Arriving at the U.S. border in Washington State early Sunday after a skiing trip to Canada, Negah Hekmati and her family were pulled out of line for questioning by Customs and Border Protection agents. The family found itself in a room filled with fellow Iranian-Americans, many of whom had been held for hours. The agents wanted to know the identities of Hekmati’s parents, siblings, uncles and cousins. The family was held for five overnight hours at the Peace Arch Border Crossing. More than 100 people of Iranian descent faced similar delays at Washington’s border with Canada over the weekend, a process Gov. Jay Inslee called the inappropriate “detention” of people, including U.S. citizens, who had done nothing wrong, reports the New York Times. “I don’t think there’s any reason that is rational — and certainly constitutional — to target people based on the place of their birth,” he said. “It’s pretty clear that that’s what they did here.” The stepped-up border screenings came after a U.S. drone strike on Friday killed a powerful Iranian general, Qassim Suleimani. Customs and Border Protection officials insisted that no one was detained or refused entry “because of their country of origin.” However, agents often require people seeking admittance to undergo a process known as secondary screening. An agency official told members of Congress that local offices had been “asked to remain vigilant and increase their situational awareness given the evolving threat environment.” Legal advocates described cases of travelers questioned about their feelings about the U.S. and what was happening in Iran. U.S. citizens “do not have to answer questions about their political views or religious views and practices, and cannot be denied entry into the United States for declining to answer these questions,” said Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union. A federal government website was hacked to show messages vowing revenge for the death of Iran’s most powerful commander and a doctored photograph of President Donald Trump being punched in the jaw. The intrusion was consistent with the work of low-level nationalist Iranian hackers, experts told the New York Times. For an unspecified amount of time starting Saturday, the website of the Federal Depository Library Program featured the altered photograph superimposed over a map of the Middle East, accompanied by a tribute to Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, whose killing in a U.S. drone strike on Friday prompted worldwide political upheaval. “Hacked by Iran Cyber Security Group Hackers,” text on the website read before it was put back online. “This is only small part of Iran’s cyber ability!” The program, administered by the U.S. Government Publishing Office, helps the public access government documents on a wide variety of subjects — including bills, regulations and studies — in more than 1,100 libraries. Its website was taken down for 24 hours as officials conducted a security analysis and put back online Sunday after they found that “none of the site’s data was compromised,” said agency spokesman Gary Somerset. A spokeswoman for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is under the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that there was no confirmation that hackers sponsored by Iran were behind the attack. The hack came as experts and officials have warned of possible cyberattacks in the wake of General Suleimani’s killing. Nine people were shot in August after a high school football game in Mobile, Al. The New York Times calls it part of an overlooked epidemic of school shootings, the kind that happens after class lets out and draws little attention despite a national push to fortify schools and protect children. Since mid-August, gunfire has erupted more than 20 times at or near school sporting events, more shootings than during school hours. Since the start of 2013, at least 19 people have been killed and more than 100 wounded in shootings with some connection to school sporting events. As gunmen have stormed into classroom after classroom during the school day, killing dozens, schools have tightened security, preparing children with elaborate drills. A pattern of after-school shootings has largely gone unnoticed. A database from the Naval Postgraduate School shows that shootings at school events are a longstanding problem. Efforts to prevent them have been halting, piecemeal and sometimes virtually nonexistent. On some campuses where IDs are required to walk into school and active-shooter drills are standard, after-hours games are wide open: Anyone who pays a few dollars for a ticket can stroll in. “There’s a growing problem there and we know that it’s not some spurious thing — it’s something systematic,” said Justin Kurland of the University of Southern Mississippi’s National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security. “How many of these have to happen before the schools and first responders start to take this more seriously?” Since 2013, there have been at least 108 incidents of gunfire around school sporting events in 36 states, found a Times analysis. Most of those had some link to basketball or football. About three in four were in the South and Midwest, where high school sports are widely popular and gun laws are often loose. The leader of Mississippi’s underfunded prison system was pleading with lawmakers for money to hire more guards and pay them better in 2012 when he warned, “I see trouble down the road.” Christopher Epps, a longtime Mississippi Department of Corrections employee, later went to prison himself for collecting $1.4 million in bribes. During budget hearings seven years ago, he said keeping salaries for guards the lowest in the nation would only work “as long as we don’t have an uprising,” the Associated Press reports. The uprising arrived last week when five inmates died at the hands of fellow prisoners and two large prisons were rocked by what officials called “major disturbances” between gangs. Some observers called them riots. With a new governor’s inauguration looming and a new prison chief to be selected, Mississippi leaders face choices. They could pump tens of millions more dollars into a prison system that strains finances in the nation’s poorest state. They could try to resume stalled progress toward letting out inmates in a state with one of the world’s highest incarceration rates. Or they could keep locking people up without more spending. Departing Gov. Phil Bryant on Monday blamed gangs, saying prisons are difficult to manage “under the best of circumstances.” He said, “The inmates are the ones that take each other’s lives. The inmates are the ones that fashion weapons out of metal.” Others blamed the state. “The Mississippi Department of Corrections needs to be responsible for this massacre,” said Malaika Canada, a prisoner advocate whose son is incarcerated. After violence Thursday, guards and state troopers marched prisoners into a cell block closed in 2011 in a lawsuit settlement. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union told a federal judge the unit’s living conditions were “as bad as anywhere in the country.” New York City recorded a rise in murders, shootings, robberies and assaults in 2019, even as overall serious crime fell, the Wall Street Journal reports. The number of murders rose to 318 last year, up eight percent from 295 in 2018, the police department said. The increase stemmed in part from the reclassification of deaths that occurred in previous years and from gang- and drug-related killings. Officials also cited a rise in deaths associated with domestic violence. Overall serious crime in the city fell about one percent compared with 2018, with declines in burglaries, rapes and thefts. “The challenges are real,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “The uptick in murders is something we take very seriously, as well as the uptick we’ve seen in felony assault and robbery.” The number of shootings in the city rose to 776 last year, nearly three percent more than the 754 in 2018. Robberies rose about three percent last year, with 13,363 incidents in 2019 compared to 12,965 in 2018. Police officials said the rise in robberies was driven by the mugging theft of electronic devices, often perpetrated by juvenile offenders on young victims. A sharp drop in burglaries, accompanied by declines in rapes and larceny, led to an overall decrease in the city’s annual tally of serious crimes. There were 95,521 serious crimes in 2019, a nearly one percent drop from 96,393 crimes in 2018. Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said the tally of serious crimes represented a record low. The number of reported hate crimes rose to 428 in 2019, up 20 percent from 356 in 2018. Police have increased their patrols of areas where the crimes occur and have stepped up targeted enforcement efforts to stop such incidents, Shea said. An Oklahoma criminal justice reform task force will recommend the Department of Corrections hire a chief cultural officer to help push cultural changes within the agency and to serve as a bridge for public-private partnerships, The Oklahoman reports. The RESTORE Task Force will release a report Friday. At a meeting Monday, task force members talked about creating pathways to divert people from the criminal justice system, maximizing use of technology in rural Oklahoma and reducing barriers for people who re-enter society after being incarcerated. “Probably 65 percent of what we can do doesn’t require any … legislative approval,” said Secretary of Public Safety Chip Keating. “It requires just doing things differently.” Gov. Kevin Stitt created the 15-member body, called the Criminal Justice Reentry, Supervision, Treatment and Opportunity Reform Task Force, or RESTORE. The task force was asked to study ways to reduce Oklahoma’s incarceration rate, reduce recidivism, enhance and establish diversion programs and improve other aspects of the criminal justice system. Keating and Stitt recently visited Louisiana State Penitentiary, which has undergone drastic reforms. “What they’ve done in 25 years is remarkable,” Keating said. “It was people. They brought the right warden in and the right people and they started putting down the right cultural changes and the right programs.” Tricia Everest, ex-officio chair of the task force, said members heard from former inmates, victims, juveniles, law enforcement, prosecutors, rural and urban judges, probation officers, mental health experts, child experts, trauma-informed experts and others. A tiny white church in Gainesville, Ga., has new locks, peepholes, and brass plates. While parishioners pray, the sanctuary is bolted shut and a police officer is stationed outside. Surveillance cameras will be installed, and the 47-member congregation will participate in active-shooter training. It is the next chapter for the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was targeted in November, the New York Times reports. Police charged a 16-year-old white girl with planning a racially motivated knife attack to kill black worshipers, a plot similar to a 2015 massacre at a storied African-American church in Charleston, S.C. In Gainesville, a city of 40,000, Police Chief Jay Parrish urged church members to use low-tech force to protect themselves. They should hurl Bibles or hot coffee, chairs or fire extinguishers, anything, he said, that can be weaponized if they are under attack and cannot safely escape. The Rev. Michelle Rizer-Pool, the pastor of Bethel, and religious leaders across the U.S. are fortifying their buildings and preparing for the possibility of mass shootings. Some have also turned to armed security and organized law enforcement patrols. Last week, a gunman opened fire during Sunday service at a Texas church, killing two parishioners before an armed member of the volunteer security team fatally shot him. Faith groups have responded to the growing threat of hate crimes and violence by offering specialized training and producing safety guides. The Council on American-Islamic Relations published a safety manual for religious institutions and began holding training sessions after a mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012. After a gunman stormed the small church in Sutherland Springs. Tx., in 2017, a Dallas-area megachurch organized an active-shooter training session, in which more than 600 church leaders from across the nation attended. Former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was charged with sex crimes in Los Angeles as his trial on similar accusations opened in New York. Weinstein was charged with raping one woman and sexually assaulting another in 2013, said Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey. He faces one felony count each of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by use of force and sexual battery by restraint, the Wall Street Journal reports. The new charges come as Weinstein, 67, appeared in state court in New York City on Monday for the first day of his trial. He faces five criminal counts: two counts of rape, one count of criminal sexual act and two counts of predatory sexual assault, a felony that includes committing sex crimes against multiple people. He has pleaded not guilty and denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex. Los Angeles prosecutors alleged Weinstein raped a woman after pushing his way inside her hotel room on Feb. 18, 2013. Prosecutors said that on the next night, he sexually assaulted a woman at a Beverly Hills hotel suite. Lacey said it was a coincidence that her office filed charges on the first day of the New York trial. Arthur Aidala, a Weinstein lawyer, asked the judge to sequester the jury, a measure that is rarely taken, during the New York trial to protect jurors from knowing about potential future charges. Judge James Burke ruled against sequestering the jury, and said he would address the matter of additional charges in another jurisdiction later. Jury selection is scheduled to start Tuesday. Potential jurors will be asked whether they can be fair and impartial and if they would be available for a six- to eight-week trial. More than 61,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, authorities announced Monday, sharply raising their estimate of those who have vanished in more than a decade of extreme violence by and among organized-crime groups, the Washington Post reports. The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador released the new figure after an exhaustive analysis of data from state prosecutors. The previous official estimate, released in 2018, put the number at 40,000. While some cases date to the 1960s, 97 percent have been reported since 2006, when Mexico launched an offensive targeting drug trafficking and criminal organizations. Karla Quintana, head of Mexico’s National Search Commission, said that at least 61,637 people had been reported disappeared and not been found. “These are data of horror, and behind them are stories and narratives of great pain for families,” she said. The numbers confirm that Mexico is suffering one of the worst crises of “the disappeared” in Latin American history. Around 40,000 people went missing in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. An estimated 30,000 disappeared during Argentina’s “dirty war” from 1976 to 1983. Unlike those countries, Mexico has not been at war. While militaries were behind most of the Cold War disappearances, narco-traffickers and other criminals are the likely culprits in the majority of the Mexican cases. Authorities suspect many of them worked with corrupt police and politicians. The Monday announcement highlights the toll of more than a decade of extraordinary violence that shows no sign of abating. Last year, homicides through November topped 31,000, a record. In some regions, organized-crime groups openly battle police and soldiers. Quintana said 3,631 clandestine graves have been discovered since 2006. Jami Resch pledged in her first public outing as Portland’s new police chief to be a “collaborative chief’’ who will work to be out in the community as much as possible, The Oregonian reports. Resch said she’ll continue the momentum that predecessor Danielle Outlaw began and hopes to serve out the remaining five years of her career as chief. The 45-year-old police veteran will mark 21 years with the Portland bureau in February. She addressed reporters along with Mayor Ted Wheeler, a week after Outlaw accepted a job as Philadelphia’s next police commissioner. Resch said she’s dedicated to working to stem gun violence and traffic-related deaths, speeding up hiring to fill a growing number of officer vacancies, working to hold officers accountable, improving trust in the city and continuing to seek help from outside agencies as Portland braces for large protests in this upcoming election year. There are 100 vacancies in the bureau, leaving 901 officers on the job. Wheeler said he chose Resch because he believes she can “seamlessly” continue to make the improvements in the police force that he and residents want. He said she’s been crucial in setting a vision for the bureau as deputy chief, demonstrated she can work well with city commissioners and is respected by rank-and-file officers and other command staff. Resch, a Montana native, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Portland, where she majored in allied health services. She had a plan to become a doctor. When that didn’t transpire, she ended up becoming part of the Police Bureau’s “Operation 80,’’ a large class of recruits hired in 1999. Outlaw, an outsider from Oakland, started in Portland in October 2017 after a national search and served two years and two months. The U.S. government cannot be held liable for a federal ranger’s stolen gun used to kill a young woman on a San Francisco pier in 2015, a federal judge ruled Monday, reports Courthouse News Service. U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero found a lack of direct connection between a car burglary and shooting that took place three days later and half-mile away made it impossible to hold the government liable for the death. “In this case, the gun traveled at least some distance from the theft, three and a half days elapsed, the gun changed hands once at the very least, and there is no way to know what else transpired during that time,” Spero wrote. He granted the U.S. government’s motion for summary judgment in a lawsuit filed by the parents of Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old woman shot dead by an undocumented immigrant. Her killer, Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate, said the shooting was accidental. He was acquitted of murder in 2017. Garcia-Zarate said he found the gun wrapped in a rag under a bench on the Embarcadero. The Steinle family argued the ranger who left a government-issued firearm in a backpack in his private vehicle parked in downtown San Francisco should have foreseen such a careless act would likely result in harm to others. U.S. Bureau of Land Management ranger John Woychowski parked his SUV in downtown San Francisco before going to dinner with his family. He left the car “packed to the brim with five luggage bags, five backpacks” and electronic equipment, the Steinle family said. At a hearing, Spero voiced concern that ruling in favor of the Steinle family could expose people who have guns stolen to “open-ended liability” for crimes committed with stolen property. |
