Dallas Shooting Suspect

Dallas Shooting Suspect, Micah Johnson, ‘Upset at White People’

A military veteran who said his goal was to kill white police officers opened fire Thursday night in downtown Dallas, leaving five officers dead and seven wounded before the police killed him with a remote-controlled explosive delivered by a robot, officials said.

During a standoff that lasted for hours after the attack, the sniper claimed — apparently falsely — to have planted explosives in the area, and told police negotiators that “he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” the Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said on Friday.

“He said he was upset about the recent police shootings,” Chief Brown said. “The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

The officers who were shot were patrolling a peaceful demonstration by thousands of people protesting the fatal shootings earlier in the week of black men by police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana. The gunfire, starting just before 9 p.m., sent terrified marchers, including families with children, running for cover, while police officers ran the other way, guns drawn and toward the shooting, and returned fire. Two civilians were wounded by gunfire.

The police arrested three people, but there was some uncertainty about the number of gunmen. At first, officials said that multiple snipers had carried out a coordinated ambush of the officers — some of whom were shot in the back, the chief said — but later, a senior law enforcement official said it appeared that the suspect killed by the police, identified as Micah Johnson, 25, was the sole gunman.

Mr. Brown declined to identify the people who were arrested, or to say if there might have been others involved, either as snipers or in other roles. The gunman claimed he acted alone, he said, but “we’re not satisfied that we’ve exhausted every lead.”

Mr. Johnson, an Army Reserve veteran who served in Afghanistan and lived in the Dallas area, apparently had no criminal record in Texas. Investigators have not turned up any evidence that Mr. Johnson, who was black, had ties to the Black Lives Matter movement or to other political groups.

The sequence of events this week tore at a nation already deeply divided over questions of policing and race, pivoting from anger and despair over shootings of black men by the police to officers being targeted in apparent retaliation. It dealt a blow both to law enforcement and to peaceful critics of the police, who have fended off claims that the outcry over police shootings foments violence and puts officers’ lives in danger.

“All I know is that this must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens,” Chief Brown said.

Just hours after President Obama, reacting to video recordings of the shootings in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, Minn., spoke in anguished terms about the disparate treatment of the races by the criminal justice system, he felt compelled to speak again, this time about the people who attacked officers.

“We will learn more, undoubtedly, about their twisted motivations, but let’s be clear: there are no possible justifications for these attacks or any violence towards law enforcement,” he told reporters Friday morning in Warsaw, where he was attending a NATO summit meeting, after speaking by phone with Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas. “There has been a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.”

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, who was in Washington, said: “After the events of this week, Americans across our country are feeling a sense of helplessness, of uncertainty and of fear. Now, these feelings are understandable and they are justified. But the answer must not be violence. The answer is never violence.”

“To our brothers and sisters who wear the badge, I want you to know that I am deeply grateful for the difficult and dangerous work that you do every day to keep our streets safe and our nation secure,” she said. To the protesters, she said, “Do not be discouraged by those who would use your lawful actions as a cover for their heinous violence.”

The attack appeared to be the deadliest for law enforcement officers in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

“Our profession is hurting,” Chief Brown said. “Dallas officers are hurting. We are heartbroken. There are not words to describe the atrocity that occurred to our city.”

The shootings, only a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, transformed an emotional but peaceful rally into a scene of carnage and chaos, and they injected a volatile new dimension into the anguished debate over racial disparities in American criminal justice.

Bystanders captured extraordinary video of the shootout on downtown streets, with officers taking shelter behind patrol cars and pillars, and tending to their fallen comrades.

After Mr. Johnson was cornered on the second floor of a parking garage, negotiators spent hours trying to get him to surrender, Chief Brown said, but he “told our negotiators that the end is coming and he’s going to hurt and kill more of us, meaning law enforcement, and that there are bombs all over the place in this garage and downtown.”

“The negotiations broke down, and we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect,” the chief said. “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was.”

The three other suspects were a woman who was taken from the garage and two others who were taken in for questioning after a traffic stop, but they were not providing much information, the chief said.

“We just are not getting the cooperation we’d like, to know that answer of why, the motivation, who they are,” he said. They “planned to injure and kill as many law enforcement officers as they could.”

The police said that four of the dead were Dallas police officers and that one was from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit force. The transit agency identified him as Brent Thompson, 43. He joined in 2009 and was the first DART officer to be killed in the line of duty.

Another of the officers killed was identified by his family, on social media, as Patrick Zamarripa. “Need prayers to get through this,” Mr. Zamarripa’s father, Rick Zamarripa, said in a Facebook post from Parkland Hospital on Friday.

Mr. Johnson served as a private in the Army Reserve from March 2009 to April 2015, according to records released by the Pentagon. He was listed as a carpentry and masonry specialist, assigned to the 420th Engineer Brigade, and served in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014.

The F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were assisting in the investigation.

Jane E. Bishkin, a Dallas lawyer who represents five of the wounded officers, said they were expected to recover, but that one of the five, a woman, had suffered a serious injury to her left arm and may be disabled as a result.

The shooting unfolded near one of the busiest parts of the city’s downtown, filled with hotels and restaurants as well as Dallas County government buildings. Videos of the scene circulated widely on social media. In many of them, gunshots could be heard ringing out against a city illuminated by flashing police lights. Teams of armed officers could be seen running through the area.

The are was on lockdown during the night, and remained off-limits to civilians through the day Friday, as investigators combed through a crime scene that stretched for blocks.

Chief Brown said it was too early in the investigation to say whether there was any connection between the gunman and the demonstration. He suggested that whoever was involved had some knowledge of the march route.

“How would you know to post up there?” he said. “So we’re leaving every motive on the table of how this happened and why this happened.” He added, “We have yet to determine whether or not there was some complicity with the planning of this, but we will be pursuing that.”

Jeff Hood, a minister who said he was one of the protest organizers, said he had seen two officers felled by gunfire.

“I grabbed my shirt because I was close enough, I thought I might have been shot,” he said. “I was screaming, `Run, run!’”

In one section of downtown, officers asked an African-American man wearing a bulletproof vest to walk toward them. The man slowly approached with his hands up, and a crowd of onlookers became angry and shouted and cursed at the police. An officer had his gun pointed at a black woman, and many in the crowd quickly began filming the scene with their cellphones. The tension eased as people in the crowd chanted, “Black lives matter.”

The shootings occurred after Mr. Obama, reacting with the same horror as many Americans to a video of a dying man in Minnesota who was shot by the police, implored the nation to confront the racial disparities in law enforcement while acknowledging the dangers that officers faced.

Mayor Rawlings said: “It is a heartbreaking morning to lose these four officers that proudly served our citizens. To say that our police officers put their life on the line every day is no hyperbole, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a reality.”


The protest was planned by Dominique R. Alexander, an ordained minister and the head of the Next Generation Action Network. He said that the organization “does not condone violence against any human being, and we condemn anyone who wants to commit violence.”

“I was right there when the shooting happened,” Mr. Alexander said.

source: nytimes

Minnesota police shooting

Aftermath of deadly Minnesota police shooting caught on video as protest grows

FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. – A Minnesota officer fatally shot a man in a car with a woman and a child, an official said, and authorities are looking into whether the aftermath was livestreamed in a widely shared Facebook video, which shows a woman in a vehicle with a man whose shirt appears to be soaked in blood telling the camera "police just shot my boyfriend for no apparent reason."

St. Anthony Police interim police chief Jon Mangseth said the incident began when an officer pulled over a vehicle around 9 p.m. Wednesday in Falcon Heights, a St. Paul suburb that Mangseth's department serves. Mangseth said he did not have details about the reason for the traffic stop, but that at some point shots were fired. The man was struck but no one else was injured, he said.

As word of the shooting and video spread, relatives of the man joined scores of people who gathered at the scene of the shooting and outside the hospital where the man died and identified him as Philando Castile of St. Paul, a 32-year-old cafeteria supervisor at a Montessori school.

Speaking to CNN early Thursday, Castile's mother said she suspected she would never learn the whole truth about her son's death.

"I think he was just black in the wrong place," Valerie Castile said, adding that she had underlined to her children to that they must do what authorities tell them to do to survive. Police have not released details on the ethnicity or service record of the police officer involved but to say he has been placed on paid administrative leave.

"I know my son ... we know black people have been killed ... I always told them, whatever you do when you get stopped by police, comply, comply, comply."

Police use of force, particularly against minorities, has returned to the national spotlight since the video-recorded fatal shooting earlier this week of 37-year-old Alton Sterling by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday launched a civil rights investigation into the shooting, which took place after Sterling, who was black, scuffled with two white police officers outside a convenience store.

Castile's cousin, Antonio Johnson, told the Star Tribune that he believed that because Philando Castile was a black man driving in Falcon Heights, a largely middle-class suburb, he "was immediately criminally profiled and he lost his life over it tonight."

The site of the shooting in Falcon Heights is close to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds and not far from a clutch of fields associated with the University of Minnesota's agricultural campus.

Late Wednesday, protesters moved to the governor's mansion in nearby St. Paul, where around 200 people chanted and demanded action from Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton. By daybreak Thursday, around 50 protesters remained outside the mansion despite a light rain.

The video posted Wednesday night on Facebook Live appears to show the aftermath of a shooting like the one described by Mangseth. It shows the woman in a car next to a bloodied man quietly slumped in a seat. The woman describes being pulled over for a "busted tail light" and her boyfriend being shot as he told the officer that he was carrying a pistol and was licensed. A clearly distraught person who appears to be an armed police officer stands at the car's window, telling the woman to keep her hands where they are and intermittently swearing.

The Associated Press couldn't immediately verify the authenticity of the video. Mangseth said he was "made aware there was a livestream on Facebook" but that he had not yet seen the video and didn't know anything about its contents.

The woman in the video says the man she identified as her boyfriend was reaching for his ID and wallet when the officer shot him. Police said in a statement that a handgun was recovered from the scene.

The officer tells her to keep her hands up and says: "I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand out."

"You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir," the woman responds.

The video goes on to show the woman exiting the car and being handcuffed. A young girl can be seen and is heard saying at one point, "I'm scared, Mommy."

The woman describes being put in the back seat of the police car and says, "The police just shot my boyfriend for no apparent reason."

Clarence Castile spoke to the Star Tribune from the Hennepin County Medical Center, where he said his nephew died minutes after arriving.

He said Philando Castile had worked in the J.J. Hill school cafeteria for 12 to 15 years, "cooking for the little kids." He said his nephew was "a good kid" who grew up in St. Paul.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has been called to investigate, Mangseth said. A spokesman for that agency couldn't immediately be reached.

The president of the Minneapolis NAACP, Nekima Levy-Pounds, told the crowd she has no faith in the system in the wake of this and other police shootings of black men, including last year's killing of Jamar Clark in Minneapolis. Levy-Pounds was a leading voice during the protests outside a police station that followed Clark's death, as well as during a renewed wave of protests after prosecutors decided not to charge the officers involved.

"I'm tired of the laws and policies on the books being used to justify murder," Levy-Pounds, a civil rights attorney, told the crowd as rain began to fall. "This is completely unacceptable. Somebody say, `Enough is Enough."'



source: foxnews

Abner Mikva, ex-congressman,dies at 90

Abner Mikva, ex-congressman, judge from Illinois, dies at 90

FILE - In this Nov. 24, 2014, file photo, President Barack Obama awards former Illinois Rep. Abner Mikva the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Mikva, a former congressman, Illinois legislator, federal appellate judge and presidential adviser, died Monday, July 4, 2016. He was 90 years old. (Jacquelyn Martin, File/Associated Press)

CHICAGO — Abner Mikva, a liberal stalwart from Illinois who served in all three branches of the federal government, mentored a young Barack Obama and famously learned firsthand the brazen nature of Chicago’s political machine, has died.

The 90-year-old died of bladder cancer Monday at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Steven Cohen, who is married to Mikva’s oldest of three daughters, told The Associated Press.

Counterterrorism operations under Obama

White House releases its count of civilian deaths in counterterrorism operations under Obama

In this 2010 photo, an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field in southern Afghanistan. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

The United States has inadvertently killed between 64 and 116 civilians in drone and other lethal air attacks against terrorism suspects in non-war zones, the Obama administration said Friday.

In releasing only aggregate figures that did not include when or where the strikes occurred, the administration shielded those claims from meaningful public scrutiny, even as it sought to bolster its own assertions about the accuracy and effectiveness of the operations.

Independent groups, whose own tracking of civilian deaths have produced far higher numbers, said they appreciated the administration’s effort. But they said it fell far short of President Obama’s repeated promises of greater transparency about his administration’s extraordinary reliance on armed drones in overseas counterterrorist operations.

The unintentional deaths, according to previously unreleased administration figures, came in a total of 473 CIA and military counterterrorism strikes between 2009 and the end of 2015. Those attacks, it said, killed between 2,372 and 2,581 “combatants” in countries where the United States is not at war.

Although it did not name the countries, they include Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. The figures do not include deaths in ground operations, such as the one that killed Osama bin Laden and four others in Pakistan in 2011, or operations in the administration-designated war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

The release was accompanied by an executive order, signed by Obama, that would require future presidents — unless he or she supplanted or amended it with an order of their own — to annually release similar lists. It also says that the families of civilians killed by the United States should receive condolence payments. And it orders U.S. government agencies to consult with non-government groups and conduct regular reviews of casualty trend lines.

The order is “a very deliberate attempt to ensure that the architecture . . . is durable, sustainable and lasting well beyond the next seven months or so,” said one of four senior administration officials who jointly briefed reporters on conditions of anonymity set by the White House.

“To undo it,” the official said, “any successor administration would need to take an affirmative action,” an indication of expectations that the use of drone killings will continue under Obama’s successor. Both the executive order and the casualty statistics, this official said, are also intended to “set a positive example” for other countries using drone technology for targeted killings.

Release of the non-combatant casualty counts provoked a flood of reaction from groups who questioned the value of the numbers.

“Unless details are provided on specific incidents, it’s not possible to determine if individuals killed were civilians, and thus whether the U.S. is complying with its own policy and with international law,’ said Laura Pitter, senior U.S. national security counsel at Human Rights Watch.

In speeches in 2013 and 2016, President Obama stressed that the U.S. tries to avoid civilian deaths as a result of drone strikes – but doesn't always succeed. (The Washington Post)

The New America Foundation and the Long War Journal, which have tracked drone strikes since the George W. Bush administration, each put the number of civilians killed under the current administration at just over 200. A third group, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, says the number is far higher, estimating that as many as 325 civilians have died in U.S. counterterrorism operations since Obama took office.

The administration’s figures were cast as a rebuke to those claims, which U.S. officials have said are often inflated by erroneous press reports, terrorist propaganda, or even efforts by Pakistan and Yemen to pass off their own military miscues as U.S. drone strikes.

Officials said the administration took non-government assessments into account, as well as reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and others that may have more access on the ground to what the government described as “non-permissive” environments.

But the office of the Director of National Intelligence, in a statement accompanying the newly released figures, said its numbers were better because it had access to more and better information before, during and after a strike, including “video operations, human sources and assets, signals intelligence, geospatial intelligence, [and] accounts from local officials on the ground,” as well as “open source reporting.”

Officials responded somewhat testily to questions about how outsiders could judge the veracity of the data. “We didn’t have to do this in the first place,” said one. “We do believe we’re trying to go the extra mile here.”

The administration’s figures were largely drawn from post-strike analyses done by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command, both of which have conducted drone strikes and, in the case of the military, attacks by manned aircraft. Although even critics acknowledge these entities have become more accurate in their use of armed drones but say they nevertheless have institutional incentives to undercount the number of civilians they kill.

Administration officials sharply denied allegations that they indiscriminately target “military-aged males” and then label them terrorists for counting purposes. But they acknowledged the continuing use of so-called “signature strikes,” in which they may not know the identities of those they target.

“An individual may be lawfully targeted if they are formally or functionally a member of an armed group with which we are engaged in an armed conflict,” a senior official said. Functional membership, another official said, includes the extent to which “the individual performs functions to the benefit of a particular terrorist group that are analogous to those traditionally performed” by a military organization.

But “there’s no hard and fast rule that anyone killed in a particular strike within X many feet of a known combatant is therefore a combatant.” This official and others acknowledge the possibility of mistakes, which they said accounts for the range of numbers for both civilians and militants killed.

Even with the highest standards, one official said, “you’re not always right, tragically.” The lower number of 64 civilians killed counts those conclusively determined to be non-combatants; the higher number of 116 includes those whose status remained in doubt.

Issuance of the casualty figures and executive order completes a process Obama began in May 2013, when he issued a still-secret document called the Presidential Policy Guidance, or PPG, for military actions “outside areas of active hostilities.

The guidance said that “lethal force will be used only to prevent or stop attacks against U.S. persons” when capture is not feasible, according to a public summary released at the time. Such force was to be used only when there was a “near certainty” that “the terrorist target is present” and that “non-combatants will not be injured or killed.”

The administration agreed earlier this year, as part of a court case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, to release a redacted version of the PPG document. That release has been delayed by ongoing discussions between the court and the administration over what portions can be legitimately blacked out.

To ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, the limits on information released Friday were part of a long-standing pattern.

“While we welcome today’s disclosures, transparency about the drone campaign should not be a matter of executive grace,” he said. “The executive branch should not be able to dictate the scope of the public’s ‘right to know.’ It should not be up to executive officials alone to decide what the public knows about the killings they’ve authorized.”



source: Washington post

FBI recommendations on Clinton emails

Loretta Lynch to accept DOJ, FBI recommendations on Clinton emails

(CNN)Attorney General Loretta Lynch will accept the "determinations and findings" of the FBI and career prosecutors who are investigating Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, a Justice Department official said Friday.

Lynch is expected to discuss her handling of the case at an event Friday morning in Aspen, Colorado.
The news of Lynch's decision was first reported by The New York Times.
The assurances from the official follow criticism stemming from a private meeting Lynch had with former President Bill Clinton at a Phoenix airport earlier this week.
Clinton joined Lynch aboard her plane while both were on the tarmac. Lynch said the pair mostly talked about grandchildren and a little golf.

But the meeting itself instantly drew criticism from Republicans and even some Democrats, who said that just the decision for the two to interact was a mistake while the Justice Department is conducting an investigation of Clinton's private email server.

The No. 2 Republican in the Senate, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, called for a special counsel to take over the investigation into the private server, citing the appearance of impropriety.

"This incident does nothing to instill confidence in the American people that her department can fully and fairly conduct this investigation, and that's why a special counsel is needed now more than ever," Cornyn said in a statement.

The conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch that has led the charge in suing for access to Hillary Clinton's email records also jumped on the news, calling for an investigation into what transpired between Lynch and Clinton.

"Attorney General Lynch's meeting with President Clinton creates the appearance of a violation of law, ethical standards and good judgment," the group said in a statement. "Attorney General Lynch's decision to breach the well-defined ethical standards of the Department of Justice and the American legal profession is an outrageous abuse of the public's trust."

And Democratic Sen. Chris Coons also joined the fray, expressing confidence in Lynch's objectivity but decrying the meeting, even if innocuous, as sending the wrong signal.

"I think she should have said, 'Look, I recognize you have a long record of leadership on fighting crime, but this is not the time for us to have that conversation. After the election is over, I'd welcome your advice,'" Coons told CNN's Alisyn Camerota on "New Day" Thursday.

The White House has maintained that the Justice Department is keeping politics out of the investigation, which is happening at the same time as Hillary Clinton's run for office.

Without commenting directly on Lynch's meeting, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest reiterated Thursday that President Barack Obama is committed to avoiding "political interference" in Department of Justice investigations, and said Lynch understands investigations should be "conducted free of political influence and consistent with the facts."

CNN's Eli Watkins contributed to this report.

source: CNN

Turkish president 'sorry' for shoot-down of Russian military jet

Turkish president 'sorry' for shoot-down of Russian military jet

The Kremlin reported Monday Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin saying "I am sorry" for the downing of a Russian jet last November, an incident Putin had called "a stab in the back."

Erdogan expressed his "sympathy and deep condolences" to the family of the killed pilot and "asked to be forgiven," Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

The Turkish president also said an investigation was underway against a "Turkish citizen who is associated with the 'death of Russian pilot,'" the Kremlin added.

Syrian Turkmen rebels said they shot and killed the pilot and a Russian marine who tried conducting a rescue. The Russian jet's navigator survived.

Turkey had previously claimed two of its F-16s shot down the Russian jet because it violated Turkish airspace near the Syrian border and failed to heed warnings to turn around. The navigator told Russian media he never received such warnings.

The Russians responded by halting package tours to Turkey and banning most agricultural imports from Turkey.

source: foxnews

Officer critical but stable, 1 in custody in police shooting

Officer critical but stable, 1 in custody in police shooting

Law enforcement gather in the aftermath of a shooting, Folcroft, Friday, June 24, 2016. Authorities are hunting for a suspect after a police officer was shot near Philadelphia.

FOLCROFT, Pa. (AP) — A police officer was shot several times Friday as he approached people suspected of smoking drugs behind an apartment building, prompting a three-hour manhunt near Philadelphia that halted a dozen Amtrak trains, authorities said.
Folcroft Officer Christopher Dorman, 25, sustained injuries that required at least two surgeries, officials said. He was in critical but stable condition Friday afternoon, and police said they had a suspect in custody.

"I was told by the doctors that 'thank God he had his vest on,' so apparently there may have been several shots to his vest," Chief Robert Ruskowski said at a news conference outside the hospital.
The shooting took place about a block from the tracks used by Amtrak and a regional rail line. The lines were shut down at about 10:30 a.m. as police combed the area. About 500 passengers on Amtrak's Acela and Northeast Regional lines were stopped on tracks nearby, spokesman Craig Schulz said.

At least one person was taken into custody sometime after 1 p.m. Officials did not immediately return messaging seeking details on the arrest.

Dorman has been on the force for about a year.


source: timesunion