Gun Violence 'Depletes Precious Natural Resource'












It took the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, to prompt lawmakers to call for stricter gun legislation. But the reality is that in a city like Chicago, where 515 murders took place last year and more than 100 shooting incidents have occurred since January 1, gun violence is an ongoing issue and it has been for years. Only, these shootings have become so common that they don't make national headlines.


"We lost a classroom full of children in Connecticut which sparked national outrage that needs to be translated into action, but in Chicago, we sometimes lose a dozen or more young people every weekend," Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois), who serves the Chicago area, said in a statement. "Too many bullets and too many guns are killing the next generation and we have got to make it stop."


Gutierrez, like many others, believe that any debate about gun violence shouldn't just take into account mass shootings that make headline news. It should also consider the chronic gun violence that takes place on a daily basis across the U.S.


In Chicago's case, many of the victims are young minorities growing up in poor, gang-ridden neighborhoods on the south and west side of the city.


Just earlier this week a 15-year-old girl who performed at President Barack Obama's recent inauguration was gunned down, The Washington Post reported.


The teen, Hadiya Pendleton, was hanging out in a park with about a dozen other young people when she was shot. Two other victims were reportedly wounded. By all accounts she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Reports indicate that the gunman was not even aiming at her.


And Pendleton is just the latest example. Chicago police officer Ron Holt lost his son, Blair, to gun violence in the spring of 2007. The 16-year-old was shot and killed while riding a bus after school.


Holt now works with young people in the community, particularly minorities at an increased risk of engaging in dangerous behavior, to encourage them to focus on their education instead of turning to violence.


"I explain to them that if they continue to ascribe to this diabolical idea of resolving conflict with firearms they're depleting the most precious natural resource in the community, and that is them," Holt said.


What's clear is that the root of the gun problem is not just the guns. There are several factors that play a role, many of which are rarely discussed. For example, for minority youth living in urban communities characterized by poverty, violence, particularly gun violence, tends to be chronic. And the groups largely impacted tend to be African American and Hispanic.


A lot of that has to do with acculturation, according to Rahsmia Zatar, executive director of Strong Youth, a gang prevention and intervention organization. There is a sense that it's difficult to move beyond one's cultural sphere.


As a result, minorities often tend to gravitate toward other young minorities in similar situations, and turn to violence to gain a sense of control, however false it really is.






Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo







"It's easy to fall victim to feeling a sense of empowerment through violence," Zatar said. "They feel they have limited opportunities and they don't have a sense of 'I can achieve,' [or] that there is something here for me that's better."


According to the 2011 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 30 percent of Chicago's African-American population and nearly 27 percent of Hispanics live below the poverty line. Perhaps more importantly, blacks and whites remain largely segregated, with African-Americans making up the vast majority of neighborhoods in the south, and whites comprising most of the north. Latinos are somewhat more mixed, often living in "buffer" communities between blacks and whites, which could exacerbate the pressure to conform to two cultures, neither of which is entirely comfortable.


These various enclaves also suffer from a distinct gang problem. Chicago Police Commissioner Garry McCarthy told Reuters the city is plagued by the breakup of larger more established gangs into new factions that are fighting over everything from turf to money.


Then there's the city's illicit gun issue, which is bigger than New York's or Los Angeles' despite strict laws to limit weapons. Gun shops are actually outlawed in Chicago, as are assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Handguns were even banned until 2010.


Still, in a place like Chicago it's handguns doing the most damage. According to statistics from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, most of the guns they recovered in Illinois were pistols, followed by revolvers and rifles. Machine guns come in a distant sixth.


Why so many guns? Gun laws in neighboring communities are not as strict, and firearms make their way into the city. According to a recent article by The New York Times, officials "seized 7,400 guns [in Chicago] in crimes or unpermitted uses last year (compared with 3,285 in New York City), and have confiscated 574 guns just since Jan. 1 — 124 of them last week alone."


And while Chicago residents are required to report the loss or theft of a handgun, that same law does not apply to all of Illinois, so a stolen firearm could easily make its way into Chicago without the owner ever reporting it missing.


The dynamics created in poor minority communities like those in Chicago combined with the sheer number of guns that make their way into such a city bear out in the overall statistics.


According to the Bureau of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey, African Americans were disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders between 1980 and 2008. They were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and seven times more likely than whites to commit homicides.


Latinos don't fare much better. According to the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Hispanic advocacy organization, "Today in America, every three hours a young person is killed by firearm violence. Every 14 hours, that teen or child is Latino."


Young Latinos are especially likely to be impacted by gang violence in places like Chicago. Nationally, Hispanics are also more likely than non-Hispanics to be victims of violent crimes committed by gang members.


The impact of guns on the Latino community may explain why they're inclined to favor increased gun control. According to the Pew Research Center, while 57 percent of whites think it's more important to protect the rights of Americans to own guns than to protect gun ownership, only 29 percent of Latinos feel the same way.


Holt would certainly like to see something change. Several days after his son was killed, he received a voicemail. It was then-Senator Barack Obama. The young lawmaker had called Holt to express his condolences and to promise that if there was anything he could do in the future to help curb gun violence, he was prepared to do it. The two never spoke on the phone, but Holt remembers the message.




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VA study finds more veterans committing suicide



The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans’ suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


“There is a perception that we have a veterans’ suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true,” said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. “The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it.” The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says.

As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says.

VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said his agency would continue to strengthen suicide prevention efforts. “The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” he said in a statement.

The study follows long-standing criticism that the agency has moved far too slowly even to figure out how many veterans kill themselves. “If the VA wants to get its arms around this problem, why does it have such a small number of people working on it?” asked retired Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist. “This is a start, but it is a faint start. It is not enough.”

Bossarte said much work remains to be done to understand the data, especially concerning the suicide risk among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. They constitute a minority of an overall veteran population that skews older, but recent studies have suggested that those who served in recent conflicts are 30 percent to 200 percent more likely to commit suicide than their ­non-veteran peers.

An earlier VA estimate of 18 veterans’ suicides a day, which was disclosed during a 2008 lawsuit, has long been cited by lawmakers and the department’s critics as evidence of the agency’s failings. A federal appeals court pointed to it as evidence of the VA’s “unchecked incompetence.” The VA countered that the number, based on old and incomplete data, was not reliable.

To calculate the veterans’ suicide rate, Bossarte and his sole assistant spent more than two years, starting in October 2010, cajoling state governments to turn over death certificates for the more than 400,000 Americans who have killed themselves since 1999. Forty-two states have provided data or agreed to do so; the study is based on information from 21 that has been assembled into a database.

Bossarte said that men in their 50s — a group that includes a large percentage of the veteran population— have been especially hard-hit by the national increase in suicide. The veterans’ suicide rate is about three times the overall national rate, but about the same percentage of male veterans in their 50s kill themselves as do non-veteran men of that age, according to the VA data.

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SMU holds inaugural service learning symposium






SINGAPORE: Filial piety, being less self-centred and not taking family for granted -- these were some of the topics discussed at the Singapore Management University's inaugural service learning symposium on Saturday.

Service learning is a method to get students to participate and learn in community projects.

Some 300 students from secondary and tertiary institutions gathered at SMU to share their thoughts on social responsibility and community service.

-CNA/ac



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ED raids in 3 cities, hawala money seized

JALANDHAR: The enforcement directorate (ED) conducted simultaneous raids in Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Delhi on Friday and recovered money received through hawala channels. It is learnt that the directorate also seized documents pertaining to hawala transactions running into a few hundred crores.

The raid in Jalandhar was conducted at Happy Forex Pvt Ltd in Adda Hoshiarpur in the early afternoon. The team was accompanied by a heavy posse of CRPF and Punjab Police. They conducted thorough search in the office when according to eye witnesses one person escaped with a bag from the roof of the foreign exchange company.

Though ED officials remained tight-lipped about the raids, sources revealed that these people were on ED radar for a long and were carrying out hawala transaction at the behest of some individuals as well as some companies based abroad. These hawala operators were being used for sending funds in the country for anti-national activities.

Sources disclosed it is also being investigated if these people were conducting transactions at the behest of drug lord Raja Kandhola or other drug peddlers. Kandhola is main accused in the recovery of 40kg synthetic drug ice.

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Pictures We Love: Best of January

Photograph by Dieu Nalio Chery, AP

The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck near Port au Prince, Haiti, in January 2010 so devastated the country that recovery efforts are still ongoing.

Professional dancer Georges Exantus, one of the many casualties of that day, was trapped in his flattened apartment for three days, according to news reports. After friends dug him out, doctors amputated his right leg below the knee. With the help of a prosthetic leg, Exantus is able to dance again. (Read about his comeback.)

Why We Love It

"This is an intimate photo, taken in the subject's most personal space as he lies asleep and vulnerable, perhaps unaware of the photographer. The dancer's prosthetic leg lies in the foreground as an unavoidable reminder of the hardships he faced in the 2010 earthquake. This image makes me want to hear more of Georges' story."—Ben Fitch, associate photo editor

"This image uses aesthetics and the beauty of suggestion to tell a story. We are not given all the details in the image, but it is enough to make us question and wonder."—Janna Dotschkal, associate photo editor

Published February 1, 2013

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Gov's Handling of Sandusky Case Under Investigation













The newly-elected attorney general of Pennsylvania is going after the state's governor, Tom Corbett, who was attorney general when child sex allegations against Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky were first brought forward.


Kathleen Kane, a Democrat who was sworn in as attorney general on Jan. 15, said that she will name a special prosecutor in the coming days to investigate Corbett's handling of the Sandusky case. Corbett is a Republican.


The investigation will look specifically at why it took the attorney general's office three years to bring criminal charges against Sandusky while he continued to have access to children.


"Attorney General Kane will appoint a special prosecutor to lead the office's internal investigation into how the Sandusky child abuse investigation was handled by the Office of the Attorney General," Kane's office said in a statement released today.


Corbett's attorney general's office was first notified of the allegations against Sandusky in 2008 when a high school student told his mother and school that Sandusky had molested him. The local district attorney passed the allegation on to the attorney general, then Corbett. Corbett convened a grand jury.






Mario Tama; Patrick Smith/Getty Images











Jerry Sandusky Insists Innocence Before Sentencing Watch Video









Jerry Sandusky Sentencing: Why Did He Release Statement? Watch Video









Jerry Sandusky Claims Innocence in Audio Statement Watch Video





It wasn't until 2011 that sex abuse charges were filed against Sandusky while Corbett had since become governor. Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts of sex abuse in June 2012.


The charges sent shockwaves throughout Pennsylvania, as Penn State's president, two top officials, and legendary coach Joe Paterno all lost their jobs over the scandal.


"Why did it take 33 months to get Sandusky off the streets? Was the use of a grand jury the right decision? Why were there so few resources dedicated to the investigation? Were the best practices implemented?" the statement from Kane's office read.


"At the end of this investigation, we will know the answers to these questions and be able to tell the people of Pennsylvania the facts and give them answers that they deserve," the statement said.


Describing an interview Kane gave the New York Times, the Times said Kane suggested that Corbett did not want to upset voters or donors in the Penn State community before his gubernatorial run in 2009.


Corbett has denied those suggestions. His office did not immediately return calls for comment.


Kane's office preemptively fought back against the idea that the investigation is politically motivated. Kane, a Democrat, defeated the incumbent attorney general, Linda Kelly, a Republican in November 2011. Corbett is a Republican.


"The speculation that this is about politics is insane," a staff member in Kane's office told ABC News today. "You go anywhere in Pennsylvania and anywhere across the country and you'll find individuals asking, 'why did it take three years? Why was there a grand jury? Why make these kids talk to 30 different people about what happened?"



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VA study finds more veterans committing suicide



The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans’ suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


“There is a perception that we have a veterans’ suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true,” said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. “The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it.” The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says.

As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says.

VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said his agency would continue to strengthen suicide prevention efforts. “The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” he said in a statement.

The study follows long-standing criticism that the agency has moved far too slowly even to figure out how many veterans kill themselves. “If the VA wants to get its arms around this problem, why does it have such a small number of people working on it?” asked retired Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist. “This is a start, but it is a faint start. It is not enough.”

Bossarte said much work remains to be done to understand the data, especially concerning the suicide risk among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. They constitute a minority of an overall veteran population that skews older, but recent studies have suggested that those who served in recent conflicts are 30 percent to 200 percent more likely to commit suicide than their ­non-veteran peers.

An earlier VA estimate of 18 veterans’ suicides a day, which was disclosed during a 2008 lawsuit, has long been cited by lawmakers and the department’s critics as evidence of the agency’s failings. A federal appeals court pointed to it as evidence of the VA’s “unchecked incompetence.” The VA countered that the number, based on old and incomplete data, was not reliable.

To calculate the veterans’ suicide rate, Bossarte and his sole assistant spent more than two years, starting in October 2010, cajoling state governments to turn over death certificates for the more than 400,000 Americans who have killed themselves since 1999. Forty-two states have provided data or agreed to do so; the study is based on information from 21 that has been assembled into a database.

Bossarte said that men in their 50s — a group that includes a large percentage of the veteran population— have been especially hard-hit by the national increase in suicide. The veterans’ suicide rate is about three times the overall national rate, but about the same percentage of male veterans in their 50s kill themselves as do non-veteran men of that age, according to the VA data.

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Death toll in Mexico oil firm blast rises to 25






MEXICO CITY - A huge blast rocked the headquarters of Mexican state-owned oil giant Pemex on Thursday, killing at least 25 people, injuring 100 and leaving rescuers scrambling to find survivors into the night.

Smoke billowed skyward as people fled the 54-floor Mexico City skyscraper, with some of those hurt in the blast being carried out on stretchers and office chairs, as witnesses recalled an earthquake-like rumble shaking the floor.

Windows broke on several lower floors, scattering debris. The company said the cause of the deadly incident was under investigation and declared that any reports on the origin of the blast amounted to speculation.

Officials said the blast ripped through an annex at around 3:40 pm (2140 GMT), causing severe damage to three floors. Witnesses said a roof connecting the annex to the tower collapsed. Thousands of people were evacuated.

As night fell, floodlights shone on the rubble and two cranes were brought to help rescuers find survivors.

Almost six hours after the blast, President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Twitter that "one more person was rescued alive in the rubble."

"I don't have any conclusive report on the cause, which is why I insist against any speculation," Pena Nieto told reporters after visiting the site.

A spokesman for the civil protection agency said there was an apparent "accumulation of gas" in an electrical supply room, but the exact cause of the blast has yet to be confirmed.

Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told a news conference that 17 women and eight men had died, and that 101 people had been injured.

Almost eight hours after the blast, he said it was hard to know if anybody was still trapped in the rubble.

Pena Nieto ordered that the rescue continue "to the last piece of debris, to be sure that there is not one single person trapped under," the minister said.

Emergency workers with rescue dogs, helicopters and several ambulances were at the scene in the capital, a city that is equipped to handle earthquakes.

Pemex said on Twitter that the explosion hit the ground floor and mezzanine of the tower's annex.

"We had two minutes to leave the building. I was headed to the pharmacy when the windows broke. It was a deafening noise," Astrid Garcia Trevino, who worked in the annex, told AFP. "The floor shook as if it was an earthquake."

Some witnesses told local media that a number of people were trapped in rubble.

"It was dramatic. The building was shaking and suddenly there was debris. We couldn't even see the people next to us," Pemex employee and union member Cristian Obele told reporters.

"Windows broke, people were injured and a lot of people were in shock," an unidentified worker told the Televisa channel, describing the impact of the "very strong explosion."

Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera and several top federal officials headed to the scene, as authorities closed off the avenue in front of the tower.

"I deeply regret the death of Pemex workers," Pena Nieto said on Twitter. "The priority at the moment is to help the injured and protect the people working there."

Pemex, the world's fourth-largest crude producer with around 2.5 million barrels per day, said the administrative centre would remain closed "until further notice," after it had earlier been evacuated due to a power failure.

The company has experienced deadly accidents at its oil and gas facilities in the past. Last year, a huge explosion killed 30 people at a gas plant near the northern city of Reynosa, close to the US border.

The previous worst incident took place in December 2010, when an oil pipeline exploded after it was punctured by thieves in the central town of San Martin Texmelucan, leaving 29 dead and injuring more than 50.

In October 2007, 21 Pemex workers died during a gas leak on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Most drowned when they jumped into the sea in panic.

- AFP/ir



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Supreme Court to hear Ashis Nandy's plea today

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court will on Friday hear sociologist Ashis Nandy's petition seeking protection from arrest for an alleged anti-Dalit remark he made at the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF).

Nandy has requested the apex court to quash all the FIRs registered against him.

"We are moving the Supreme Court for quashing of the FIR as well as laying down the guidelines in terms of something which constitutes an offence against SC/ST Act and something which is said in 'freedom of speech'," Nandy's lawyer Gaurav Kanth told the media yesterday.

Kanth informed that there are four FIRs registered against Nandy.

"To our knowledge, I thing there are four of them which have been registered. We don't have the copy of the FIRs, but we know one each is in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Nasik and Raipur and there is something in Patna too," he added.

The lawyer said that his main plea in the apex court is that there was no intent when Nandy had spoken these statements.

"My main plea is because there is no intent when he had spoken these statements and as far as the SC/ST Act is concerned, there is no question of any harm or anything which has been caused to any particular member of SC/ST caste or community. So, we are moving in terms of the fact that nothing really constitutes any criminal or penal action," he added.

To a poser on why the police had not yet questioned Nandy in connection with this case, Kanth said that Nandy was all ready for cooperation in this regard.

"I can't really comment anything on that because I really don't know why they are not coming and questioning him because we were ready for (it) and we are still ready to participate in the investigations. Whatever questions they have, we are ready to answer them," said Kanth.

"We were all ready yesterday also and we are ready today also, but we have not received any intimation from them as to when do they want to come and question him," he added.

Asserting that he has worked for Dalits, OBCs and adivasis for 45 years of his life, Nandy had earlier on Tuesday said that he was ready to go to jail if tried under the Atrocities Act and convicted.

"It is a non-bailable warrant, I am told, under this act. And, if at the age of 75, I am tried under the Atrocities Act and convicted, I will go to jail. I will not contest it. I will go to jail because I have worked for Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis for 45 years of my life, and I am not going to take this insult quietly, in the sense that I will oppose it and try to subvert it. I will go to jail," he said, when asked about his future course of action if issued summons by Rajasthan Police.

Nandy, however, said that he has not received the summons as yet.

"I have only heard that an FIR has been lodged against me. When I get that FIR, when I get that summons I shall respond to that, I shall go there," he added.

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Sinkhole Swallows Buildings in China

Photograph from AFP/Getty Images

The sinkhole that formed in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (pictured) is, unfortunately, not a new occurrence for the country.

Many areas of the world are susceptible to these sudden formations, including the U.S. Florida is especially prone, but Guatemala, Mexico, and the area surrounding the Dead Sea in the Middle East are also known for their impressive sinkholes. (See pictures of a sinkhole in Beijing that swallowed a truck.)

Published January 31, 2013

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