The mother of a teenager facing trial in the United States for piracy off Somalia wants President Barack Obama to pardon her son because he was misled into joining a sea gang. Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse was captured by U.S. forces when they rescued an American sea captain being held hostage by pirates. Three of Muse’s comrades were killed in the operation. (snip) “I want his remains because my children cannot believe their father was killed at sea. I want compensation for this killing as my children are desperate and have no one that can help.”
You know things are sliding sideways when a New York State trooper is busted for swiping mulch.
State police say a trooper has been charged with stealing truckloads of mulch from a central New York business. They say 28-year-old David Volz of Oriskany was arrested Thursday morning after investigators found that he used a borrowed dump truck to take mulch from Mohawk Valley Mulch Inc. in Rome without paying for it.
Why has the FAA kept information about aircraft bird strikes from the public?
The federal government is reversing itself and plans to release data on the thousands of incidents in which aircraft hit birds, the Department of Transportation said Wednesday. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the decision was reached Tuesday in a meeting with Federal Aviation Administration officials. It came after a 30-day public comment period yielded opposition to a proposal to keep the incidents out of the public eye.
Boy, 12, charged with murder of 10 month old baby.
A 12-year-old suspended from school for fighting killed a 10-month-old baby by throwing him to the floor at a home where several young children were unsupervised, officials said yesterday. The preteen boy, whom authorities won’t name because of his age, was charged as a juvenile with capital murder. A judge yesterday ordered him held in juvenile detention.
Apple has apparently rethought its decision to allow an iPhone application that allows you to shake a baby to death to quiet its crying. “Baby Shaker,” a simple app from Sikalosoft, was first released Monday for 99 cents. It shows pictures of babies with the sound of them crying and a stop watch. To stop the crying, you shake the iPhone hard and then little Xs appear on the eyes of the baby, who will presumably never cry again.
A Philadelphia court officer who was described as an “exceptional man” by one judge was recently suspended for 10 days after he asked a juror to become his Facebook friend, according to a court official. Nicholas Stampone Jr., 50, who worked as a court officer at the Criminal Justice Center, was suspended for “inappropriate contact with a juror” after he went online and asked a woman who was sitting on a jury in the courtroom where he worked to be his Facebook friend, said David C. Lawrence, First Judicial District court administrator.
Sponsors... article continues below...
General Motors Corp. is planning to temporarily close most of its U.S. factories for up to nine weeks this summer because of slumping sales and growing inventories of unsold vehicles, two people briefed on the plan said Wednesday. The exact dates of the closures are not known, but both people said they will occur around the normal two-week shutdown in July to change from one model year to the next. Neither person wanted to be identified because workers have not been told of the shutdowns.
ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap. The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast. Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month. However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.
Czech soldiers won’t fight insurgents claiming it’s just too scary out there.
CZECH soldiers in Afghanistan have let their British command down by refusing to fight terrorists several times, the Czech daily DNES wrote today. When asked by the Britons to attack Afghan rebels, the commander of a special operations unit (SOG) said “we’re not going to, it’s dangerous,” then ordered his men to get in trucks and return to the base. On another occasion, an SOG commander decided that the task the Britons had set ran counter to the unit’s mission. Yet another time, a commander said he could not help as his soldiers were on vacation.
A human-relations executive at Freddie Mac advised David B. Kellermann, the mortgage giant’s acting chief financial officer, to take time off from work earlier this week, shortly before he was found dead in his basement in an apparent suicide, according to people familiar with the situation. These people say Freddie’s human-resources chief, Paul George, expressed concern at a meeting this week with Mr. Kellermann that he was spending too much time at work and needed a break.
The bailout may be coming to your local mall. The credit crunch has thus far focused on the residential mortgage mess. But with $1.3 trillion in loans to shopping centers and other commercial properties coming due between now and 2013, another time bomb is ticking. In a report scheduled for release on Wednesday, Deutsche Bank estimates that at least half the loans — and two-thirds of those packaged and resold as securities — will not qualify for refinancing. As a result, many borrowers will likely default, leading to losses on securitized mortgages of $50 billion or more and losses of at least $200 billion on commercial real estate loans overall, according to Deutsche analyst Richard Parkus, who authored the report. “People are only now beginning to realize there is a looming crisis,” Parkus told TIME.