Subway Suspect Dimes Himself
Thursday, April 14, 2022
Vol. 11, No. 87
Subway Shooting: The suspect in the New York subway shooting yesterday called in a tip on himself, telling police the man they were looking for was in a McDonald’s. Police arrested Frank R. James, 62, a few blocks away.
“We got him,” Mayor Eric Adams announced at an afternoon news conference. “We got him.” At least 10 people were shot in the incident.
James was arrested in New York’s East Village and charged with having committed a terrorist act on a mass transit system. If convicted he could be sent to prison for life.
The reason why James may have committed the shooting is unknown. He has a long history of arrests and had posted racist and threatening videos on YouTube. His sister, Catherine James Robinson, told The NY Times that her brother had “been on his own his whole life,” and that she had little contact with him.
James has been arrested nine previous times in New York, and three in New Jersey. Police know that James drove to the crime in a U-Haul van rented in Philadelphia. There’s security video of the van crossing the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn and video of a man getting out of that same van in Brooklyn.
The War Room: Two Ukrainian missiles struck the Russian cruiser Moskva that is the flagship of the Black Sea fleet, causing evacuation of the crew of 500. The Russians admit the ship is damaged, but claim it’s the result of an unexplained fire on board.
A Ukraine special-operations unit claims to have destroyed a bridge as a Russian convoy of armored vehicles and trucks crossed it.
Saying a second time that the Russians have been committing “genocide” in Ukraine, President Biden approved another $800 million in military aid for Ukraine, including artillery, anti-tank missiles, and helicopters.
Watching the Russian war on Ukraine, leaders in Finland and Sweden say they are considering applying to become part of the NATO defense alliance which exists mostly to deter Russian aggression. One of the major backfires of Putin’s war is that it has re-confirmed dedication to NATO and might even grow it.
In Ukraine, investigators are busy recording evidence of Russian war crimes and atrocities. French forensics teams and Ukrainian authorities have been digging up bodies from communal graves. An initial report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe documented a “catalog of inhumanity perpetrated by Russia’s forces in Ukraine” and found “instances in which war crimes and crimes against humanity may have been committed.” The report also noted violations committed by Ukrainian forces.
Money War: As western countries crack down on the Russian rich to discourage their support of Vladimir Putin, France has seized the chateau on the Riviera belonging to Roman Abramovich, a crony of Vladimir Putin.
Abramovich has spent a fortune restoring and improving the villa that once belonged to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It has a dozen bedrooms and he put in a rooftop pool.
The Rich Are Different: Tesla electric car boss Elon Musk is offering to buy the social media platform Twitter, saying in his filing that he is the right person to “unlock” Twitter’s “extraordinary potential”. He’s offering $54.20 a share, which would value the company at about $43 billion.
Musk stirred controversy recently when it became known that he had quietly become Twitter’s biggest shareholder. In a filing with the US financial regulator, Musk said: “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”
But he also said, “However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”
The Obit Page: Mimi Reinhard, the Austrian Jew held in a Nazi labor camp who typed up Oskar Schindler’s famous list of hundreds of prisoners he claimed were essential workers for his munitions factory, thereby saving them from the death camps, has died at age 107.
Ironically, Reinhard was capable of typing only with two fingers.
Schindler was at first a brazen and bribing war profiteer, but he came to be horrified by the Nazi genocide of Jews. Australian author Thomas Keneally turned the story into a best-selling novel first published as “Schindler’s Ark,” then issued in the United States as “Schindler’s List.” It was made by Steven Spielberg into a movie that won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.
The Spin Rack: Masks to protect against Covid-19 will be required on airplanes and public transportation in the country for at least two more weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control. — Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff in the Trump White House, was dropped from the voter rolls in North Carolina as officials investigate whether he fraudulently voted in the state in the 2020 presidential election. Meadows and his wife registered at the address of a mobile home in which they never lived.
Presidential Orders: Capitol rioter Dustin Thompson testified in his trial yesterday that he believed he had received “presidential orders” to go to the US Capitol on January 6th last year. “Besides being ordered by the President to go to the Capitol, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Thompson told the jury. “I was caught up in the moment.”
The 38-year-old said he had lost his job as an exterminator during the pandemic, became isolated, “stuck at home,” and eventually “fell down the rabbit hole” into online conspiracy theories.
The prosecutor asked whether Thompson was able to get himself dressed without help that morning and he said, “Yes.”
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