Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

Snow leads to massive pileup in Wisconsin, dozens injured

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Dozens of people were injured in a massive traffic pileup amid snowy conditions in southern Wisconsin on Friday, which blocked Interstate 39/90 for hours, authorities said.

Beloit Memorial Hospital said at least 27 people were treated for injuries sustained in the crash, WIFR-TV reported. The extent of their injuries was not immediately clear, the station said.

State Patrol officials said snow, ice and whiteout conditions were factors in the crash.

Most of southern Wisconsin remained under a winter weather advisory Friday afternoon with more snow expected Saturday.

The crash occurred at around 12:30 p.m. in Rock County between Janesville and Beloit, the State Patrol said in a statement posted on its Facebook page. Troopers arrived to find the interstate blocked in both directions.

Troopers diverted traffic onto side roads. The southbound lanes reopened just after 8 p.m., the State Patrol said on Twitter late Friday.

WIFR-TV posted live video of the scene just before 4 p.m. showing semitrailers backed up as emergency workers assisted motorists.

As of 6 a.m. Friday, the Beloit area had seen 2.2 inches of snow over the last 24 hours, according to the National Weather Service.

The State Patrol said in a separate statement that another multi-vehicle crash around 1:30 p.m. Friday blocked northbound Interstate 41 in Kenosha County near the Wisconsin-Illinois border. Those lanes reopened by 7:35 p.m. Snow, ice and whiteout conditions factored into that crash as well, according to the State Patrol.

Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

Teen Isabeau Levito wins U.S. women’s figure skating title

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Teen star Isabeau Levito needed a near-flawless free skate to capture gold at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships after Bradie Tennell’s beautiful performance minutes earlier.

And the 15-year-old Levito accomplished just that, delivering a dazzling 149.55 score for a 223.33 total to win her first women’s national championship Friday night.

The New Jersey skater drew a rousing standing ovation from an audience wowed by her poise under pressure on the big nationals stage.

Two-time U.S. champion Tennell scored a 139.36 in the free skate and finished second with a 213.12 total.

Levito looked unfazed, elegantly landing her triple lutz-half loop-triple salchow sequence and other most difficult jumps while captivating the crowd as the final skater of the evening. She came into the free skate leading Tennell by just two-hundredths of a point following Thursday’s short program.

Amber Glenn finished third at 207.44. She delivered an impressive 138.48 free skate that moved her into the lead with the top three skaters from the short program remaining.

Starr Andrews, a fan favorite after she made her nationals debut on this ice in San Jose five years ago at age 16, finished fourth at 188.24. She missed on her planned triple flip early in her routine and was visibly disappointed after a free skate that scored 119.27.

There’s certainly some nostalgia here for Andrews, who dazzled with a free skate set to her cover of Whitney Houston’s “One Moment in Time” in her senior nationals debut in 2018 at SAP Center. She was in third place entering Friday — just hundredth of a point ahead of Glenn.

Glenn came into Friday fourth after her 68.96 in the short program. The 2021 U.S. silver medalist was forced to withdraw from last year’s event following a positive COVID-19 test.

Josephine Lee, making her senior nationals debut and sitting 11th after the short program, skated beautifully in the free skate event for a 132.08 and total score of 187.68. She beamed afterward when hearing her score on a night she delivered a triple flip-double axel-double toe loop sequence that certainly impressed the judges.

And reigning junior champion Clare Seo showed poise and promise at 16 as one of the younger skaters to watch this quad.

Levito, the reigning junior world champion who took third place in her senior nationals debut last year, entered as the favorite to win her first U.S. title. She earned silver at both Grand Prix assignments and the Grand Prix Final last month.

It was a disappointing night for two-time national champion Gracie Gold. She delivered one of her best short programs of late to come into Friday’s free skate in fifth place only to miss out on attempting a couple of her planned triples. She won U.S. titles in 2014 and ’16.

Earlier Friday, 18-year-old Ilia Malinin scored a personal-best 110.36 in the men’s short program as he chases his first national title, leading second-place veteran Jason Brown by more than 10 points heading into Sunday’s free skate.

Malinin finished second to Olympic champion Nathan Chen — now a mentor offering support of the teen star — in his senior nationals debut last year but was passed over for the Olympic team in favor of the more experienced Brown.

This time, Brown appreciated skating after the youngster and feeling the crowd’s energy.

“I’m very surprised how I was able to pull that off, especially with the whole beginning of the season with all the short programs didn’t go as well,” Malinin said. “I think we took the time and effort to see all the bad things that I’d done, just to take it all in to sort of see what works best. We did a little bit of changing a bit of the program and I think that also helped with getting the performance.”

U.S. Figure Skating announced Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, as the host for the 2024 nationals.

___

AP Sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

ChatGPT is on its way to becoming a virtual doctor, lawyer, and business analyst. Here’s a list of advanced exams the AI bot has passed so far.

ChatGPTChatGPT is making progress towards a host of professional degrees.

CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

  • ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI that uses generative artificial intelligence to create its own content.
  • The bot has been used to generate essays and write exams, often passing, but making mistakes, too. 
  • Insider rounded up a list of the assignments, quizzes, and tests ChatGPT has passed. 
Wharton MBA ExamThe Wharton SchoolChatGPT would have received a B or B- on a Wharton exam, according to a professor at the business school.

David Tran Photo/Shutterstock

Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch recently tested the technology with questions from his final exam in operations management— which was once a required class for all MBA students — and published his findings

Terwiesch concluded that the bot did an “amazing job” answering basic operations questions based on case studies, which are focused examinations of a person, group, or company, and a common way business schools teach students.  

In other instances though, ChatGPT made simple mistakes in calculations that Terwiesch thought only required 6th-grade-level math. Terwiesch also noted that the bot had issues with more complex questions that required an understanding of how multiple inputs and outputs worked together. 

Ultimately, Terwiesch said the bot would receive an B or B- on the exam. 

 

US medical licensing examDoctor uses computer an smartphone simultaneously.ChatGPT passed all three parts of the United States medical licensing examination within a comfortable range.

Getty Images

Researchers put ChatGPT through the United States Medical Licensing Exam — a three part exam that aspiring doctors take between medical school and residency — and reported their findings in a paper published in December 2022. 

The paper’s abstract noted that ChatGPT “performed at or near the passing threshold for all three exams without any specialized training or reinforcement. Additionally, ChatGPT demonstrated a high level of concordance and insight in its explanations.”

Ultimately, the results show that large language models — which ChatGPT has been trained on— may have “the potential” to assist with medical education and even clinical decision making, the abstract noted

The research is still under peer review, Insider noted based on a report from Axios. 

EssaysEssay TyperWhile ChatGPT has generated convincing essays on occasion, it’s also raised eyebrows for spewing out well-written misinformation.

Tech Insider

It didn’t take long after ChatGPT was released for students to start using it for essays and educators to start worrying about plagiarism. 

In December, Bloomberg podcaster Matthew S. Schwartz tweeted that the “take home essay is dead.” He noted that he had fed a law school essay prompt into ChatGPT and it had “responded *instantly* with a solid response.” 

 

—〽️atthew S. Schwartz (@SchwartzReports) December 7, 2022

 

In another instance, a philosophy professor at Furman University caught a student turning in an AI-generated essay upon noticing it had “well-written misinformation,” Insider reported

“Word by word it was a well-written essay,” the professor told Insider. As he took a more careful look however, he noticed that the student made a claim about the philosopher David Hume that “made no sense” and was “just flatly wrong” Insider reported

In an interview in January, Sam Altman— CEO of OpenAI which makes ChatGPT — said that while the company will devise ways to help schools detect plagiarism, he can’t guarantee full detection. 

 

Microbiology QuizMicrobiologyChatGPT successfully passed through a college level microbiology quiz.

Clouds Hill Imaging Ltd./Getty Images

Science journalist and executive editor of Big Think, Alex Berezow, tested ChatGPT with a 10-question microbiology quiz that he devised

Berezow, who also holds a Ph.D in microbiology, noted that the questions would be appropriate for a final exam for college level students. ChatGPT “blew it away,” Berezow wrote. 

In one example, Berezow asked: 

“An emergency room patient presents with a terrible headache and stiff neck. The doctor orders a spinal tap to collect cerebrospinal fluid. A Gram stain of the CSF reveals the presence of Gram negative diplococci. What is the diagnosis?”

To which ChatGPT correctly responded:

Based on the information you provided, the Gram stain of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) shows the presence of Gram-negative diplococci, which are bacteria that are typically oval-shaped and occur in pairs. This finding is consistent with the diagnosis of meningitis.

In another instance he asked:

“In five words or less, what is the point of Koch’s postulates?”

To which ChatGPT said: 

Establish causality between microbe and disease.

Taking out the word “and” Berezow said ChatGPT “Nailed it.”

Law professorLaw School Exams

Jacobs Stock Photography Ltd/ Getty Images

ChatGPT recently passed exams in four law school courses at the University of Minnesota, based on a recently published paper written by four law school professors at the school. 

In total, the bot answered over 95 multiple choice questions and 12 essay questions that were blindly graded by the professors. Ultimately, the professors gave ChatGPT a “low but passing grade in all four courses” approximately equivalent to a C+. 

Still the authors pointed out several implications for what this might mean for lawyers and law education. In one section they wrote:

“Although ChatGPT would have been a mediocre law student, its performance was sufficient to successfully earn a JD degree from a highly selective law school, assuming its work remained constant throughout law school (and ignoring other graduation requirements that involve different skills). In an era where remote exam administration has become the norm, this could hypothetically result in a struggling law student using ChatGPT to earn a JD that does not reflect her abilities or readiness to practice law.”

 

 

Read the original article on Business Insider
Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

Tyre Nichols video shows a complete ‘breakdown’ in police protocols, legal experts say: ‘No reason 5 officers need to reduce themselves to closed-fist punching’

63d491bafc1847001955365f?format=jpeg

  • The video of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols being beaten by Memphis police was released Friday.
  • Legal experts told Insider the footage showed police met Nichols with force even though he wasn’t initially resisting.
  • He may have run away from the officers because he thought he needed to in order to save his life, lawyers said.

Content note: This story describes police brutality, death, and contains graphic videos.

The video released Friday of five Memphis police officers brutally beating Tyre Nichols during a traffic stop showed clear police misconduct and a breakdown in protocol for detaining someone, legal experts told Insider.

The violent footage was taken during a traffic stop on January 7 in Memphis, Tennessee, and was released days after the five officers were all charged with second-degree murder, among other charges. Nichols, who was 29, died of his injuries on January 10. Police said Nichols was pulled over on suspicion of reckless driving, but later said there was no evidence substantiating the allegation.

Prior to the video’s release, the Memphis police chief said it was “heinous” and “inhumane.”

“What I saw was certainly police misconduct,” Joshua Ritter, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney, former prosecutor, and partner with El Dabe Ritter Trial Lawyers, told Insider of the footage. “What I saw is never the way that five fully trained officers should try to detain a person.”

The videos showed an officer approaching the car after pulling Nichols over and immediately telling him to “get the fuck out of the fucking car.” After Nichols exclaims that he didn’t do anything, an officer pulls him out, throws him to the ground, and says “I’m gonna tase your ass.” Nichols then stands, struggles with an officer, and runs away after the officer deploys his taser.

As he runs, an officer can be heard saying: “I hope they stomp his ass.”

Ritter said it was “abundantly clear” that “there was either a breakdown in training and protocol or a complete lack of training and protocol that these officers had to begin with.”

“There’s no reason why five officers need to reduce themselves to closed-fist punching in order to subdue a suspect who does not appear to be violent in return, but at the very worst can be said to not be compliant with their orders,” he added.

He added it was hard to believe there was no way the five officers should not have been able to detain Nichols safely, without resulting to physical blows. “It’s almost as if they are trying to gain his compliance by assaulting him,” he said.

Los Angeles-based civil rights attorney V. James DeSimone agreed the police’s treatment of Nichols from the beginning of the interaction was excessive, adding, “this could’ve all been avoided if police had treated this young man with respect in the first incidence” rather than with a “physical confrontation” and threats.

All of the lawyers Insider spoke to said that Nichols initially appeared compliant but was met with force anyways, raising questions about why he ended up running away, which could be construed as him resisting arrest and used to argue they were just trying to make a non-compliant person comply.

“They came in hot. They came in just straight beating on him even though he was very compliant,” Matthew Barhoma, a criminal defense attorney and founder of Power Trial Lawyers and Barhoma Law, told Insider. “Then he resisted. And it raises the question: Why did he resist? It’s very likely he resisted because he felt the need to save his life.”

Ritter agreed, adding that the “natural human instinct may be to resist when five people are essentially beating up on you.”

Barhoma said he was “shocked” by the footage, adding that when the charges were announced he thought it may be a case of “overzealous prosecution,” but that after the video he clearly sees how this could be a case of police brutality.

Whether or not the officers’ conduct clears the high bar of second-degree murder is another question.

“I think the second-degree charge is probably high, and it’s going to be difficult for them to ascertain,” Barhoma said, adding he thought manslaughter charges may have been more fitting.

Ritter agreed the murder charges would be hard to prove, but that given all the context — the video showing force, Nichols being pulled over on suspicion of a non-violent offense — prosecutors may be able to prove it.

However Neama Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, said there was “no question in my mind that murder charges are appropriate.”

“I’ve prosecuted police officers. I’ve seen police officers imprisoned. I’ve seen a lot,” he said. “This is probably one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”

Read the original article on Business Insider
Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

Memphis councilman breaks down in tears over bodycam footage of the beating of Tyre Nichols: ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen’

Protesters take over a bridge Friday, Jan. 27, 2023, in Memphis, Tenn., as authorities release police video depicting five Memphis officers beating Tyre Nichols, whose death resulted in murder charges and provoked outrage at the country's latest instance of police brutality. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)Protesters take over a bridge Friday, Jan. 27, 2023, in Memphis, Tenn., as authorities release police video depicting five Memphis officers beating Tyre Nichols, whose death resulted in murder charges and provoked outrage at the country’s latest instance of police brutality.

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

  • A Memphis city councilman told CNN the beating death of Trye Nichols “cannot go unaddressed.”
  • In an emotional interview with Don Lemon, chairman Martavius Jones wept over the 29-year-old’s death.
  • “We gotta build a better Memphis for Mr. Nichols,” Jones said.

In an emotional interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Memphis City Council chairman Martavius Jones broke down in tears over the death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, saying “this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Bodycam footage released Friday night revealed police interactions with Nichols, who had been pulled over in a traffic stop, including the brutal beating that ultimately killed him. The five officers involved in the incident have been charged with second-degree murder.

“Don, we have to do something,” Jones told Lemon in the clip, which has since gone viral on social media. “Not that we were immune to anything, but this wasn’t supposed to happen in our community. This was a traffic stop, it wasn’t supposed to end like this.”

—Shannonnn sharpes Burner (PARODY Account) (@shannonsharpeee) January 28, 2023

 

Jones was so overcome with emotion in the interview that he was unable to speak, breaking down in tears over the violent footage that showed Nichols being repeatedly kicked, beaten with batons, and electrocuted with a taser. The footage prompted nationwide protests over the brutality of the officers involved.

“We gotta do something,” Jones told Lemon. “You know, to think that this is my last year in office. We have to build a better Memphis. We gotta build a better Memphis for Mr. Nichols. We have to let his legacy — his sacrifice, the sacrifice that his mother will not have her son anymore — we cannot let this go unaddressed. So I hope that, well I’m sure, that my colleagues will stand with me, we’re gonna have some tough conversations.”

Read the original article on Business Insider
Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

Ukraine says Russia’s putting inflatable tanks on the battlefield — but the decoys deflated

Russia T-90M tank in UkraineA Russian T-90M Proryv main battle tank destroyed by Ukrainian forces near the village of Staryi Saltiv in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, May 9, 2022.

REUTERS/Vitalii Hnidyi

  • Ukraine accused Russia of staging inflatable tanks near Zaporizhzhia in a Thursday Facebook post.
  • But the Russian decoys unintentionally deflated, according to Ukrainian officials. 
  • Russia has employed deceptive warfare for decades, but its recent efforts apparently fizzled. 

Ukrainian military forces accused the Russian army of deploying inflatable tanks in the south of Ukraine in an effort to deceive the opposing side, saying the country’s “rubber” decoys had deflated in an anticlimactic display.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in a Thursday Facebook post said Russia’s army had run out of steam in the Zaporizhzhia region, where Russian troops have been incessantly firing on Ukrainian defenses in recent days, according to the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration.

“At the time when our partners are coordinating the supply of tanks to Ukraine, the invading army is also increasing the presence of ‘tank units’ in the Zaporizhzhia area,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine wrote.

But Russia’s multiplying tanks are, according to Ukrainian officials, not what they seem.

“Apparently, the free air of the Cossack region is not suitable for the ‘rubber’ products of the occupiers, so they deflate without fulfilling their main mission. Just like the inflated bravado of the Russian army,” the agency said.

 

Inflatable tanks are a staple of Russia’s deception doctrine known as maskirovka, or masking. The country’s approach to psychological warfare relies on an arsenal of inflatable tanks and launchers, decoy vehicles and soldiers, and other operations of deceit to boost stealth tactics and sow confusion. 

Russia has utilized elements of maskirovka in conflicts going back decades, but their most recent efforts in Ukraine apparently fizzled, Ukraine claims.

It was not clear for what purpose Russia allegedly staged the inflatable tanks near Zaporizhzhia.

Earlier in the war, Ukraine also produced false weaponry, using fake rocket launchers made of wood to entice Russia to waste missiles on useless targets. The wooden decoys were meant to look like US rocket launchers when spotted by Russian drones, prompting Russian cruise missile carriers in the Black Sea to fire on the false targets, according to August reports.

Deception as warfare has a long history. The US also utilized inflatable tanks in World War II as part of its Ghost Army operation in an effort to trick the Third Reich into overestimating the Allied forces’ military strength. The unit created illusions and sought to spread disinformation by using inflatable mock-ups of military vehicles, tanks, and artillery, as well as audio recordings of sounds that mimicked the movement of large armies. 

Read the original article on Business Insider
Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

Tyre Nichols’ family attorney: Don’t stop investigating

(NewsNation) — The attorney for Tyre Nichols’ family said Friday they want a deeper criminal investigation into Nichols’ death that should go well beyond the five arrested officers who were recorded beating him.

“We do not want this investigation stopped just at the five,” Antonio Romanucci told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield on Friday. “We think there is much more going on underneath here.”

Memphis authorities on Friday released footage showing five officers beating Nichols, who later died. Later that evening, Romanucci later that night said the Nichols family wanted the world to see that video, called the SCORPION police unit the five officers worked under “100% corrupted,” and said criminal charges should include those who did nothing to try and help Nichols as he lay injured.

“You only showed part of the video. There’s 20 more minutes where he is laying on the ground, waiting for an ambulance, waiting for an EMT while there are firefighters there who aren’t performing first-responding services. There are deputy sheriffs who are there who aren’t intervening, not rendering aide,” Romanucci said.

“Who knows whether or not there were chances to keep him alive longer than he was, or actually save him,” he said. “Those are all questions that need to be asked.”

Romanucci said the family has met and had a “very productive conversation” with local authorities, the Department Justice and the FBI about additional charges beyond the five officers.

Soon after the video was released, Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner announced that two deputies who appeared on the scene after the beating have been relieved of duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

The Nichols’ family attorney also criticized the SCORPION unit. The two-year-old specialized gang unit, with an acronym that stands for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, was designed to patrol high-crime areas in the city. The officers who are on tape beating Nichols were part of that unit.

“There is no reason that the SCORPION unit should continue to exist in any form whatsoever,” Romanucci said. “How is it that now this unit, which in my opinion after seeing that video is 100% corrupted, in the sense that we don’t know how many other incidents there have been, clearly not as serious or as grave as Tyre’s, but that were never reported or were justified in different ways so that innocent people were arrested or put in jail.”

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis described the officers’ actions as “heinous, reckless and inhumane,” and said Friday that her department has been unable to substantiate the reckless driving allegation that prompted the stop.

Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

When all you can do about Israeli and Palestinian violence is scream ‘Enough!’ in any language

GettyImages-1246596585-1.jpg

There are certain words that Israeli Jews and Palestinians share, words they repeat so much they’re almost like punctuation, words that fit seamlessly into both conversational Hebrew and Arabic — and just as well sprinkled, like a dash of local seasoning, into English conversations with Americans like me.

When I lived in Jerusalem, these words became part of my vernacular, too. I’ve missed them in the seven years since I returned to the U.S., because they each have a distinct flavor that their translations don’t quite convey.

There’s yalla, which means “let’s go,” and embodies the particular urgency and energy that pulses through the region. There’s sababa, which means “awesome” but can also be used to express simple assent, OK, no problem. There’s dugri: straight talk, bluntness, the bottom line. 

And there’s halas — enough, I’m done. 

That’s what I want to scream right now, as I absorb the horrific news that a Palestinian gunman killed at least seven Israelis as they left Kabbalat Shabbat services in an East Jerusalem neighborhood Friday night, a day after Israeli soldiers shot dead nine Palestinians during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp.

I know that as the editor-in-chief of the nation’s leading Jewish news organization I am meant to have something profound to say about these tragedies. I understand that, after nearly four years as Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, people expect me to offer some insight into the cycles of violence — some analysis or explanation, some hint of what might happen next. 

But all I can think is halas. Enough death, enough hate, enough guns, enough statements of sorrow from abroad, enough videos of outrage on social media, enough settlers chanting “Death to Arabs,” enough Gaza celebrations passing sweets in the streets — enough, halas, enough. 

And yet: I have to write this column. So I think back to the deadly attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem that I covered in 2014

It was in Har Nof, a Haredi neighborhood in the west side of the city. (Friday’s was in Neve Yaakov, a settlement in the east — the part Israel seized in 1967 and later annexed, in a move the U.N. said was against international law; the part Palestinians see as their future capital.) 

Back then, two men with a gun, knives and an axe burst into the shul on a Tuesday morning, killing three rabbis and another man, whose blood pooled onto their prayer shawls and books, and later a police officer. On Friday, a lone gunman shot up the street outside a synagogue as worshippers prepared to walk home, killing five men and two women, ages 20 to 70.

I think, too, of the time I spent in Jenin, one of the first Palestinian cities in the occupied West Bank that I visited upon arriving as a Times correspondent in the spring of 2012. I went in the wake of the death of Qadoura Moussa, the 60-year-old governor of the area, who suffered two heart attacks roaming the city with a rifle an hour after a Palestinian shot up his hilltop home

Moussa’s wife told me she was fetching the two of them ice cream from the kitchen when the barrage of bullets hit the stone house — the same house where her husband was born, where they’d been married 31 years earlier, where they raised three sons and a daughter. His children talked about how he loved to lounge on the red-and-black couches in the glass-enclosed rooms on the house’s roof, where on a clear day you could see all the way to Haifa, where his family lived before Israel’s establishment in 1948. 

I wrote again about Jenin the next year, when Israeli troops killed a 22-year-old Palestinian man during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp aimed at arresting a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad — and again in 2014, when Israeli forces killed three Palestinians and wounded seven in a raid on the Jenin refugee camp seeking to arrest suspected militants. 

That’s the very same refugee camp a new generation of Israeli soldiers raided early Thursday morning to arrest, yes, Islamic Jihad militants. They ended up killing nine people, including two teenage boys and a 60-year-old woman. 

Jenin, the site of a deadly 10-day battle between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants during the second intifada in 2002. Jenin, where Juliano Mer Khamis, the son of a Jewish mother and Palestinian Christian father, made the 2004 documentary Arna’s Children, in which he returned to the refugee camp to track down the kids who’d acted in the theater program his mother ran in the 1990s — and found they were hardened fighters, imprisoned or dead.

Jenin, where Mer Khamis went on to create the Freedom Theatre in 2006 — and to be murdered by masked gunmen, presumably Palestinian militants, five years later. Jenin, where the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed last year covering yet another Israeli raid on the refugee camp. Jenin, the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian terror cell featured in the new season of Fauda

Halas

As the word echoed in my head Friday afternoon, I called my friend Libby Lenkinski, who works at the New Israel Fund, and is the best person I know at not just analyzing the conflict, but grappling with our emotions around it. 

After the 2021 Israel-Gaza war, Libby and I partnered on a series of events called “Israel Therapy,” a concept she invented that will soon become a podcast with Libby as therapist-in-chief. On Friday afternoon, she was thinking about how the eruption of violence shattered the illusion of unity shown in recent weeks at mass protests against Israel’s new far-right government in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa.

“There are these corners of plausible deniability that we get into as liberal Israelis, liberal Jews, liberal Arabs, liberal Palestinians, and then violence is the thing that pulls those things out from behind the curtain,” Libby explained. “There’s unity in opposition. But we may not agree about what we want as the future here, and then violence is the thing that comes in to drive that point into the center of the focus.”

We have seen this horror movie so many times, and it just gets more difficult to watch. It’s not that the narrative always has the same ending. It’s that it never ends. Halas.

I heard someone on NPR ask Friday afternoon whether U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who is headed to the region this weekend, could do anything to restore calm. No, is the short answer.

I read that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to respond. Israel will probably bulldoze the home of the family of the man responsible for the attack, erect new checkpoints in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. If the gunman is found to have ties to Hamas, which rules Gaza, or another militant group, Israel may bomb terror sites in the strip. Or make another arrest raid in Jenin. Halas.

Will this spark a third intifada? Probably not, given both the vacuum in Palestinian leadership and the intense PTSD from the second intifada that still blankets both sides. But it will certainly spawn many articles asking that ineffable, unanswerable question.

Some Palestinians will justify Friday’s synagogue attack as a response to Thursday’s killings in Jenin. Some Israelis will excuse Jenin because of intelligence reports that suggested militants there were planning an imminent terror attack. That attack would have been a response to some offense by Israel, which could be traced back to some wrongdoing by Palestinians, which was predicated on something before it that was spawned by something before that, and so on until you get back to 1967 and 1948. 

And further still, to the beginning, to Genesis: Abraham had two sons; there was Isaac, and there was Ishmael. 

Halas, their descendants are screaming. Enough. 

The post When all you can do about Israeli and Palestinian violence is scream ‘Enough!’ in any language appeared first on The Forward.

Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

The Tyre Nichols Videos Demand Solemnity, Not Sensationalism

We find ourselves, as a nation, in a nauseating position.

In the hours before Memphis police released video of the beating death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man from Memphis, cable-news anchors filling some of their copious time, spoke of the police footage as “hours away from release,” “soon to come,” and with other terms typically reserved for sporting events, major political speeches, moments of scandal, and Hollywood film premieres. The city, newscasters said, is on edge. Memphis’s Black female police chief, Cerelyn Davis and surrounding Shelby County’s District Attorney Steve Mulroy, a white man and Democrat, have been lauded for their comparatively swift, decisive action. The five Black officers involved in the January 7 beating have been fired and indicted on multiple charges including official misconduct and oppression, second-degree murder, aggravated assault, and aggravated kidnapping. Davis described the contents of the tape as revolting, reflecting a disregard for human life.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

So here we are now, just after the airing of what is effectively a police snuff film, an execution on tape for what may have been no crimes at all.

That stomach-churning fact is, of course, possible because of America’s stop-start, sometimes hard-to-call-sincere commitment to do something about the number of people killed by police each year, a disproportionate share of whom are Black. And, at the same time, there have also been a range of – in many cases, well-intentioned – warnings, suggestions, and publicly declared refusals to watch the tapes’ contents. Instead, these people, including Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, said in the hours before the tapes were released, that Nichols should be remembered the way he lived. He was, his mother said, tall and lanky, weighing in at “a buck fifty.” He was a “beautiful soul,” artistic and “his own person,” not perfect but, “damn near close,” Wells said at a Friday press conference before the videos were made public. He was a man who liked to take his chances on a skateboard and photograph Memphis’s architecture, scenery, and sunsets. But when she saw him last, comatose in a hospital bed, his neck and nose had been broken, the latter resembling an “S.” Nichols’ head was swollen, Wells said, ”like a watermelon.” His on-tape beating, some who refused to watch it said, was just more Black death porn on the pyre, and unnecessary psychic wounds for people who already know all about the damage done by American policing.

Years ago, a newsroom colleague, a white woman who also liked to joke that on her frequent getaways she could tan to a color browner than me, asked me if she was obligated to watch yet another police-execution tape. That time, it was 17-year-old Laquan McDonald’s 2014 shooting death by Chicago Police. It had taken more than a year since his killing to get the tape released, unlike the 20 days since Nichol’s beating in Memphis. I gave her the answer I knew she wanted and perhaps needed to hear. Only you know your own limits, what you can and cannot handle. So do whatever that demands, just find a way to connect with the facts of what happened, to be well and accurately informed. And I’d probably say the same today to those who are hesitant. But I would likely add this: Those of us who are adults, living and breathing, must contend with the fact that unchecked and unlawful policing, a state-funding force with unlimited power and little to no accountability, not only allows for assaults on citizens but threatens democracy. It’s an element of a fascist state.

I’ve watched Lora King, the daughter of the late Rodney King, peer through a steady font of tears at a looped video of his 1991 beating. She did not look away. She looked straight ahead at what America was and, it appears, is. She only briefly closed her eyes. And at least some of us – adults – are going to have to join her, to bear witness to the current contours of American brutality and consider what, if anything, can be done. Those who don’t are within their rights. It may be necessary for reasonable mental health in deeply troubling times characterized by mass shootings, child shootings, and a very young child who fired a bullet into his teacher in class. But there is also the disquieting fact that images of official violence – on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and on a Minneapolis street in 2020 – have played a role in boosting public support for policy changes and forced some people who, because of their own race, have very different experiences with police, to admit that, at the very least, some officers have broken the law. The law of qualified immunity, some of white America’s indifference, and the highest court in the land together shield some officers from accountability.

Read More: Americans Need to Examine Their Relationship to Images of Black Suffering

Police departments across the country have shot and killed about 1,000 people per year, since 2015, according to a Washington Post database. Those figures do not include beating, choking, and other deaths caused by police uses of force. Some of these deaths are, a policing expert told me just before Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd, not even recorded as deaths caused by police because it all comes down to what local medical examiners and coroners are willing to list in autopsy records. And overall, data on deaths caused by police or even the relationship between officer race and officer conduct are so inconsistently collected by departments that patterns are difficult to verify.

But three things, Max Markham, vice president of policy and community engagement at the Center for Policing Equity, told me before the tapes were released today, are clear. Black drivers in multiple cities are significantly more likely than white drivers to be subjected to a traffic stop, traffic stops are the genesis of a large share of incidents that lead to a use of force, and when Black Americans do come in contact with police, they are also significantly more likely to have some type of force used upon them than white Americans. And there’s one other thing. It’s too reductive to say that because the officers involved in the Nichols beating in Memphis were, like Nichols, Black that the beating and other choices made that led up to it had no relationship to race. The policies and practices that prompt officers in many cities to disproportionately pull over Black drivers produce racially disparate – some might say racist – results, Markham says.

And Memphis is an interesting place to examine policing policy, practice, and culture, or at least its history. In 1971, a group of white Memphis police officers caused the death of a 17-year-old black boy named Elton Hayes following a high-speed car chase. Police initially claimed the boy’s injuries were caused by a crash, but the medical and other physical evidence told a different story, showing the boy had been severely beaten in a ditch. Two years passed before prosecutors took the officers involved to trial, and when they were all acquitted of charges including murder and assault, what police called riots followed. Hayes’ was one of two deaths of a Black young person under similar circumstances that year. Three years later, a Black police officer shot and killed a 15-year-old Black boy named Edward Garner as the teen was climbing a backyard fence after allegedly burglarizing a house where no one was home. The boy’s father, Cleamtee Garner, was what a lawyer who worked on the case described as a “regular working man,” and a decorated WWII veteran. He was appalled that his son’s life could be summarily ended and filed a suit that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

During his testimony in a lower court, the officer who shot Garner was unusually candid describing a sickening police culture where he was congratulated for the killing. Some, perhaps even many, officers carried “drop guns” to plant on suspects and put notches on their service weapons for every Black person they’d killed. When the Supreme Court decided Tennessee v. Garner in the family’s favor in 1985, the decision established that police could not shoot fleeing suspects unless the officer believed the suspect posed an immediate danger. For many states, this was the first guideline for use of potentially fatal force set since the 19th century. And, for a time, it reduced the number of people shot and killed by police across the country – until officers got better at using the ruling’s precise language to render a shooting justifiable. The standard has since changed. It now varies from state to state, but generally speaking, force can be used when an officer perceives a threat to his own or other lives.

Today, despite the seeming wall-to-wall coverage of events in Memphis and the relatively quick firing and arrest of the officers, the vast majority of deaths caused by police will not lead to criminal charges. And an even smaller subset still – infinitesimal may be more accurate – will lead to an officer’s conviction. So, we who are alive to see it or at least take in the essential facts of what happened to Nichols do have a range of choices, including the degree of solemnity those of us who watch bring to the viewing and what those of us who don’t say about a man’s last moments in immense terror and pain.

The precise sequence of events is difficult to parse. In the end it is not a police body cam that provides a view of most of the beating. On the footage from the officers’ devices made public little can somehow be seen. Much can be heard. But an overhead outdoor camera mounted to a pole provided a view of the beating. An officer approaches Nichols’ car after a traffic stop. The officer is yelling curse words and commands then physically jerks Nichols from the vehicle. Nichols is repeating the words “all right,” and “OK,” then “why” as officers yell more commands and land blows on his body. Nichols flees. Officers lose sight of Nichols, chase him, curse and pant as they catch, kick, beat and possibly shock and pepper spray Nichols while he is pinned to the ground. There are blows from what looks like a police baton, along with additional punches and kicks to the head. There are demands that Nichols “give” the officers his “(expletive) hands,” and “lay flat, (expletive),” although at points he appears limp and is not moving at all and at others is moving slowly under an officer’s body weight.

Among the last things Nichols says on tape as he’s held by several officers on the ground about 100 yards from his mother’s home is the word “Mom.”

Nichols can be heard moaning, and eventually officers trying to get him up are told to “grab his foot,” and start to discuss their belief that he’s “on something,” a claim frequently made by officers in legal cases where excessive force has allegedly been used. That assertion by officers at the scene has not yet been proven by postmortem tests and exams that have thus far been made public. Nichols is not heard speaking again. Officers prop what looks like an unconscious Nichols against a police car. He repeatedly slides toward the ground. The officers, at points, chatter among themselves about what they have experienced. And despite the presence of paramedics, no one appears to check on Nichols’ condition for several minutes.

Categories
Audio Sources - Full Text Articles

Tyre Nichols’ police beating video released, additional officers removed

Viewer warning: the videos below are graphic and may be disturbing to some.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Memphis authorities released video footage Friday showing Tyre Nichols being beaten by police officers who held the Black motorist down and repeatedly struck him with their fists, boots and batons as he screamed for his mother and pleaded, “’I’m just trying to go home.”

The video is filled with violent moments showing the officers, who are also Black, chasing and pummeling Nichols and leaving him on the pavement propped against a squad car as they fist-bumped and celebrated their actions.

The footage emerged one day after the officers were charged with murder in Nichols’ death. The chilling images of another Black man dying at the hands of police renewed tough questions about how fatal encounters with law enforcement continue even after repeated calls for change.

The recording shows police savagely beating the 29-year-old FedEx worker for three minutes while screaming profanities at him throughout the attack. The Nichols family legal team has likened the assault to the infamous 1991 police beating of Los Angeles motorist Rodney King.

After the first officer roughly pulls Nichols out of a car, Nichols can be heard saying, “I didn’t do anything,” as a group of officers begins to wrestle him to the ground.

One officer is heard yelling, “Tase him! Tase him!”

Nichols calmly says, “OK, I’m on the ground.”

“You guys are really doing a lot right now,” Nichols says. “I’m just trying to go home.”

“Stop, I’m not doing anything,” he yells moments later.

Nichols can then be seen running as an officer fires a Taser at him. The officers then start chasing Nichols.

Other officers are called, and a search ensues before Nichols is caught at another intersection. The officers beat him with a baton and kick and punch him.

Security camera footage shows three officers surrounding Nichols as he lies in the street cornered between police cars, with a fourth officer nearby.

Two officers hold Nichols to the ground as he moves about, and then the third appears to kick him in the head. Nichols slumps more fully onto the pavement with all three officers surrounding him. The same officer kicks him again.

The fourth officer then walks over, unfurls a baton and holds it up at shoulder level as two officers hold Nichols upright, as if he were sitting.

“I’m going to baton the f— out you,” one officer can be heard saying. His body camera shows him raise his baton while at least one other officer holds Nichols. The officer strikes Nichols on the back with the baton three times in a row.

The other officers then appear to hoist Nichols to his feet, with him flopping like a doll, barely able to stay upright.

An officer then punches him in the face, as the officer with the baton continues to menace him. Nichols stumbles and turns, still held up by two officers. The officer who punched him then walks around to Nichols’ front and punches him three more times. Then Nichols collapses.

Two officers can then be seen atop Nichols on the ground, with a third nearby, for about 40 seconds. Three more officers then run up and one can be seen kicking Nichols on the ground.

At one point, as Nichols is slumped up against a car, and not one of the officers renders aid. The body camera footage shows a first-person view of one of them reaching down and tying his shoe.

It takes more than 20 minutes after Nichols is beaten and on the pavement before any sort of medical attention is provided to him, even though two fire department officers arrived on the scene with medical equipment within 10 minutes.

Cities across the country braced for large demonstrations. Nichols’ relatives urged supporters to protest peacefully.

Memphis Police Director Cerelyn Davis described the officers’ actions as “heinous, reckless and inhumane,” and said that her department has been unable to substantiate the reckless driving allegation that prompted the stop.

She told The Associated Press in an interview that there is no video of the traffic stop that shows Nichols recklessly driving.

During the initial stop, the video shows the officers were “already ramped up, at about a 10,” she said. The officers were “aggressive, loud, using profane language and probably scared Mr. Nichols from the very beginning.”

Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, pleaded for peace.

“I don’t want us burning up our city, tearing up the streets, because that’s not what my son stood for,” she said Thursday. “If you guys are here for me and Tyre, then you will protest peacefully.”

Speaking at the White House, President Joe Biden said Friday that he was “very concerned” about the prospect of violence and called for protests to remain peaceful.

Biden said he spoke with Nichols’ mother earlier in the day and told her that he was going to be “making a case” to Congress to pass the George Floyd Act “to get this under control.” The legislation, which has been stalled, is meant to tackle police misconduct and excessive force and boost federal and state accountability efforts.

Court records showed that all five former officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr., Emmitt Martin III and Justin Smith — were taken into custody.

The officers each face charges of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. Four of the five officers had posted bond and been released from custody by Friday morning, according to court and jail records.

Second-degree murder is punishable by 15 to 60 years in prison under Tennessee law.

Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner said in a statement late Friday that two deputies who appeared on the scene after the beating have been relieved of duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

Patrick Yoes, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, condemned the alleged actions of the Memphis officers.

“The event as described to us does not constitute legitimate police work or a traffic stop gone wrong. This is a criminal assault under the pretext of law,” Yoes said in a statement.

Rallies and demonstrations were planned Friday night in Memphis, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Portland, Oregon and Washington.

Romanucci and civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who also represents Nichols’ family, called on the police chief to disband the department’s so-called scorpion unit focused on street crime.

Davis said other officers are still being investigated for violating department policy. In addition, she said “a complete and independent review” will be conducted of the department’s specialized units, without providing further details.

As state and federal investigations continue, Davis promised the police department’s “full and complete cooperation.”

___

Associated Press reporters Aaron Morrison in New York; Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee; and Rebecca Reynolds in Lexington, Kentucky, contributed to this report.