Convicted officer chose rape victims carefully, attorney says

The former Oklahoma City police officer convicted of sexually assaulting eight African-American women, while he was on duty, chose his targets carefully, an attorney for some of the victims said Friday.

“It wasn’t coincidence who he chose to violate,” attorney Benjamin Crump said at the press conference in Oklahoma City where two victims of former officer Daniel Holtzclaw also spoke. “It was methodical and it was deliberate.”

Holtzclaw, who is white and Asian, was found guilty Thursday on 18 counts,including four counts of first-degree rape. He had been charged with 36 counts, with 13 women testifying at the trial that Holtzclaw sexually victimized them. All of his victims were African American.

One question addressed at the press conference is how a police officer could prey on so many women without anyone noticing. Another question is why the national press failed to focus earlier on a case involving 13 alleged victims.

“Why are they unworthy [of] national media attention in such a sensational situation as a serial rapist with a badge raping a dozen women?” Crump said.

Advocates for the women used social media to bring more attention to Holtzclaw’s trial, issuing updates from the courtroom.

“We started tweeting. And then others started tweeting. Then celebrities started tweeting. And now people finally started paying attention,” said Crump.

Two of Holtzclaw’s victims also spoke at the press conference.

Janie Liggins said that the officer pulled her over, fondled her and “did certain things” to her.

“I kept begging him, ‘Please, don’t make me do this, don’t make me do this, sir,’” Liggins said. “I tried to look up [at] his name, I was afraid to because I said, ‘If I know his name, I know he’s going to kill me,’” she said.

But Liggins reported her attack immediately.

Sade Hill, another victim, said that she was arrested by Holtzclaw and taken to a hospital across town. Once she took off her clothes, she said that she was handcuffed to a hospital bed. “I was scared, I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was in survivor mode so I had to do what he was making me do,” said Hill. “No nurses, nobody came to check on me.”

Some other recent media coverage has focused on sex crimes by police officers. An Associated Press investigation found that roughly 1,000 police officers lost their badges within a six-year period because of sexual misconduct.

Grace Franklin, a co-founder of Oklahoma Artists for Justice, and an advocate for Holzclaw’s victims, spoke briefly at the press conference on Friday.

“We want to say that we are pleased with the 18 counts that we received,” Franklin said. “We are not pleased with the 18 that we didn’t. There are five women who did not receive justice.”

Protesters Rally Against UK's Syria Airstrikes

Organisers of the protest were expecting large crowds to march on Downing Street, partly because of the high profile support of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Corbyn did not attend the rally, but instead sent a message to be read out on his behalf.

On Friday night, he spoke at a fundraising dinner for the Stop The War organisation, declaring it to be "a vital force at the heart of our democracy".

Jeremy Corbyn spoke at a Stop The War dinner, despite pressure not to

"It has brought hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets time and again. It has organised protests and lobbies in every part of the country, including by military families.

"Most of all, it has been shown to be right in opposing more than a decade of disastrous wars - in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya - while many of its most vociferous critics supported them."

Speakers at Saturday's protest - which finished on Whitehall - lined up to voice their anger at the UK's decision to bomb Syria.

One man, who gave his name as Tony, labelled Prime Minister David Cameron as "insane" and "evil" for pursuing a more aggressive approach.

He said: "You can't bomb your way to peace."

Nancy Taaffe, from the Socialist Party, told the crowd: "We've been here before people, haven't we?

"When we're told about peace and reconstruction, and then ... we see the bodies coming back, we see the bombs in Baghdad market and the sectarian civil war erupted when they kicked the hornets' nest of the Iraq war."

She added: "We say 'no' to the continued violence, we say 'no' to the terror and we say 'no' to the racism that is the fallout of this war."

Trudeau launches inquiry into missing, murdered native women

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced an inquiry into why 1,200 indigenous women were murdered or have gone missing over decades.

Their fate has been a festering wound in many of Canada's more than 600 native communities, with allegations of mishandled murder investigations or failures to look into missing-persons cases.

The previous Conservative administration had long resisted calls for an inquiry, seeing the disproportionate number of deaths and disappearances as resulting from domestic violence.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper, in office for nine years, has said these tragedies were not due to a sociological phenomenon but rather were crimes to be investigated by police.

Trudeau, in announcing a public inquiry, is seeking a rapprochement with the 1.4 million descendants of Canada's original inhabitants, who make up 4.3 percent of the country's total population.

“It is time for a renewed nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples,” he told an assembly of chiefs in Ottawa.

The relationship should be “one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience, but a sacred obligation,” he said.

The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Perry Bellegarde, welcomed the pledge.

“Chiefs, it is indeed a new day on Turtle Island,” he said, using a native name for North America.

“I'm optimistic,” Bellegarde said about the new government's change in tone from the previous administration.

"But we also have much work to do. Our 400 years of shared history has brought us a massive gap in the quality of life between indigenous peoples and the rest of Canada."

A 2014 report and an update this year by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police identified 1,049 murdered and 172 missing aboriginal women dating back to 1980.

In most cases, the perpetrators were known to the victims.

Wilson-Raybould said the inquiry will be held in the Spring following consultations with victims' families and native groups.

"No inquiry can undo what happened nor can it restore what we have lost," she said.

But the violence against indigenous women — who represent four percent of the population and 16 percent of homicide victims — "is a national tragedy that requires an urgent and deliberate national response," she said.

Wilson-Raybould noted the “heartbreaking reality that girls born in our indigenous communities are three times more likely to experience violent crime.”

Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett said the goal of the inquiry is to bring an end to the ongoing violence through “concrete actions.”

In addition to ordering the inquiry, Trudeau vowed to make “significant investments” in native education and to lift a cap on federal funding for indigenous communities.

Furthermore, he said Canada would “fully implement” the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Canada and three other countries — Australia, New Zealand and the United States —were the only nations to vote against the UN indigenous text in 2007.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai: 'let's not let fear defeat our values'

An escalating tide of intolerant rhetoric has overtaken the media thanks to Donald Trump, but voices at leading businesses are pushing back. In an essay posted to Medium, Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded to recent waves of prejudice against Muslims by reiterating his own hopeful narrative of emigration from India to the US and the idea that his company is strengthened by diversity.

"It's been said a million times that America is the 'land of opportunity' — for millions of immigrants, it's not an abstract notion, but a concrete description of what we find here," Pichai wrote. "That is why it's so disheartening to see the intolerant discourse playing out in the news these days — statements that our country would be a better place without the voices, ideas and the contributions of certain groups of people, based solely on where they come from, or their religion."

Pichai joins a chorus of major Silicon Valley executives that have spoken out against intolerance — specifically Trump's — in recent days. On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook would "fight to protect" the rights of Muslims, and work to "create a peaceful and safe environment." The comments echo a soaring statement Google's Eric Schmidt made on Monday, when he called on leaders in government and the technology industry to use their power to "fight broadly for human progress and tolerance."

It's worth mentioning that despite Pichai's glowing account of Google's campus, where he sees "a vibrant mix of races and cultures," his company and its competitors still have a lot of work to do within their own companies to further the cause of diversity and inclusion. Immigration is a particular concern among the Silicon Valley elite, who want to bring top international talent on board — something intolerant government policies would work against. Regardless, Pichai's thoughts feel personal and sincere. "I debated whether to post this, because lately it seems that criticism of intolerance just gives more oxygen to this debate," he wrote tonight. "But I feel we must speak out — particularly those of us who are not under attack."

Apple Pushing iPhone Upgrades

Apple this week has encouraged customers to trade in and upgrade to a new iPhone through its website, email and an App Store banner advertisement. 

Apple's new section on its iPhone websitereminds customers about trading in their current smartphone at the Apple Store or online through partner Brightstar for up to $320 instant credit. Apple accepts the iPhone 4 or later for trade in. 

Apple's mass email to U.S. customers promotes the iPhone Upgrade Program and shares details about how the financing program works. The email also provides similar details about trading in a smartphone for up to $320 instant credit. 

Apple has also made the controversial decision to advertise the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus to older iPhone users directly in the App Store, with a pop-up banner advertisement that can be dismissed by tapping on "skip" in the top-right corner. 


iPhones are one of the hottest gifts during the holiday shopping season, so it is unsurprising that Apple is pushing its latest smartphones at this time of the year alongside free shipping, extended returns and complimentary gift wrapping. Undoubtedly, though, the move will also stir discussion about iPhone sales. 

Apple sold 48 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015, up from 39.2 million in the year-ago quarter. iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus sales topped a record 13 million during their launch weekend, but KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo recently predicted the iPhone 6s may not outsell the iPhone 6.

BlackBerry Messenger Updated With New Features

BlackBerry Messenger, typically known as BBM, is one of the original mobile instant messaging applications that circumvented carriers’ SMS charges. BBM was a significant force in early instant messaging applications but it did have one critical weakness: in order to use BBM, one needed to have a BlackBerry. As BlackBerry devices fell out of favour with customers for a number of reasons, BBM use started dropping. BlackBerry eventually released BBM for other platforms after spending years denying that they would do this, and today BBM has joined many other instant messaging applications on the Android platform. BBM offers a number of features that are considered as standard across the industry, such as voice and video calling, group messaging, emojis and images to share. Today, BlackBerry released an update to BBM, which brings with it a number of new features.
This is a significant update with a number of useful features, such as the ability to search BBM on the device to look for information in BBM chats, contacts, groups and channels. It’s also possible to like posts in your BBM feed and delete unwanted messages from conversations. If you are interested in where a correspondent is, you can use the Glympse function to request their location. BBM has allowed users to retract messages that they no longer wish to have been sent and this update allows users to retract images, too. BlackBerry have incorporated a “retract all sent messages” function and the ability to edit messages in multi-person or group conversations. In addition to these feature enhancements, BlackBerry’s release notes promise improved performance and bug fixes throughout the application.
BlackBerry typically release beta versions of their applications for some days or weeks during final testing, before moving the application from the beta to the final release. In the case of this particular version of BBM, the new features have been available for the BlackBerry 10 and iOS BBM clients for some weeks now. The Android update has been in the beta testing area for the same time, so none of these features were a surprise – nevertheless it’s good to see the BlackBerry client catching up with the iOS and BlackBerry 10 versions. The update should be available on the Google Play Store, so if you are a BlackBerry Messenger user, go ahead and run the update to enjoy the new features.

Potential Paris Climate Agreement Nears as ‘Final Text’ Released

Francois Mori—APFrancois Hollande, Laurent Fabius and Ban Ki-moon applaud at the COP21, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Le Bourget, north of Paris, on Dec.12, 2015.

Leaders at a major climate change conference in Paris released what they called the “final draft” of an agreement to address global warming Saturday after an all-night negotiating session.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who is heading the United Nations conference, said the agreement resolved points of contention that had taken negotiations into overtime and called the agreement “the best possible text.” Negotiators will meet later Saturday afternoon to respond to the text and potentially consider its adoption.

“In this room you are going to be deciding on an historic agreement,” Fabius told delegates from the nearly 200 nations gather in Paris. “The world is holding its breath. It counts on all of us.”

The deal, which would be known as the Paris Agreement if passed, would represent remarkable compromise after years of negotiations in which developing countries wrangled with their developed counterparts and failed to come to agreement on several key occasions. Supporters say the agreement would help define the energy landscape for the remainder of the century and signal to markets the beginning of the end of more than one hundred years of dependence on fossil fuels for economic growth

Observers had feared that a negotiated text could result in a lowest common denominator to meet the differing needs of all the parties present in Paris. But climate policy experts appeared largely satisfied with the draft presented Saturday afternoon.

A strong long-term goal to reduce carbon emissions, provisions explaining how developed countries would receive financing for their efforts to adapt to climate change, and a transparency system to ensure that countries meet their promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were among those key goals. The draft text released Saturday included provisions addressing all those key points.

“It has all the core elements that the environmental community wanted,” said John Coequyt, the Sierra Club’s director of federal and international climate campaigns.