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Tuesday, March 22, 2005

A 17-year-old Minnesota student is believed to have shot his grandfather and grandmother, drove his grandfather’s squad car to the high school, and shot a security guard, a teacher and five other classmates, later committing suicide. This happened at 3pm local time on Monday (2100 UTC), and as many as 14 others were injured before the rampage subsided.

One witness said of the gunman, he was “grinning and waving”.

“I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that’s when I hid,” Sondra Hegstrom told The Pioneer of Bemidji. “You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?”

Today’s incident marks the highest death toll yet in US school shootings since the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999. There were 15 people shot in Jefferson County, near Littleton, Colorado, in the Columbine shooting.

Police are still investigating any possible motive.

“It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together,” said FBI spokesman Paul McCabe in a briefing to the press. “We do have evidence that we believe that the shooter is dead,” he continued, “we believe he was acting alone.”

Reporters were asked to leave the area, located on The Red Lake reservation, by tribal authorities.

“The events that took place today involving the shootings at the Red Lake High School make this one of the darkest and most painful occurrences in the history of our tribe,” said Floyd Jourdain Jr., Chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. The Indian band is made up of about 5,100 people, living on 825,000 acres of land in the northern part of the state.

Minnesota’s last school shooting was in September 2003, when two students were fatally shot at Rocori High School. That incident had statewide implications, causing a hearing on expansion of tribal gaming in Minnesota to be canceled for the day.

“We ask Minnesotans to help comfort the families and friends of the victims who are suffering unimaginable pain by extending prayers and expressions of support,” said a statement from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

According to news reports from Turkey, a number of the members of the Turkish security forces, though unofficially, are treating Ogün Samast, the assassin of Hrant Dink as if he were a national hero.

For instance, after being taken into custody, Samast was filmed shoulder to shoulder with the Turkish police, in front of a Turkish flag and a quote from Turkey’s founder Atatürk: “The nation’s land is sacred. It cannot be left to fate.”

On January 24th, Ogün Samast was transferred to the Bayrampa?a prison, Istanbul’s largest prison. Before the transfer, inmates from a section of the prison were temporarily moved to another section, which, as a result, housed more than 100 inmates, 80 more than its maximum capacity. Then, the now-vacant section, often subject to inmates’ complaints regarding bedbugs, was cleaned and disinfected. Finally, the walls were painted, a brand new cotton bed was put in, and red carpet was laid out on the floors of the section.

When Samast was brought to the Bayrampa?a Prison, inmates witnessed that he was welcomed with cheers and applause by the jail management, soldiers, and the guards. Witnesses also report that Samast was given two guards to serve him. He ate kebab, a luxury food compared to the food given to other inmates.

After four days, Samast was transferred to the Kand?ra F-type Prison.

Ultra-nationalist elements of the Turkish society seem to have penetrated into the Turkish security forces. These events resulted major Turkish newspapers such as Sabah, Radikal, and Vatan to accuse the Turkish security forces and the Turkish state of supporting, endorsing, and cooperating with the killers of the journalist.

A 52 year old Turkish-Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink was assassinated in front of the Agos newspaper office, at the Istanbul district of Osmanbey, where he worked as the editor and a journalist. Dink, a brave journalist who was not afraid to discuss one of Turkey’s most controversial issues, clearly called what happened to Armenians in 1915 when the land was being governed by the Ottoman Empire the Armenian Genocide.

Following her father’s assassination, Dink’s daughter, referring to the fascist obsession with pure blood, said:

Large numbers of people marched protesting the killing of Hrant Dink on the day of his funeral, carrying placards that read “We are all Armenian” and “We are all Hrant Dink”.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s plans to implement a carbon tax in Australia have hit a roadblock today with the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union Paul Howes demanding that exemptions be made to certain heavy polluting industries including steel production as well as concerns about whether jobs will be lost.

Steel producing companies within Australia including BlueScope Steel and OneSteel have supported the move by the union claiming that a carbon tax would affect Australian Jobs. Paul O’Malley, managing director and Chief Executive of BlueScope, said that “the tax threat is still real for the Australian Steel industry and for our customers.”

Paul Howes told The Australian newspaper that “if one job is gone, our support is gone.” Mr. Howes is a powerful figure within the Australian Labor Party who is believed to have been instrumental with the removal of PM Gillard’s predecessor Kevin Rudd. Support for the Gillard Labor Government has dropped to an all time low earlier this year, with only a 30% approval rating.

The move by the AWU has been supported by other unions in Australia, including the Transport Workers Union as well as Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

A compilation of brief news reports for Monday, July 8, 2013.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

The Belgrade Neonatology Institute has refused to hand over a child to her mother, after she was unable to pay her medical bills.

Macedonian Senija Roganovic, who has no health insurance of any kind and cannot come up with the money for the bill, gave birth to the baby two months ago at and owes US$8,290.91 in hospital bills.

20-year old Roganovic has been sedated for the past two months and has lost 30 pounds of weight, possibly due to anxiety over what might happen to her child. During this period the hospital only let her see the baby once and she was not allowed to breast-feed her son.

On the 7th of February, Roganovic told her story to a journalist from the daily paper Kurir. After media reports the following day, the hospital finally let the baby go yesterday.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The Finnish police have added Finnish hacker Matti Nikki’s website lapsiporno.info criticizing Internet censorship to Finland’s new national child porn filter. The blacklisting was noticed when Finland’s second largest Internet service provider Elisa started blocking the page today. More of the ISP’s are expected to join the filtering when their blacklists are updated from the police’s master list.

The banned site has been a harsh critic of Internet censorship over the last three years. It contains information and news about how censorship has been discussed and developing in Finland. Although the site’s provocative name is lapsiporno.info (“childporn.info”) there is no child porn on the site – the content is mainly text.

Tekniikka & Talous magazine asked Commissioner Lars Henriksson of Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) why the page was censored. His answer was that he cannot discuss individual sites, but said that sites which are linking to child porn pages are also within the scope of the law. This interpretation, however, seems to conflict with the actual laws, the scope of which was supposed to be only sites with illegal pictures in foreign countries.

On Wednesday, NBI confirmed that site was censored because it published and maintained an incomplete version of the Finnish child porn blacklist. Nikki’s list contained roughly two-thirds of the 1500 blacklist entries, and it was created by scanning a large amount of sites and logging the censored pages.

The scan also found that the top three results of a Google search for “gay porn” are blacklisted, and that most of the blocked sites are actually physically located in the United States or the European Union.

Leena Romppainen of Electronic Frontier Finland commented that “The local authorities have taken no action on these sites. Therefore, either the sites do not contain child pornography or the NBI has not informed the local authorities. Both of the alternatives are equally scary.”

Matti Nikki’s opinion is that the majority of the censored sites are legal adult sites and that the police are not doing that much research when they are deciding which sites to block.

Internet censorship has been a hot topic in Finland as of late. There have been proposals of extending Internet filtering to Internet gambling sites, sites related to terrorism and violence, and torrent-tracker The Pirate Bay.

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