#charles drove according to the team's plan

[petit-papillion]

Source: formularapida.net

Just in case anyone is still delusional about what happened with Charles on Sunday.

[violetszone]

Bianchi in the Paddock

(In memory of Jules Bianchi)

Charles x fem!Jules' daughter!reader

From this request

Summary: Charles wanted you with him in a race, but things didn't go as planned and you were caught in the paddock by journalists.

WARNINGS: angst, fluff, not edited writing, google translate French

A/n: I don't know what I write because I write it in the middle of the night

After your father's death, your family made big decisions for you. They didn't want to hide you from the media, but they didn't want them to ask things that would upset you, so they kept you away from the paparazzi as much as possible. They were acting in accordance with this rule, including Leclercs, especially Charles, when your mother told everyone about this rule,he said it was absolutely the right thing and he did his best for it.

Yes everyone knew you were Jules Bianchi's daughter and they approached you about it as unobtrusively as possible and it made you happy that they were so considerate.Luckily the family had no intention of keeping you away from the real world, you were usually going out and spending time with Charles.

Even though you can't participate much in his races, Charles specifically wanted you to come to the race because seeing you next to him would be good for him, you were his little luck charm.Before you came to the race, they had arranged everything in general, you would proceed on the paddock as unobtrusively as possible, then a ferrari employee would come and pick you up.Of course, things didn't always go as planned.

Your mother drove you to the race place and followed you until you passed the security. You were calming yourself by saying everything is fine, but from the moment you stepped into the paddock, things changed, first a few security guards recognized you, then the staff of other teams, lowered your head and started walking quickly, that's when you were recognized by the press.Someone was supposed to come and get you but there was no one around.It was unwise to leave an 8-year-old girl alone in the paddock.

When the journalists were asking you questions and taking a picture of you, you tried not to hear them, you were really stressed.At that time, Charles was looking at his watch at the motorhome and was saying that you were late, then he got a message that you were in the paddock but no one else was with you.He ran out of the engine house and saw the crowd in the distance and started running towards it.

You were trying to walk with your ears closed as Charles tried to get through the crowd.Finally someone put an arm around your shoulder and pulled the two of you out of the crowd.You almost cried when you saw it was Charles."Mon petit ange, je suis désolé, je suis tellement désolé, tu as probablement trop peur" ("My little angel, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, you're probably too scared") took your hand and walked with you to the motorhouse.

When both of you stood at the door, he looked at you, you were about to cry, it made you feel so bad when you bumped into so many people all of a sudden, and the moment Charles looked at you, a few tears fell from your eyes.Charles got down on one knee to reach your height. The moment he opened his arms, you dropped yourself into his arms and hugged him tight."Je suis vraiment désolé" (I am really sorry) you put your head on his shoulder really Charles was your everything.You got into the motorhouse together Charles introduced you to everyone and did everything he could to make you comfortable.he still felt guilty and you knew it.Charles turned to you when you called him "Char" He came to you and sat in the chair opposite you.

"Ce qui est faux mon précieux" (What is wrong my precious) "Ce n'était pas ta faute, je sais que tu te blâmes, tu ne peux pas toujours être à mes côtés, je dois faire face à certaines choses" (It wasn't your fault, I know you blame yourself, you can't always be by my side, I have to deal with some things.) Charles smiled at you  "Bébé tu n'as que 8 ans, si tu veux avoir 20 ans je serai toujours à tes côtés je ne te laisserai jamais t'inquiéter d'une seule chose surtout je ne laisserai personne t'énerver à propos de ton père" (Baby you are only 8 years  old, Be 20 years old if you want, I'll still be by your side. I will never let you worry about a single thing especially I will not let anyone upset you about your father)

"Je ne suis pas triste pour mon père, parce que tu es comme mon père" (I'm not sad about my father, because you're like my father) Charles was touched because since you were born there hasn't been a second he didn't think about you and what you said really touched his heart "viens ici mon petit ange" (come here my little angel) you hugged him.The rest of the day went very well, but today showed you again how hard your life really was. You realized that you couldn't really live without Charles.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Trump Expected to Order Troop Withdrawal (Foreign Policy) U.S. President Donald Trump is set to order a dramatic and rapid cut in the number of U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia as he seeks action from loyalists newly installed at the U.S. Department of Defense. A perception that Mark Esper, the previous U.S. Secretary of Defense, would not agree to further troop reductions on so quick a schedule, was seen as one of the reasons for his removal from the post shortly after the U.S. presidential election. Although the numbers are not yet public, several media reports signal a halving of current troop levels in Afghanistan from the 4,500 troops currently stationed there. A reduction in Iraq would be less severe, but almost all of the 700 U.S. troops stationed in Somalia are expected to return to the United States. Although Republican leaders are wary, a troop withdrawal appears to be popular among the American public. According to a YouGov poll commissioned by the libertarian Charles Koch Institute in August, 76 percent Americans supported withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, with almost half of respondents strongly supporting withdrawal. The number supporting U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq was 74 percent. The desire to end America’s wars in the Middle East and South Asia is felt similarly among U.S. military veterans. An April poll by another Koch-backed group found 73 percent of veterans surveyed supported a full withdrawal from Afghanistan, an almost 13 percent increase from the previous year.

Covid-19 origin remains a mystery (South China Morning Post, Tumori Journal) The virus that causes the Covid-19 disease has now infected more than 54 million people across the planet, but the question of just where it came from remains a mystery. Researchers may have found a new link in this puzzle after discovering evidence suggesting the pathogen had infected people across Italy as early as September last year, or months before it was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The unexpected finding “may reshape the history of [the] pandemic”, said the team led by Dr Gabriella Sozzi, a life scientist with the National Cancer Institute of Milan, in a peer-reviewed paper published last week in the Tumori Journal.

Hurricane Iota bashes Nicaragua, Honduras after Eta floods (AP) Hurricane Iota battered Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast and flooded some stretches of neighboring Honduras that were still under water from Hurricane Eta two weeks earlier, leaving authorities struggling to assess damage after communications were knocked out in some areas. By late Tuesday, Iota had diminished to a tropical storm and was moving inland over northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras, but forecasters warned that its heavy rains still posed a threat of flooding and mudslides. The storm passed about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south-southwest of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, where rivers were rising and rain was expected to intensify. In mountainous Tegucigalpa, residents of low-lying, flood-prone areas were being evacuated in anticipation of Iota’s rains, as were residents of hillside neighborhoods vulnerable to landslides.

Boris Johnson, in self-quarantine, says he’s ‘bursting with antibodies’ (Washington Post) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson boasted that he was “fit as a butcher’s dog” and “bursting with antibodies” as he began two weeks of self-quarantine after having close contact with a lawmaker who contracted the coronavirus. Johnson was infected with the virus in March—and struggled to breathe in an intensive care unit for three days. His staff did not say on Monday whether he had been tested this time, but cases of coronavirus reinfection have been incredibly rare. Johnson on Monday said that he felt great and that because he previously had the disease he was “bursting with antibodies” but that he would self-quarantine for two weeks as “we got to interrupt the spread of the disease.” He added that he would continue to govern by video conference.

After Trump, Europe aims to show Biden it can fight for itself (Reuters) The Donald Trump era may be coming to an end. But European Union ministers meeting this week to discuss the future of the continent’s defence will say the lesson has been learned: Europe needs to be strong enough to fight on its own. EU foreign and defence ministers meeting by teleconference on Thursday and Friday will receive the bloc’s first annual report on joint defence capabilities, expected to serve as the basis for a French-led, post-Brexit, post-Trump effort to turn the EU into a stand-alone military power. “We aren’t in the old status quo, where we can pretend that the Donald Trump presidency never existed and the world was the same as four years ago,” a French diplomat said. The EU has been working since December 2017 to develop more firepower independently of the United States. The effort has been driven mainly by France, the EU’s remaining major military power after Brexit.

Hungary and Poland Threaten E.U. Stimulus Over Rule of Law Links (NYT) When European Union leaders announced a landmark stimulus package to rescue their economies from the ravages of the coronavirus, they agreed to jointly raise hundreds of billions of dollars to use as aid—a bold and widely welcomed leap in collaboration never attempted in the bloc’s history. But that unity was shattered on Monday when Hungary and Poland blocked the stimulus plan and the broader budget. The two eastern European countries said they would veto the spending bill because the funding was made conditional on upholding rule-of-law standards, such as an independent judiciary, which the two governments have weakened as they defiantly tear down separation of powers at home. Their veto has thrown a signature achievement of the bloc into disarray, deepening a long-building standoff over its core principles and threatening to delay the stimulus money from getting to E.U. member states, if a new agreement can be reached at all.

Armenia seethes over peace deal (Foreign Policy) Armenia’s government is under strain after signing a cease-fire agreement with Azerbaijan in a Russian-backed deal a week ago. On Monday, Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan resigned after a public disagreement with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan over the direction of peace talks. Pressure on Pashinyan has shown no sign of easing in recent days: 17 opposition parties have called for his resignation as street protests against his leadership continue.

Kissinger Warns Biden of U.S.-China Catastrophe on Scale of WWI (Bloomberg) Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said the incoming Biden administration should move quickly to restore lines of communication with China that frayed during the Trump years or risk a crisis that could escalate into military conflict. “Unless there is some basis for some cooperative action, the world will slide into a catastrophe comparable to World War I,” Kissinger said during the opening session of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. He said military technologies available today would make such a crisis “even more difficult to control” than those of earlier eras. “America and China are now drifting increasingly toward confrontation, and they’re conducting their diplomacy in a confrontational way,” the 97-year-old Kissinger said in an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “The danger is that some crisis will occur that will go beyond rhetoric into actual military conflict.” U.S.-China relations are at their lowest in decades. As President Donald Trump stepped up his criticism of China, blaming it for the spread of the virus and the death toll in the U.S., each side also has ramped up moves the other sees as hostile.

Hundreds of fraudulent votes were discovered. Then a fat green parrot was elected. (Washington Post) A plump, waddling parrot has soared past its competition to claim victory in New Zealand’s Bird of the Year contest, a tense race marked by attempted voter interference during a divisive month of campaigning. In what event organizers conceded was “a stunning upset,” the critically endangered kakapo flew into first place to steal the title—ruffling the feathers of those who say the bright-green parrot unfairly secured a second term as chosen bird. The bird-of-the-year controversy took flight after data analysts working with Forest & Bird discovered that roughly 1,500 fraudulent votes had been cast. The “illegal votes,” which were submitted using a suspicious email account and came from the same IP address in Auckland, briefly pushed the country’s tiny kiwi pukupuku bird into the lead, a brazen meddling attempt that sent officials and campaign managers into a flap. Those votes were immediately disregarded, organizers said. “It’s lucky we spotted this little kiwi trying to sneak in an extra 1500 votes under the cover of darkness!” Laura Keown, spokesperson for Bird of the Year, said in a statement Nov. 10, adding that officials did not “want to see any more cheating.”

Israelis Take On Netanyahu And Coronavirus Restrictions In Wave Of Civil Disobedience (The Intercept) Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having been at the helm for over 11 consecutive years. He is also the first sitting prime minister to be indicted, currently on trial in three cases of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, arising from abusing his authority to grant favors for, among other things, favorable media coverage. While there have been small but stubborn protests against Netanyahu since investigations into his corruption first opened in late 2016, it was not until the coronavirus paralyzed Israel’s economy that people—many of them in their 20s and 30s—starting coming out in droves. For more than 20 weeks now, tens of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to call on Netanyahu to recuse himself for corruption, for failing to manage the pandemic, and for what many describe as his megalomania—doing whatever it takes to evade trial. They have been convening in massive numbers in front of his official residence, many carrying homemade signs, chanting in unison “Go!” and “We won’t leave till Bibi resigns.”

Protests that historically bring out large numbers of Jewish Israelis have long been dominated by Israel’s left-leaning peace camp, and a decade ago, others drawing attention to the high cost of living. What is happening now is different: With over a million people unemployed in a country of 9 million, culture and nightlife all but dead amid the pandemic, and people’s ability to travel outside the country severely restricted, a nationwide movement of disgruntled Israelis, spanning ages and to an extent sociocultural backgrounds, is practicing civil disobedience. The government has responded with relative force against a segment of the Jewish population that is largely unfamiliar with police brutality and has not had their individual rights violated. At the same time, the government has all but ignored incitement and incidents of violence against the protesters. The official response is giving Jewish Israelis a tiny window into what it has always been like for Palestinians, both in Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza, whose protests are, prima facie, treated as suspect.

Ethiopia bombs Tigray capital (Foreign Policy) Ethiopia’s air force began bombing the Tigray region’s capital, Mekelle, on Monday in another escalation of the country’s civil war, now entering its third week. In a tweet he later deleted, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni called for the two sides to negotiate and halt the conflict “lest it leads to unnecessary loss of lives and cripples the economy.” Redwan Hussein, a government spokesman, said the war would be a “short-lived operation,” and that mediation offers from Uganda or another country were not being considered.

Amazon opens online pharmacy, shaking up another industry (AP) Now at Amazon.com: insulin and inhalers. The online colossus opened an online pharmacy Tuesday that allows customers to order medication or prescription refills, and have them delivered to their front door in a couple of days. The potential impact of Amazon’s arrival in the pharmaceutical space rippled through that sector immediately. Before the opening bell, shares of CVS Health Corp. fell almost 9%. Walgreens and Rite Aid both tumbled more than 10%. The big chains rely on their pharmacies for a steady flow of shoppers who may also grab a snack, or shampoo or groceries on the way out. All have upped online services, but Amazon.com has mastered it, and its online store is infinitely larger. Amazon will begin offering commonly prescribed medications Tuesday in the U.S., including creams, pills, as well as medications that need to stay refrigerated, like insulin. Shoppers have to set up a profile on Amazon’s website and have their doctors send prescriptions there. The company said it won’t ship medications that can be abused, including many opioids. Most insurance is accepted, Amazon said. But Prime members who don’t have insurance can also buy generic or brand name drugs from Amazon for a discount. They can also get discounts at 50,000 physical pharmacies around the country, inside Costco, CVS, Walgreens, Walmart and other stores.

R.I.P. whoopsie (Euronews) French broadcaster RFI has apologized after a bug on its website triggered the publication of obituaries of Queen Elizabeth II, Pelé, Jimmy Carter, Brigitte Bardot, Clint Eastwood and about 100 other prominent (and still alive) celebrities. RFI said in a statement that a “technical problem” led to the erroneous publications. Broadcasters often prepare obituary material in advance to publish it promptly when a death is announced.

[hamilton-one-shots]

Can we have a Thaurens one shot using number 11 where Thomas kills someone who likes John and Laurens says this when he find out? You don't have to, not many people ship thaurens, by the way your writing is awesome!

(11: “ You’re a monster. ” )

Everyone in school knew better than to flirt with John Laurens. He was dating Thomas Jefferson, after all. The guy could’ve easily been captain of the football team, if he wanted to play, and he knew something about everyone. If there were anyone that was to be left alone, it was definitely him. Everyone in school knew this. Everyone but Charles Lee, apparently.

“Hey, Laurens.” He grinned as he leaned against the wall of lockers.

“Hey, Lee. What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing. Just checking you out. You look so good today.”

John frowned and put his books away. “Back off, Lee. You know I’ve got a boyfriend.”

He shrugged. “A boyfriend who is out with the flu, if the rumors are right.”“They are, but he’s still my boyfriend, so quit it.” John slammed his locker shut and turned to walk away, Lee grabbing his shoulder.

“Hey, slow down, baby. I just want to talk.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t.” He yanked his shoulder away and walked off, Lee tutting as he left.

That evening, John went over to Thomas’ house to check on him. He was not happy.

“Hey, Tommy. How are you feeling?” He smiled and sat beside him on his bed, trying to brush it off.

“Did Charles Lee flirt with you this morning?” So much for that.

“Wha-”

“Answer the question.”

John sighed and looked down, nodding his head. “Yes… How did you know?”

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is my fever went down and I can go back to school tomorrow.”

“Thomas, please don’t do anything drastic.. I told him to fuck off and he left me alone.”

“I don’t care. That isn’t the point. The point is he knows you’re mine and tried to take you from me.”

“Tommy, nobody could take you from me..” He kissed his cheek as his phone buzzed in his pocket.

“Oh, really? And who is that?”

John sighed and pulled out his phone, going pale as he saw the message.

[Hey, baby

“It’s nobody.”

“Johnny.. You know I hate it when you lie to me…” Thomas sighed, reaching up and cupping John’s face. “You know I’d never hurt you.”

It wasn’t himself that he was worried about. Thomas would’ve known that and that in itself was a problem. “It’s Charles again…”

“Let me see the phone.”

John handed him his phone and Thomas responded for him.

[I thought I told you to fuck off. I have a boyfriend.]

[He doesn’t have to know anything]

[Leave me alone. He’s my boyfriend and that’s that.]

[Doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy this.] Charles replied before sending a picture. Flirting, Thomas could handle. It could easily be stopped. Dick pics were a whole other story. [My parents aren’t home.] [What he won’t know won’t hurt him

That was it. Thomas got out of bed and got changed out of his pajamas and into some proper clothes.

“Tommy, go back to bed, baby. Please.”

“No. He won’t stop until he gets what he wants. I know. And he needs to see that you are just something he can’t have.”

“Baby, he’s just being stupid. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“I’m going to make sure.” Thomas went outside with John following and got in his car, keeping John out. “Stay out of this, baby. I don’t want you seeing this side of me.” He blew John a kiss and left. He trusted John not to follow if he asked. He didn’t think that John would hop into his own car and follow, so he didn’t see him. He was just focused on getting to Lee’s house, going up and knocking on the door when he did. Of course, he believed that John was coming and answered the door, going white as a sheet when he saw who it really was.

“T-Thomas…”

“Expecting someone?” he asked as he let himself in.

“What are you doing? My parents are-”

“Not here, according to the picture you sent my boyfriend.”

“Listen, I didn’t mean-” Thomas cut him off as he whipped around, slamming Charles’ back into the wall as he held his collar.

“Mean what? To flirt with my boyfriend when he asked you to stop? To send him that god awful picture?” He pushed him harder against the wall.

“Let me go!”

Thomas tutted and dropped him to the ground. “Whatever.”

John only got there then, running in. “Thomas, what did you do?” he asked as he helped Charles to his feet.

“He’ll be fine, Johnny. I just shook him up a bit.”

“He straight up attacked me! He’s a dick! I don’t know why you’re with that loser, anyways when you can have someone like me.” That was it.

Thomas pulled John away and put him outside before locking the door and turning back to Charles with fire in his eyes.

John heard screaming and yelling inside and did his best to break down the door and get in, only successfully picking the lock a minute after it went silent. When he got in, the sight made him gasp and take a step back. There Thomas stood, his knuckles and shoes coated with blood, and there Charles laid, blood running down his face.

“Thomas… What the fuck did you do?!”

“Now he can’t flirt with you anymore. You should be happy about this.”

John ran forward to see if he could help, but Thomas grabbed his arm, holding him back.

“Are you crazy? Touch him and the police will think it was you. We have to go, now.”

John pulled his arm away and shook his head, feeling sick to his stomach. “You’re a monster…”

“I did this for you.”

John shook his head. “No… You did this for you…”

Thomas sighed and rolled his eyes, reaching out for John’s arm, but he moved before he could grab him. “Don’t be like that, Johnny…”

“No! Don’t touch me… I’m going home…”

John turned to leave, but Thomas stopped him, grabbing his arm. “You are not going to leave me.”

“Watch me.” John tried to leave again, but Thomas grabbed him again, this time by his neck, and pushed him against the wall.

“I’m going to give you one last chance to apologize. You are coming home with me and we are going to be happy. Forever. We are going to act like this never happened and that is final.”

At that moment, John realized something. Thomas was smart. There was no way he was going to get sent to jail and there was no way that John was going to escape anytime soon. “I’d rather die than keep listening to you.”

Thomas sighed. “So be it.” He raised his other hand to John’s throat and squeezed tightly, John barely struggling. “You know I love you, Johnny. It didn’t have to be this way.” Thomas kept his grip strong on John’s neck, tightening it more and more until he finally went limp in his arms, his eyes rolling to the back of his head as he lost consciousness. Thomas held on for another minute for good measure before loosening his grip and holding John bridal style. “Oh, John… I really wish that it didn’t have to come to this. You know I can’t live without you.” He carried him out to his car and drove back home, making sure nobody was there before he took John inside and put him on his bed, kissing his cheek. “Oh, Johnny… When you agreed to go out with me, I promised myself something. I’d love you through everything. In sickness and in health. Through good times and bad. Until death would we part. Unfortunately, it seems like a change of plans is in order. Death came far earlier than anticipated, way too soon for me to let go.” He grabbed a bottle of painkillers and popped off the cap, pouring them all into his mouth and chasing them down with some water, then laid down beside John, giving him one last kiss. “See you soon, baby.”

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/making-a-difference-in-disasters-news-sports-jobs/

Making a difference in disasters | News, Sports, Jobs

Submitted Photo American Red Cross volunteers Vickie Phippins of Minot, right, and Judi Leonard, Granville, perform a disaster assessment on hurricane-damaged property during their deployment to Louisiana in October.

Whether feeding displaced residents who lost their homes in a flood or assessing property damage following a hurricane, Vickie Phippins of Minot has never felt a time when her presence as an American Red Cross volunteer wasn’t making a difference.

“I just like helping people recover from disasters. That’s huge, and I feel it’s the right thing to do — that we should be helping others as we would want them to help us if we were in a disaster,” Phippins said.

Phippins has been a Red Cross volunteer for four years. During the 2011 flood in Minot, she and her family worked nonstop to help her daughter restore her flooded home. Phippins said she appreciated the Red Cross and other organizations being there to help, and she decided then that when she retired, she wanted to be part of that effort.

Phippins’ first deployment in 2017 took her to Florence, North Carolina, where she assisted in sheltering and feeding residents after a hurricane devastated the region about two weeks earlier.

“It was quite a bit like Minot down there. Although they experienced it from a hurricane, there was still a lot of flooding,” she said. From her experience in Minot, she could relate to the damage and the piles of rubble along the streets as people cleaned out.

Numerous shelters had been set up along the coast. During the two weeks she was there, Phippins saw the shelter population dwindle as people found places to go. As the sheltering needs changed, Phippins moved to different shelters in different cities. Red Cross staff established their personal quarters wherever there was room, which varied from a hotel to a classroom inside a high school that was being used as a client shelter.

“One of the things about being part of this is you get to meet a lot of interesting people, whether it’s fellow volunteers from all over or the clients,” Phippins said. “There were volunteers that had been 15 years at different places. Many of them had been on numerous deployments. Also on that deployment I met a girl from Fargo, and I ended up working with her quite a bit.”

Her second two-week deployment was in June 2018 to Missouri, following a flood and also a tornado that hit Jefferson City.

During her four days in Jefferson City, Phippins assisted with feeding displaced individuals, first at a church location and later in a shelter facility. In St. Louis, Phippins was on a team that took the emergency response vehicle to pick up supplies and deliver them to the Red Cross headquarters and shelters.

In September of this year, Phippins deployed to Alexandria, Louisiana, following Hurricane Laura. She served on a team assessing damaged homes to determine whether clients would be able to return and the amount of help they would need.

“When I first got out there, we weren’t in the worst areas, but I did have a day off and I volunteered to go down to Cameron, which was right on the coast. That town was totally demolished. So that was an eye opener,” Phippins said.

Another experience that sticks with her was visiting an apartment complex to do an assessment and finding an older man in a wheelchair, still living in his damaged apartment.

“He was probably the only one left in that one building, but he did not want to leave,” she said. “He had lived there for many years so he wasn’t planning on leaving. He was an interesting gentleman to talk to. It was such a nice visit with some of those people and finding out about their lives. It really makes it even more worthwhile to do what you are doing.”

A few weeks later, this past October, Phippins traveled back to Louisiana to respond following Hurricane Delta. She again served on a disaster assessment team, stationed at a Bible camp near Eunice, Louisiana. Much of their work was around Lake Charles, one of the hardest hit locales. Lake Charles was affected by both Hurricane Laura and Delta, creating challenges in assessing which damage came from Delta.

She drove over 3,000 miles in two weeks, assessing the damage to homes that were impacted by the hurricanes, according to the Red Cross.

“You meet some really great people. Everybody is so thankful for you, even people that weren’t affected,” she said. On her deployment in North Carolina, she and two other volunteers went to Walmart to pick up a few things late one evening. A woman in front of them in line noticed the Red Cross uniforms on the worn-out volunteers and paid their bill.

“Without hesitation. She was just so thankful that we were down there helping people. Anytime you would go to the store for something, people are just coming up to you and thanking you for being there. And they weren’t affected. But that is pretty neat — to see that they’re grateful that you’re helping someone else in their community,” Phippins said.

Phippins said she definitely will be signing up for further deployments.

“I always look at a deployment as an adventure,” she said. “It’s hard to explain but it gives you a sense of fulfillment and joy that you were able to make a difference like that in someone’s life.”

The opportunities with the Red Cross aren’t just in other states, though, she said. The organization needs people here at home, responding to help victims of fires and other local emergencies.

Since July, the Minnesota and Dakotas region has had over 200 in-person and virtual deployments supporting large-scale disasters around the region and across the country and more than 800 disasters this year in the region,

The American Red Cross provides extensive training to all volunteers. Every volunteer position within the Red Cross has its own unique training path, according to information from the organization. Prior to COVID 19, training classes were available as a blend of in-person and on-demand virtual training. Currently, all training has moved to a virtual/online training platform. Most courses are available “on-demand,” while others are taught live via webinar. Additionally, many of the trainings have been revised to adopt the organizations COVID 19 protocols, and individual chapters also host regular online meetings for volunteers.

The Red Cross reports it is closely monitoring COVID-19, evaluating training opportunities, volunteer assignments and staff positions to ensure that they can be done safely and remotely. Individual hotel rooms typically replace group shelters for disaster clients. Volunteer Disaster Responders are handling client intake over the phone, and they are trained to deliver Comfort Care Kits and/or monetary support to clients in a safe, contact-less manner.

Volunteers can support local efforts by doing a number of things at home, including being a Digital Advocate, working with technology or fundraising.

To become a volunteer visit RedCross.org and click “Volunteer” and enter your zip code to see available positions in the Minot area.

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[aion-rsa]

How Fargo Season 4 Pays Homage to the Union Station Massacre

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This has a major spoiler so don’t read until you’ve seen Fargo season 4 episode 8 “The Nadir.”

Fargo’s season 4, episode 8, “The Nadir,” contains an allegorical reference to a true crime occurrence. It appears Loy Cannon (Chris Rock) dropped dime on the two lady criminals he felt responsible for, Zelmare Roulette (Karen Aldridge) and Swanee Capps (Kelsey Asbille). He thought he was turning two tickets to Philadelphia into a one-way ride to Palookaville. They turned it into a grand exit. The conclusion of this sequence points to a conspiracy. Put these together and you have the Union Station Massacre.

In the opening disclaimer of every Fargo, we read how the names have been changed on real events. In this case, that includes the genders, body count, and arc of the gunfight at Kansas City’s main transportation hub, the Union Railway Station. The real events of the Union Station Massacre of June 17, 1933, are still very dramatic. Convicted murderer Frank “Jelly” Nash had been caught after escaping from Leavenworth Penitentiary. His partner-in-crime, Verne Miller, hatched a plan to snatch the convict on the way back to prison.

Nash who had already been sentenced to life for a murder and pardoned in 1913. On March 3, 1924 he was given 25 years for assaulting a mail custodian. He escaped the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, on Oct. 19, 1930. The FBI launched an intensive search over the entire U.S. and parts of Canada. They found Nash went back to Leavenworth on December 11, 1931, to help seven more convicts escape.

FBI agents Frank Smith and F. Joseph Lackey, along with Otto Reed, the Chief of the McAlester, Oklahoma Police, caught up with Nash in a store in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on June 16, 1933, according to the official FBI site. At 8:30 p.m. they escorted Nash on a Missouri Pacific train from Fort Smith, Arkansas. It was due to arrive at Kansas City, Missouri at 7:15 a.m. on June 17. News of the transfer made the morning edition of the Kansas City Star.

The FBI page maintains the plan to snatch Nash was put together by Richard Tallman Galatas, Herbert Farmer, “Doc” Louis Stacci, and Frank B. Mulloy. There are reports Kansas City gangster John Lazia  was also to help. Lazia controlled votes on the North Side of Kansas City, making him a darling of political “boss” Tom Pendergast and city manager Henry McElroy. Lazia bribed almost every cop in the police department, or he got associates on the force. This makes it likely he would have known about the prison transfer. The head of the Kansas City crime family was more of a politician than a gangster, and Lazia allegedly farmed the job out to Adam Richetti and Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, who earned the FBI distinction of being Public Enemy No. 1 after the grab became a bloodbath.

Floyd and Richetti’s car broke down in Bolivar, Missouri, on the way to Kansas City, according to the FBI site. While getting it fixed, Sheriff Jack Killingsworth came into the garage. Richetti and Floyd, armed with a machine gun and two .45 pistols, respectively, ordered the sheriff and the mechanics against the wall. The two gunmen moved their stash of weapons into another car, along with the sheriff and drove to Deepwater, Missouri. They stole another car and made it to Kansas City by 10:00 the night before the transfer, where they were filled in on the details.

Seven law enforcement officers, a mix of FBI agents, Kansas City Police Department officers and Chief Reed, armed with shotguns and pistols, walked Nash through Union Station to a Chevrolet parked directly in front of the entrance. Two men ran out from behind a green Plymouth which was parked about six feet away, as another man emerged from behind the radiator of another car across the street, and they opened fire. Three officers survived the 30 second exchange. Captive Frank Nash was not one of them.

The incident marked the second agent death in FBI history. Armed with a latent fingerprint on a beer bottle, the massacre’s lead investigator J. Edgar Hoover, accused Richetti and “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Hoover went on to become the first FBI director. The Bureau shook down the entire Midwest criminal world looking for the mobsters. Like many gangsters, Floyd was beloved by the people where he grew up. During bank robberies he would be sure to destroy mortgage papers. The people of Oklahoma called him “the Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills.”  

In October 1934, an FBI team led by Melvin Purvis, the same agent who led the street execution of John Dillinger, caught up with the pair in Ohio. Floyd was shot while trying to escape and denied having anything to do with the massacre, according to Dary Matera’s book John Dillinger: The Life and Death of America’s First Celebrity Criminal. He didn’t live to go to trial, he was allowed, or helped, to bleed out by the agents. Richetti did go to trial, and was executed on Oct. 7, 1938.

According to Blackie Audett’s 1954 book Rap Sheet, the real gunmen were Maurice Denning and Solomon “Solly” Weissman. According to Americanmafia.com, Weissman, who was also known as “Slicey Solly,” “The Bully of Twelfth Street” and “the Cutcher-head-off Kid,” ran crime in Kansas City.

The massacre was a major fuckup for organized crime. It brought unwanted attention to the syndicate. Verne Miller, who set it up, was beaten to death and left in a ditch outside of Detroit in 1934. Lazia was shot to death in front of his wife at the Park Central Hotel on July 9, 1934, one week short of the first anniversary of the massacre. His underboss, “Charley the Wop” Carollo took the top spot for a short while but did time for income tax evasion before being deported to Italy.

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Fargo airs Sundays at 9 pm on FX.

The post How Fargo Season 4 Pays Homage to the Union Station Massacre appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3p9IuKm

[hyaenagallery]

The Lynching of the Ruggles brothers took place on July 24, 1892 in Redding, California. Brothers John and Charles Ruggles thought that they could make some easy money by robbing a stagecoach. John, a sex addict and ex-convict, had lost his wife to illness and had left his young daughter to live with relatives while he went to live off the land in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Concerned about his brother's well-being, Charles sought him out in the mountains. Charles had been robbing stagecoaches throughout California and Nevada with a man called Arizona Pete, and talked John into joining him on the outlaw trail. On May 10, 1892, the brothers robbed the Weaverville stage, but the take was small. The men settled on a location on top of a hill five miles north of Redding to pull off their next robbery. The stage would be moving slowly, and the horses would be tired from the uphill journey. The brothers stopped the stage on May 12, 1892, and everything went according to plan, until Charles was hit with buckshot fired by a guard riding inside the coach. More shots rang out, and soon passenger George Suhr, driver Johnny Boyce and guard Amos "Buck" Montgomery were all wounded. John Ruggles ran up to Montgomery and shot the seriously wounded man in the back, killing him. Boyce regained control of his team and drove off as fast as the horses could run. John, thinking that Charles was mortally wounded, said goodbye to his brother, grabbed the money and fled the scene. A posse found Charles where he was shot and took him into custody. His wounds looked worse than they were, and he was soon recovering in the Redding jail. Under questioning by Wells Fargo detective John Thacker, Charles admitted that the other robber was his brother John. A reward of eleven hundred dollars was placed on John's head. John Ruggles was arrested while eating a meal at a restaurant in his hometown of Woodland, California, by a Yolo County deputy sheriff. Taken by train to Redding, John was overcome with joy upon seeing that his brother was not dead. #destroytheday https://www.instagram.com/p/B_DGfR1hJKC/?igshid=arkj7khy8mgy

[scripttorture]

Interrogation as Torture

Interrogation is probably the scenario that comes to most Western people’s minds when torture is mentioned. The belief that torture can be used during interrogation is heavily ingrained in Western pop culture whether the story believes it ‘works’ or not.

 I’m going to go over some of the most common misconceptions about what bringing torture to the interrogation table does and does not do.

 Tell the Truth

 ‘Care must be exercised when making use of rebukes, invectives or torture as it will result in his telling falsehoods and making a fool of you.’ Japanese Kempeitai manual found in Burman 1943

 ‘The use of force often has the consequence that the person being interrogated under duress confesses falsely because he is afraid and as a consequence agrees to everything the interrogator wishes.’ Indonesian interrogation manual, East Timor, 1983

 ‘Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions concocted as a means of escaping from distress.’ CIA Kubark Counterintelligence Manual 1963

 I can’t prove conclusively that in the history of the world torture has never ever once produced accurate information. Overwhelmingly often it does not. There are several reasons why.

 Torture produces a lot of lies. Both people with information and people without information have a good reason to lie under torture. And they both do. The person with information does not want to give it up. The person without information needs to say something to make the torture stop.

 Humans are bad at telling when someone is lying. When tested even people who think they’re good at spotting lies can’t do it consistently. It can be almost impossible to tell who is hiding something and who genuinely doesn’t know what’s going on. A person under torture might have already told the truth and started lying when the interrogator didn’t believe them. Which is exactly what happened to Shelia Cassidy when she was tortured in Chile in the 70s.

 Pain and stress destroy the human memory. Experiments with willing volunteers have repeatedly shown that stress, pain and lack of sleep make it difficult for people to remember. A 2004 paper using US military survival school as the ‘high stress situation’ which simulated capture and interment as a POW (C A Morgan et al, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27, 265-279) found that between 51-68% of soldiers identified the wrong person as their interrogator. Interrogations had lasted four hours with the interrogator shouting at and manhandling the volunteers. The low stress group identified the wrong person 12-38% of the time.

Torture results in loss of public trust. Most police and intelligence investigations live or die on public support. People coming forward voluntarily with accurate information. People reporting on suspects. In the long term torture actively recruits for the opposing ‘side’. According to the IRA this is exactly what happened in Northern Ireland when the British used torture. It also happened in Aden and to a lesser extent Cyprus.

 Torture in short produces more lies than truth and in such a mixture that it can be hard to tell which is which. Because of the pain it causes torture can make it impossible for victims who want to tell the truth to actually do so accurately. And because of the effect it has on communities it often makes it harder to gather accurate information through more reliable sources.

 Accuracy in torture is so poor it is ‘in some cases less accurate than flipping a coin’. (No that isn’t exaggeration, that’s a quote from D Rejali who literally wrote the book)

 The Ticking Bomb

 The famous ‘ticking-bomb’ scenario is a fictional situation (it literally came from a novel, written by a suspected torturer) where a disaster (such as a bomb attack) is known to be approaching and in order to save innocent lives the characters need more intel fast.

 So they start debating whether to use torture.

 Depending on the story and the characters they sometimes do torture. Usually if they do it gives them information they then use to save lives.

 There’s another problem, aside from the total lack of accuracy for information that comes from torture. Torture takes as long or longer than other interrogation techniques.

 According to the CIA’s own records detainees were put through several days of sleep deprivation before interrogation. The Senate Torture Report (testimony from Ali Soufan) estimated that their torture techniques took 30 days.

 According to British records and accounts from the IRA during the Troubles a single torture session by ‘walling’ (sleep deprivation, white noise and stress positions combined) could last between nine and forty three hours.

 I’ve selected the following quotes to give an idea of the time frame for short tortures used in interrogation. Both are from Northern Ireland by Irish men detained by the British. Emphasis is mine.

 ‘One powerfully built RUC detective would keep me pinned in a position while the other one would hold my elbow then press back on my wrist. And that could last for an hour or possibly two hours. And it’s excruciatingly painful, to the extent that I remember after three or four days I would simply go unconscious-’ Tommy McKearney

 ‘When I was taken away from Girdwood to be interned, I thought I had been there for about eight days, but it was only three. I later realised I was only being allowed to sleep for ten minutes at a time.’ Joe Docherty

 Interrogation always takes time. And that time is measured in days not minutes.

 Sanitised Portrayals

  ‘NO useful information so far….He did vomit a couple of times during the water board with some beans and rice. It’s been 10 hours since he ate so this is surprising and disturbing.’ Senate Torture Report, from quoted emails SSCI 2014, 41-42

 For me this is one of the most noticeable differences between torture in pop culture and torture in reality. Torture in films and books is always sanitised.

 I don’t mean that it isn’t gory or isn’t gory ‘enough’. Blood seems to be a cinematic staple and seeing the hero beaten and bloodied in a dingy lit room has become standard in a certain sort of action story.

 What I’m talking about are the body fluids and products we’re trained to think are less acceptable. Vomit. Urine. Mucus. Faeces.

 I can think of several movies where a ‘good-guy’ gets beaten to a bloody pulp on screen. I can’t think of any where they piss themselves. But losing control of bladder and bowel function seem to be pretty common in real life. A lot of the eyewitness accounts I’ve read about systematic torture mention the smell of urine and shit.

 Vomiting is something I don’t see mentioned as often in survivor accounts but I think it’s very likely to occur frequently because a lot of common methods of torture produce nausea.

The ‘Tough’ Interrogator

 ‘It may be only later, outside of that specific environment, that the torturer may question his or her behaviour, and begin to experience psychological damage resulting from involvement in torture and trauma. In these cases, the resulting psychological symptoms are very similar to those of victims, including anxiety, intrusive traumatic memories and impaired cognitive and social functioning.’ Psychologists Mark Costanzo and Ellen Gerrity.

 ‘Those techniques [CIA ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques] are so harsh it’s emotionally distressing to the people who are administering them.’ Dr James Mitchell, psychologist involved in the CIA’s EIT program.

 ‘We are where we are- and we’re left popping our Prozac and taking our pills at night.’ Anonymous torturer quoted in Cruel Britannia

 There’s a growing body of evidence that torture has a negative psychological effect on the torturer.

 The evidence is for the most part anecdotal, based on patterns emerging across interviews. Torturers, funnily enough, don’t show up in droves for psychological studies. But there is a pattern. One of substance abuse, addiction, PTSD and suicide.

 The cause of these symptoms in torturers is the same thing that causes trauma in people who witness horrific things. It is well known that seeing violent attacks on others can cause trauma in witnesses.

 Humans are empathic creatures.

 There is a measurable, automatic response in the brain to seeing others in pain. We can not control it and we can not stop it. Even when we are told that the other person is anaesthetized our brains still respond to their perceived pain.

 This, combined with the destruction of normal social interaction and dehumanisation, appears in a very real sense to harm torturers.

 If you’re planning to use torture as part of an interrogation scene it’s worth noting that some torturers do believe torture is a useful way to get information, despite the evidence. Some of them cling to the idea that they had to torture, that what they did was useful and saved lives. Some of them seem to overplay the value of torture in order to justify their own actions and jobs.

 None of that makes them immune to the effect of torturing another human being.

 Disclaimer

[Additional Sources-

‘Torture and Democracy’, Princeton, D Rejali (Only order this if you’ll be at home to pick it up, at over 850 pages it’s a monster)

‘Accuracy of eyewitness memory for person encountered during exposure to highly intense stress’, The International Journal of Law and Psychiatry C A Morgan, G Hazlett, A Doran, S Garrett, G Hoyt, P Thomas, M Baranoksi, S M Southwick, 2004 (This team have actually done a series on high stress situations and the effects on memory. Charles Morgan is the first author on this set of papers.)

‘Audacity to Believe’ Cleveland, S Cassidy

‘Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation.’ Harvard University Press, S O’Mara (Highly recommended, reasonably accessible for a layman)

‘Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture.’ Portobello Books, I Cobain (Very good history, although the author doesn’t seem to understand many of the techniques he writes about)

‘What are you feeling? Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Assess the Modulation of Sensory and Affective Responses during Empathy for Pain’, PLoS ONE, C Lamm, H C Nusbaum, A N Meltzoff, J Decety 2007 (The experiments in this paper include brain scans of people seeing photos of a needle and a hand in various different positions, some of which would be painful. There wasn’t much change in brain response if the volunteers were told the hand couldn’t feel pain.)]

[the-record-newspaper]

The Killing of Rhonda Hinson Part 26

This photo was taken by Sarah McBrayer, who is a longtime neighbor of the Hinson family.  McBrayer stood in the driveway of her Hillcrest home and took a photo of the Hinson House, diagonally across the street from her location.

By LARRY J. GRIFFIN

Special Investigative Reporter

The Record

 To say that a death is suspicious is to offer an opinion; something doesn’t seem right.  Instead, we presented the facts and left the interpretation to others. –Ken Holmes, Marin County Coroner, The Education of a Coroner, 2017.

 It was during Sheriff Ralph Johnson’s administration that Bobby Hinson contacted authorities requesting that all of his daughter’s personal effects be returned to the family—including all of the items found in her car. Judy Hinson recounted the episode:  

“He went up there to get Rhonda’s things, and Ralph Johnson brought them to Bobby bundled up in what looked like a sheet. Bobby told me that he actually kinda  flung that bundle with her things in it at him…And yes, we had everything after that:  her East Burke jacket, the grey-hooded sweatjacket, and the pink snake. It was when Flash was working the case that he asked if he could take the snake and sweatjacket with him back to his office at the Sheriff’s Department. So, we let him have them.”

On Tuesday March 7, 1995 at 6 p.m., Detective James “Flash” Pruett phoned the residence of Sarah McBrayer, who lived diagonally across from the Hinson house on Hillcrest Street.  According to his investigative notes, Flash had received some information from Ernest Scott who owned a cab company in Morganton at that time.  

“[Mr. Scott] told me several years after the Hinson homicide he had some important information. He was reluctant to tell me over the years, but in October, 1994, he approached me with the information. He said that a Morganton attorney…had him pick Rhonda Hinson up at her home. Ernest said [the attorney] specifically told him to drive a vehicle no one would recognize. Ernest drove his Jeep. He said the event took place around the time of the homicide.”

Apparently in January 1995, Detectives Pruett and Franklin had discussed the probability of the attorney being involved in the killing of Rhonda Hinson.  Flash wrote:

“Gene [Franklin] felt that [the attorney] would have a lot to lose if Rhonda was about to tell something. We discussed where Rhonda could have come in contact with [his] family and suddenly we remember that the attorney’s brother was a physician and that the entire…family is from Valdese.”

Then the rhetorical questions, attendant to that hypothesis, were recorded in Flash’s assiduous notes:

“Could the [children of the family] have known Rhonda? Could [the attorney] and Rhonda [have] played tennis together? Were any of the events scheduled or promoted by the Mimosa Country Club or a club where the [attorney and his family] are members?”

However, during his interview with Ms. McBrayer on a late Winter early evening, speculations and concomitant questions were laid to rest.  

“During the conversation with Sarah McBrayer, she stated that Ernest [Scott] picked her up because she did not have a car back in 1981. She further stated that she dated [the attorney] about the time of Rhonda’s death and has continued to date him to this date. She lives…across from the victim’s home on Hillcrest.”  

Indicating that Ms. McBrayer had been “very helpful,” Detective Pruett turned attention to her previous statement detailing events of Dec. 23, 1981.  [Her full statement can be read in Installment XI of The Killing of Rhonda Hinson.]  Flash summarized the remainder of his conversation with Sarah in his notes:

“She was at the victim’s home when the first officer arrived on the scene on the morning of 122381 [Sic].  She saw Charles McDowell come to the home and stated exactly what the Hinsons recalled of the event. She said he would not talk to anyone and just stood by the doorway in the kitchen. She overheard one conversation when Charles McDowell called someone from the kitchen phone. Charles implied to Sarah he was calling the funeral home. She said he only made one phone call.”  

According to retrieved Central Telephone long distance records, a two-minute call was place between the Hinson residence and the McDowell residence at 3:37 a.m., on Dec. 23, 1981.  Detective Pruett identified that phone call to be one placed by Detective John McDevitt to the McDowell residence—a conversation alluded to by Betty McDowell in her statement of Feb. 16, 1982.  [Mr. McDowell left and went to look for her [Rhonda] in the beige Citation. Charlie did not get home before Valdese PD called and told them what happened.]”

At 3:43 a.m., a five-minute call was placed from the Hinson home to family members residing in Great Falls, S.C.  “It was to my sister, Bill Gantt, who is now deceased,” Judy Hinson averred.

Likely the call witnessed by Sarah McBrayer was placed at 3:50 a.m.—a one-minute call to the McDowell residence.  As before, Betty McDowell referenced that phone conversation as well, in her February 16th statement. [Charlie called…from the Hinsons and told us to come over.] Detective Pruett indicated this contact was made 13-minutes after John McDevitt called Greg McDowell.”  

And Ms. McBrayer was still at the Hinsons’ when Betty and Greg McDowell arrived.  Flash wrote:

“She observed the same unusual behavior the Hinsons observed.  The only difference in Sarah’s story is Greg threw-up numerous times. She also wondered why Greg was so clean shaven and why he had taken a shower before coming.”  

A week later—Tuesday March 14, 1995—Flash noted that he had not been able to meet with the Hinsons, as he had ostensibly planned to do, because he had to devote attention to “numerous” breaking-and-entering [B & E] arrests, though he did stipulate that he had spoken with them twice that day.

However, he did manage to place a call to Special Agent L. B. Thomas of the FBI in Raleigh.  During the hour conversation, he asked S.A. Thomas to do a profile of the shooter. He faxed a synopsis of the case to the FBI profiler, summarizing key events.  Agent Thomas concurred with Flash’s conclusion as to the identity of the shooter.  

“He stated that all the responses the shooter would have are inherit to [the suspect]…Agent Thomas said he would send me a written synopsis of his profile and he would also submit his thoughts on how we could break [the suspect].  He feels that [the suspect] would confess if we used the proper tactics.  Agent Thomas also feels the polygraph should not be used exclusively to clear a suspect.”

 “Due to a heavy case load and numerous arrests on B & E’s [sic], I have not been able to work on the Hinson case,” Detective Pruett confided in his written notes, dated Wednesday, March 22, 1995. He was able to meet, however, with Mr. Webb with the Department of Transportation. The survey of Highway 350 [Eldred  Street] was on Flash’s calendar for that day and had been scheduled by Tony Moore.  

“I talked with Webb at the office, made him copies of photographs showing the rods with the angles, and he also followed me to the scene. I also gave him the map we drew the 20 degree angle on.  Webb was unable to calculate the six-percent grade with the angles. Webb briefly looked at the terrain at the scene and returned to McDowell  County.  

Later that day, Tony Moore contacted Flash with some rough measurements. Because the exact location of Rhonda’s vehicle at the point of impact was unknown, Moore factored a maximum and minimum distance on northbound Highway 350, leading into Valdese. His preliminary findings were compelling:

“At the minimum distance, Tony said the shooter would have to be 15-feet above I-40 and at the maximum, the shooter would have to be 42-feet above 1-40. Tony explained the vertical angle was very shallow (three and a half degrees) but when you factor the distance to I-40, the height of the angle increased dramatically.

Translation?  If Mr. Moore’s measurements were accurate, the shot could not have possibly been fired from I-40, as some had posited.  But, he agreed to research the angles and road grade and send the survey team back with the correct formula.  

“Tony said in his opinion, the shooter would have been close to the victim’s car to match the angles.”  

In April 1995, Detective Pruett journeyed to Wilkies Grove Baptist Church to meet and talk with the secretary, Shelia Robinson. He requested the phone records of the parsonage and church.  Ms. Robinson felt that records did not exist because of the time period lapse, but pledged to look further into the matter and let Flash know.

After some weeks without a word, he called the secretary’s residence several times.  Finally on May 16, 1995, Ms. Robinson phoned the detective to inform him that she had located the records.  Nine days later, he returned to the church to peruse the phone data.  It was 10 a.m., Thursday May 25, 1995, when Detective Pruett walked into Shelia Robinson’s office at Wilkies Grove Baptist Church.

“She first brought the brown manila envelope containing the 1981 records. I found the telephone records up to just a few days before the homicide…All the bills were neatly divided into monthly packets showing the bill divided into personal and official categories. The itemized list of [long-distance] calls was attached to each monthly bill. There were many calls to the victim’s residence from the parsonage. The billing cycle caused the sheet I wanted to see fall on the January 1982 bill. I asked for the 1982 envelope. Shelia left the room and returned with it.”

As Flash examined the contents of the envelope, he was able to locate the main telephone bill but discovered the itemized long-distance phone call listing was missing.  He asked Ms. Robinson for the 1983 records and discovered the main phone bills; but, the itemized long-distance listings were missing as well. Upon requesting and perusing the 1984-1985 records, the detective found the billing information to be complete and accurate—like those of the 1980-1981 records.  

 “I called John Suttle and asked him to call the AG’s [Attorney-General’s] office.  John called several people, including our DA [District Attorney] and called me back at the church office.  He said everyone agreed the proper way to handle the matter…”

Against the wishes of the pastor and deacons, yet armed with the approval of his superiors, Detective Pruett seized the church’s 1980-1985 records.

[thisdaynews]

How Lewis Hamilton remained master to Max Verstappen's apprentice

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-lewis-hamilton-remained-master-to-max-verstappens-apprentice/

How Lewis Hamilton remained master to Max Verstappen's apprentice

Hamilton now has seven victories at the Hungaroring

Formula 1 has been waiting for a full-on battle between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen for years now. The Hungarian Grand Prix finally delivered it, and what a treat it was.

Verstappen in a slower Red Bull holding off Hamilton in a faster Mercedes, their teams fighting a strategic battle as much as the drivers were scrapping on track – it produced a race that not only thrilled in the moment, but whet the appetite for what might be to come when F1 resumes after the four-week summer break in Belgium on 1 September.

Even Hamilton was excited by the battle – which became a reality as soon as the world champion had passed team-mate Valtteri Bottas by Turn Three on the first lap and settled in behind Verstappen.

“As soon as I got into second,” Hamilton said, “I was like: ‘OK, this whole battle we’ve been talking about me and Max having we are going to have that today.’ And it was really awesome.”

Hamilton overtakes Verstappen for late Hungary win

Listen: “Hats off to the strategists, hats off to Lewis Hamilton”

What happened to the woman who beat Hamilton in go-karts?

“I was definitely not thinking: ‘Genius'”

As they slugged it out at the front, the two men were in a separate race from anyone else, Hamilton more than a minute ahead of the Ferrari of third-placed man Sebastian Vettel by the end of the grand prix.

Hamilton always looked quicker, but track position is so important at the Hungaroring, a tight and twisty track in a dusty amphitheatre about 12 miles outside Budapest.

Throughout, Hamilton rarely gave Verstappen any breathing space, and Verstappen defended with maturity and skill.

Never more than about two seconds behind, Hamilton ramped up the pressure on Verstappen as the window for him to make a pit stop and rejoin ahead of the Ferraris, then led by Charles Leclerc approached.

Hamilton closed a 20-second deficit in less than 20 laps to pass Verstappen for the lead

That forced Red Bull to stop Verstappen as early as they could – to protect against Hamilton stopping first and jumping the Dutchman that way.

That early pit stop meant Mercedes could run Hamilton longer, to give him fresher tyres for their fight in the second stint, which at that time was planned to be to the end of the race.

After that first stop, Hamilton was all over Verstappen. But after one breathtaking overtaking attempt around the outside of the super-fast Turn Four just failed to come off, he and Mercedes began to doubt that he would be able to pass.

That was on lap 39, and immediately afterwards the Mercedes strategists began to consider the idea of a second stop. It would lose them 20 seconds, but the idea was that Hamilton would come back at Verstappen like a rocket.

They analysed and discussed it for seven laps and then took the plunge, switching from the hard to the medium tyres for the final 22 laps, in which Hamilton would have to make up 20 seconds and pass arguably the most aggressive and uncompromising driver in the sport.

It was an unusually bold and aggressive strategy from a team that can tend towards the cautious – and impressively so just a week after they came in for criticism for questionable strategy in the rain at Hockenheim, their and Hamilton’s worst race for years.

Hamilton was far from sure it was the right idea.

Wolff said: “I’m happy for the strategy group as in Germany we came under fire for the strategy calls.”

“I definitely was not thinking: ‘Genius,’ he said. “Was I thinking ‘worth a try’? I have a different viewpoint in the car. I came out (from the first pit stop) with six- or seven-lap fresher tyres and at the time I was much quicker and I was like: ‘OK, I just have to keep the pressure on.’

“But then they told me we were going two-stop and I couldn’t compute how it would work.

“I thought I could make the hards go to the end so I knew he would be able to do the same. I thought pitting was going to be difficult and I hadn’t even had the chance to be thinking what tyre.

“They put me on the medium and it didn’t feel great initially and then he started matching my times.”

Over the radio, the doubt in Hamilton’s mind at the wisdom of the strategy was clear. He needed to close at a second a lap, but after cutting the gap to 16 seconds, Verstappen started doing the same lap times. Hamilton was cooling his brakes, which were on the limit, but once they were back in the right temperature window, he cut loose.

“I was thinking: ‘Jeez this is really risky,'” Hamilton said. “In the end you have to just go: ‘Go for it, give it everything. Just don’t worry if you don’t catch him. Just concentrate on putting perfect laps.'”

It was what Mercedes and Hamilton call “hammer time”. From 15.4 seconds, the gap came down to nothing in 10 laps.

“I saw his times rising and I was like: ‘I am going to catch him and as soon as I catch him I am going by, no messing around. And it was such a relief when I got by because it’s your dream.”

The drive and the win clearly made as big an impression on Hamilton as they did on those watching.

“It feels like a first (win),” he said. “I don’t know how. I’ve been doing this a long time but it feels like one of the first.”

Two men in a league of their own

Hamilton may have won in Hungary but fans voted Verstappen driver of the day

According to Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff, Hamilton’s driving was “in a different dimension”.

In reality, there were two men in that dimension. Verstappen was hugely impressive, too. His pole position on Saturday was stunning, and he lost out to a faster car, driven by a great driver at the top of his game, and a bold strategy to which Red Bull could not respond.

“We were just not fast enough,” Verstappen said. “I tried everything I could on that hard tyre to stay alive. Still, second, fastest lap, a good weekend overall. Congrats to Lewis, he was pushing me really hard. I like that. We were just lacking a bit of grip. We tried a one-stop, they had the opportunity for two and that worked out well.”

Hamilton praised Verstappen for the way he had conducted himself in the heat of their battle.

“Strong competitor and great driver at his best,” Hamilton said. “It’s awesome to see the respect between us, really respectful driving and I hope to continue that.

“He put the car in some good places. I gave him space and more. If we were on the same (championship) points he may have been a lot more aggressive but there was no need for that. It was just making sure when I do finally pull off an overtaking manoeuvre it was a full sweep by.”

The respect went both ways. Afterwards, in the news conference, there was a fascinating exchange between the two men when they were asked to give themselves scores out of 10 for the first half of the season.

Verstappen took fastest lap and an extra bonus point which takes him to within seven points of second-placed Bottas in the championship standings

After Vettel had given himself a five, saying he was “not happy with the first half – I can do a better job” – Hamilton gave himself an “8.9/8.8 – if it wasn’t for the last race (in Germany) it would be a little higher.

“It has been the best start of the season we’ve ever had and one of the best starts I’ve ever had but there are areas I can continue to work on. That’s the great thing about this sport, you can always improve.”

Verstappen refused to give himself a number, saying: “I hate putting a number on it because it reminds me of school which is not that long ago. I am always quite critical, it can always be better. I am never satisfied. It has a been very positive and I’ve had good results.”

So Hamilton did it for him, pointing to the two wins Verstappen had in the three races immediately preceding Hungary.

“Last few races it’s high nines,” Hamilton said of Verstappen. “I don’t remember all the races. But he drove exceptionally and if he continues like that it will be high nines.”

Finally, the quality of their race was summed up by their former rival Fernando Alonso, the two-time champion, who retired at the end of last season, watching the race at home.

“Bravo Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen,” Alonso wrote on Twitter. “Pushing 70 laps to the maximum. More than one minute to the third, nearly + one lap and a half to the top five. Both Impressive. Thanks for the show.”

A nervous wait for Bottas

Bottas was taken out of contention by a touch with team-mate Hamilton early in the race

While Hamilton goes into the summer break with his championship lead extended and a sixth title set to be sealed long before the end of the season, his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas faces a far less comfortable month.

He is out of contract this year and Wolff is going to spend the summer break deciding whether to keep Bottas, or replace him with reserve driver Esteban Ocon.

So it was a bad time for Bottas to have a race like this. Second out of the first corner, he was fourth by the time he was heading into Turn Four on the first lap, and with a broken front wing, after locking his wheels into both the first two corners, being passed by Hamilton, lightly touching his team-mate and then being overtaken by Leclerc, who broke the Mercedes’ front wing in the process.

That led to a difficult afternoon fighting back and an eventual eighth place finish.

Wolff said: “I am so sad for him. He was so pumped since yesterday, his qualifying performance was brilliant and he was in the right frame of mind before the race.

“And then the unfortunate incident in flat-spotting the tyre, touching with Lewis, touching with Leclerc and then suddenly within half a lap all the work is gone and that is just awful for him and I am sorry for him.”

Wolff said Bottas’ future will not turn on this one performance.

“We will not be letting one race result influence our decision,” he said. “It is more about compounding all data and then making a decision on stability and great personality and a very good driver versus giving youth a chance with all the reward and risk it can bring and we haven’t done that yet.

“We will start the process tomorrow and it will not be an easy one.”

Verstappen’s father Jos finished on the podium at the Hungarian Grand Prix in 1994 for Benetton, 25 years before his son. Michael Schumacher won that day

Changing of the guard? Not yet, according to Hamilton, who took his 81st career win

The Verstappen fans packed the grandstands in their thousands at the Hungaroring

Read More

[a380flightdeck]

‘Heaviest aircraft pull by a production car’

As world record attempts go it may strike many as plane bonkers.

But a British driver has accelerated into the Guinness Book of Records by successfully towing a 285-tonne Airbus A380 superjumbo - the biggest passenger aeroplane on the planet – using a standard Porsche Cayenne sports utility vehicle (SUV).

And that was after the UK Porsche team behind the record-breaking attempt drove the car – more usually seen on school runs - from London to Paris to carry out the feat.

The German 4X4 , driven by Porsche GB technician Richard Payne, towed the giant Air France double-decker aircraft over a distance of 42-metres at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, to set a new Guinness World Records title for ‘Heaviest aircraft pull by a production car’. It beat the previous record by a margin of 115-tonnes.

The new Guinness World Records title was set by a 157mph Cayenne S Diesel costing £66,767 whose 4.1litre V8 engine produced 385hp of pulling power – the equivalent of around four Ford Fiestas. The exercise was then repeated using a 176mph Porsche Cayenne Turbo S costing £121,550.

A far cry from towing the standard caravan, trailer or horse-box, the Porsche Cayenne was connected to the Airbus A380 via a special attachment that sat on the vehicle’s standard tow bar.

Slowly but surely as Porsche’s Mr Payne pressed down on the accelerator, the Cayenne carefully pulled away with the giant passenger plane edging forward inch by inch behind it and then gradually picking up the pace as both car and aircraft gained in momentum.

Mr Payne, a technician at Porsche GB, who drove the record breaking car said: ‘It did it – I’m so relieved! We don’t usually go this far to test the limits of our cars but I think today we got pretty close. I could tell that it was working hard but the Cayenne didn’t complain and just got on with it. My mirrors were quite full of Airbus, which was interesting.

‘Our cars can go a bit beyond what our customers might expect – they’re designed to be tough. But even so, what the Cayenne did today was remarkable. ‘We drove the car here from London – and I plan to drive it home again, having towed an A380 in between.’

But while the attempt was primarily a British achievement, Mr Payne also praised colleagues at his parent company in Southern Germany. He said: ‘Credit should go to the team in Stuttgart who developed the car – they did a thorough job. I’m also very grateful to Air France and its engineers for their generosity in allowing me to tow their beautiful aircraft’.

The project was carried using one of Air France’s fleet of ten A380 aircraft and the airline’s 60,000 square metre state-of-the-art engineering hangar which is big enough to house one superjumbo or 3,000 Porsche Cayennes. The hangar is usually home to all the engineering and maintenance activity for the Air France fleet.

Pravin Patel, adjudicator, Guinness World Records said: ‘I’ve verified some amazing record attempts during my time as a Guinness World Records adjudicator – watching a Porsche Cayenne tow one of the largest aircraft in the world definitely ranks as among the most spectacular. My congratulations go out to all those involved in achieving this remarkable feat.’

Porsche said: ‘In accordance with the rules applied by Guinness World Records, the test was overseen by independent engineers. After the record was set, performance testing and scrutiny of every major component and electronic system on the vehicle was carried out in order to provide certification that the car was to production standard.’

Gery Mortreux, executive vice president Air France Industries said: ‘It was an honour to host Porsche at our hangar at Charles de Gaulle. It is usually home to our engineers working on our fleet of 10 Airbus A380 – one of the most sophisticated aircraft in the world.

It was fun and exciting to watch the two machines together – our engineers were intrigued and impressed. Congratulations to Porsche on a remarkable achievement.’ ‘It shows the passion we put on every challenge we take. Like Porsche, we thrive on excellence and pushing engineering boundaries.’

The previous world record, broken by the Porsche Cayenne, was set in August 2013 when an unmodified Nissan Patrol pulled an Russian Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane weighing 170.9 tonnes inclusive of fuel, at Sharjah International Airport in the United Arab Emirates.

[newstfionline]

Door-Busting Drug Raids Leave a Trail of Blood

By Kevin Sack, NY Times, March 18, 2017

CORNELIA, Ga.--This town on the edge of the Appalachians has fewer than 5,000 residents, but the SWAT team was outfitted for war.

At 2:15 a.m. on a moonless night in May 2014, 10 officers rolled up a driveway in an armored Humvee, three of them poised to leap off the running boards. They carried Colt submachine guns, light-mounted AR-15 rifles and Glock .40-caliber sidearms. Many wore green body armor and Kevlar helmets. They had a door-breaching shotgun, a battering ram, sledgehammers, Halligan bars for smashing windows, a ballistic shield and a potent flash-bang grenade.

The target was a single-story ranch-style house about 50 yards off Lakeview Heights Circle. Not even four hours earlier, three informants had bought $50 worth of methamphetamine in the front yard. That was enough to persuade the county’s chief magistrate to approve a no-knock search warrant authorizing the SWAT operators to storm the house without warning.

The point man on the entry team found the side door locked, and nodded to Deputy Jason Stribling, who took two swings with the metal battering ram. As the door splintered near the deadbolt, he yelled, “Sheriff’s department, search warrant!” Another deputy, Charles Long, had already pulled the pin on the flash-bang. He placed his left hand on Deputy Stribling’s back for stability, peered quickly into the dark and tossed the armed explosive about three feet inside the door.

It landed in a portable playpen.

As policing has militarized to fight a faltering war on drugs, few tactics have proved as dangerous as the use of forcible-entry raids to serve narcotics search warrants, which regularly introduce staggering levels of violence into missions that might be accomplished through patient stakeouts or simple knocks at the door.

Thousands of times a year, these “dynamic entry” raids exploit the element of surprise to effect seizures and arrests of neighborhood drug dealers. But they have also led time and again to avoidable deaths, gruesome injuries, demolished property, enduring trauma, blackened reputations and multimillion-dollar legal settlements at taxpayer expense, an investigation by The New York Times found.

For the most part, governments at all levels have chosen not to quantify the toll by requiring reporting on SWAT operations. But The Times’s investigation, which relied on dozens of open-record requests and thousands of pages from police and court files, found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in such raids from 2010 through 2016. Scores of others were maimed or wounded.

The casualties have occurred in the execution of no-knock warrants, which give the police prior judicial authority to force entry without notice, as well as warrants that require the police to knock and announce themselves before breaking down doors. Often, there is little difference.

Innocents have died in attacks on wrong addresses, including a 7-year-old girl in Detroit, and collaterally as the police pursued other residents, among them a 68-year-old grandfather in Framingham, Mass. Stray bullets have whizzed through neighboring homes, and in dozens of instances the victims of police gunfire have included the family dog.

Search warrant raids account for a small share of the nearly 1,000 fatalities each year in officer-involved shootings. But what distinguishes them from other risky interactions between the police and citizens, like domestic disputes, hostage-takings and confrontations with mentally ill people, is that they are initiated by law enforcement.

In a country where four in 10 adults have guns in their homes, the raids incite predictable collisions between forces that hurtle toward each other like speeding cars in a passing lane--officers with a license to invade private homes and residents convinced of their right to self-defense.

After being awakened by the shattering of doors and the detonation of stun grenades, bleary suspects reach for nearby weapons--at times realizing it is the police, at others mistaking them for intruders--and the shooting begins. In some cases, victims like Todd Blair, a Utah man who grabbed a golf club on the way out of his bedroom, have been slain by officers who perceived a greater threat than existed.

As the police broke down his door in 2010, Todd Blair emerged from his bedroom with a golf club. He was shot to death five seconds after the first ram at his front door.

To be sure, police officers and judges must find probable cause of criminal activity to justify a search warrant. Absent resources for endless stakeouts, police tacticians argue that dynamic entry provides the safest means to clear out heavily fortified drug houses and to catch suspects with the contraband needed for felony prosecutions.

But critics of the forced-entry raids question whether the benefits outweigh the risks. The drug crimes used to justify so many raids, they point out, are not capital offenses. And even if they were, that would not rationalize the killing or wounding of suspects without due process. Nor would it forgive the propensity of the police to err in the planning or execution of raids that are inherently chaotic and place bystanders in harm’s way.

Forcible-entry methods have become common practice over the last quarter century through a confluence of the war on drugs, the rise of special weapons and tactics squads, and Supreme Court rulings that have eroded Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. Support for their continued use has been bolstered by an epidemic of opioid abuse and the threat of domestic terrorism.

Because many raids occur in low-income neighborhoods, shooting deaths like one in November of a 22-year-old black man in Salisbury, N.C., have exacerbated racial tensions already raw from a spate of high-profile police killings. The American Civil Liberties Union concluded in a recent study of 20 cities that 42 percent of those subjected to SWAT search warrant raids were black and 12 percent Hispanic. Of the 81 civilian deaths tallied by The Times, half were members of minority groups.

The no-knock process often begins with unreliable informants and cursory investigations that produce affidavits signed by unquestioning low-level judges. It is not uncommon for the searches to yield only misdemeanor-level stashes, or to come up empty.

In some instances when officers have been killed, suspects with no history of violence, found with small quantities of drugs, have wound up facing capital murder charges, and possible death sentences.

In December, a jury in Corpus Christi, Tex., acquitted a 48-year-old man who spent 664 days in jail after being charged with attempted capital murder for wounding three SWAT officers during a no-knock raid that targeted his nephew. The jury concluded that the man, Ray Rosas, did not know whom he was firing at through a blinded window.

While the raiders are typically seeking narcotics, there also have been deaths and serious injuries when warrants were served on people suspected of running illegal poker games, brewing moonshine and neglecting pets. In 2011, officers in Marine City, Mich., conducted a dynamic-entry raid to serve a search warrant for “any and all evidence pertaining to graffiti including but not limited to, spray paint containers, markers, notebooks, and photographs.” After forcing residents to the floor at gunpoint, they found nothing, according to depositions by the residents.

The Times found that from 2010 to 2015, an average of least 30 federal civil rights lawsuits were filed a year to protest residential search warrants executed with dynamic entries. Many of the complaints depict terrifying scenes in which children, elderly residents and people with disabilities are manhandled at gunpoint, unclothed adults are rousted from bed and houses are ransacked without recompense or apology. Louise Milan, 68, of Evansville, Ind., alleged in her filing that she and her 18-year-old daughter were handcuffed in front of neighbors during a door-busting 2012 raid prompted by threats against the police made by someone who had pirated her wireless connection.

“There’s a real misimpression by the public that aggressive police actions are only used against hardened criminals,” said Cary J. Hansel, a Baltimore lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in such lawsuits. “But there are dozens and dozens of cases where a no-knock warrant is used against somebody who’s totally innocent.”

At least seven of the federal lawsuits have been settled for more than $1 million in the last five years. They include a $3.75 million payment in 2016 to the family of Eurie Stamps, the unarmed Framingham grandfather who was accidentally shot, while compliant and on his stomach; and $3.4 million in 2013 to the family of Jose Guereña, a 26-year-old former Marine shot more than 20 times as agents broke into his house in Tucson. No drugs were found.

In each of those cases, as in almost all botched raids, prosecutors declined to press charges against the officers involved.

Perhaps no fiasco illustrates the perils of no-knock searches as graphically as the 2014 raid here in Georgia’s northeast corner. On May 22, an eager young Habersham County sheriff’s deputy named Nikki Autry, who was attached to a narcotics task force, turned a small-time methamphetamine user into a confidential informant. Intent on avoiding jail, the informant, James Alton Fry Jr., set about the task of baiting bigger fish.

According to trial testimony and investigative documents, the agents sent Mr. Fry out on the night of May 27 to make drug buys. He scored two Lortab pain pills on his first approach, struck out with a second source and then was connected to a meth dealer named Wanis Thonetheva. At around 10:30 p.m., Mr. Fry, his wife, Devon, and their housemate, Larry Wood--all persistent meth users--drove to the address provided by the dealer.

“It didn’t look like a drug house,” Ms. Fry later testified. “This was a nice house. It’s usually a shack or trailer.” The police did not follow them to provide protection or surveil the property.

Mr. Wood conducted his business out front with Mr. Thonetheva, a 30-year-old American-born son of Laotian immigrants, as the Frys waited in their red pickup. All three appeared shaken when they met up with their handlers in a church parking lot. They had spotted two men at the house whom they took to be guards for the drug operation, and a third who might have been a supplier.

The agents sent the informants home, but about half an hour later Deputy Autry texted Ms. Fry with an afterthought. “Did y’all see any signs of kids at wanis’ house,” she asked.

“Nothing except a mini van,” came the response.

Thinking she was on to a big score, Deputy Autry, who was 28, did not wait for daylight or further investigation. She returned to the Sheriff’s Office, where she pulled Mr. Thonetheva’s criminal history and mug shot. With the approval of the sheriff, Joey Terrell, she alerted the county’s Special Response Team to prepare for a raid. She and her drug unit commander, Murray J. Kogod, began drafting the application for the no-knock warrant.

The affidavit included inaccuracies and hyperbole. It asserted incorrectly that Mr. Fry--the only informant formally certified by the police--had bought the drugs, rather than Mr. Wood. Deputy Autry described Mr. Fry as “a true and reliable informant,” even though he had not made a buy before that night. Despite the lack of surveillance, she wrote that she had “confirmed that there is heavy traffic in and out of the residence.”

Shortly after midnight, Deputy Autry and another agent awakened the county magistrate, James N. Butterworth, with a house call. He read the affidavit and placed her under oath.

She told him that Mr. Thonetheva had been arrested several times for drug possession, that there might be armed lookouts at the house and that an assault involving an AK-47 had been reported there the previous year. The judge, who had never denied Deputy Autry a warrant, found no reason to dispute probable cause and signed at 12:15 a.m.

“If you had drugs and you had weapons, that was constitutional purpose to go on in there, not to knock on the door,” he later testified.

The Special Response Team, formed three years earlier, consisted of a dozen men plucked from the Sheriff’s Office and the Cornelia Police Department. They trained on their own time for four hours each Thursday. The Humvee had been procured through a Pentagon program that made surplus military equipment available to even the most rural departments.

There had been few chances to quell riots and subdue active shooters in the hamlets of Habersham County, population 43,000. Instead, the unit had been used primarily to serve narcotics search warrants, 32 times in all.

During their pre-raid briefing, team members circulated a photograph of Mr. Thonetheva, a Google Earth image of the brick house with dark shutters and a sketch of the three-bedroom interior. Deputy Autry mistakenly told the team’s commander that the drug deal had gone down near a side door to an enclosed garage, so he plotted his entry from there. She told him there were no signs of children or animals, failing to mention the minivan.

When the flash-bang detonated with a concussive boom, a blinding white light filled the room. The entry team rumbled in, screaming for the occupants to get to the ground. Deputy Stribling peered into the playpen with a flashlight and found 19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh.

Deputy Stribling waved off Deputy Long, who had lobbed the grenade. “Charlie, go away, you don’t need to see this,” he said.

The child, known affectionately as Bou Bou, had a long laceration and burns across his chest, exposing his ribs, and another gash between his upper lip and nose. His round, cherubic face was bloodied and blistered, spackled with shrapnel and soot. The heat had singed away much of his pillow and dissolved the mesh side of the playpen.

At first the child was silent. But as Deputy Stribling picked him up, rubbed his feet and shook his arms, he began to wail. Even the drug agents stationed outside the other end of the house could hear the screams.

“You don’t think that baby got hurt, do you?” one asked another.

Some mistakes might be laughable were they not so consequential.

In May 2010, the police in Hempstead, N.Y., shot and wounded 22-year-old Iyanna Davis during a no-knock raid at a two-family residence where she lived in an upstairs unit with a separate entrance. The warrant was for downstairs.

Ms. Davis was awakened at about 7 a.m. by the sound of a door’s being smashed and hid in a closet, she recounted in a deposition. A Nassau County police officer, armed with an assault rifle, opened the door, found her crouching and screamed at her to raise her hands.

“That’s when I heard the shot,” she recounted. “The force actually knocked me back on my backside.” The bullet had entered her right breast and exited her abdomen.

In his own deposition, the officer, Michael Capobianco, said that he “tripped and didn’t mean to fire.” He was cleared of any policy violations; Ms. Davis, who spent a week in the hospital and another three months recuperating, won $650,000 in a legal settlement from the county.

Some SWAT veterans find it confounding that many police agencies remain so devoted to dynamic entry. The tactic is far from universally embraced, and a number of departments have retired or restricted its use over the years, often after a bad experience.

The National Tactical Officers Association, which might be expected to mount the most ardent defense, has long called for using dynamic entry sparingly. Robert Chabali, the group’s chairman from 2012 to 2015, goes so far as to recommend that it never be used to serve narcotics warrants.

“It just makes no sense,” said Mr. Chabali, a SWAT veteran who retired as assistant chief of the Dayton, Ohio, Police Department in 2015. “Why would you run into a gunfight? If we are going to risk our lives, we risk them for a hostage, for a citizen, for a fellow officer. You definitely don’t go in and risk your life for drugs.”

Another former chairman of the association, Phil Hansen, said SWAT teams tended to use dynamic entry as “a one-size-fits-all solution to tactical problems.” As commander of the Police Department in Santa Maria, Calif., and before that a longtime SWAT leader for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, he said it seemed foolhardy to move so aggressively in a state that voted in November to legalize recreational marijuana.

“Why am I risking people’s lives to save an ounce of something that they’re bringing in by the freighter every year?” he asked.

Clearly there are factors that contribute to the tactic’s staying power. Some of it, according to long-term observers, derives from the adrenalized, hypermasculine, militaristic ethos of SWAT.

“It’s culturally intoxicating, a rush,” said Dr. Kraska, the criminologist. “It involves dressing up in body armor and provocative face coverings and enhanced-hearing sets, a cyborg 21st-century kind of appeal. And instead of sitting around and waiting for something to happen twice or three times a year, you can go out and generate it.”

That culture is reinforced by a cottage industry of tactical training contractors, many of them veterans of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, who are hired by police departments to keep SWAT teams up to date.

“For them, collateral damage is something you try to avoid but it’s not a deal breaker,” Commander Hansen said. “That doesn’t translate well for police work. If you’re in the military and told to clear a block of houses in a half-hour, you’re going to do it quickly by kicking in doors and throwing grenades. It’s a whole different theater of operations.”

Another potential factor is the incentive sometimes provided by asset forfeiture laws when contraband or drug proceeds are found in a residence. Revenue generated by those seizures typically reverts back to law enforcement agencies.

Connor Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute in Utah, said that was one of the rationales behind his state’s recent ban on forcible entry in drug possession cases. In 2015 when the new law passed, search warrant executions accounted for 29 percent of all forfeitures, according to a state report.

“We feel strongly that a lot of this is financial motive, not to keep the community safe,” said Mr. Boyack, whose libertarian-leaning group advocated for the restriction.

Further inducement has come from the Defense Department’s excess property program, which has distributed more than $6 billion in military vehicles, weapons and other equipment to law enforcement agencies since 1997. Until last May, the Pentagon required that any transferred equipment be “placed into use within one year of receipt.”

The Obama administration ended that requirement after a larger review of the so-called 1033 program, which was prompted by the police response to the 2014 civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo. President Trump has yet to act on a campaign pledge to rescind an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2015 that limited the kinds of equipment offered by the government. It is unclear whether he would reinstate the one-year rule.

As SWAT officers administered first aid to Bou Bou Phonesavanh, other agents detained his parents--Bounkham and Alecia Phonesavanh--and their three other children, ages 3 to 7.

“You know why we’re here,” an officer barked at Mr. Phonesavanh.

He didn’t. “Why didn’t you knock on the door?” he asked.

Elsewhere in the house, the agents came upon Mr. Phonesavanh’s sister, Amanda Thonetheva, who owned the place, as well as her boyfriend, her grandson and one of her sons. They did not find her other son, 30-year-old Wanis, who no longer lived there but dropped by at times. Nor did they find guns or drugs beyond some meth residue in a glass pipe. Later that night, deputies arrested Wanis at another address.

The Phonesavanhs had already suffered their share of misfortune. Earlier that year, the family’s house in Janesville, Wis., had burned down. They stayed in a motel as long as they could afford it, then lived for two weeks in their 11-year-old Chrysler Town & Country minivan.

They drove to Georgia when Mr. Phonesavanh’s sister offered the room in her garage. Seven weeks later, after struggling to find work, they were preparing to drive back to Wisconsin.

Remarkably, Bou Bou survived the explosion after being sped to a hospital in Atlanta. Now 4, he underwent his 15th surgery late last year, with more to come, his mother said. “The nightmares are still there,” she said, “several times a week. When he wakes up he’s usually sweating and holding his face.” She said all of her children became scared when they saw a police officer or security guard.

The Phonsevanhs, who have returned to Janesville, received $3.6 million in settlements to the federal lawsuit they filed against the traumatized members of the drug and SWAT teams. The payments were made through government insurance policies purchased with taxpayer funds. All but $200,000, Ms. Phonesavanh said, has been spent on medical and legal bills.

“Things are still quite the struggle,” she said. “They didn’t mean to hurt my son, but they could’ve done a lot more to prevent this.”

A Habersham County grand jury issued a stinging report, but found no criminal negligence and declined to indict any of the participants. Federal prosecutors then won an indictment of Deputy Autry for violating Bou Bou’s civil rights, but she was acquitted after a weeklong trial. The jury accepted the defense’s assertion that the mistakes made by the former deputy, who had resigned, were unintentional.

In their closing arguments, opposing lawyers found common ground in their criticism of no-knock searches.

The prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney William L. McKinnon Jr., called the tactic “probably the most intrusive contact that any citizen could have with the government.” He got no dispute from one of Deputy Autry’s lawyers, Michael J. Trost. “There’s a pattern of excess in the ways search warrants are executed,” he told the jury. “That’s what led to the injuries to this child.”

[attredd]

Less than 24 hours after a man was fatally shot in downtown Portland, Oregon’s governor offered what looked like a way forward: a six-point, “unified law enforcement plan” enlisting the help of local, state, and federal officers to “protect free speech and bring violence and arson to an end in Portland.”But with Portland now close to 100 consecutive nights of protests, most of which have resulted in violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement, the plan doesn’t have much in terms of substance. Local jurisdictions are declining to send in backup. State troopers are deputizing their own, effectively circumventing the local district attorney’s office. And the federal government is, once again, threatening to send in troops.“We have a schoolyard beef going on and people are acting like adolescents,” said Mike German, retired FBI agent and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.“Rather than taking responsibility for the errors they’ve made thus far and trying to actually resolve the issues the protesters are trying to raise, we instead see these agencies look to gain some political edge.”Portland has been mired in nightly protests since the end of May, when rage over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody led people to take to the streets nationwide. Most nights have seen law enforcement officers rushing protesters with fists, batons, and crowd control munitions including tear gas, pepper balls, and smoke bombs, often in response to a small number of black-clad demonstrators lighting fires, breaking windows, vandalizing buildings, and throwing projectiles at officers, such as rocks, water bottles, and paint.As of this writing, local and state police officers have made close to 800 arrests related to the protests, according to Oregon State Police. Of those 800, close to 700 arrests are claimed by PPB, according to the bureau’s own numbers. The overwhelming majority of charges are “interfering with a peace officer,” “disorderly conduct,” and “resisting arrest.” Cops have arrested protesters for alleged crimes such as setting fires and shining lasers in officers’ eyes. Often, however, officers arrest protesters for talking back to them and failing to move out of their way.Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced in mid-August a policy against prosecuting protest-related cases that didn’t include the use of force against someone else, deliberate property damage, or theft. “As prosecutors, we acknowledge the depth of emotion that motivates these demonstrations and support those who are civically engaged through peaceful protesting,” Schmidt wrote in a statement at the time.Oregon State Police, sent to Portland at the beginning of August to take over for federal law enforcement officers defending the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse, withdrew in a huff. “At this time, we are inclined to move those resources back to counties where prosecution of criminal conduct is still a priority,” said OSP’s Timothy Fox. Since then, Portland Police have been mostly going it alone, with a backlog of cases piling up at the County DA. When asked about a total number of prosecutorial cases, the Multnomah County DA’s Office did not offer any figures. “We still don’t have a final number of the cases we will be prosecuting because we continue to review new cases each day, many older cases remain under follow-up investigation, and because each new case is still being independently reviewed by our team of 10 attorneys.”Last weekend, the violence turned deadly. After a miles-long caravan of Trump supporters drove through downtown Portland on Saturday evening, a man associated with the far-right group Patriot Prayer was fatally shot in the chest. “For the last several years, and escalating in recent months, President Trump has encouraged division and stoked violence,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said the following day. “It happened in Charlottesville. It happened in Kenosha. And now, unfortunately, it is happening in Portland, Oregon.”It was in the aftermath of that shooting that Brown’s office unveiled the “unified law enforcement plan to protect free speech and bring violence and arson to an end in Portland.” “With months of nightly protests stretching the Portland Police Bureau’s resources thin, additional local and state personnel, as well as federal resources, will give the Police Bureau the investigative capacity to arrest and charge those individuals who have engaged in violent or destructive acts and endangered public safety,” her statement read.The plan instructed the Multnomah County DA’s Office to continue prosecuting serious criminal offenses, “including arson and physical violence,” related to the protests. It requested that Oregon State Police send backup officers to support the PPB and asked the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to commit additional resources for investigations. Nearby jurisdictions were also asked for additional personnel and resources to support PPB.But local jurisdictions refused. The City of Gresham’s police chief released a statement the following day: “Governor Brown released her plan without consultation with the listed agencies. At this time, Gresham Police Department will not be assisting our colleagues at Portland Police Bureau.”Both sheriffs’ offices for Washington County and Clackamas County took a more strongly worded approach.“At this time, I do not plan to send deputies to work directly in Portland,” wrote Washington County Sheriff Pat Garrett in a statement the same day.“PPB is a terrific partner and I am very sympathetic to what they are enduring. However, the lack of political support for public safety, the uncertain legal landscape, the current volatility combined with intense scrutiny on use of force presents an unacceptable risk if deputies were deployed directly.”Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts took direct aim at the Multnomah County DA’s Office in a statement the same day.“Increasing law enforcement resources in Portland will not solve the nightly violence and now, murder. The only way to make Portland safe again is to support a policy that holds offenders accountable for their destruction and violence.”Oregon State Police say they are ready to help local law enforcement, as they did in mid-August after federal troops withdrew from the protest area. Now, a group of roughly 50 state troopers, as part of OSP’s Mobile Response Team, are in Portland to assist local law enforcement. Only this time, the majority of state troopers deployed have been deputized, which means they have the dual authority of state and federal law enforcement. This effectively bypasses the local district attorney’s office by allowing the U.S. Attorney’s Office, instead, to prosecute offenders.“OSP is not criticizing any officials and we respect the authority of the District Attorney, but to meet the Governor’s charge of bringing violence to an end we will use all lawful methods at our disposal,” Fox said in an email to The Daily Beast.The governor’s office said state troopers were deputized over the summer to allow them to work more effectively with federal law enforcement, according to a statement from Charles Boyle, a spokesman for Governor Brown’s office.Also critical of the local district attorney is the federal government. In a letter to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler on Monday, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf criticized the city’s “lack of action” in tamping down on protest-related violence, and threatened to, once again, send in federal troops.As part of President Trump’s July 4 executive order to protect federal monuments, troops from the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Protective Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement began confronting protesters outside the federal courthouse. That led to consecutive nights of arrests, injuries, and wide sections of downtown Portland being coated in tear gas.“For whatever reason, police departments have adopted these escalating force models that have created this violence,” explained German, whose own civil rights work revolves around national law enforcement issues.German points to a 2015 article by the St. Louis University School of Law that envisions a new model of protest policing that includes police officers facilitating protests and showing support toward crowd members as de-escalation tactics.“I’d be interested to see how this kind of policing model could ever bring an end to this,” he said.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[the-record-newspaper]

The Killing of Rhonda Hinson Part 24

Detective James “Flash“ Pruett, formerly of the Burke County Sheriff’s Department, and his dog, Paiute.

By LARRY J. GRIFFIN

Special Investigative Reporter

For The Record

 When presented with competing hypotheses that make the same predictions, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions. – Occam’s Razor

 It was in mid-December 1994, when 44-year-old Detective James “Flash” Pruett of the Burke County Sheriff’s Department began to look into the killing of Rhonda Hinson.  

Arguably the most perspicacious of all the investigators to scrub the case, Detective Pruett commenced his inquiries subsequent to an order from Sheriff Richard Epley.  “…Sheriff Epley instructed all investigators to look into the Rhonda Hinson homicide,” he wrote in his extensive case notes.  

Immediately, he located Rhonda’s grandmother, Julia Price—Judy Hinson’s mother—and interviewed her on Monday Dec. 19, 1994, six days after what would have been her granddaughter’s 32nd birthday. At the time, the 89-year-old lived alone in a home located on Rora Avenue in Valdese, approximately a mile from the Hinsons’ residence on Hillcrest Street.  

During the interview, Detective Pruett mainly listened as Ms. Price talked.  She provided little more than biographic information about her granddaughter; but Flash did inquire as to Rhonda’s confidantes.  “…I did ask who Rhonda would confide in or tell her innermost thoughts.  Julia said Rhonda was very close to Chris Price [Dr. Christina Hardin], her first cousin who is a schoolteacher in either South Jefferson or North   Augusta, S.C.  She said Rhonda told her problems to her during a family visit.  Another friend of Rhondas’s, Jill Turner [Mull] is married and living in Charlotte, NC.”

Additionally, Ms. Price did confirm that her granddaughter “spent a lot of time with the McDowell Family, would go to church, eat lunch, and come back home on Sundays.”

On Tuesday, Jan. 3, 1995, Detective Pruett purposed to locate a blue Chevy Nova that the McDowell Family owned in 1981. His objective:  to examine the automobile for any traces of Rhonda Hinson’s blood.

Flash contacted Shelia Robinson, secretary at Wilkies Grove Church, to inquire after a similar car belonging to her father-in-law, Jack Robinson.  She recalled observing a vehicle matching the description at his house but averred that he had sold it a year earlier.  

“I decided to talk with Jack today, and I located him at East Burke  High School.  He is a teacher there, and I was able to talk with him in a conference room near the front office.  Jack said he indeed had a blue 1969 Nova, but he had purchased it new.  It was never owned or used by the McDowells.”

Mr. Robinson confirmed that he had sold the automobile a year earlier to a Harold Cantrell; and, he had no recollection of a similar car being owned or utilized by the McDowells.  [Note:  In 1969, Mr. Robinson was teaching at Drexel High School.  He taught mathematics and physics to this writer who graduated in the same year that he purchased his blue Nova.]

According to Mr. Pruett’s case notes, it was during his first interview that Charles McDowell confirmed owning a blue four-door 1976 Chevy Nova.  Burke County property records, reviewed on Thursday, July 12, 1984, corroborated his claim.  Previously reported was a statement by Tonya Benge [Featherby]—who worked with Rhonda at Hickory Steel and attended the Dec. 22, 1981, company Christmas party with her and Sherry Pittman [Yoder]—in which she averred that she saw Greg McDowell picking up Rhonda Hinson at noon on the same day. The car was parked next to the building at Hickory Steel at lunchtime when Tonya and Rhonda exited the building together.

Before he concluded his interview with Mr. Robinson, Flash asked if Greg had ever “target practiced” around the church’s parsonage or near Jack’s home.  The pedagogue indicated that he was unaware of any firearms or target shooting by the neighboring McDowells.  

In an interview with Detective Pruett and—eventually—this writer, Judy Hinson maintained that Jack Robinson and student, Greg McDowell, were close.  Initially, Flash delayed talking with Mr. Robinson because of the alleged relationship between him and Greg; however, he decided to proceed.  

At the inception of his investigation, James Pruett was partnered with Detective Gene Franklin—the assignment was made by Richard Epley, Flash recollected, when asked about it over the weekend past.  In fact, on Friday Jan. 20, 1995, the sheriff issued an official case reassignment memorandum.  It read:

“On today’s date, Sheriff Richard Epley, Major Robert Lane and Lieutenant Greg Calloway assigned Detective James Pruett to be the lead investigator in the thirteen year old [sic] homicide of Rhonda Annette Hinson. Major Lane will assign Gene Franklin to assist Detective Pruett in the continuation of the investigation.”

Flash’s first mention of Detective Franklin, in his copious notes, was dated Monday, Jan. 30, 1995—10 days subsequent to the reassignment notice.  

“I met with Gene Franklin today to discuss his opinions on the case and to plan the re-creation of the crime scene…I was curious if Gene would come to the same conclusions I reached…. Gene’s conclusions were almost identical to mine.  He and I felt the previous investigators did an outstanding job, but were constantly under pressure to prove they were creditable.”

After a brief discussion of possible suspects and noting that the McDowells had credible alibis because “each member verifies where the other was at the time of the shooting,” the detective duo turned attention to re-creating the crime scene, aspiring to ascertain from which location the fatal shot had been fired.  They first visited the office of Norman Long in the county Tax Office.

“…[We] requested him to plot a rough field of fire from the angles I obtained from the photographs.  He made a large copy of the area and plotted the angles supplied. The 70-degree horizontal angle would have placed the gunman on the east side of [Hwy] 350 [Eldred Street] in a wooded area between Perkins Road and the off ramp at I-40.  The five-degree vertical angle was not plotted because of the lack of topographical maps.”  

After observing Mr. Long completing the map by marking off 25-foot increments from the exit ramp and extending north on Eldred St approximately 250 feet, the two detectives drove to the crime scene where they verified that it would be almost impossible to shoot into the vehicle on the 70-degree angle—the terrain was too steep.  They concluded that the fatal shot would have had to come from the eastside of Eldred Street.  

In 1995, Gene Franklin’s ex-brother-in-law, Jack Andrews maintained a surveyor’s office at 113 West McDowell Street in the city of Morganton.  Flash and Franklin visited the office to request that a survey team meet them on-site to plot the field of fire—a task that Mr. Andrews and his crew averred would be easy to complete with a scant few measurements.  It was agreed that all would meet at the location the next afternoon at 3:30 p.m.  

 The detective duo decided to meet the next day, in-advance of the crew’s arrival, to re-create the crime scene.  They also planned to wear off-duty casual clothes to conceal the renewed interest in the Hinson case.  There were two objectives to be attained:  First, determine the location at which the weapon fired the fatal shot; and two, to extensively comb the area for a shell casing that could have potentially been ejected from a rifle.  

Detectives, Pruett and Franklin arrived the next morning to stake-out the crime scene per their plans.  They also devoted some time to listening to motorists change gears as they navigated the incline of Eldred Street, after turning right off the I-40 Westbound exit ramp.

“We determined most of the time the drivers changed into third gear near the old torn down home driveway or near the power pole [where] the crime scene measurements were taken.  Gene and I feel the victim was in motion and changing the gears from second to third; but the shift was not complete when the projectile immediately killed the victim.”  

The survey team-of-three arrived at approximately 3:38 p.m.  The crew sprang to work immediately taking measurements from a previously located control point. Then, a moment of disappointment for Flash.  

“I immediately became disappointed when the vertical angle cleared the southern-most bank near the exit ramp.  I was wanting to completely discount the random-shooting from I-40 [theory].”  

The crew and the investigators left the scene approximately 5:14 PM, after deciding that they needed to reflect upon their angle logic.

Flash and Gene drove east on I-40, exited via the Rutherford College off-ramp before returning to the I-40 westerly direction from whence they came.  

“We were discussing the angle problems when suddenly Gene realized no one had compensated the six-percent grade into the formula.  We rushed to the surveyor’s office in Morganton and caught [two of the surveyors] in the parking lot.  We informed them of Gene’s finding, and they agreed the corrected formulas would lower the trajectory at least six-feet from the stake of the control 00 location. Due to that fact, it would be impossible for the projectile to have been fired from either Elmer Buff’s [located on a ridge south of the I-40 W off-ramp toward Mineral Springs Mountain and on the opposite side of the road from Hazel Street and Holly Hills] or I-40.  The angle would indicate it was absolutely possible the shooter could have ambushed the victim from or near the old logging road.”

For all intents and purposes—over 24-years ago—Detectives Pruett and Franklin eliminated the possibility that the killing of Rhonda Hinson was a random act.  

On Feb. 10, 1995, Gene Franklin wrote a synopsis of the Rhonda Hinson case, that not only questioned the efficacy of the investigation, but cast doubt upon its solvability.

[teeky185]

Less than 24 hours after a man was fatally shot in downtown Portland, Oregon’s governor offered what looked like a way forward: a six-point, “unified law enforcement plan” enlisting the help of local, state, and federal officers to “protect free speech and bring violence and arson to an end in Portland.”But with Portland now close to 100 consecutive nights of protests, most of which have resulted in violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement, the plan doesn’t have much in terms of substance. Local jurisdictions are declining to send in backup. State troopers are deputizing their own, effectively circumventing the local district attorney’s office. And the federal government is, once again, threatening to send in troops.“We have a schoolyard beef going on and people are acting like adolescents,” said Mike German, retired FBI agent and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.“Rather than taking responsibility for the errors they’ve made thus far and trying to actually resolve the issues the protesters are trying to raise, we instead see these agencies look to gain some political edge.”Portland has been mired in nightly protests since the end of May, when rage over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody led people to take to the streets nationwide. Most nights have seen law enforcement officers rushing protesters with fists, batons, and crowd control munitions including tear gas, pepper balls, and smoke bombs, often in response to a small number of black-clad demonstrators lighting fires, breaking windows, vandalizing buildings, and throwing projectiles at officers, such as rocks, water bottles, and paint.As of this writing, local and state police officers have made close to 800 arrests related to the protests, according to Oregon State Police. Of those 800, close to 700 arrests are claimed by PPB, according to the bureau’s own numbers. The overwhelming majority of charges are “interfering with a peace officer,” “disorderly conduct,” and “resisting arrest.” Cops have arrested protesters for alleged crimes such as setting fires and shining lasers in officers’ eyes. Often, however, officers arrest protesters for talking back to them and failing to move out of their way.Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced in mid-August a policy against prosecuting protest-related cases that didn’t include the use of force against someone else, deliberate property damage, or theft. “As prosecutors, we acknowledge the depth of emotion that motivates these demonstrations and support those who are civically engaged through peaceful protesting,” Schmidt wrote in a statement at the time.Oregon State Police, sent to Portland at the beginning of August to take over for federal law enforcement officers defending the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse, withdrew in a huff. “At this time, we are inclined to move those resources back to counties where prosecution of criminal conduct is still a priority,” said OSP’s Timothy Fox. Since then, Portland Police have been mostly going it alone, with a backlog of cases piling up at the County DA. When asked about a total number of prosecutorial cases, the Multnomah County DA’s Office did not offer any figures. “We still don’t have a final number of the cases we will be prosecuting because we continue to review new cases each day, many older cases remain under follow-up investigation, and because each new case is still being independently reviewed by our team of 10 attorneys.”Last weekend, the violence turned deadly. After a miles-long caravan of Trump supporters drove through downtown Portland on Saturday evening, a man associated with the far-right group Patriot Prayer was fatally shot in the chest. “For the last several years, and escalating in recent months, President Trump has encouraged division and stoked violence,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said the following day. “It happened in Charlottesville. It happened in Kenosha. And now, unfortunately, it is happening in Portland, Oregon.”It was in the aftermath of that shooting that Brown’s office unveiled the “unified law enforcement plan to protect free speech and bring violence and arson to an end in Portland.” “With months of nightly protests stretching the Portland Police Bureau’s resources thin, additional local and state personnel, as well as federal resources, will give the Police Bureau the investigative capacity to arrest and charge those individuals who have engaged in violent or destructive acts and endangered public safety,” her statement read.The plan instructed the Multnomah County DA’s Office to continue prosecuting serious criminal offenses, “including arson and physical violence,” related to the protests. It requested that Oregon State Police send backup officers to support the PPB and asked the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to commit additional resources for investigations. Nearby jurisdictions were also asked for additional personnel and resources to support PPB.But local jurisdictions refused. The City of Gresham’s police chief released a statement the following day: “Governor Brown released her plan without consultation with the listed agencies. At this time, Gresham Police Department will not be assisting our colleagues at Portland Police Bureau.”Both sheriffs’ offices for Washington County and Clackamas County took a more strongly worded approach.“At this time, I do not plan to send deputies to work directly in Portland,” wrote Washington County Sheriff Pat Garrett in a statement the same day.“PPB is a terrific partner and I am very sympathetic to what they are enduring. However, the lack of political support for public safety, the uncertain legal landscape, the current volatility combined with intense scrutiny on use of force presents an unacceptable risk if deputies were deployed directly.”Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts took direct aim at the Multnomah County DA’s Office in a statement the same day.“Increasing law enforcement resources in Portland will not solve the nightly violence and now, murder. The only way to make Portland safe again is to support a policy that holds offenders accountable for their destruction and violence.”Oregon State Police say they are ready to help local law enforcement, as they did in mid-August after federal troops withdrew from the protest area. Now, a group of roughly 50 state troopers, as part of OSP’s Mobile Response Team, are in Portland to assist local law enforcement. Only this time, the majority of state troopers deployed have been deputized, which means they have the dual authority of state and federal law enforcement. This effectively bypasses the local district attorney’s office by allowing the U.S. Attorney’s Office, instead, to prosecute offenders.“OSP is not criticizing any officials and we respect the authority of the District Attorney, but to meet the Governor’s charge of bringing violence to an end we will use all lawful methods at our disposal,” Fox said in an email to The Daily Beast.The governor’s office said state troopers were deputized over the summer to allow them to work more effectively with federal law enforcement, according to a statement from Charles Boyle, a spokesman for Governor Brown’s office.Also critical of the local district attorney is the federal government. In a letter to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler on Monday, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf criticized the city’s “lack of action” in tamping down on protest-related violence, and threatened to, once again, send in federal troops.As part of President Trump’s July 4 executive order to protect federal monuments, troops from the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Protective Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement began confronting protesters outside the federal courthouse. That led to consecutive nights of arrests, injuries, and wide sections of downtown Portland being coated in tear gas.“For whatever reason, police departments have adopted these escalating force models that have created this violence,” explained German, whose own civil rights work revolves around national law enforcement issues.German points to a 2015 article by the St. Louis University School of Law that envisions a new model of protest policing that includes police officers facilitating protests and showing support toward crowd members as de-escalation tactics.“I’d be interested to see how this kind of policing model could ever bring an end to this,” he said.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[kathleenseiber]

Team creates their own coronavirus test to fill gaps

A team has created their own coronavirus test to address shortages in testing capacity.

Scrolling Twitter late at night on March 12, Boston University’s George Murphy noticed a desperate tweet coming from the feed of his friend and fellow researcher, Lea Starita of the University of Washington. She was asking for lab-savvy volunteers to help process coronavirus tests that had been jury-rigged by the Seattle Flu Study.

“If you’re coming up with a test result that will lead to clinical decisions, it has to be right…”

As the two scientists began exchanging direct messages about what was happening in Seattle—the first US epicenter to emerge in the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus responsible for COVID-19 infections—Murphy, codirector of the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) on Boston University’s Medical Campus, felt a dawning realization that the same fate would soon be upon the Greater Boston area and the university’s own teaching hospital, Boston Medical Center (BMC).

Across the nation, and the city of Boston, there would not be enough coronavirus tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to go around. Researchers and clinicians would need to develop their own clinically validated tests to have a fighting chance.

“She was telling me her war story of having to do inhouse testing, navigating governmental restrictions,” Murphy says. “It got me thinking, maybe we should be thinking about trying to do something here.”

Center for Regenerative Medicine researchers Aditya Mithal, Claire Burgess, and Andrew McCracken prepare samples collected from Boston Medical Center patients suspected to be infected with the novel coronavirus. (Credit: Aditya Mithal/Boston U.)

‘Standing up’ a new coronavirus test

The next day, March 13, Murphy met with Chris Andry, chair of pathology at the School of Medicine and BMC.

“We hatched a plan to try and ‘stand up’ our own [coronavirus test],” Murphy says. Stand up, in the clinical world, describes the complex process to get a new diagnostic test validated and approved according to the stringent regulations of the US Food and Drug Administration. “If you’re coming up with a test result that will lead to clinical decisions, it has to be right,” he says.

Murphy and Andry’s meeting kicked off a week-plus-long flurry of around-the-clock activity, as CReM researchers—most of their own experiments already shuttered by social distancing efforts—volunteered in droves to design an inhouse COVID-19 test from scratch. They joined forces with a team of clinical lab technicians led by Nancy Miller, chief and vice chair of BMC laboratory medicine. They also leaned on the expert advice of fellow scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the University of Washington.

“My best friends are going to war.”

All told, more than 50 volunteers swarmed to the CReM from across the BU Medical Campus, working in shifts to ensure proper social distancing. By the week’s end, their teamwork culminated in a one-of-a-kind coronavirus test that can spit back a positive or negative result in less than 24 hours. The crew of collaborators is now processing many dozens of such tests each day—performing all of BMC’s COVID-19 testing—and making plans to even further ramp up capacity.

“We repurposed the whole CReM,” Murphy says of the state-of-the-art stem cell lab. Overnight, its researchers converted the facility into a makeshift command center and prototyping assembly line for coronavirus testing. Meanwhile, at BMC, patients began surging into the hospital with symptoms fitting the profile for the novel coronavirus. Clinicians faced agonizingly long delays waiting for patients’ COVID-19 test results, relying on state and commercial labs to validate swabs within five to seven days.

“It’s dangerous for healthcare workers if they are unaware someone they are treating has the coronavirus,” Murphy says. “That’s data that clinicians need to make decisions, to either quarantine patients or whether to use precious, dwindling supplies of [personal protective equipment] when they don’t need to. If we can [get a] result faster, that also protects our friends and loved ones from the CReM and around campus who are going into the clinic. My best friends are going to war.”

‘Heroic effort’

One of those friends includes the CReM’s director, Darrell Kotton, a stem cell biologist, Boston University School of Medicine professor of medicine, and a pulmonary/critical care physician at BMC. He reported into BMC’s intensive care unit on Wednesday, March 25, to serve as an attending physician alongside other doctors and physician-scientists from the BU Medical Campus community. There, he is doing everything he can to keep patients alive who have gone into respiratory failure from COVID-19 infection.

“…it’s been an exceptional and heroic effort—it’s made a big difference for the hospital, clearing a key early hurdle that faced us…”

“When the first patients were being admitted to BMC with COVID-19, we had a system meltdown in testing bandwidth,” Kotton says. “Tests being sent out that weren’t being turned around [quickly]. The hospital was getting bogged down. So I was thrilled when George’s team stepped in.”

He knew that since CReM researchers work with molecular reactions every day, Murphy’s team could help. “[Seeing them team up] with Chris, it’s been an exceptional and heroic effort—it’s made a big difference for the hospital, clearing a key early hurdle that faced us,” Kotton says.

To start, the collaborators filed what’s called an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), an application released by the FDA that allows for research medical centers and commercial companies to develop their own inhouse COVID-19 tests and protocols for emergency FDA approval. Across the country, “everybody is trying to do it,” Murphy says. The idea is that you develop and “vet the diagnostic [test] in a research setting, and then move it up to clinical standards.”

Challenges and pitfalls

From the get-go, the team faced several choke points that threatened its ability to get an inhouse test off the ground. One of the first steps in testing for coronavirus is to use a reagent, called a viral RNA extraction kit, to break free the unique and identifying genetic strands of the SARS-Cov-2 virus from cells swabbed out of a patient’s nose or mouth mucosa.

Those unique SARS-Cov-2 RNA strands are what COVID-19 tests screen for; if they’re present, the patient is infected with the novel coronavirus. But viral RNA extraction kits weren’t available—suppliers were backordered for at least eight weeks, the team quickly found. So, they got scrappy. “We knew there were other reagents we could use,” Murphy says.

They knew that all across the BU Medical Campus, tons of labs had stockpiles of broad-use RNA extraction kits. RNA, which stands for ribonucleic acid, is essential to all organic life—it provides instructions for cellular machinery to manufacture the proteins that make up the structures of all cells, tissues, and organs. (Viruses don’t have cells of their own; instead they are made up of pieces of RNA encased in proteins. So, they rely on infecting animal and human cells to take advantage of their host’s cellular machinery, tricking them into reading the viral RNA instructions to build more copies of the virus—much to the host’s peril.) Studying RNA, therefore, is essential to understanding how humans stay healthy or develop disease. To do that, scientists need to isolate RNA from cells using a variety of standard RNA extraction kits.

“I don’t want to say the government failed, but there was a letdown in the kits being shipped to BMC…”

Murphy reached out, across the Charles River, to friend and fellow scientist Pardis Sabeti and her research team at the Broad Institute for their help working through the problem. “We were asking, ‘How would you do this with various reagents?’ We were working out the supply chain issues, identifying which reagents we were able to come by,” Murphy says.

Not only did they want to pick something that would work now, they also wanted a reagent they wouldn’t run out of in the coming weeks or months.

“We decided to go with using a very basic RNA extraction kit, we knew everyone would have it in their labs, so we plugged that into our EUA application,” Murphy says. The team put out the call to their colleagues across the BU Medical Campus, and kit donations came flooding in.

The problem with using a non-viral-specific kit, however, is that it liberates all the RNA within a cell, not just RNA from a virus. That muddies the waters, making it necessary to sift through lots of normally-occurring levels of human RNA, which keep our cells functioning properly, to find any amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Just like any diagnostic test, a coronavirus test requires there to be a certain threshold of SARS-Cov-2 RNA to trigger a result. “You’ve got to be able to get enough viral RNA from a sample to amplify and detect it,” Murphy says.

Working around the clock

In the CReM, the team barely took breaks for sleep. Graduate students, faculty, postdoctoral researchers, staff technicians—it was all hands on deck. Richard Giadone, a BU graduate researcher days away from defending his PhD dissertation over Zoom, was there around the clock. “He was a critical part of the development team that created an FDA-approved COVID-19 test in one week,” Murphy says.

A CReM conference room became mission control, where researchers worked out new strategies to try optimizing the basic RNA extraction kit into a workable process for isolating SARS-Cov-2 RNA. On the table, coffee and snacks were strewn about, the team working so frantically they went without square meals for days. On the walls, whiteboards quickly filled with promising calculations and notes for troubleshooting each attempt. In the lab, researchers kept trying out each newly-conceived combination of techniques in hopes of developing a suitable protocol with the limited resources available.

“Our day job is to make stem cells, not diagnostics,” Murphy says. “It’s like we turned the CReM into a startup company to solve this problem. All the while, we’re working from separate rooms to maintain social distancing, never more than three people at a time in the same area.”

Within days, the team discovered that 150 microliters of RNA extraction solution, combined with other ingredients and several hands-on steps, generated enough viral RNA for detecting SARS-CoV-2.

“We made a brute-force RNA extraction process, we’re running the samples through spin columns, washing and pipetting samples into [PCR] plates,” Murphy says. PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction, a process that happens inside a lab machine—called a thermocycler—to make millions or billions of copies of genetic material. In this case, it multiplies the amount of viral RNA in a sample to a high-enough quantity that a test can detect SARS-CoV-2 from just a handful of a patient’s cells, originally captured by cotton swab.

A CReM bioinformatician, Taylor Matte, wrote a software script that allows the team to read off test data coming directly out of the thermocycler, allowing them to tentatively see a result before the sample gets sent up four floors to BMC pathology, where results are formally confirmed by clinicians.

“It takes a village,” Murphy says. “We started off with people from my own CReM group, but we knew immediately that we needed more people, so we started onboarding more help.” Behind the scenes, from the isolated safety of their homes, volunteers mobilized to recruit other researchers accustomed to running PCRs for their own experiments.

Molecular biologists from all over campus have stepped forward, getting cleared by BMC’s human resources department to work with clinical samples. “You can’t just show up and do it, you have to become a BMC-vetted employee,” Murphy says. “There are procedural things that need to happen to transform a basic scientific researcher into a clinical laboratory technician.”

Before they can work with real patient samples, BMC has to check their health history and make sure their vaccinations are up to date. Dozens upon dozens of these volunteers, once vetted, will staff the CReM around the clock so the inhouse COVID-19 tests keep pouring out results. All the while, just down the street, BMC clinicians will use those rapid-turnaround results to make decisions that could save lives.

“I don’t want to say the government failed, but there was a letdown in the kits being shipped to BMC,” Murphy says. “It’s science at its finest when collaborators get together to develop inhouse protocols, using their expertise, to directly impact patient care during a public health emergency.”

Most importantly, he says, in line with the CReM’s philosophy of doing “open source” biology and making its data available to all, the inhouse coronavirus test protocols developed by the team are now freely available to the worldwide scientific community.

Murphy says anyone interested in the protocols can reach out on Twitter: @DrGJMurphy.

Source: Boston University

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