A sport utility vehicle driven by an Australian man of Afghan descent with a history of mental illness plowed into pedestrians in Melbourne on Thursday, injuring at least 19 people, four of them critically, officials said.
While the incident bore similarities to recent terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States, and police described the ramming as a “deliberate act,” authorities said there was no evidence of terrorist links.
“We don’t have any intelligence or evidence to indicate there is a connection to terrorism,” said Shane Patton, the acting police commissioner of Victoria state, of which Melbourne is the capital. “Having said that, we continue to support this investigation with the Counter Terrorism Command to ensure there isn’t that connection and there is no ongoing threat.”
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A car plowed into pedestrians at a crowded intersection on Dec. 21 in Melbourne, Australia, injuring at least 19 people.(The Washington Post)
The sting began, as so many things do these days, on social media.
Daniel Stiles, a self-styled ape trafficking detective in Kenya, had been scouring Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp for weeks, looking for pictures of gorillas, chimps or orangutans. He was hoping to chip away at an illicit global trade that has captured or killed tens of thousands of apes and pushed some endangered species to the brink of extinction.
“The way they do business,” he said of ape traffickers, “makes the Mafia look like amateurs.”
After hundreds of searches, Mr. Stiles found an Instagram account offering dozens of rare animals for sale, including baby chimpanzees and orangutans dressed in children’s clothes. He sent an email to an address on the account — “looking for young otans” (the industry standard slang for orangutans) — and several days later received a reply.
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A bonobo in a reserve outside Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
When my parents went to law school in the 1980s, they took courses on contracts, torts, criminal law, constitutional law — the list goes on. While there were lessons on persuasion, to be sure, they never took a class on how to tell a story. And they certainly never learned how to make a film.
Today, however, a growing number of lawyers are creating empathetic biographical mini-documentaries, or “sentencing videos,” to reduce their clients’ prison sentences. Inspired by the storytelling techniques of traditional documentary film, some lawyers team up with independent filmmakers while others become filmmakers themselves. These films are made for an audience of one: the presiding judge.
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To beg for leniency, defense attorneys are producing entire documentaries for an audience of one: the judge.Published OnCreditImage by Lance Oppenheim
Most of the half-million or more vehicles damaged after Harvey and Irma will be headed to the scrapheap — but thousands more could wind up on the used car market, often in states far away, where buyers may not suspect they’d been damaged until it’s too late.
Vehicles that have been submerged, especially in salt water, can experience serious problems, though not always immediately. But there are ways to protect yourself if you’ll be in the market for a previously owned vehicle.
Jonathan Smoke, chief economist for Cox Automotive, has estimated up to 500,000 were damaged by Hurricane Harvey, most by flood waters. That would be nearly twice as many as were destroyed following Superstorm Sandy, and about 2.5 times more than the number of vehicles wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, according to Louisiana State Police.
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A submerged pickup truck remains in a neighborhood in the aftermath of Harvey, in Katy, Texas on Sept. 2, 2017. Charlie Riedel / AP file
Daryl Davis’ home is filled with memories of the days he has spent with the Ku Klux Klan.
He is not a member of the white supremacist organization. He can’t be. Davis is the descendant of slaves. He’s a blues musician who has learned how to lift hate out of hearts, even from those who in other times might have been hell-bent on killing him or anyone who looked like him.
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You could consider Davis a KKK whisperer, a man who’s spent decades talking to Imperial Wizards, Grand Dragons, and rank and file Klansmen.
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Daryl Davis looks at his collection of KKK robes, given up by Klansmen he has befriended.
As of this morning, there were 14 open cases of missing juveniles in Washington D.C. Police there say the number is not unusual, but the interest in them is. A social media campaign has evolved demanding that law enforcement and the mainstream media do more to disseminate information about these kids and facilitate their recovery amid growing speculation that they are victims of a sex-trafficking epidemic.
While there is no direct evidence yet to support that suspicion regarding the Washington kids, it shouldn’t be ruled out. A Maryland mother told a Washington D.C. TV station this month that her teen daughter, who has autism, was picked up from a Baltimore high school by a man she met online, then driven to Washington, where she was trafficked for six days by various men in different locations before she was recovered.
Sex trafficking is a pernicious crime that all parents should better understand.
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Unlike made for Hollywood movies on sex trafficking, victims are infrequently kidnapped. More often, traffickers will portray themselves as prospective lovers or faux family in order to lure their victims away from their social support system. Once isolated, the trafficker will typically keep the victim under control through a cyclical process of ingratiation, and mental and physical abuse, putting them to work on the streets or in hotel room meetings hastily arranged through sex sites on the Internet.
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Police captured a suspect in what they called a “terror-related incident” in the transit system near Times Square during rush hour on Monday morning.
An improvised, low-tech pipe bomb device was affixed to his chest with Velcro and zip ties. The explosion, which occurred around 7:20 a.m. in the subway near Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, immediately plunged the commuter hub into chaos.
Five people have been treated at two Mount Sinai hospitals for minor injuries related to the incident, the hospital said in a statement to HuffPost. They had all been released by about 5 p.m. local time.
Police identified the suspect as 27-year-old Akayed Ullah, who they said is a U.S. resident from the Bangladeshi city of Chittagong. Ullah, who had no criminal record, allegedly triggered the bomb intentionally and mentioned the self-described Islamic State after his arrest. He last visited Bangladesh on Sept. 8, authorities said.
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New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission/Handout/Reuters
Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi man who police say attempted to detonate a homemade bomb in New York City on Monday, in a photo released by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.
Larry Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison Thursday on child pornography charges. The former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor knowingly collected 37,000 images and videos of child pornography as early as 2003.
U.S. District Judge Janet Neff gave Nassar the toughest sentence possible. Nassar will consecutively serve 20 years for each of the three federal charges against him.
“He has demonstrated that he should never again have access to children,” Neff said in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, courtroom.
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Nassar arrives in court on Nov. 22, 2017. JEFF KOWALSKY via Getty Images
Michael T. Slager, the white police officer whose video-recorded killing of an unarmed black motorist in North Charleston, S.C., starkly illustrated the turmoil over racial bias in American policing, was sentenced on Thursday to 20 years in prison, after the judge in the case said he viewed the shooting as a murder.
The sentence, which was within the range of federal guidelines, was pronounced in Federal District Court in Charleston about seven months after Mr. Slager pleaded guilty to violating the civil rights of Walter L. Scott when he shot and killed him in April 2015. The case against Mr. Slager is one of the few instances in which a police officer has been prosecuted for an on-duty shooting.
“We have to get this type of justice, because being a police officer is one of the most powerful jobs in the country, and it should be respected,” L. Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Mr. Scott’s family, said after the hearing, which was punctuated by tears and grief. “But that doesn’t mean you’re above the law. That doesn’t mean you can do as you please.”
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Michael Slager, the former North Charleston police officer, at the Charleston County Courthouse in December 2016.CreditRandall Hill/Reuters
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A car plowed into pedestrians at a crowded intersection on Dec. 21 in Melbourne, Australia, injuring at least 19 people. 
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James' World 2 