected a guilty plea from Travis McMichael after McMichael offered in court to plead guilty to federal hate crimes in the death of Ahmaud Arbery.

It is highly unusual for a U.S. judge to reject a plea agreement, which would waive McMichael’s right to appeal.

McMichael said he was willing to plead guilty to attacking Arbery out of racial animosity, which would make Arbery’s murder a hate crime. In the proposed plea deal, he would have spent the first 30 years of his sentence in a federal prison. After that, he would move to a Georgia state prison for the rest of his life. Per this deal, even if his state charges were overturned, McMichael would still spend many years in prison.

In court, federal prosecutors urged Judge Wood to accept the plea deal, but Arbery’s family asked her not to. The dead man’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said that the men who killed her son did not deserve to choose their living conditions: “Granting these men their preferred choice of confinement would defeat me. It gives them one last chance to spit in my face.”

Prosecutors claimed they had talked with the victim’s family about the plea deal in advance, but lawyers for Cooper-Jones disagreed.

Judge Wood explained that Cooper-Jones’ statement was part of her decision, but her main reason was that she did not want to be held to the strict 30-year sentence agreed upon by prosecutors and McMichael’s lawyers.

Wood’s decision casts doubt on whether McMichael’s father, Gregory McMichael will also plead guilty as planned. Gregory McMichael also helped kill Arbery.

In February 2020, the McMichaels and a third man, William Bryan, chased Arbery, 25, in trucks as he jogged through their suburban Georgia neighborhood. Travis McMichael then fought with Arbery on foot and shot him to death. Bryan took cell phone video of the event, which later appeared on the Internet.

In November 2021, all three men were convicted of murder in Georgia’s Glynn County Superior Court. They were sentenced to life in prison, though only Bryan was granted the possibility of parole. The state of Georgia did not at that time have its own hate crime law, and prosecutors decided to charge the men on the federal level.

Jury selection for Travis McMichael’s federal hate crimes trial is scheduled to begin on Monday, February 7.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Media in the United States says a suicide bomber who attacked a Central Intelligence Agency base in eastern Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian working as an al-Qaeda double agent.

The reports say current and former Western intelligence officials identified the suicide bomber as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year-old physician and al-Qaeda sympathizer from Zarqa, Jordan.

U.S. television network NBC says Jordanian authorities arrested al-Balawi more than a year ago and later recruited him to infiltrate al-Qaeda, believing he had been successfully reformed. Due to his medical background, it is believed his mission was to find and meet Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command. The CIA declined to comment on the reports.

According to multiple sources, al-Balawi posted online in jihadist forums under the name Abu Dujanah al-Khurasani. One post by him read, “When a fighter for God kills a U.S. soldier on the corner of a tank, the supporters of Jihad have killed tens of thousands of Americans through their connection to the opposition.”

Jarret Brachman, consultant to the US government on terrorism said in a telephone interview to The New York Times, “He’s one of the most revered authors on the jihadists’ forums. He’s in the top five jihadists. He’s one of the biggest guns out there.”

Evan Kohlmann, who tracks jihadi Web sites for NBC News said, “He was actually an administrator on the now-defunct Al-Hesbah forum, previously al-Qaeda’s main chat forum.”

The bombing last Wednesday at the CIA base, known as Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Afghanistan’s Khowst province killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian officer.

The U.S. military’s intelligence chief in Afghanistan has criticized the work of U.S. intelligence agencies operating there, saying they are “ignorant” and out of touch with the Afghan people. General Michael Flynn says U.S. intelligence efforts have focused too much on gathering information about insurgent groups in Afghanistan.

He says U.S. intelligence has been unable to inform U.S. and NATO forces about the environment in which they operate and the Afghan people whom they seek to persuade. His comments were published in a report issued Monday by a U.S. think tank, the Center for a New American Security.

The bodies of the seven CIA employees killed in the Khowst attack arrived Monday at a U.S. Air Force base in the East Coast state of Delaware. A small, private ceremony was held at the base, attended by friends and family and CIA Director Leon Panetta.

The bombing was the second-deadliest attack in the U.S. intelligence agency’s history. In a statement, CIA spokesman George Little described the fallen employees as “patriots who courageously served their nation.”

In message to employees the day after the bombing, Panetta said, “Those who fell yesterday were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism.”

Jordan’s state news agency, Petra, identified the Jordanian officer killed in the bombing as Sharif Ali bin Zaid. It says he was killed while “performing the sacred duty of Jordanian forces in Afghanistan.” NATO says Jordan has seven troops in Afghanistan.

NBC News says Bin Zaid was an intelligence agent and a first cousin of Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Both the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005A team of Australian surgeons yesterday reattached both hands and one foot to 10-year-old Perth boy, Terry Vo, after a brick wall which collapsed during a game of basketball fell on him, severing the limbs. The wall gave way while Terry performed a slam-dunk, during a game at a friend’s birthday party.

The boy was today awake and smiling, still in some pain but in good spirits and expected to make a full recovery, according to plastic surgeon, Mr Robert Love.

“What we have is parts that are very much alive so the reattached limbs are certainly pink, well perfused and are indeed moving,” Mr Love told reporters today.

“The fact that he is moving his fingers, and of course when he wakes up he will move both fingers and toes, is not a surprise,” Mr Love had said yesterday.

“The question is more the sensory return that he will get in the hand itself and the fine movements he will have in the fingers and the toes, and that will come with time, hopefully. We will assess that over the next 18 months to two years.

“I’m sure that he’ll enjoy a game of basketball in the future.”

The weight and force of the collapse, and the sharp brick edges, resulted in the three limbs being cut through about 7cm above the wrists and ankle.

Terry’s father Tan said of his only child, the injuries were terrible, “I was scared to look at him, a horrible thing.”

The hands and foot were placed in an ice-filled Esky and rushed to hospital with the boy, where three teams of medical experts were assembled, and he was given a blood transfusion after experiencing massive blood loss. Eight hours of complex micro-surgery on Saturday night were followed by a further two hours of skin grafts yesterday.

“What he will lose because it was such a large zone of traumatised skin and muscle and so on, he will lose some of the skin so he’ll certainly require lots of further surgery regardless of whether the skin survives,” said Mr Love said today.

The boy was kept unconscious under anaesthetic between the two procedures. In an interview yesterday, Mr Love explained why:

“He could have actually been woken up the next day. Because we were intending to take him back to theatre for a second look, to look at the traumatised skin flaps, to close more of his wounds and to do split skin grafting, it was felt the best thing to do would be to keep him stable and to keep him anaesthetised.”

Professor Wayne Morrison, director of the respected Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery and head of plastic and hand surgery at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, said he believed the operation to be a world first.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

The leading supplier of school uniforms in the United Kingdom, Lancashire-based manufacturer Trutex, has announced it is “seriously considering” including GPS tracking devices in future ranges of its uniform products after conducting an online survey of both parents and children.

“As a direct result of the survey, we are now seriously considering incorporating a [tracking] device into future ranges” said Trutex marketing director Clare Rix.

The survey questioned 809 parents and 444 children aged nine to 16. It showed that 44% of parents were worried about the safety of pre-teen children, and 59% wanted tracking devices installed in school apparel. 39% of children aged nine to 12 were prepared to wear clothing with tracking devices in them, while teenagers were notably less enthusiastic and more wary of what Trutex has admitted they see as a “big brother” concept.

However, Trutex has claimed the tracking devices would bring about worthwhile benefits, including being a valuable resource for parents who wanted to keep a close eye on where their children were at all times.

“As well as being a safety net for parents, there could be real benefits for schools who could keep a closer track on the whereabouts of their pupils, potentially reducing truancy levels” says Rix.

Each year, Trutex supplies 1 million blouses, 1.1 million shirts, 250,000 pairs of trousers, 20,000 blazers, 60,000 skirts and 110,000 pieces of knitwear to the UK.

It is not the first company to manufacture school uniforms with a central focus on child safety; last week Essex firm BladeRunner revealed it was selling stab-proof school blazers to parents concerned about violence against their children. The blazers were outfitted with Kevlar, a synthetic fibre used in body armour. It has already received orders internationally, including Australia.

If the Trutex tracking devices go ahead, it is unclear where in the uniform they will be located.

Friday, October 24, 2008

On August 21, the Polish weekly Przekrój published an advertisement for Dan-Mark exercise books, bearing the logo of 4fun.tv, a Polish music/interactive TV station. Part of the advertisement contained a definition of the word “exercise book”. The wording looked familiar, and Wikinews consulted Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia.

Upon seeing the Wikipedia definition, it appeared that the entry quoted in the promotional material was identical to the initial two paragraphs of the relevant Wikipedia entry.

Freelance reporters for the Polish Wikinews decided to find out the reason for such a similarity and whether either of the texts (the advertisement’s or Wikipedia’s) might be a case of copyright violation.

The reporters contacted a Jaros?aw Janas, Creative Director of 4fun.tv., where the ad appeared. His reply included the following claim:

Copyright on text does not last for fifty years as claimed by Janas, but for 70 years after the death of the author.

To investigate the authenticity of the above claims, Wikinews asked the main author of the two paragraphs in question, Wikipedian Julo, about the sources used to write the entry. He confirmed that he had written the text in question, and not copied it from an encyclopedic publication as claimed by Jana.

It is therefore impossible that both Julo and the people responsible for the exercise book advertisement have used the same uncopyrighted encyclopedia, thus coincidentally creating identical texts. The reporters also noted that the first draft of the introduction to the article was written by WaldemarWolskiHuta (February 2006). Afterward the text had undergone some modifications by Julo (September 2006), as well as Picus viridis and Beno (March 2008). However, the text presented in the press promotional material, which – according to 4fun.tv – came from an old-print encyclopedia is identical to the Wikipedia entry after the changes mentioned above had been made. Julo added that he was still alive, together with the other authors of the article in question who constituted the group of the copyright co-holders. This naturally led to a conclusion that neither 50 nor 70 years could have passed since their death. He left 4fun.tv’s actions with a comment that although the contents he and the other Wikimedians had made public and free, they are far from making them available in any “free style”, but under a specified license.

In follow up messages to Jaros?aw Janas, Wikinews reporters confronted the creative director over his seemingly inaccurate claims.

Wikinews was told in a reply that 4fun.tv would ignore the claims unless they see permission from the author of the original content to investigate this story. They were also informed that further e-mails without any specifics sent by the reporter would be qualified as spam. 4fun.tv’s creative director further added that he found the reporter’s picture on the Internet and asked how the person would feel if this picture was to appear on billboards or press releases that advertised the TV station.

Wikipedia does allow copying of its content under certain conditions. The encyclopedia’s content is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that it can be copied, modified, and used commercially and non-commercially – under the conditions that the license’s text is included with the copied content and the five main authors are mentioned. If a part of the article is used, like in the example quoted in this news story, a “right to quote”, recognized by Polish law, may be used. In such a case it suffices to mention the source of the text (Polish Wikipedia) and the author of the excerpt. 4fun.tv met none of these conditions, meaning that copyright has been violated.

Over a year ago Polish Wikinews reported on a similar problem, regarding the use of free-licensed photographs. Since that time such “borrowings” have become less frequent, however photos are still being used in discordance with the license. Journalists have gotten used to citing sources, e.g. Wikipedia, although licensing conditions require attributing the actual author, not the source. So instead of attributing John Doe for his contribution, agencies like Polska Agencja Prasowa (Polish Press Agency) are attributing the source, Wikipedia.

In early September 2008 a similar situation occurred in relation to the Polish edition of Wiktionary. Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish daily, published an IKEA advertisement, on the opening page of which an almost word-for-word Wiktionary entry was placed; additionally the advertisement used the characteristic MediaWiki layout. The reference to the external source used was missing.

In April 2008, an example of an Australian professor was cited; the scientist, in a reply to a news story, quoted a Wikipedia definition almost word-for-word. The same professor condemned the use of Wikipedia in his previous press appearances.

In 2005 Wikipedia material was discovered in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, which acknowledged its fault and published appropriate apologies in place of the article in the online edition.

Frontline magazine in 2007 was found using an image from Wikipedia without proper credit. When pointed out the magazine acknowledged the failing and a correction was promptly given in the subsequent issue.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

At least 113 people are now dead and hundreds more are missing after a 10 foot (3 m) tsunami destroyed several villages in a series of remote islands in western Indonesia. The tsunami was caused by a magnitude 7.7 earthquake which struck on Monday at 9:42 p.m. local time (14:42 UTC). The epicenter of the earthquake was 78 kilometers (48 mi) west of South Pagai, one of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra.

“We are predicting that people will need food supplies and shelter. The rain is coming down very hard, the wind is very strong,” a local police officer said, addind that emergency posts had been set up and patrols were being made to try and locate the missing. An official said that they had purchased 200 body bags “just in case.”

A local official said that most of the buildings in the coastal village of Betu Monga had been destroyed when the tsunami struck. “Of the 200 people living in that village, only 40 have been found. 160 are still missing, mostly women and children,” he said. “We have people reporting to the security post here that they could not hold on to their children, that they were swept away. A lot of people are crying.” Food supplies, he added, were running low.

Wisnu Wijaya, the preparedness director with the National Disaster Management Agency, said that the government is getting aid to the islands. “We already sent a rapid response team to this area, coordinated by the provincial government. We have local disaster management at Padang, because right now the condition of the wave is quite high,” he said. Wijaya added that high waves and stormy weather have made it difficult to reach the affected areas, and communication was a problem. Emergency shelters have been set up and the first team from Sumatra was arriving Tuesday evening to begin a rapid assessment of the aid that was needed. “Up to now, I think we still can manage this problem. Maybe also we’ll send staff to go there and make a better coordination. If they need national resources to deploy there, we’ll be ready to support local government,” Wijaya said.

The head of the regional government in the affected area told local television that some of the people recorded as missing may have moved to higher ground to take refuge from the waves. Rick Hallet, who was aboard his boat when the earthquake struck, told Australian television: “We threw whatever we could that floated—surfboards, fenders—then we jumped into the water. Fortunately, most of us had something to hold on to … and we just washed in the wetlands, and scrambled up the highest trees that we could possibly find and sat up there for an hour and a half.” The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade issued a statement saying that radio contact had been lost with a tourist boat in the area which could have been nine Australians and a Japanese national. A humanitarian organisation said that there were “genuine fears” for those aboard.

A spokesperson for a surfing resort on the coast of North Pagai said that they had “experienced a level of devastation that has rendered the resort inoperable”. Witnesses suggested that villas at the resort had been “wiped out” by the tsunami. One report suggested that a 10 feet (3 m) wave had hit the resort, causing boats to burst into flames. “There was a lot of debris floating in the water, including bar stools and other pieces of furniture from Macaronis Resort,” a member of staff said. Reports suggested that water had reached rooftops in North Pagai.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area prone to seismic shifts that spark earthquakes and volcanic activity. A massive earthquake in 2004 caused a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people across the Indian Ocean. After that disaster Indonesia worked to establish early warning systems and disaster management programs to help deal with future quakes.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

An unresponsive United States reconnaissance satellite is in an uncontrolled, decaying orbit and will re-enter Earth‘s atmosphere in late February or early March.

According to Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, “Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation.”

The satellite is out-of-control, and therefore there is no possibility to guide it to re-entry over an ocean or unpopulated area. On the one hand, since most of the earth’s surface is water or unpopulated, death or property loss due to any falling fragments, which may result from the satellite entering the atmosphere, is statistically unlikely. On the other hand, it cannot be ruled out entirely. According to General Gene Renuart, of the United States Air Force, there is a chance that the satellite may re-enter over North America. After entering the atmosphere, some debris could possibly fall on land.

“Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause,” said Johndroe.

Concerns have also been raised that some materials used in the satellite’s construction could be hazardous if they reach the ground. The satellite contains quantities of toxic hydrazine fuel, which is used for maneuvering, although this is likely to burn up on re-entry. Some of the optics aboard the satellite may contain beryllium, which is also toxic.

As the satellite was part of a classified U.S. military program, no other details, including its name, have been made public. The satellite is publicly identified by the codenames USA-193 and NRO L-21. It was launched in December 2006, by a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Ground controllers lost contact with the satellite shortly after it reached orbit. Amateur observers had been tracking USA-193 for some time, and believed that its orbit was decaying.