Posts Tagged ‘Featured Video’
Ohio school shooter gives finger to victims while wearing ‘killer’ T-shirt
Tuesday, 19 March 2013 10:37
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A teenager who was convicted of killing three classmates at an Ohio high school last year showed up at his sentencing on Tuesday wearing a T-shirt with the word “killer,” and then flipped his middle finger at the families of the victims.

According to ABC News, TJ Lane removed a blue button down shirt after arriving to court to reveal a white T-shirt with the word “killer” handwritten across the front in black letters.

Lane then used his opportunity to make a statement to the court to hold up his middle finger to the families of those he was convicted of killing. (Read more…) Lane made a statement that Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer described as “unintelligible,” and then concluded by saying, “Fuck all of you.”

“Frankly, I wasn’t prepared for this,” the prosecutor remarked. “This is confirming what we have known all along, that this was a cold, calculated, premeditated killing.”

CNN reported that Lane had “smiled” at the notion that juvenile killers could receive the death penalty.

In the end, Geauga County Common Pleas Judge David Fuhry sentenced Lane to life in prison for the 2012 murders of 16-year-old Daniel Parmertor, 16-year-old Demetrius Hewlin and 17-year-old Russell King Jr. Lane also shot three other students. One of those teens is now confined to a wheelchair.

It was not immediately clear why Lane was allowed to wear the “killer” T-shirt in open court.

Watch this video from USA Today, broadcast March 19, 2013.

Watch this video from CNN, broadcast March 19, 2013.

 
 
Amanpour on Iraq: Where were the journalists?
Tuesday, 19 March 2013 07:48
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On Monday, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked how so many journalists could have been misled in the run-up to the Iraq War. She interviewed two reporters for Knight-Ridder newspapers, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, both of whom have been vindicated as being consistently right on Iraq.

Amanpour began by recapping some of the George W. Bush administration’s hallmark assertions regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported programs to make nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and highlighting the debunked claims that Iraq was importing aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for enriching uranium. (Read more…)

“So how could so any false assertions have been taken as fact?” she asked. “After the war, some of America’s leading newspapers were forced to apologize for getting it wrong.”

She then welcomed Strobel and Landay to the program.

Landay talked about the difficulty of getting stories published that ran contrary to the narrative being established by Washington. Editors would demand to know why these stories weren’t also running in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

“It was very lonely,” he said. “One of the ironies is that every time we would write something, the White House would say nothing, because we realized after a while that that would have been the best advertisement for our stories that we could possibly ask for.”

“There’s a problem with journalism in Washington,” said Strobel, “and that’s access. The New York Times and others had access to top officials who were spinning this line. We talked to those people as well, but most of our reporting was done with intelligence — military and diplomatic — mid-level and lower-level, the types that journalists don’t normally talk to or go after.”

Watch the clip, embedded below via CNN:

 
Police: Sandy Hook gunman had compiled ‘doctoral thesis’ of mass shootings
Tuesday, 19 March 2013 07:22
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The 20-year-old man behind the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut kept a database and “score sheet” of similar crimes as part of a plan to achieve greater levels of violence, CBS News reported on Monday.

Police said Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people in the December 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary, had compiled information on several mass killings, and chose the school because he thought it was a convenient target.

One particular influence on Lanza’s rampage was the July 2011 attack by Anders Breivik in Norway. (Read more…) Breivik, an avid fan of Islamophobic conservatives, killed 77 people in attacks in downtown Oslo and at a summer camp on nearby Utoya Island.

The New York Daily News reported on Sunday that Lanza’s database contained the names of 500 gunmen and failed shooters, according to an anonymous officer who said he was briefed in detail on Lanza’s plan at a law enforcement conference in a seminar by Connecticut State Police Col. Danny Stebbins.

Lanza’s dossier, the source said, contained “names and the number of people killed and the weapons that were used, even the precise make and model of the weapons. It had to have taken years. It sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research.”

But according to a Connecticut newspaper, the Torrington Register Citizen, the Daily News’ report defied a request by Stebbins to not share his findings with the public before they could be delivered to the families of the victims in the Newtown shooting.

“It is unfortunate that someone in attendance chose not to honor Col. Stebbins’ request to respect the families’ right to know specifics of the investigation first,” a state police spokesperson, Lt. J. Paul Vance, told the newspaper in a statement. “Law enforcement sensitive information was discussed dealing with tactical operational approaches by first responders on the day of the shootings.”

Newtown First Selectman Pat Llodra, the town’s chief executive, said he was not aware of any new efforts to share information on the shootings.

State police have said in the past they would release a report on their findings regarding the shooting once their investigators had completed their analysis. Vance did not comment on the specifics of the Daily News report.

On Monday, the Daily News reported that some lawmakers are also calling for increased monitoring of the video game industry after it was discovered that Lanza shared Breivik’s affinity for playing violent games like the Call of Duty series.

“There are too many video games that celebrate the mass killing of innocent people,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). “Games that despite attempts at industry self-regulation find their way into the hands of children.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has proposed granting the Federal Communication Commission more leeway in regulating video games.

“In today”s world, where kids can access content across a variety of devices often without parental supervision, it is unrealistic to assume that overworked and stressed parents can prevent their kids from viewing inappropriate content,” said Rockefeller, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee.

However, both law enforcement officials and researchers have said in recent months that there is no evidence of a direct link between video games and violent behavior.

Watch CBS News’ report on Lanza’s grisly research, aired Monday, below.