Tag: InternationalNews

{{in US, a teenager from Oregon has landed himself in the county jail for posting about his drunk-driving hit-and-run escapade.}}

“Drivin drunk … classsic 😉 but to whoever’s vehicle i hit i am sorry. :P” was the early-morning post that quickly led to the at-home arrest of Jacob Cox-Brown in the Oregon-coast city of Astoria, reports the Daily Astorian.

Upon reading Cox-Brown’s post, two of the 18-year-old’s Facebook friends contacted the Astoria Police Department to report it; it became vital information after two officers responded to a 1am report of a hit-and-run, which left a white Scion plus an adjacent vehicle damaged in their parking spots.

After collecting pieces of the Scion’s damaged taillight and bumper cover, the police received tips about the Facebook post and headed over to the home of Cox-Brown.

They arrested the young man, charging him with two counts of failing to perform the duties of a driver. (Nearly nine hours had elapsed between the report and the confrontation, and the driver was no longer in his car, Deputy Chief Brad Johnston told Yahoo! Shine, which is why there was no driving-while-intoxicated charge.)

He was held in the Clatsop County Jail and released on his own recognizance, and is scheduled to appear in Astoria Municipal Court on January 23.

“Astoria Police have an active social media presence,” Astoria Police said in a press release.

“It was a private Facebook message to one of our officers that got this case moving, though. When you post … on Facebook, you have to figure that it is not going to stay private long.” Also, Johnston said , “We actually use Facebook to find things not unlike this.”

Cox-Brown’s Facebook page is filled with telling clues about the young man’s penchant for both altered states and vehicles: His “favorites” include Mommy Needs a Beer and Lifted Trucks USA, while “smoking blunts” and “rolling Ford Rangers” are listed among his “activities.”

The 18-year-old now joins a roster of not-so-bright Facebook users who got themselves into hot water with the law, including Joseph Bernard Campbell, who was arrested in Florida for cyberstalking 19 women and putting risqué photos of them on Facebook; a group of Nevada girls arrested after posting an event called “Attack a Teacher Day”; and London Eley of Philadelphia, who was taken into custody after posting, “I will pay somebody a stack to kill my baby father.”

{Wirestory}

The Islamic Republic of Iran has agreed to hold talks with six major powers about its atomic program in January but the date and venue has yet to be decided, the country’s top nuclear negotiator said on Friday.

The six powers want to rein in Iran’s uranium enrichment program to ensure it is geared only for civilian energy, through a mix of diplomacy and sanctions.

Iran denies Western assertions it is seeking nuclear weapons capability.

“We have accepted that these talks should be held in January, but until now, the details have not been finalized,” Jalili said through a translator during a trip to India.

The six powers – the United States, Russia, France, Britain, Germany and China – have failed to achieve a breakthrough in three rounds of talks since April.

But neither side has been willing to break off totally, partly because of concern this could lead to war if Israel attacked its arch-foe.

The powers last met Iran for talks in Moscow. That meeting was followed by low-level technical talks in Istanbul.

Jalili is the second member of Iran’s nuclear team to visit India in the past month.

He said he welcomed the two countries’ strong ties but said India had no particular role in getting nuclear talks restarted.

{Wirestory}

{{A top Taliban commander who targeted U.S. troops in Afghanistan was killed in an American drone strike in Pakistan along with nine of his comrades, intelligence and local sources confirmed.}}

The Taliban leader, Maulvi Nazir, died in an attack on a compound in Angoor Ada, a border town in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

Nazir was a powerful and undisputed leader of the Wazir tribe of Waziristan and told ABC News in 2009 that his forces were intent on killing American troops.

“We have readied suicide bombers for them, they cannot escape us,” Nazir said in the exclusive interview.

Nazir was in power in 2002 when Islamic fighters from various countries converged on South Waziristan to escape the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan.

He rose to prominence, however, in 2007 after he successfully defeated and evicted fighters of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan from South Waziristan.

Nazir opposed fighting Pakistani government forces and concentrated on attacking NATO and Afghan forces across the border in neighboring Afghanistan. That policy put him at odds with a faction led by Hakeemullah Mehsud, the commander of the Taliban movement of Pakistan and disrupted an alliance the two had made.

After a failed suicide attack on his life, Nazir ordered all the Mehsud tribesmen to leave the area under his command.

Analysts say that his death will leave a significant impact on his followers and South Waziristan. He had led them right from the beginning.

“The area can erupt in violence,” says retired brigadier general Asad Munir, a former intelligence chief in North Western Pakistan.

Peace in the region may also depend on what choice Nazir’s successor will make, whether to keep the focus of his fighting in Afghanistan or turn his guns internally on the Pakistani military, like the rest of the Taliban factions.

One thing is for sure that “his followers will not take this lying down,” says Munir.

Nazir was buried this morning in Azam Warsak and a replacement has already been chosen.

{{Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is being treated for “respiratory deficiency” after complications from a severe lung infection, his government has said.}}

“Chavez has faced complications as a result of a severe respiratory infection. This infection has led to respiratory deficiency that requires Commander Chavez to remain in strict compliance with his medical treatment,” Ernesto Villegas, the Venezuelan information minister, said on television on Thursday night.

The statement pointed to a deepening crisis for the ailing 58-year-old president, who has not been seen or heard from since his December 11 operation in Cuba, and raised the possibility that Chavez might be breathing with the assistance of a machine.

But the government did not address that question and did not give details of the president’s treatment.

Chavez’s government expressed confidence in his medical team and condemned what it called a “campaign of psychological warfare” in the international media regarding the president’s condition.

Officials have urged Venezuelans not to heed rumours about Chavez’s condition.

In its latest statement, the government didn’t point to any particular rumours but said “this campaign aims ultimately to destabilise the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela… and end the Bolivarian Revolution led by Chavez”.

Venezuela’s opposition has demanded that the government provide more specific information about Chavez’s condition.

Chavez has undergone four cancer-related surgeries since June 2011 for an undisclosed type of pelvic cancer. He has also undergone chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

He was re-elected in October to another six-year term, and two months later announced that the cancer had come back.

{{A car bomb blew up late Thursday in a Damascus gas station, killing at least nine people, a Syrian activist group said.}}

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the death toll in the blast in the capital’s Masakin Barzeh neighborhood is expected to rise because many of the wounded were in critical condition.

Syria’s state news service also reported the blast but did not give a number of dead or wounded. It said the bomb targeted cars that were lined up to get gas and blamed the attack on “terrorists,” the government’s shorthand for rebels seeking to topple President Bashar Assad.

The pro-regime Ikhbariyeh TV station said some 30 civilians were killed or wounded in the blast.

Despite gains in other parts of Syria by rebels seeking to topple Assad, he has largely kept his grip on the capital.

But Damascus has been targeted by a number of large bombings, many of which appear to target government buildings. Some have been claimed by the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Thursday’s blast.
Masakin Barzeh is a middle-class neighborhood northeast of downtown that is home to many government employees.
The U.N. says more than 60,000 people have been killed in Syria since the start of the uprising in March 2011. The conflict has since evolved into a civil war.

{{Jerry Hartfield was still a young man when an uncle visited him in prison to tell him that his murder conviction had been overturned and he would get a new trial.}}

Not long afterward, he was moved off of death row.

“A sergeant told me to pack my stuff and I wouldn’t return. I’ve been waiting ever since for that new trial,” Hartfield, now 56, said during a recent interview at the prison near Gatesville where he’s serving life for the 1976 robbery and killing of a Bay City bus station worker. He says he’s innocent.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Hartfield’s murder conviction in 1980 because it found a potential juror improperly was dismissed for expressing reservations about the death penalty.

The state tried twice but failed to get the court to re-examine that ruling, and on March 15, 1983 — 11 days after the court’s second rejection — then-Gov. Mark White commuted Hartfield’s sentence to life in prison.

At that point, with Hartfield off death row and back in the general prison population, the case became dormant.

“Nothing got filed. They had me thinking my case was on appeal for 27 years,” said Hartfield, who is described in court documents as an illiterate fifth-grade dropout with an IQ of 51, but who says he has since learned to read and has become a devout Christian.

A federal judge in Houston recently ruled that Hartfield’s conviction and sentence ceased to exist when the appeals court overturned them — meaning there was no sentence for White to commute.

But Hartfield isn’t likely to go free or be retried soon because the state has challenged a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision favorable to Hartfield, arguing he missed a one-year window in which to appeal aspects of his case.

A 5th Circuit panel of the New Orleans court agreed with the district court in an October ruling, but last month it made a rare, formal request to the Texas appeals court asking it to confirm its decades-old decision to overturn Hartfield’s conviction.

Hartfield’s current attorney, Kenneth R. Hawk II, recently described the case as a “one-in-a-million” situation in which an inmate has been stuck in the prison system for more than three decades because no one seems to know what to do with him.

“When you see it, it’s kind of breathtaking,” he said. “It was tough story for him so far and it’s not over yet. … The bottom line is the commutation came after a mandate was issued. It wasn’t valid and it’s time for him to get a new trial.”

Several factors appear to have contributed to Hartfield’s unusual predicament.

Hartfield said that when his uncle read him the article about his conviction being overturned, he didn’t fully grasp the meaning of it.

Furthermore, Hartfield’s trial lawyers, who worked on his initial appeal, stopped representing him once his death sentence was commuted, said Robert Scardino, who was the lead trial attorney.

“When governor commuted the sentence, that’s when our obligations to Hartfield ended,” Scardino said.

Hartfield was 21 in June 1977 when he was convicted of murdering 55-year-old Eunice Lowe, a bus station ticketing agent who was beaten with a pickaxe and robbed.

Her car and nearly $3,000 were stolen. Lowe’s daughter found her body in a storeroom at the station.

At the time, Hartfield, who grew up in Altus, Okla., had been working on the construction of a nuclear power plant near Bay City, which is about 100 miles southwest of Houston.

He was arrested within days in Wichita, Kan., and while being returned to Texas, he made a confession to officers that he calls “a bogus statement they had written against me.”

That alleged confession was among the key evidence used to convict Hartfield, along with an unused bus ticket found at the crime scene that had his fingerprints on it and testimony from witnesses who said he had talked about needing $3,000.

Scardino said he tried using an insanity defense for Hartfield and that psychiatrists called by the defense described Hartfield as “as crazy a human being as there was.”

Virginia Higdon, who lived next door to Lowe and knew her most of her life, told the AP that she spoke to Lowe the day she was killed and her friend complained of about a man who refused to leave the station.

“‘I can’t get rid of this guy. He’s just sitting there eating candy, a bag of candy,’” Higdon said her friend told her. “And it was Jerry Hartfield.”
She said it’s “absurd” that Hartfield might ever be released or retried.

Jurors deliberated for 3½ hours before convicting Hartfield of murder and another 20 minutes to decide he should die, Scardino said.

He said the jury foreman later told him the jurors were “all farmers and ranchers down here, and when one of our animals goes crazy, we shoot it.”

Matagorda County District Attorney Steven Reis said with the appeal still pending, it’s premature to discuss a possible retrial of Hartfield.

Lowe’s killing was particularly bloody and investigators found semen on her body, but Reis declined to say whether there was crime scene evidence from the case that could undergo DNA testing, which wasn’t available when Lowe was killed.

Scardino said that if Hartfield’s confession, which he believes authorities illegally obtained, is allowed at a retrial, Hartfield risks being sent back to death row.

“You have to think: Why would you undo something like that now when you might be looking at something like the death penalty?” he said.

But in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed executing mentally impaired people, a threshold generally accepted as below the IQ of 70.
Hartfield insists that he’s not angry that he’s spent nearly all of his entire adult life locked up, and he says he holds no grudges.

“Being a God-fearing person, he doesn’t allow me to be bitter,” he said. “He allows me to be forgiving. The things that cause damage to other people, including myself, that’s something I have to forgive.
“In order to be forgiven, you have to forgive.”

{Wirestory}

{{Indian police say they are ready to file murder, rape and kidnapping charges against six people accused in the gang-rape and killing of a 23-year-old university student.}}

New Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat says the charges against the suspects were expected to be presented to a court in south Delhi on Thursday.

The Dec. 16 rape triggered outrage across India and sparked demands for stronger laws, tougher police action against sexual assault suspects and a sustained campaign to change society’s views on women.

Media reports say 30 witnesses have been gathered, and the charges have been detailed in a document running more than 1,000 pages.

AP

{{At least 60,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war, with monthly casualty figures steadily increasing since the conflict began almost two years ago, according to a new analysis released Wednesday by the United Nations.}}

The death toll is a third more than the figure of 45,000 given by activists opposed to the regime of President Bashar Assad – the first time that the global body’s estimates are higher.

It comes as activists report that a Syrian warplane blasted a gas station near Damascus on Wednesday, killing and wounding dozens of people and igniting a huge fire in what could be one of the bloodiest attacks in weeks during the 22-month conflict.

Independent experts compared 147,349 killings reported by seven different sources – including the government – for the study, which was commissioned by the U.N. human rights office.

By removing duplicates they arrived at a list of 59,648 individuals killed between the start of the uprising on March 15, 2011, and Nov. 30, 2012.

In each case, the victim’s first and last name, the date and the location of his or her death were known.

“Given there has been no let-up in the conflict since the end of November, we can assume that more than 60,000 people have been killed by the beginning of 2013,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement.

“The number of casualties is much higher than we expected, and is truly shocking.”

The real death toll is likely to be even greater because reports containing incomplete information were excluded and a significant number of killings may not have been documented at all by the sources available.

“There are many names not on the list for people who were quietly shot in in the woods,” Pillay’s spokesman Rupert Colville told The Associated Press.

The data, which didn’t distinguish among soldiers, rebels and civilians, also show that the killing in Syria has accelerated.

During the summer of 2011, shortly after the uprising against Assad began, the monthly death toll stood at around 1,000. A year later, an average of 5,000 were killed each month, the U.N. said.

Most of the killings occurred in Homs, followed by rural Damascus, Idlib, Aleppo, Daraa and Hama. At least three quarters of the victims were male.

“The failure of the international community, in particular the Security Council, to take concrete actions to stop the blood-letting, shames us all,” Pillay said. “Collectively, we have fiddled at the edges while Syria burns.”

The U.N. rights chief warned that thousands more would die or suffer terrible injuries if the conflict continues, and repeated her call that those responsible for the killings – which in some cases could amount to war crimes – should be held accountable.

“We must not compound the existing disaster by failing to prepare for the inevitable – and very dangerous – instability that will occur when the conflict ends,” she said.

“Serious planning needs to get under way immediately, not just to provide humanitarian aid to all those who need it, but to protect all Syrian citizens from extra-judicial reprisals and acts of revenge” like those seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Congo, she said.

What began with peaceful protests has evolved into a full-scale civil war in Syria, with scores of armed groups fighting regime forces across the Arab country.

Anti-regime activists said Wednesday that a single Russian-built MiG fighter fired a missile that hit the gas station, setting off an inferno in the eastern suburb of Mleiha.

Black smoke billowed from the site. An amateur video posted online showed charred bodies and gruesome carnage at the scene.

Mohammed Saeed, an activist who visited the site, said the missile struck as drivers waited in line with their cars at the station.

Syria has been facing a fuel crisis, and people often must wait for hours to get gasoline.

Meanwhile, rebels have been targeting airports, including the Mannagh military helicopter base near the Turkish border.

{Wirestory}

{{Russian warships have embarked on a long voyage to the Black and Mediterranean seas to take part in what the Defence Ministry said would be the largest naval exercise in decades.}}

It said on Wednesday that ships from its Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific fleets would stage the exercise at the end of the month to test their ability to act together outside Russian waters.

Its website said the training exercise would also include anti-terrorism and anti-piracy drills.

“A Navy exercise on such a scale is being staged for the first time in recent decades,” the ministry said, without giving other details such as how many ships would take part.

Russia regularly stages naval war games involving different fleets, and in August sent ships to the Mediterranean for a combined training exercise.

State-owned RIA Novosti news agency said that that exercise had involved three large amphibious assault ships, two frigates, a destroyer and two support ships.

Moscow has been trying to strengthen its military presence in the Mediterranean region.

President Vladimir Putin, a former operative for the Soviet Union’s KGB national security agency, says Russia needs a stronger army to protect it from foreign attempts to stoke conflicts around its borders.

{Wirestory}

{{The father of a teenage Pakistani activist shot in the head by Taliban for advocating girls’ education has been given a diplomatic post in the U.K.}}

Malala’s father, Ziauddin, has been appointed Pakistan’s education attache in Birmingham.

Malala Yousufzai has been recovering at a hospital in Birmingham, England, after she was shot in October in Pakistan.

The Taliban have vowed to target her again.

The position — with an initial 3-year commitment — virtually guarantees Malala will remain in the U.K.

{Wirestory}