Murder
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FILE PHOTO – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pauses while speaking at AIPAC in Washington, U.S., March 26, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
April 11, 2019
By Patricia Zengerle and Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday he was still trying to determine the best way to respond to the October murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate, but described the kingdom as an important U.S. ally against Iran.
“We’re trying to figure out the best way to” respond, McConnell said at a roundtable meeting with reporters.
“Obviously what clearly happened is outrageous and unacceptable. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia’s an important ally against the Iranians. So it is a difficult problem to figure out exactly the most appropriate response.”
Members of Congress, including some Senate Republicans as well as Democrats, have been clamoring for Republican President Donald Trump to take a stronger line against Saudi Arabia.
They are concerned not just about the death of Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist killed in October at a Saudi consulate in Turkey, but also the heavy toll on civilians of the war in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition is battling Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.
A CIA assessment has blamed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for ordering Khashoggi’s killing. Riyadh denies the prince had any involvement in the murder.
Lawmakers have introduced legislation seeking to impose sanctions on Saudi officials, but they have failed to advance in the Senate.
McConnell would not say whether he foresaw votes on those measures. “It’s a tough situation,” he said.
McConnell also predicted that the Senate, where Republicans hold a slim majority, would sustain Trump’s expected veto of a resolution that would end U.S. involvement with the Saudi-led coalition in the war in Yemen.
The war powers resolution passed the House of Representatives last week, in a historic rebuke of Trump’s policy of continued support for Saudi Arabia. Having already passed the Senate, the measure was sent to the White House, where Trump is expected to issue the second veto of his presidency.
It was the first time both chambers of Congress supported a War Powers resolution, which limits the president’s ability to send U.S. troops into action without the consent of Congress.
“I think the veto will be sustained,” McConnell said.
McConnell said he did not agree with this use of the war powers act, because the United States does not have troops on the ground in Yemen. The U.S. military is providing targeting assistance to the Saudi-led coalition.
Overriding a veto requires two-thirds majorities in both the Senate and House.
(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Richard Cowan; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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FILE PHOTO: Notre Dame Fighting Irish running back Cierre Wood runs a play as quarterback Everett Golson (back) watches during practice for the NCAA college football 2013 Discover BCS National Championship game in Davie, Florida January 4, 2013. REUTERS/Jeff Haynes
April 11, 2019
Former NFL and Notre Dame running back Cierre Wood was scheduled to appear in court Thursday in Las Vegas after being charged with first-degree murder in the death of a 5-year-old girl, according to court records.
The alleged victim was the daughter of Wood’s girlfriend, identified by local media as 26-year-old Amy Taylor, who also was taken into custody Tuesday night at Summerlin Hospital.
The Clark County Coroner’s Office confirmed 5-year-old La’Ravah Davis died at the hospital that night, KVVU-TV in Las Vegas reported.
Wood, 28, played in seven games in the NFL from 2013-15, carrying the ball five times for 12 yards. He was mostly on the practice squads in Houston, Buffalo, New England and Seattle. He also had three stops in the Canadian Football League after the NFL.
At Notre Dame, where he played from 2010-12, he rushed for 16 touchdowns and 2,447 yards in his career. He also had 52 receptions for 384 yards and two scores.
–Field Level Media
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Mourners begin to arrive at Staples Center ahead of a memorial for rapper Nipsey Hussle in Los Angeles, California, April 11, 2019. REUTERS/Patrick T. Fallon
April 11, 2019
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Thousands of people streamed into a public memorial in Los Angeles on Thursday for slain rapper Nipsey Hussle, who was gunned down in the city last month.
Free tickets were all snapped up this week for the two-hour event at the 21,000-capacity Staples Center, a popular sports and pop concert venue. Performers have not been announced.
Fans, many wearing T-shirts bearing Hussle’s face, or carrying flowers, lined up early to get into the Downtown venue, watched by dozens of police in cars, on motorcycles and on bicycles.
The memorial will be livestreamed on Black Entertainment Television (BET) and followed by a 25-mile long procession through the streets of south Los Angeles where the musician was raised and shot dead on March 31.
Security was tight in and around the Staples Center because of Hussle’s former connections with some of Los Angeles notorious street gangs. A stampede erupted at a local vigil for Hussle last week after reports of a gunman in the crowd.
More recently Hussle, 33, had parlayed his fame into a role as a community organizer and activist combating gang violence. He was shot outside a clothing store he owned in south Los Angeles.
Los Angeles police last week arrested a 29-year-old man who has pleaded not guilty to murder charges. Police said the shooting was motivated by a personal dispute between Hussle and the suspect, Eric Ronald Holder, although they said it took place against a surge in gang-related violence and shootings in south Los Angeles in March.
Hussle, whose real name was Ermias Asghedom, was Grammy-nominated earlier this year for his debut studio album “Victory Lap.”
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Richard Chang)
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FILE PHOTO: Demonstrators take part in a protest rally marking the first anniversary of the murder of investigative reporter Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova in Bratislava, Slovakia, February 21, 2019. REUTERS/David W. Cerny/File Photo
April 11, 2019
BRATISLAVA (Reuters) – A man charged with Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak’s murder has confessed to shooting him, Slovak public television RTVS and the aktualne.sk news website reported on Thursday, quoting police sources.
The killing last year of Kuciak, a reporter covering corruption, and his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova, sparked massive protests that led to the resignation of the prime minister, Robert Fico.
(Reporting by Tatiana Jancarikova; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
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FILE PHOTO: Firearms and accessories are displayed at Gun City gunshop in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 19, 2019. REUTERS/Jorge Silva/File Photo
April 11, 2019
WELLINGTON (Reuters) – New Zealand police expect tens of thousands of firearms to be surrendered in a guns buy-back scheme after parliament passed tough new firearm laws in the wake of the country’s worst peacetime mass shooting.
Lawmakers in New Zealand voted almost unanimously on Wednesday to change gun laws, less than a month after a lone gunman killed 50 people in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch.
The new legislation bars the circulation and use of most semi-automatic firearms, parts that convert firearms into semi-automatic firearms, magazines over a certain capacity, and some shotguns. This includes the gun used by the suspect in the Christchurch shooting.
It granted an amnesty until Sept. 30 for people to surrender prohibited items. More than 300 weapons had already been handed in, police minister Stuart Nash told parliament.
Police Deputy Police Commissioner Michael Clement told a news conference on Thursday that they are not sure how many guns they would receive as New Zealand has no law requiring people to register firearms.
“Its a great unknown question…everybody appreciates that there is no register of firearms with regards to the type of firearms we are talking about,” Clement said.
“So It could be in the tens of thousands, it could be more,” he added.
There are about 1.2-1.5 million firearms in New Zealand, according to gunpolicy.org. Of these, the government has said that a record of licenses show 13,500 firearms are military style semi-automatics (MSSAs). But the number could be higher.
Clement said details are being worked out of the gun buy-back scheme and he urged gun owners in possession of the prohibited firearms to register online.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has estimated that the gun buy-backs would cost the government between NZ$100-200 million but other government ministers have warned that the costs could be higher depending on how many guns are handed to the police.
Authorities have charged Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, with 50 counts of murder following the Christchurch attacks on March 15.
(Reporting by Praveen Menon; Editing by Michael Perry)
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FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 9, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
April 10, 2019
By Stephen Kalin and Jonathan Landay
RIYADH/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Egypt has pulled out of the U.S. effort to forge an “Arab NATO” with key Arab allies, according to four sources familiar with the decision, in a blow to the Trump administration’s strategy to contain Iranian power.
Egypt conveyed its decision to the United States and other participants in the proposed Middle East Security Alliance, or MESA, ahead of a meeting held Sunday in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, one source said.
Cairo did not send a delegation to the meeting, the latest gathering held to advance the U.S.-led effort to bind Sunni Muslim Arab allies into a security, political and economic pact to counter Shi’ite Iran, the source said.
Egypt withdrew because it doubted the seriousness of the initiative, had yet to see a formal blueprint laying it out, and because of the danger that the plan would increase tensions with Iran, said an Arab source who, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity.
Uncertainty about whether U.S. President Donald Trump will win a second term next year and whether a successor may ditch the initiative also contributed to the Egyptian decision, the Arab source said.
“It’s not moving well,” a Saudi source said of the initiative.
The initiative, which Saudi Arabia first proposed in 2017, also is aimed at limiting the growing regional influence of Russia and China, according to a classified White House document reviewed by Reuters last year.
The Egyptian Embassy in Washington and the White House did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
In addition to the United States and Saudi Arabia, the MESA participants include the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Jordan.
Two days after the Riyadh meeting, Egypt President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi visited Washington for talks with Trump. Before the meeting Trump said they would talk about security issues, but it was not clear whether they discussed MESA issue.
Two sources said the countries remaining in MESA were moving ahead with the initiative and would press Egypt diplomatically to revoke its withdrawal, with one saying that the decision did not appear to be final.
“We all want them back,” said the other source.
The Arab source, however, said Cairo could not be convinced to return.
The withdrawal of Egypt, which has the Arab world’s largest military, is the latest setback to the MESA initiative, informally referred to as the “Arab NATO.”
The plan already was complicated by international outrage over the October 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, which Turkish officials and some U.S. lawmakers have accused Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of ordering. Riyadh denies the allegation against Salman.
Other obstacles have been feuds among the Arab allies, especially a Saudi-led economic and political boycott of Qatar.
The problems have forced several postponements of a summit meeting in the United States at which a preliminary accord on the alliance would be signed.
John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, has been a key proponent of the MESA plan and an architect of the administration’s strategy for containing Iran, according to U.S. officials.
(Reporting by Jonathan Landay and Stephen Kalin; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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FILE PHOTO: Kim Kardashian attends the CFDA Fashion awards in Brooklyn, New York, U.S., June 4, 2018. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
April 10, 2019
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Reality star Kim Kardashian is studying to be a lawyer, inspired by her success in helping to win the release from U.S. prisons of two women.
Kardashian told Vogue magazine in an interview published on Wednesday that she has begun a four-year apprenticeship with a San Francisco-based law firm under a California program for those without formal qualifications. Kardashian, who dropped out of college, said she aims to take the bar exam in 2022.
The “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star said she made the decision last summer after visiting the White House and persuading President Donald Trump to commute a life sentence handed out to a 63-year-old woman in Tennessee for a first drug offense.
“I just felt like I wanted to be able to fight for people who have paid their dues to society. I just felt like the system could be so different, and I wanted to fight to fix it, and if I knew more, I could do more,” Kardashian, 38, told Vogue.
Kardashian helped to win clemency in January for another woman in Tennessee who had been convicted as a teenager of murdering a man who paid to have sex with her.
Kardashian said her first year of the apprenticeship involved studying three subjects: criminal law, torts and contracts.
“To me, torts is the most confusing, contracts the most boring, and crime law I can do in my sleep. Took my first test, I got a 100. Super easy for me,” she told Vogue. “The reading is what really gets me. It’s so time-consuming. The concepts I grasp in two seconds.”
While best known for developing beauty and fashion products and showcasing her life with her sisters on the TV show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” Kardashian has some powerful legal DNA.
Her late father, Robert Kardashian, was a prominent Los Angeles lawyer who was part of the legal team representing football star O.J. Simpson in his 1995 trial and acquittal for double murder.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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FILE PHOTO: A logo of the Brazilian mining company Vale SA is seen in Brumadinho, Brazil January 29, 2019. REUTERS/Adriano Machado/File photo
April 10, 2019
(Reuters) – Prosecutors are planning to file criminal charges against Brazil’s miner Vale SA and its employees over the collapse of a mine-waste dam in January that killed hundreds of people, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing the lead investigator.
Investigators have gathered enough evidence to affirm that Vale employees involved in the mine operation knew the dam was unsafe, the report said, quoting Jose Adercio Leite Sampaio, the prosecutor heading the probe.
“At this point, we know that the operational side knew [that the dam was at risk of collapse], but did Vale’s directors know?” Sampaio said in an interview with the Journal. (https://on.wsj.com/2P5fB0A)
The charges for crimes related to the disaster could include murder, manslaughter, environmental damage and false representation, according to the report.
(Reporting by Ankit Ajmera in Bengaluru; Editing by James Emmanuel)
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An Islamic State bride unwittingly revealed the murder of a 5-year-old girl to the German security services man who posed as her driver, prosecutors say.
Turkish authorities deported the 27-year-old German woman, identified as Jennifer W. because of German privacy laws, to Germany in 2016, according to an indictment. She was looking for a ride back to Turkey and found a man who offered to drive her the entire way, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
Unbeknownst to her, he was a German security services member and recorded the entire conversation in which she revealed her complicity in the murder of a child slave, according to the indictment. Jennifer is now on trial for crimes that could send her to prison for life, including “membership of a terrorist organization, weapons violation, murder and, specifically, murder as a war crime,” CNN reported.
Jennifer allegedly revealed to her driver that she and her husband bought a 5-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave in the summer of 2015, according to CNN. Jennifer’s 5-year-old slave was a prisoner of war — ISIS had overrun northern Iraq in 2014 and sold thousands of Yazdi women and girls as slaves. These women were also made subject to the ISIS’s sex codes and Quran endorsed rapes, The Times reported.
A 5-year-old Yazidi girl died of thirst while a German woman who joined ISIS who held her captive. Now the girl’s mother “would like to see justice served,” her lawyer said, as murder proceedings against the German woman began. https://t.co/QmSBwLuvqo
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) April 9, 2019
Jennifer revealed her husband had tied the child up outside and left her to die of thirst, German authorities allege. “After the girl fell ill and wet her mattress, the defendant’s husband punished the girl by chaining her up outside in the searing heat and leaving her in great agony to die of thirst,” prosecutors said, according to The Times. “The defendant let her husband do as he liked, and took no action to save the girl.”
Paul Joseph Watson breaks down the story surrounding a woman who left the United Kingdom when she was 15 to marry a member of ISIS and join their Islamic caliphate revolution.
The child’s mother, who was also allegedly kept by Jennifer and her husband as a slave, is expected to testify in court against Jennifer and is represented by Amal Clooney, an international human rights lawyer. “Our client would like to see justice served, as well as the opportunity to finally give a full account of her suffering and that of her daughter,” one of the mother’s lawyers, Natalie von Wistinghausen, said in a statement.
Jennifer’s husband is a member of ISIS living on the border of Turkey, but officials have not yet identified him, according to German news media reports.
Jennifer explained to her driver her 2014 journey through Turkey, Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. There she became an enforcer for the morality code for women in the Iraqi cities Fallujah and Mosul, prosecutors say.
“Her job was to make sure that women were upholding the terror organization’s dress and behavior codes,” prosecutors said. “To intimidate them, she carried an AK-47 machine gun, a pistol and an explosive vest.”
Paul Joseph Watson urges Westerners not to make the same mistake again.
Source: InfoWars
Sri Lanka’s Secretary of Defense Gotabaya Rajapaksa listens during a news conference in Colombo January 24, 2013. The Sri Lankan military should be given more training opportunities by the United States, Rajapaksa said on Thursday according to local media. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte (SRI LANKA – Tags: HEADSHOT MILITARY POLITICS)
April 10, 2019
By Shihar Aneez
COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka’s former defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who oversaw the crushing of Tamil Tiger rebels under his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule a decade ago, is being sued in two cases in the United States for his alleged role in torture and murder, according to a lawyer and court documents.
Gotabaya, popular among many Sri Lankans for his role in winning a 26-year war that ended in 2009, has expressed interest in running for president in elections later this year.
Since the end of the war Gotabaya has been accused by rights groups of multiple crimes during the civil war, including extrajudicial killings. He has rejected the allegations.
Milinda Rajapaksha, Gotabaya’s spokesman, said the former defense secretary has yet to receive “any official document or notice” on the cases.
“We see this as pure political revenge, part of propaganda designed to tarnish his image by vested interests for their own political mileage,” Rajapaksha told Reuters, without elaborating.
The South Africa-based International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), in partnership with U.S. law firm Hausfeld and human rights lawyer Scott Gilmore, filed a civil damages case in California this week against Gotabaya on behalf of a Tamil torture survivor, Roy Samathanam.
The case alleges that Samathanam was detained in the capital Colombo in September 2007 by the Terrorism Investigation Division of the Sri Lanka police, who reported directly to Gotabaya, and was physically and psychologically tortured and forced to sign a false confession before being released in August 2010.
“Samathanam had no options left to seek justice in Sri Lanka or at the United Nations,” Gilmore told Reuters. “That’s why we brought the case in the United States when we found Gotabaya Rajapaksa returning to California.”
Gotabaya, a dual U.S.-Sri Lanka citizen, is planning to renounce his U.S. citizenship as required by Sri Lankan law to run for president, his close allies have told Reuters. His spokesman did not confirm this.
The case, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, was brought under the Torture Victim Protection Act, which gives torture victims legal redress in U.S. courts, Hausfeld said in a statement.
A statement from ITJP said that Gotabaya was formally served with notice of the case in a supermarket parking lot in Pasadena, California on Sunday after being tracked by private investigators.
In a separate case, Ahimsa Wickrematunga, the daughter of murdered investigative editor Lasantha Wickrematunga, filed a complaint for damages on April 4 in the same U.S. District Court in California for allegedly instigating and authorizing the extrajudicial killing of her father, documents seen by Reuters showed.
In her complaint, Ahimsa said that after the murder of her father in January 2009 Gotabaya and his allies obstructed her “efforts to seek justice in Sri Lanka by tampering with witnesses and engaging in a pattern of coercion and intimidation”.
Wickrematunga, an outspoken editor of The Sunday Leader newspaper, often clashed with politicians including Gotabaya.
(Reporting by Shihar Aneez; Editing by Alasdair Pal and Frances Kerry)
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