Ben Giaimo--A Foreign Disciple of Confucius

How Many Mass Shootings Are There, Really?

On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that “The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.” Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015.

At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.

What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for “mass shooting.” Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California.

While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them — and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/how-many-mass-shootings-are-there-really.html

Manager says former Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland dead at 48

Scott Weiland, the former frontman for the Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver, has died. He was 48.

The singer's manager, Tom Vitorino, confirmed the death to The Associated Press early Friday morning. Vitorino said he learned of Weiland's death from his tour manager but did not provide further details.

Weiland's current band, Scott Weiland & the Wildabouts, was scheduled to play at a Medina, Minnesota, concert venue, according to the venue's website. The website showed the event was cancelled. It did not give a reason.

Local authorities couldn't immediately be reached for comment by the AP.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/manager-says-former-stone-temple-pilots-frontman-scott-063920711.html

Radiation from Japan nuclear disaster spreads off U.S. shores

Source: Reuters

Radiation from Japan's 2011 nuclear disaster has spread off North American shores and contamination is increasing at previously identified sites, although levels are still too low to threaten human or ocean life, scientists said on Thursday.

Tests of hundreds of samples of Pacific Ocean water confirmed that Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant continues to leak radioactive isotopes more than four years after its meltdown, said Ken Buesseler, marine radiochemist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Trace amounts of cesium-134 have been detected within several hundred miles (km) of the Oregon, Washington and California coasts in recent months, as well as offshore from Canada's Vancouver Island.

Another isotope, cesium-137, a radioactive legacy of nuclear weapons tests conducted from the 1950s through the 1970s, was found at low levels in nearly every seawater sample tested by Woods Hole, a nonprofit research institution.

"Despite the fact that the levels of contamination off our shores remain well below government-established safety limits for human health or to marine life, the changing values underscore the need to more closely monitor contamination levels across the Pacific," Buesseler said in an email.



Read more: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/radiation-japan-nuclear-disaster-spreads-off-u-shores-222502042.html

Air Force burning through bomb stockpiles striking ISIL

Source: USA Today

The Air Force has fired more than 20,000 missiles and bombs in the air war against the Islamic State, depleting its stocks of munitions and prompting the service to scour depots around the world for more weapons and to find money to buy them, according to records obtained by USA TODAY.

The Air Force efforts come as the Pentagon has stepped up airstrikes on Islamic State, or ISIL, targets in Iraq and Syria. That bombing campaign began in August 2014 in Iraq, spread to Syria a month later and has continued to target ISIL fighters and equipment.

"We're in the business of killing terrorists and business is good," Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in statement. "We need to replenish our munitions stock. Weapons take years to produce from the day the contract is assigned until they roll off the production line."

The Air Force carries out most of the bombing runs, using a variety of warplanes from single-prop Predator drones to huge B-1 bombers. Navy and Marine pilots, and several other countries, also fly missions.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/12/03/isil-iraq-syria-hellfire-missiles-drones/76741954/

Civilian Deaths Raise Questions About C.I.A.-Trained Forces in Afghanistan

Source: NY Times

A series of home raids by C.I.A.-trained Afghan counterterrorism forces in the last month resulted in the deaths of at least six innocent civilians, according to Afghan government officials, reviving an issue that has been a chronic source of tension between Afghanistan and the United States.

The deaths happened over the course of three raids in the restive eastern province of Khost, the officials said, including a Nov. 20 episode in which a husband and wife were killed with two American advisers present. The raids were conducted by the Khost Protection Force, one of the regional units known as counterterrorism pursuit teams, set up by the C.I.A. to fight the Taliban, the Haqqani network and Al Qaeda.

The C.I.A. has trained thousands of Afghan forces for such missions — around 3,500 in the Khost Protection Force alone. But from the start, some senior Afghan officials have considered them a problem, accused of human rights abuses and seen as largely unaccountable.

The C.I.A. began dismantling or shrinking the teams as the agency began a partial withdrawal from Afghanistan in recent years. And control of the pursuit teams was officially shifted to the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, from the C.I.A. two years ago, at the request of Afghan officials.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/world/asia/afghanistan-civilian-casualty-khost.html?_r=0

The King of Saudi Arabia Gave More Than $1.3M in Gifts to the Obamas Last Year

Officer convicted of assault for pointing gun at civilian’s face

Source: Washington Post

Prince George's County police officer Jenchesky Santiago was convicted Wednesday of assault and misconduct in office. The police department has released cellphone video of the incident, showing Santiago holding a gun to a man’s head. (PGPD Police/ YouTube)
By Julie Zauzmer December 2 at 10:45 PM Follow @JulieZauzmer
A police officer who held a gun to a man’s head, apparently to impress his friends, was convicted Wednesday of first-degree assault and misconduct in office.

After Officer Jenchesky Santiago’s conviction, the Prince George’s County police chief condemned the officer’s actions and said he was recommending that the department fire him.

The police department also released a cellphone video of the May 2014 incident, which showed Santiago holding the gun close to the man’s forehead and shouting, “I dare you to [expletive] fight me, son.”

William Cunningham, the victim, said Wednesday that he still thinks every day about the terrifying traffic stop beside his front lawn . “I thought I was going to die right there,” he said. “I just thought it was over.”


Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/officer-convicted-of-assault-for-pointing-gun-at-civilians-face/2015/12/02/f8d3ec04-992b-11e5-94f0-9eeaff906ef3_story.html

San Bernardino: Shooter was in touch with terror subjects, officials believe

Source: CNN

Syed Rizwan Farook -- who along with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, carried out the San Bernardino shooting massacre -- apparently was radicalized and in touch with people being investigated by the FBI for international terrorism, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

Farook's apparent radicalization contributed to his role in the mass shooting of 14 people Wednesday during a holiday party for the San Bernardino County health department, where Farook worked, sources said.

Still, it wasn't necessarily the only driver behind the carnage, as workplace grievances might have also played a role. President Barack Obama hinted as much Thursday when he said that the attackers may have had "mixed motives."

David Bowditch, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles office, told reporters Thursday that Farook had traveled to Pakistan.

Read more: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shooting/index.html

Nielsen: smartphones and the internet are eating our tv time

The use of Internet-ready devices like smartphones appears to have seriously cut into the time Americans spend watching traditional TV, new Nielsen data show, potentially undermining the notion that mobile devices merely serve as "second screens" while people are plopped in front of the set.

Data provided to The Associated Press show an increase in the number of 18-to-34-year-olds who used a smartphone, tablet or TV-connected device like a streaming box or game console. That grew 26 percent in May compared with a year earlier, to an average of 8.5 million people per minute.

Those devices, which all showed gains in usage, more than offset declines in traditional TV, radio and computers. In the same age group, the demographic most highly coveted by advertisers, use of those devices fell 8 percent over the same period to a combined 16.6 million people per minute.

It's not a one-to-one tradeoff, though. Sometimes people are using smartphones while watching TV, or using them outside the home where it wouldn't cut into TV time. In addition, some mobile device use is, well, to watch TV shows.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MOBILE_VS_TV_TIME