Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged assailant

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
abbykleman

A Hateful Fringe Stirs as Canada Embraces Migrants - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...anada-quebec-nationalists.html

shared by abbykleman on 01 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 01 Feb 17
     
    Few people believe that this stirring, which is moderate by United States standards, contributed directly the shooting Sunday inside Quebec City's largest mosque, in which six worshipers were killed and eight injured. And no evidence yet has emerged that the accused assailant, a Québécois university student, had ties to specific groups.
julia rhodes

Karzai Arranged Secret Contacts With the Taliban - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...contacts-with-the-taliban.html

US history politics crisis policy taliban obama afghanistan karzai

shared by julia rhodes on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been engaged in secret contacts with the Taliban about reaching a peace agreement without the involvement of his American and Western allies, further corroding already strained relations with the United States.
  • The secret contacts appear to help explain a string of actions by Mr. Karzai that seem intended to antagonize his American backers, Western and Afghan officials said.
  • The clandestine contacts with the Taliban have borne little fruit, according to people who have been told about them. But they have helped undermine the remaining confidence between the United States and Mr. Karzai, making the already messy endgame of the Afghan conflict even more volatile.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Mr. Karzai seemed to jump at what he believed was a chance to achieve what the Americans were unwilling or unable to do, and reach a deal to end the conflict — a belief that few in his camp shared.
  • Afghan officials have struggled in recent years to find genuine Taliban representatives, and have flitted among a variety of current and former insurgent leaders, most of whom had only tenuous connections to Mullah Omar and his inner circle, American and Afghan officials have said.
  • . The continued presence of American troops after 2014, not to mention billions of dollars in aid, depended on the president’s signature. But Mr. Karzai repeatedly balked, perplexing Americans and many Afghans alike.
  • And it is not clear whether the Taliban ever intended to seriously pursue negotiations, or were simply trying to derail the security agreement by distracting Mr. Karzai and leading him on, as many of the officials said they suspected.
  • But other Afghan and Western officials said that the contacts had fizzled, and that whatever the Taliban may have intended at the outset, they no longer had any intention of negotiating with the Afghan government. They said that top Afghan officials had met with influential Taliban leaders in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in recent weeks, and were told that any prospects of a peace deal were now gone.
  • The diplomats repeatedly found themselves incurring the wrath of Mr. Karzai, who saw the effort as an attempt to circumvent him; he tried behind the scenes to undercut it.
  • American forces are turning over their combat role to Afghan forces and preparing to leave Afghanistan this year, and the campaigning for the Afghan national election in April has begun. An orderly transition of power in an Afghanistan that can contain the insurgency on its own would be the culmination of everything that the United States has tried to achieve in the country.
  • Mr. Karzai has been increasingly concerned with his legacy, officials say. When discussing the impasse with the Americans, he has repeatedly alluded to his country’s troubled history as a lesson in dealing with foreign powers. He recently likened the security agreement to the Treaty of Gandamak, a one-sided 1879 agreement that ceded frontier lands to the British administration in India and gave it tacit control over Afghan foreign policy. He has publicly assailed American policies as the behavior of a “colonial power,” though diplomats and military officials say he has been more cordial in private.
  • In some respects, Mr. Karzai’s outbursts have been an effort to speak to Afghans who want him to take a hard line against the Americans, including many ethnic Pashtuns, who make up nearly all of the Taliban. With the American-led coalition on its way out and American influence waning, Mr. Karzai is more concerned with bridging the chasms of Afghan domestic politics than with his foreign allies’ interests.
  • Mr. Karzai has insisted that he will not sign the agreement unless the Americans help bring the Taliban to the table for peace talks. Some diplomats worry that making such a demand allows the Taliban to dictate the terms of America’s long-term presence in Afghanistan. Others question Mr. Karzai’s logic: Why would the insurgency agree to talks if doing so would ensure the presence of the foreign troops it is determined to expel?
Ellie McGinnis

How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton - David Rohde - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354688

kerry clinton politics policy obama US

shared by Ellie McGinnis on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.
  • The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.
  • arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too
  • ...89 more annotations...
  • Barack Obama’s administration, accelerating a process that had begun in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, was centralizing foreign-policy decision making in the White House’s National Security Council, marginalizing the State Department.
  • Finally, Kerry, a defeated presidential candidate, was devoid of the sexiness that automatically attaches to a figure, like Hillary Clinton, who remains a legitimate presidential prospect
  • The consensus in Washington was that Kerry was a boring if not irrelevant man stepping into what was becoming a boring, irrelevant job.
  • Nearly a year into his tenure, Kerry is the driving force behind a flurry of Mideast diplomacy the scope of which has not been seen in years. In the face of widespread skepticism, he has revived the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; brokered a deal with Russia to remove chemical weapons from Syria; embarked on a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, holding the highest-level face-to-face talks with Iranian diplomats in years; and started hammering out a new post-withdrawal security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
  • it will be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.
  • “He’s front and center on all these issues. That clearly represents a very ambitious first year for any secretary of state.”
  • Kerry has a bad habit of wandering off script. On a trip to Pakistan in August, he created two diplomatic incidents in a single interview. First he said that the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy” when it toppled the country’s democratically elected president.
  • President Obama had “a timeline” for ending U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.
  • he overshot in the opposite direction, promising that any American strike against Syria would be “unbelievably small”—a bit of impressively self-defeating rhetoric that undermined days of administration efforts to argue that a few dozen Tomahawk cruise-missile strikes would be more than what hawkish critics were calling a pointless “pinprick.”
  • a word that comes up frequently in conversations about Kerry is gasbag. He had few close friends in the Senate, where he served for nearly 30 years. A former diplomat says Kerry’s recent foreign-policy successes have made him more insufferable than ever.
  • his gaffes are caused by arrogance and indiscipline. They say that even in a city swollen with egotism and pomposity, Kerry stands out.
  • “Nobody would challenge the notion that he’s been very much a team player and willing to take on really hard assignments from the president and go to the toughest places.”
  • (In one late-night press conference in Moscow last May, he uttered a staggering 95-word sentence.
  • “Even as a junior or senior, he was a pompous blowhard,” says someone who attended Yale with Kerry in the 1960s and asked not to be named.
  • he is not so much arrogant as awkward.
  • Liberal Democrats call his hawkish views on Syria a betrayal of his antiwar past. Republicans say he is a perennial flip-flopper: he fought in the Vietnam War and then protested against it; he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then opposed it; he tried to negotiate with Bashar al‑Assad in 2009, then compared him to Adolf Hitler—and then reopened the door to negotiating with him again.
  • Kerry “just can’t dance.”
  • Washington mandarins dismiss Kerry’s foreign-policy ambitions as grandiose and overweening, especially relative to what America’s diminishing power can achieve after Iraq and Afghanistan
  • old foreign-policy hands say that instead of acknowledging the limits of American power in the post–Arab Spring Middle East, Kerry looks for misguided ways to apply power the country no longer has.
  • Current aides argue that Kerry’s recent successes belie the caricatures of him. “Show me where he hasn’t done this job well,” one demanded when I interviewed him in mid-October.
  • “I would ask John Kerry, ‘How can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?’ ”
  • Kerry seem “pompous” is that “oftentimes he tries too hard.” According to Manley and others, Kerry had a knack for walking up to fellow members on the Senate floor at precisely the wrong time.
  • His enormous ambition motivates him to aim for major breakthroughs despite daunting odds. And his healthy self-confidence allows him to believe that he can convince anyone of virtually anything.
  • Kerry also has bottomless reserves of patience that allow him to engage for hours in seemingly fruitless negotiations; he persists long past the time others would have given up in exhaustion.
  • The amount of time he’s spent negotiating with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov alone should qualify him for some kind of diplomatic medal of honor.
  • an indifference to his own political standing.
  • Political calculations may have constrained the risks Hillary Clinton was willing to take. Kerry, in contrast, no longer needs to heed political consultants. Nor does he need to worry too much about what his detractors say.
  • “I don’t care at all,” he said. “I could care less about it. You know, David, I ran for president, so I’m not scared of failure.”
  • secretary of state is the job for which Kerry was born and bred
  • “I’m not worried about the politics,” Lowenstein recalls Kerry telling him. “I want to get things done.”
  • Obama, too, no longer has to worry about reelection; concerns about the 2012 election may have limited the president’s own appetite for diplomatic risk taking in the Mideast during his first term.
  • But his enthusiasm for his current job is unquestionable; one aide told me that he will have to be dragged from the office—fingernails scraping against the floor—at the end of his term.
  • As a presidential candidate, he had to downplay his obsession with foreign policy and his fluency in foreign languages, for fear that such things would play badly with voters; as secretary of state, he can freely leverage those qualities.
  • if there is no breakthrough with Iran, or if his efforts to broker peace in Syria fall short, or if the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks founder, history will likely view Kerry as the tragicomic figure his detractors already judge him to be.
  • “After you lose the presidency, you don’t have much else to lose.”
  • Following stints as an assistant district attorney and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Kerry would, after his election to the Senate in 1984, go on to serve for 28 years on the same committee he had stood before in 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
  • (But for Ohio, where he lost to Bush by 119,000 votes, Kerry would have been president.
  • But Kerry stepped into the role at a singularly weak moment for the position. For one thing, America, weary after a decade of conflict, is turning inward; activist diplomacy is out of favor. For another, State Department employees I interviewed told me that morale is low.
  • the department is too hierarchical, inflexible, and risk-averse—and is in danger of becoming even more so in the aftermath of Benghazi.
  • the intensely controlling Obama administration has centralized foreign-policy decision making in the National Security Council, weakening the State Department.
  • Just a day after Kerry delivered one of the most impassioned speeches of his career, assailing Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilians as a “crime against conscience” and sending a clear signal that U.S. air strikes on Syria were imminent, the president announced that missile strikes might in fact not be imminent, and that he would be seeking congressional authorization to attack Syria.
  • the president risked causing foreign leaders and negotiators to doubt whether any future warnings or statements issued by Kerry were backed by the White House.
  • Kerry conducted long interviews with every living former secretary of state—Kissinger, George Shultz, Baker, Madeleine Albright, Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clinton—and set out to model himself after Shultz, who, in six and a half years serving under Ronald Reagan, was seen as a combination of the two prototypes, both a great diplomat and a good manager.
  • “I don’t care about risk, honestly,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, spoiling for a fight. “The riskiest thing to do is to not act. I would far rather try and fail than fail not trying.”
  • When off the record, in relaxed settings, he is refreshingly direct, profane, and insightful, speaking bluntly about the limits of American power and caustically lamenting Washington’s growing paralysis and partisanship
  • He finishes sentences with phrases such as something like that or that’s about it or thanks, man. Toes tapping, head bobbing back and forth, he speaks with fervor and candor. His tenacity is palpable.
  • Recent secretaries of state have had different strengths. Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two secretaries who had close relationships with their presidents (Nixon in Kissinger’s case, George H. W. Bush in Baker’s), were powerful bureaucratic players.
  • But isn’t staking America’s credibility, and his own reputation, on long-odds breakthrough agreements with Tehran or Moscow, or on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a dubious exercise, as Obama’s failed first-term efforts at Mideast peace demonstrated?
  • Colin Powell lost a crucial internal administration battle in failing to halt the Bush White House’s march to war in Iraq—but was adored at the State Department for implementing sweeping administrative reforms.
  • Clinton embraced a new, Google Hangout era of town-hall diplomacy, and she elevated economic development and women’s issues. She was an architect of the administration’s “pivot to Asia,” and she took risks in supporting the Afghanistan troop surge and the intervention in Libya.
  • steered clear of the Middle East, delegating special envoys like Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, peace talks with the Taliban
  • Clinton was much more prudent and careful than Kerry, whom one former State Department official describes as more of a “high-risk, high-reward”
  • “My view is that she was pretty sheltered,” he told me. “They were not interpersonally pleasant, and they were very protective of her. You can get into a cocoon.”
  • “My assessment was that she made a calculated political choice not to hang her hat on that thankless task,” Kim Ghattas,
  • the former secretary would have taken bolder risks but was reined in by the White House—especially during her first couple of years in office, when hostility from the bitter 2008 primary campaign still lingered between the Obama and Clinton staffs.
  • she actively engaged in Middle East talks, at one point meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seven hours in New York.
  • Kennan warned Powell about the dangers of traveling too much—of prioritizing activist diplomacy over providing the White House with solid foreign-policy analysis.
  • Powell gave a copy of Kennan’s letter to Kerry. So far, Kerry is not following the advice. As October came to a close, Kerry had already flown more than 213,000 miles and spent more than 100 days—roughly 40 percent of his time—outside the United States. In his first nine months, he’d traveled more miles than Clinton had in her entire first year in office.
  • In 2009, he convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to consent to a runoff in his country’s disputed presidential election.
  • 2011, he was dispatched to Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden to persuade local officials to return the tail of an American helicopter that had crashed at the site.
  • cemented Kerry’s bond with Obama was less his diplomatic achievements than his ability to impersonate another tall, wealthy Massachusetts politician with good hair: Kerry served as Mitt Romney’s surrogate during weeks of preparation for the 2012 presidential debates.
  • Kerry channeled Romney so effectively that, aides to both men say, he got under Obama’s skin.
  • Kerry agreed that the U.S. should try to revive Middle East negotiations before the Palestinians again pushed for statehood, at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013.
  • In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pushed for a resumption of negotiations. At a final press conference before returning to Washington, Obama announced that he was handing the pursuit of talks over to Kerry.
  • “What I can guarantee is that Secretary Kerry is going to be spending a good deal of time in discussions with the parties.”
  • He met alone with Abbas for two hours in Amman and then flew to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu and three of his aides.
  • Kerry pressed on, returning in April to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the West Bank. After 24 hours of talks with both sides, Kerry held a press conference at the airport in Tel Aviv.
  • Kerry held three meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas in three days, including one meeting with the Israeli prime minister that lasted six hours, until 3 a.m. On June 29, he canceled a trip to the United Arab Emirates so he could keep talking with Netanyahu and Abbas, raising expectations of a breakthrough. On June 30, he held another press conference at the Tel Aviv airport.
  • “We started out with very wide gaps, and we have narrowed those considerably.”
  • Five months into the job, Kerry was off to an ominous start. His wife was in the hospital. Syria was convulsing. Progress toward Israeli-Palestinian talks was stalled. Egypt was burning. And Republican attack ads were making it appear as though the secretary of state had spent the weekend yachting.
  • Kerry said, according to the aide. “The only thing I’m interested in is a serious negotiation that can lead to a final-status agreement.”
  • “On behalf of President Obama, I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final-status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Kerry said, calmly and deliberately. “This is a significant and welcome step forward.” He declined to take questions.
  • Nine days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the release of the 104 Palestinian prisoners. The next day, Israeli and Palestinian officials arrived in Washington to begin peace talks.
  • The smallness of his circle of aides, which had been seen early on as a detriment to his management of the State Department, now made it easier to keep information contained.
  • Working with consultants from McKinsey, diplomats estimated that $4 billion in long-term private investment would flow to the Palestinians in the wake of an agreement.
  • Palestinian officials appear to have compromised on their demand for a settlement freeze.
  • From the beginning, Kerry had insisted that the Obama administration not allow a halt in Israeli settlement construction to become a public precondition.
  • Kerry also reiterated a core argument: the security that Israel currently enjoys is temporary, if not illusory. Without a two-state solution, Israel will face a European-led campaign of delegitimization, a new intifada, and a Palestinian leader far more radical than Abbas.
  • The crucial concession—the release of the 104 prisoners—came from the Israeli side
  • “It takes time to listen, it takes time to persuade,” Frank Lowenstein told me. “This is where Kerry’s willingness to stay up all night pays off.”
  • The U.S. provided nonlethal aid to the opposition, but White House officials were so fearful of American assistance inadvertently falling into the hands of jihadists that the National Security Council Deputies Committee monitored the distribution of the aid in granular detail. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were funneling cash and weapons to hard-line militants, including Al Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
  • Russia continued providing Syria with arms and blocking any action by the UN Security Council.
  • When Putin finally received Kerry, after a three-hour delay, Putin reportedly fiddled continuously with his pen and “more resembled a man indulging a long-ago scheduled visit from the cultural attaché of Papua New Guinea than participating in an urgent summit with America’s top diplomat,”
  • At a late-night press conference, a beaming Kerry announced that he and Lavrov would co-host a peace conference in Geneva.
  • “They were great efforts, and again, I reiterate my gratitude to President Putin for a very generous welcome here.”
  • Earlier, in April, after American intelligence officials had confirmed that Assad had carried out several small-scale chemical-weapons attacks, Obama had reluctantly agreed to mount a covert CIA effort to arm and train moderate rebels.
  • if the United States did not “impose consequences” for Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Syrian leader would see it as “a green light for continued CW use.” But the White House did not alter course.
  • Both Obama and Kerry favored a military response—air strikes—according to a senior administration official. As American intelligence agencies accumulated evidence suggesting that Assad was responsible, Kerry offered to make the public case for strikes. White House officials welcomed the idea and vetted his speeches.
  • “My vision is that, if you can make peace, if you can get Israel and Palestine resolved and can get the Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon put to bed appropriately—even if Syria didn’t calm down—if you get those two pieces or one piece of that, you’ve got a hugely changed dynamic in a region that is in turmoil. And if you take just the Palestinian-Israeli situation, you have the potential to make peace with 57 nations—35 Muslim nations and 22 Arab nations. If the issue is resolved, they will recognize Israel.”
Javier E

Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans From Polar Melt - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-has-begun-scientists-say.html

climate change Antarctica ice glacier melt

shared by Javier E on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable,
  • a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.
  • The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades.
  • Those six glaciers alone could cause the ocean to rise four feet as they disappear, Dr. Rignot said, possibly within a couple of centuries. He added that their disappearance will most likely destabilize other sectors of the ice sheet, so the ultimate rise could be triple that.
  • The new finding appears to be the fulfillment of a prediction made in 1978 by an eminent glaciologist, John H. Mercer of the Ohio State University. He outlined the vulnerable nature of the West Antarctic ice sheet and warned that the rapid human-driven release of greenhouse gases posed “a threat of disaster.” He was assailed at the time, but in recent years, scientists have been watching with growing concern as events have unfolded in much the way Dr. Mercer predicted
Javier E

Scientists Sequence Genome of Ancient Plague Bacterium - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13plague.html

historical plague genome

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • This is the first time the genome of an ancient pathogen has been reconstructed, opening the way to tracking other ancient epidemics and how their microbes adapted to human hosts.
  • If the microbe’s genome is so little changed, the deadliness of the Black Death may reflect the condition of its medieval victims. Harsh as the economic stresses assailing Europe today may be, they are a breeze compared with problems in the mid-14th century. The climate was cooling, heavy rains rotted out crops and caused frequent famines, and the Hundred Years’ War began in 1337. People were probably already suffering from malnutrition and other diseases when the plague arrived like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse.
  • work by Dr. Achtman and Dr. Krause had shown that the Black Death “was really a series of epidemics coming out of China and sweeping across the susceptible ecological situation” created by the culture of medieval Europe. The plague in each outbreak probably did not persist very long and was repeatedly re-established by new infections from East Asia, where the bacterium is still endemic in small rodents like marmots.
qkirkpatrick

Two Champions of Children Are Given Nobel Peace Prize - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...awarded-nobel-peace-prize.html

children nobel peace prize education culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 11 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • “Who is Malala?” shouted the Taliban gunman who leapt onto a crowded bus in northwestern Pakistan two years ago, then fired a bullet into the head of Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old schoolgirl and outspoken activist.
  • Ms. Yousafzai and her compelling story have been reshaped by a range of powerful forces — often, though not always, for good
  • In Pakistan, conservatives assailed the schoolgirl as an unwitting pawn in an American-led assault.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “This award is for all those children who are voiceless, whose voices need to be heard,” she said. “I speak for them, and I stand up with them.”
  • In Pakistan, she has come to symbolize the country’s existential struggle against Islamist violence.
  • Amid the debate about the politics of her celebrity, few question the heroism of Ms. Yousafzai — a charismatic and exceptionally eloquent teenager who has followed an astonishing trajectory since being airlifted from Pakistan’s Swat Valley. At just 17, she has visited with President Obama and the queen of England, addressed the United Nations, and become the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize since it was created in 1901.
  • Mr. Satyarthi, 60, a veteran, soft-spoken activist based in New Delhi who has rescued trafficked children from slavery
  • Indian child rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.
  • qkirkpatrick on 11 Oct 14
     
    Malala Yousafzai was given the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against terrorist groups who are not allowing girls to go to school. In Pakistan, she has come to symbolize the country's existential struggle against Islamist violence. She shares the prize with Indian child rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.
qkirkpatrick

Kim Ki-jong Attacks American Ambassador Mark Lippert in South Korea - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...386953

Korea politics history

shared by qkirkpatrick on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • On Thursday morning, Mark Lippert, the American ambassador to South Korea, was viciously attacked by a razor-wielding assailant moments before Lippert was set to speak at a meeting in Seoul
  • “South and North Korea should be reunified," the attacker yelled as he gashed Lippert's face and wrist, causing wounds that would ultimately require two-and-a-half hours of surgery and some 80 stitches.
  • The U.S. State Department issued an initial statement in which it labeled the attack an "assault" and condemned it as an "act of violence."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Meanwhile, North Korea praised the attack as a "knife shower of justice" and "just punishment" for military cooperation between the United States and South Korea.
  • An irony here is that Thursday's attack took place while Lippert was attending an event organized by the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation which, CNN notes, is a group that "advocates peaceful reunification between the two Koreas." Kim was apparently a member of the group.
qkirkpatrick

Gunman Panics Canadian Capital, Killing Soldier in Rampage - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...canada-parliament-gunfire.html

canada capital killing rampage politics crisis islam terrorism

shared by qkirkpatrick on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The heart of the Canadian capital was thrown into panic and placed in lockdown on Wednesday after a gunman armed with a rifle or shotgun fatally wounded a corporal guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier the National War Memorial, entered the nearby Parliament building and fired multiple times before he was shot and killed.
  • It was the second deadly assault on a uniformed member of Canada’s armed forces in three days
  • Law enforcement authorities in Washington said their Canadian counterparts had identified the assailant as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who had changed his name from Michael Joseph Hall, and said he had been a convert to Islam
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The shootings came amid heightened concern among Canadians about terrorist attacks
  • As the police locked down buildings in downtown Ottawa and asked stores to close, an eerie still, broken only by screaming emergency sirens, descended on the district.
  • The easy access to the grounds of Parliament Hill reflected the general Canadian view that an attack was unlikely. Mr. Harper and other members of his cabinet, however, have frequently warned that terrorist attacks might come to Canada.
  • “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be
  • qkirkpatrick on 23 Oct 14
     
    A Gunman entered the Canadian Parliament building and opened fire. He killed a Canadian armed forces man before being shot and killed. The attacker appeared to have been motivated by Islamic Extremism, which is also the second deadly event in 3 days in Canada. Many people are becoming panicked over the recent events.
  • mollyharper on 23 Oct 14
     
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/world/canada-shootings-hero/index.html?hpt=wo_c1 Kevin Vickers is being called a "hero" for taking down the gunman.
katyshannon

Israel charges two over arson attack that killed Palestinian family | Reuters - 1 views

www.reuters.com/...-charges-idUSKBN0UH05R20160103

israel charges arson attack palestinian family killed reuters politics crisis culture

shared by katyshannon on 04 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Israeli prosecutors filed murder charges on Sunday against a man and a minor for an arson attack in the occupied West Bank that killed three members of a Palestinian family and helped fuel the fiercest eruption of street violence in years.
  • The attack on July 31 killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and his parents Saad and Riham.
  • Amiram Ben-Uliel, a 21-year-old from a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, was charged with three counts of racially motivated murder at Lod court near Tel Aviv. A second Jewish defendant, whose name was withheld due to his age, was charged as an accessory.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Defence lawyers said the pair had given false confessions under torture in close-door interrogations, an allegation denied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Shin Bet security agency.
  • "I doubt such confessions will stand up in court," lawyer Hai Haber told reporters. "We know there's no significant external evidence linking the suspects to this incident."
  • The attack in Duma village and ensuing Israeli investigation laid bare fissures in Netanyahu's coalition government, where one ultra-nationalist partner voiced misgivings about the handling of Jewish suspects.Thirteen other Israeli Jews, most of them minors, were also indicted for hate crimes, including assaulting a Palestinian, vandalism of Arab property and setting fire to a church.
  • Referred to in Israel as "price-tag attacks", such offences have usually been carried out in what the attackers say are reprisals for Palestinian violence against Israelis or government curbs on unauthorized West Bank settlement building.
  • Saad Dawabsheh's brother Naser said he hoped the defendants would receive the maximum penalty, but was skeptical of Israel's seriousness in prosecuting the case."We have no trust in the Israeli judiciary. They would not have launched an investigation were it not for the international pressure on them," he said, accusing the government of effectively "support(ing) the terrorism conducted by (West Bank) settlers against our people".
  • The time it has taken Israel to crack down on the Jewish militants, compared to the speedy and sometimes lethal response by state security forces to similar actions by Arabs, has angered Palestinians, contributing to a wave of stabbings, car-rammings and shooting attacks against Israelis since Oct. 1.
  • Twenty-one Israelis and a U.S. citizen have died in the latest bloodshed, a number that will rise if police deem a Tel Aviv shooting that killed two people on Friday as a pro-Palestinian attack. The gunman, an Israeli Arab, is at large. Israeli forces or armed civilians have killed at least 132 Palestinians, 82 of whom authorities described as assailants. Most of the others were killed in clashes with security forces.
  • Israeli officials said their investigation into the attacks by far-right Jews were hampered by the suspects' operating in small, tight-knit cells and eluding electronic surveillance.Netanyau said the indictments demonstrated the rule of law in Israel, telling his cabinet in broadcast remarks: "We oppose murder of all kinds. We oppose violence of all kinds."
katyshannon

Abbas Says PA Not Bound by Agreements With Israel - Diplomacy and Defense - Haaretz - 2 views

www.haaretz.com/...1.678271

israel palestine politics crisis history culture policy

shared by katyshannon on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • NEW YORK – The Palestinian Authority will no longer uphold the agreements it has signed with Israel over the last 20 years, PA President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday
  • Abbas said Israel “must assume all of its responsibilities as an occupying power
  • The State of Palestine, based on the 4th of June 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, is a state under occupation,” Abbas continued. He urged the United Nations to grant the Palestinians international protection and said any country that hasn’t yet recognized Palestine should do so forthwith.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Abbas used the speech to assail Israel, accusing it of systematically violating all its agreements with the Palestinians and of trying to destroy the two-state solution.
  • A response to the speech issued by the Prime Minister’s Office didn’t relate directly to Abbas’ statement.  
  • “We expect and call on the [Palestinian] Authority and its leader to act responsibly and accede to the proposal of the prime minister of Israel and enter into direct negotiations with Israel without preconditions,” the PMO said. “The fact that he – time and again – has refused to do so is the best possible proof of the fact he does not intend to reach a peace agreement.”
  • Abbas also dwelled at length on hate crimes perpetrated by Jews against Palestinians and accused Israel of protecting the perpetrators rather than catching them. He also accused Israel of establishing an apartheid regime in the West Bank.
  • “How can a state claiming to be an oasis of democracy and claiming that its courts and security apparatus function according to the law accept the existence of so-called ‘price tag’ gangs and other terrorist organizations that terrorize our people, their property and holy sites, all under the sight of the Israeli army and police, which do not deter or punish, but rather provide them with protection?” he demanded.
  • Responding to speeches by other world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which focused mainly on the battle against ISIS, Abbas declared that any war on terror must begin with solving the Palestinian problem.
  • Immediately after his speech, Abbas attended a festive ceremony in which the Palestinian flag was raised at UN headquarters for the first time.
  • U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the gathering that he doesn’t consider Israeli-Palestinian peace an “impossible dream” and that Washington remains committed to peace talks.
  • katyshannon on 01 Oct 15
     
    Abbas says Palestine is no longer bound by agreements with Israel
  • horowitzza on 03 Oct 15
     
    This man, Abbas, is an anti-semite, and has made it very clear that he does not want peace: "Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah," and "The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours and they (the Jews) have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem." 'I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land' "I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and the birthplace of Jesus Christ peace be upon him, to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people…" He did not even reference the Jewish connection to Israel "In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli-civilian or soldier-in our lands." It is very difficult to believe anything he said in his speech in this article. This kind of article is the propaganda that is spreading anti Israel and anti-semitic views throughout the world.
katyshannon

Tearful Obama Outlines Steps to Curb Gun Deaths - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-control-executive-action.html

obama steps gun deaths new york times politics history US policy

shared by katyshannon on 06 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — As tears streamed down his face, President Obama on Tuesday condemned the gun violence that has reached across the United States and vowed to curb the bloodshed with or without Congress.
  • “In this room right here, there are a lot of stories. There’s a lot of heartache,” Mr. Obama said in the White House East Room, flanked by relatives of those struck down in mass shootings, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. “There’s a lot of resilience, there’s a lot of strength, but there’s also a lot of pain.”For all the emotion he showed, Mr. Obama nonetheless faces legal, political and logistical hurdles that are likely to blunt the effect of the plan he laid out.
  • A number of the executive actions he plans are only suggested “guidance” for federal agencies, not binding regulations. They were framed mostly as clarifying and enforcing existing law, not expanding it. And many of those measures rely on hefty funding increases that a Republican-led Congress is almost certain to reject.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Among other measures, the plan aims to better define who should be licensed as a gun dealer and thus be required to conduct background checks on customers to weed out prohibited buyers.
  • Even the administration said it was impossible to gauge how big an effect the steps might have, how many new gun sales might be regulated or how many illegal guns might be taken off the streets.
  • Proposals that would have the biggest effect have long been shelved by even the most ardent gun control advocates who now see an assault weapons ban or mandatory gun buyback programs like ones in Australia in 1996 and 2003 as political fantasy.
  • “Each time this comes up,” Mr. Obama said in his speech, “we are fed the excuse that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that, so why bother trying. I reject that thinking. We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.”
  • Nearly 21 million gun sales were processed through the background check system in 2014, but some industry analysts say as many as 40 percent more firearms could have been sold through private transactions not subject to background checks. Even the most hopeful advocates say the new plan would affect only thousands of sales.
  • Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch told reporters Monday that she could not say whether the new restrictions would have had any effect in a series of recent mass shootings, including last month’s attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 dead. But in the massacre of nine people at a South Carolina church in June, the man charged, Dylan Roof, was able to buy a .45-caliber handgun despite admitting to drug use. The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said at the time that a breakdown in the background check system had allowed Mr. Roof to buy the gun.
  • Modest as the new measures may prove to be, the response was unrestrained. Republican presidential candidates and congressional leaders greeted them with peals of protests and angry claims of a “gun grab” that would violate Second Amendment rights. Gun control advocates hailed them as a breakthrough in what has often been a losing battle to toughen firearms restrictions.
  • The families of gun victims and gun control activists crowded into the White House and watched Mr. Obama break down as he recalled the young children gunned down by an assailant in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
  • By taking action, Mr. Obama is purposely stoking a furious political debate that has roiled Congress and spilled over into the presidential campaign. Vowing last year to “politicize” the gun issue after a mass shooting at an Oregon community college, Mr. Obama on Tuesday made good on that promise.
  • The National Rifle Association, targeted by Mr. Obama in his speech, mocked his tears.“The American people do not need more emotional, condescending lectures that are completely devoid of facts,” said Chris W. Cox, the group’s top lobbyist.
  • Republican presidential candidates also raced to condemn Mr. Obama, with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas putting up a web page with a menacing, altered picture of the president in a commando outfit. A caption read “Obama Wants Your Guns” next to a fund-raising appeal.
  • Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin posted his opposition on Twitter as the president spoke, saying Mr. Obama’s “words and actions amount to a form of intimidation that undermines liberty.” But Mr. Obama’s allies were equally intense in their defense.
  • Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, posted on Twitter from the East Room: “President wiping tears. So am I. One of the most moving things I’ve ever seen.”
katyshannon

Zika virus tied to birth defects is international emergency, WHO says | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...health-zika-who-idUSKCN0VA39E

zika virus birth defect international emergency brazil reuters Crisis

shared by katyshannon on 02 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The World Health Organization on Monday declared the mosquito-borne Zika virus an international public health emergency due to its link to thousands of birth defects in Brazil, as the U.N. agency sought to build a global response to the threat.
  • WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told reporters that coordinated international action was needed to improve detection and expedite work on a vaccine and better diagnostics for the disease, but said curbs on travel or trade were not necessary.
  • The WHO said last week the Zika virus, transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, was "spreading explosively" and could infect as many as 4 million people in the Americas. The Pan American Health Organization says Zika has spread in 24 nations and territories in the Americas.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Chan, whose agency was assailed as too slow in reacting to West Africa's Ebola epidemic that killed more than 10,000 people in the past two years, cited "first and foremost the big concern about microcephaly," the birth defect that causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and improperly developed brains.
  • U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) head Thomas Frieden said the WHO emergency declaration "calls the world to action" on Zika. The CDC added four more countries and territories to its list of locales that pose a risk for Zika infection, advising pregnant women to consider avoiding travel to those areas.
  • Brazil is due to host the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August, and President Dilma Rousseff's chief of staff said on Monday there is no risk of cancelling the games due to Zika.
  • The emergency designation, recommended by a committee of independent experts following criticism of a hesitant response to Zika so far, should help fast-track international action and research priorities. The move lends official urgency to research funding and other steps to stem the spread of the virus.
  • This marks the fourth time the WHO has declared a global health emergency since such procedures were put in place in 2007, with the others arising from influenza, Ebola and polio.
  • The Zika virus has raised questions worldwide about whether pregnant women should avoid infected countries. Chan said delaying travel was something pregnant women "can consider" but added that if they needed to travel they should take protective measures by covering up and using mosquito repellent.
  • Brazil has reported some 3,700 suspected cases of microcephaly. Brazilian Health Minister Marcelo Castro told Reuters the epidemic was worse than believed because in 80 percent of cases the infected people had no symptoms.
  • As the virus spreads from Brazil, other countries in the Americas are also likely to see cases of babies with Zika-linked birth defects, experts believe. The clinical symptoms of Zika are usually mild and often similar to dengue, which is transmitted by the same mosquito, leading to fears that Zika will spread into all parts of the world where dengue is commonplace.
  • More than a third of the world’s population lives in areas at risk of dengue infection, in a band stretching through Africa, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.Zika's rapid spread in Latin America is attributed to the prevalence of Aedes aegypti and a lack of immunity among the population.
  • A senior Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, "This is not an Ebola-type situation where you have to stop people at the border."
  • New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said the state's health department would offer free tests for individuals with symptoms of infection who have traveled to countries impacted by Zika.
katyshannon

Mali hotel attack: 10 dead in Radisson Blu; attackers still inside, army says - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

mali hotel army cnn crisis death terrorist

shared by katyshannon on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Assailants with guns blazing attacked a hotel hosting diplomats and others in Mali's capital on Friday morning, leaving at least 10 people dead and trapping dozens in the building for hours, officials in the West African nation said
  • Malian and U.N. security forces launched a counterattack at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako and escorted guests out. By late Friday afternoon, no hostages were believed to remain in the building, though attackers still were inside, Malian army Col. Mamadou Coulibaly told reporters.
  • At least 10 bodies have been found in a hall of the hotel, Coulibaly said. At least six people injured in the attack have been hospitalized
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The assault began around 7 a.m., when two or three attackers with AK-47 rifles exited at least one vehicle with diplomatic plates and entered the hotel with guns firing, said Olivier Saldago, a spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali.The attack, Saldago said, came as the hotel hosted diplomatic delegations working on a peace process in the landlocked country, a former French colony that has been battling Islamist extremists with the help of U.N. and French forces.The Radisson chain said that as many as 170 people -- 140 guests and 30 employees -- had been there as the attack began.
redavistinnell

Killers Were Long Radicalized, F.B.I. Investigators Say - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sailants-were-radicalized.html

killers investigators new york new york times crisis culture

shared by redavistinnell on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Killers Were Long Radicalized, F.B.I. Investigators Say
  • he couple who carried out the deadly attack that killed 14 people here last week had long been radicalized and had been practicing at a target range days before their murder spree, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Monday.
  • The authorities said they now had evidence that there was extensive planning for the attack. Mr. Bowdich said the couple honed their shooting skills at ranges across the Los Angeles region, including one near where the attack took place here in San Bernardino County.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But in recent days a fuller picture of the couple has emerged as the F.B.I. and other American intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained greater access to their electronics and phone records, and as more interviews have been conducted with family members, friends, co-workers and other associates. 
  • “At first it seemed very black and white to us that he changed radically when he met her,” said one of the officials who declined to be identified because of the continuing investigation. “But it’s become clear that he was that way before he met her.” 
  • He said that the F.B.I. had interviewed 400 people, and he asked for patience from the public as the agency seeks to untangle the origins and motivations of the attack on the Inland Regional Center, which also wounded 21 people
  • John Galletta, a firearms instructor at the range, confirmed that Mr. Farook had visited, but he did not say if he had been coming regularly. Mr. Galletta said he had not seen Mr. Farook’s wife at the range.
  • “Their teachings have a strong dose of ‘Muslims are destined to lead the world’ and ‘the corrupt West must be confronted.’ ”
  • Critics in Pakistan have long said that Al-Huda, which urges women to cover their faces and to study the Quran, spreads a more conservative strain of Islam. But it has never been directly linked to jihadist violence.
  • “She said she was leaving to get married,” said Ms. Qamar, who wore a black niqab that exposed only her eyes. “Had she completed our course, I’m sure nothing like this would have happened.”
  • “Quran for all; in every hand, every heart,” reads the slogan on the group’s website. Before leaving in May 2014, Ms. Malik had requested information about completing her studies by correspondence, Ms. Chaudhry added. “We sent her the documents by email, but never heard back,” she said.
  • The group also provides charitable services like education scholarships and a marriage bureau to help religious parents find suitable spouses for their children.
  • “Religious conservatism and piety are not the only thing institutions like Al-Huda spread,
  • Officials at the center said she enrolled in an 18-month course to study the Quran in 2013, just as she completed her degree at Bahauddin Zakariya. But she left before finishing the course, telling administrators she was getting married.
  • “Whatever Tashfeen Malik allegedly did is an individual act,” said Ms. Chaudhry, the spokeswoman. “We have nothing to do with it.”
  • John E. D’Angelo, the special assistant agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said that Mr. Farook used his name to legally buy three of the guns seized after the attack. Two other weapons were bought by Enrique Marquez, a former neighbor of his family in Riverside.
zachcutler

Jakarta: Deadly attack in Indonesian capital; ISIS blamed - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

jakarta attack history US indonesian capital

shared by zachcutler on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Attackers struck in the middle of the day Thursday
  • two, wounding 19 and raising alarms about te
  • hub -- killing at least
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • this time in the world's most populous Muslim country.
  • ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack in an official statement posted online by the terror organization, which was translated by the monitoring group Flashpoint and verified by CNN
  • The Jakarta carnage, in an area frequented by foreigners, came 6,000 miles from and two days after ISIS boasted about a suicide bombing in the heart of Istanbul
  • CNN security analyst Bob Baer likened the Jakarta attack to the November 13 Paris massacre in which terrorists linked to ISIS struck several locations at the same time. Yet the number of dead was nowhere near the toll of 130 in France, with Clarke Jones,
  • "It's concerning (to have) yet one more day and another attack in another part of the world," Gohel told CNN
  • That set in motion two militants outside the coffee shop who seized two foreigners,
  • Heavily armed police soon swarmed the scene, firing on the militants and looking for other attackers
  • Dutch national among 19 wounded
  • king for those who helped them in plotting, financing and getting weaponry, according to Charliyan, the police spokesman.By then, police had already counted five assailants dead at th
  • though they are loo
maddieireland334

'Making a Murderer' and failing justice system (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Laws are designed to keep chaos at bay, to set a foundation for a civil society. My not slowing down fast enough was not a threat to the social order.
  • About the time of my last ticket, the country was fighting over O.J. Simpson. Most white Americans were horrified that because they believed he got away with a double murder and didn't want to know about prosecutorial mistakes and dubious police actions. Most black people cheered that a system they had long believed was corrupt had been beaten, for once. A lead detective lying on the stand, using the n-word and bragging about planting evidence were not incidental facts to them
  • "Making a Murderer" is forcing us to confront those disparate views anew, as well as encouraging us to better understand that the people who are ticketed or jailed and imprisoned more, and more harshly, than the rest of us aren't necessarily more deserving of punishment than those of us who have skated by dent of birth, happenstance or policy design.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Michelle Alexander did a great job detailing that arbitrariness in "The New Jim Crow."
  • "The clear majority of Americans of all races have violated drug laws. But due to resource constraints (and the politics of the drug war), only a small fraction are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated," she wrote. "In 2002, for example, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, compared to 1.5 million drug arrests and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense."
  • everyone is innocent until proven guilty; you will only be convicted if there is no real doubt that you committed the crime -- are either outright lies or fantastical tales we tell ourselves.
  • Avery spent almost 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit. DNA testing done by the Innocence Project proved that a different man was the assailant. While he served time, the actual rapist was free to hurt other women. That man, Gregory Allen, is serving a 60-year prison sentence for a 1995 rape.
  • Since the airing of the documentary, we've learned that a juror in the Avery case said the verdict was a sort of compromise, that not everyone in the room believed he had done what he had been charged with: the definition of reasonable doubt if ever there was one. No matter; they sent him to prison anyway.
  • "The 'reasonable doubt' rule was not originally designed to serve the purpose it is asked to serve today: It was not originally designed to protect the accused. Instead, it was designed to protect the souls of the jurors against damnation," he wrote.
  • An alternate juror told me there's no doubt he would have voted not guilty had he been the 12th, not 13th juror -- which would have been enough to set Huggins free. Talk about arbitrary. Because of that roll of the dice, Huggins sits in prison hoping an appeal is successful instead of raising his young kids and taking care of his elderly mother.
  • I complained about the arbitrariness of a cop giving me a ticket in a speed trap. That's nothing compared to what men like Avery and Huggins -- and too many others -- face. Finally, the public seems to be recognizing that ugly reality.
sgardner35

Justifiable Homicides, Taken Off the Books, Alter a Murder Tally - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ooks-alter-a-murder-tally.html

shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • When the Police Department counts the killings in 2015, a year when the official tally of murder in New York City was only slightly above its historic low, the preliminary figure of 350 homicides will not include the death of Mr. Williams, 26. His shooting was deemed justified by Queens prosecutors and was removed in late December from the official tally of city murders.
  • Mr. Kelly accused the department of underreporting shootings and murders, but provided no examples of when it had done so.
  • Those that are deemed by prosecutors to be justified are not counted in official statistics, nor is gunfire that misses its target.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Homicides are often added to the year-end tally of murders when men or women succumb to earlier violent acts. And occasionally the police and prosecutors determine from the outset that a gunman is justified in shooting an armed assailant, as occurred in March when a retired New York City correction officer fatally shot a construction worker after an altercation on a subway train in Brooklyn.
  • “I don’t recall one like this, with the exception of the bodega owner who shoots a guy who tries to rob him; that’s usually the typical scenario,” Stephen P. Davis, the department’s chief spokesman, said. He noted that the determination that the crime was justified rests with the district attorney.
  • In the case of Mr. Williams, detectives and prosecutors reviewed video showing the shooting in front of 25-76 Steinway Street and determined that the event had been instigated by Mr. Williams.
  • Detectives caught up with Mr. Williams in March when he drove himself to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center after being shot several times in the legs and buttocks while sitting with a friend in a car in front of his home in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
  • It was not clear what spurred the dispute between Mr. Williams and Mr. King early on the morning of Sept. 28 outside the Crystal Lounge in Astoria. Detectives found video showing the shooting, leading prosecutors to rule it a justifiable homicide.“The defendant acted in sel
  • f-defense because at the time he was being shot at he did not have a weapon and he believed he was in imminent danger of being killed or suffering bodily injury,”
jongardner04

Israeli woman stabbed to death in Otniel settlement house - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-35339520

israeli

shared by jongardner04 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • An Israeli woman has been stabbed to death by a Palestinian who broke into her house, Israel's army says.
  • Troops are searching for the attacker who fled the scene in the Jewish settlement of Otniel near Hebron.
  • Some 155 Palestinians - mostly attackers, Israel says - have been killed in that period of unrest.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Roadblocks have been set up, residents were told to lock themselves inside their homes and flares lit the night sky as the manhunt went on.
  • The assailant at a base near Nablus was Wissam Qasrawi, 21, from Mesilyeh village near the city of Jenin, in the northern West Bank, the Associated Press news agency quoted Palestinian officials as saying.
Megan Flanagan

Police: Danville officer killed after suspect's threat - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US gun violence police

shared by Megan Flanagan on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • said her ex-boyfriend took off with his weapons Sunday night and was looking to kill an officer
  • Cottrell's body was found behind the Danville Municipal Building
  • His weapon had been stolen, and his police car was missing.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • immediately clear whether Cottrell was targeted specifically, or if the assailant was trying to kill any police officer.
  • at least 30 U.S. law enforcement officers were shot to death
  • 24 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in 2015, a 4% increase from 2014
  • 42 officers were killed by firearms, which was a decline from 2014, when 49 officers were shot and killed,
  • encountered a man who shot him
  • had faced multiple state and federal charges going back more than 10 years
  • pleaded guilty to possessing an unregistered sawed-off rifle in 2005, and in 2010 pleaded guilty to felony possession of a firearm
  • a federal magistrate judge sent Henderson to a treatment center run by the Utah Department of Corrections
dangoodman

Ted Cruz: Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

ted cruz donald donald trump trump reagan US president history politics

shared by dangoodman on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Ted Cruz: Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan
  • Ted Cruz swatted away the idea that Donald Trump's conversion to Republicanism was genuine, saying that Trump's late-life change to conservatism was in no way similar to that of another former Democrat, Ronald Reagan.
  • Cruz, who has shed all caution about attacking Trump after months of playing nice, also continued to assail Trump's giving history to Democrats
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Cruz insists he will not turn the battle with Trump into a personal war
  • "I disagree with Donald," Cruz said. "We need a leader who is prepared to do what is ever needed to keep this country safe, and that typically doesn't include spending your time on Twitter."
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 79 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page