Police Blotter of the Day: So drunk he didn’t know he’d been run over by a train
That’s some Night Train hangover.
Thomas J. Boersma apparently passed out on the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks just east of Forest Grove Drive. The conductor of the 76 car freight train said he saw a person laying on the gravel and resting his back on a rail. As the eastbound train approached the conductor said the man did not turn around. The train hit Boersma about three-tenths of a mile east of Forest Grove Drive. …
Police were contacted at about 3:30 a.m. and eventually found Boersma, who was wearing camouflage. Boersma was conscious but was not aware he had just been hit by a train, the police report said. Though Boersma suffered severe injuries to his buttocks and left arm he refused medical treatment, was agitated and combative, the report said.
Full story (Lake Country Reporter of Hartland, Wis.)
The challenge of being a young journalist
I envy the newly minted journalists entering our profession today. The tools at their disposal are so much more powerful that they were when I broke in 28 years ago at The Macon Telegraph in Georgia, which were: A notepad. And a pen.
But there’s one thing I wouldn’t trade from that era for all the avenues open to today’s younger journalists: the privilege of learning my craft in relative obscurity.
At The Telegraph, the circulation was a shade under 50,000. That was about the largest number of people I could reach. Today’s young journalist can immediately reach an audience that encompasses anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
That must be terrifying.
I’m reminded of this by the outrage that greeted the publication of a headline on ESPN.com over the weekend. It used an ethnic slur on a story about the New York Knicks’ out-of-nowhere star, Jeremy Lin, the first American-born player of Chinese descent to play in the NBA.
Human editors matter, or: Pat Buchanan, call your lawyers!
Google likes to generate a “quote of the day” atop some of its news searches. It doesn’t always work out well.
Because I was doing a story that involved Adolf Hitler, I of course did a news search for “hitler” to see who else might be reporting the story. This is what I got:
Police Blotter of the Day: Pet store allegedly cuts off dog’s ear, then glues it back on
KHNL-TV
Gladys Kapuwai of Honolulu says in a lawsuit that she took Dodo, a Gilzale and Pomeranian-Maltese mix, for grooming last year July and realized a couple of days later that one of Dodo’s ears had been cut.
“When I took her to the vet, the doctor had told me it looked like they tried to glue it back,” Kapuwi said.
“I couldn’t believe what they did. I started crying, because this is our baby, too, you know.”
Video (KHNL-TV of Honolulu)
Hack or no hack?
Over at msnbc.com, I’m tracking the attack on the CIA’s website, allegedly by Anonymous.
There’s an interesting language issue here. Several major news organizations are reporting that Anonymous “hacked” the CIA. Maybe; maybe not. The CIA isn’t commenting.
Initially, it appeared that a straightforward DDoS flood knocked out cia.gov. That’s not a “hack,” which implies some sort of infiltration of the host or its servers. It’s an attack from outside.
(You can read the Wikipedia definition for DDoS here.)
As of this writing, the site has been down more than four hours, which is an unusually long time for a robust agency to recover from a DDoS attack. That raises the possibility that the site remains down for some other reason. It could be some other kind of penetrating operation, which you could call a hack. Or it could yet have been a DDoS assault, and the CIA may be keeping the site down while it investigates and scrubs it for security holes. Not a hack.
Can you even copyright porn in the first place?
Over at msnbc.com’s Open Channel blog, I have a follow-up to a story I did last year explaining how law firms threaten to sue people who allegedly illegally download porn — and out them as porn fans in court documents — unless they settle for a few thousand bucks.
One of those people has a new counter-strategy: She argues in a suit filed this week that porn is obscenity, and obscenity is ineligible for copyright. Therefore, porn can’t be copyrighted, so even if she did download it without paying — which she denies — it’s not “piracy” in the first place:
Open Channel: Internet piracy suit asks: Can you even copyright porn?
Do you think that’s a legitimate argument? Read the full piece and let me know in the comments.
Is American intelligence on the right track?
Over at msnbc.com, I have a report on the annual national intelligence assessment. In it, National Intelligence Director James Clapper told senators that al-Qaida could be receding to purely symbolic status, leaving the United States with the challenge of confronting numerous new, harder-to-get-a-grip-on security threats.
Read the details here and let me know whether you agree. And if so, how should Washington refocus its intelligence resources?
We also have a poll on Facebook: Is the U.S. safer today?
Police Blotter of the Day: Burglar downloaded child porn, left wallet
Officers found a wallet they believed the burglar had dropped, and detectives went to the address listed, where they said 25-year-old Derek McDine was found hiding in a closet.
He was arrested without further incident on burglary charges, and investigators began examining computers stolen from the accountants.
Detectives said they found evidence of child pornography that McDine is accused of loading onto the computers, and he was also charged with possession of child pornography.
Full story (WLWT of Cincinnati)
Police Blotter of the Day: Deliver my package or your drivers get it!
A Newark, Ohio, police officer is on administrative leave and faces a disciplinary hearing Feb. 1 for allegedly threatening to ticket FedEx drivers because he missed a delivery at his home.
NBC station WCMH of Columbus reports:
[Officer Bobby] Hartless was waiting for a FedEx delivery at his home Tuesday, Jan. 3. He was not on duty that day.
Hartless missed the doorbell and tried to flag down the driver.
He contacted FedEx and was told the package wouldn’t be delivered that day.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 