Tuesday, 25 January 2022 03:00 Written by OASESNEWS
A man has been discovered dead inside his home in Maryland, US alongside cages containing more than 125 snakes, including the highly venomous spitting cobras and black mambas.
David Riston, 49, a dad, was found dead at his home in Pomfret on Wednesday evening, January 19, surrounded by his caged pets - some of which are so dangerous they're illegal to keep as pets in the United States.
Investigators are yet to say whether one of the snakes may have killed Riston.
Charles County Sheriff's deputies were called to a home in the 5500 block of Rafael Drive in Pomfret at around 6pm on Wednesday night after receiving a 911 call from a neighbor, who said that he went to check on the homeowner, whom he had not seen since the day before, and saw him through a window lying unresponsive on the floor.
Inside the house, police officers found tanks on racks housing 125 snakes.
According to the sheriff's office, there were no obvious signs of foul play and Riston was transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore for an autopsy.
Jennifer Harris, a spokesperson for Charles County Animal Control, told the station WRC-TV that the breeds included rattlesnakes, spitting cobras, black mambas - the most venomous snakes in Africa - and a 14-foot-long Burmese python.
Just two drops of a black mamba’s fast-acting venom can kill a human by shutting down the nervous system and inflicting paralysis while a spitting cobra can spray venom from its fangs into its victim's eyes from 10 feet away, causing blindness. Both breeds are illegal to keep as pets in the US.
All the snakes in Riston’s home were well-cared for by their owner according to Police. Police had to assure neighbors that if any of the other snakes have escaped, the cold winter weather will kill them before they get very far.
Charles County Animal Control Chief Ed Tucker said this is the largest private collection of snakes he has ever encountered in his 30 year career.
Sunday, 23 January 2022 11:26 Written by OASESNEWS
HOUSTON – A woman is accused of killing a man whose body was found lying outside of his vehicle in a secluded parking lot near the infamous “Bissonnet track” earlier this month, Houston police said.
Ayriana Hamler, 25, was charged with the murder of 49-year-old Rotimi Olaleye on Jan. 8.
Investigators reviewed surveillance video from several businesses in the area, which appears to outline movements of the suspect and the victim.
According to court documents, at around 11:55 p.m, a black Nissan Altima driven by Hamler parked near a Chevron gas station located in the 9700 block of Bissonnet Street near Country Creek Drive. The area is known for high levels of prostitution.
Hamler is seen exiting the vehicle and walking toward the west end of the lot. Olaleye, who was in a 2011 Chevrolet Malibu, drove up and parked in a dark alleyway near the gas station. He exited the driver’s side and entered the back left side of his vehicle, and Hamler got in on the right side, police said.
It was not known what happened between the two but, at some point, Olaleye exited his vehicle and fell to the ground.
When officers arrived to the scene, they found him unresponsive and pantless. He had been shot multiple times in the chest, according to documents.
Two .40 caliber shell casings were found on the back floorboard of victim’s vehicle, in addition to a bullet hole in the roof.
Upon further investigation, police identified Hamler as the suspect in the case. Charges were filed, but she remains on the loose.
Hamler was last seen wearing a black sweater with white spotted-designs, black underpants, and black high boots.Records show she was previously arrested and charged with prostitution in 2021.
A researcher at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, works on the omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus in December 2021. African countries were penalized by Canada’s travel ban even though they discovered the Omicron variant via complex sequencing work when western nations failed to. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
Few people would consider airports to be arenas of power plays among nations.
But the reality is that airlines and border control agents are often a country’s first line of defence. Airports can be where foreign policy decisions are subjected to experiments and where, according to Kenyan political analyst Nanjala Nyabola, “the realities of privilege and race in travel are laid bare.”
I discovered this recently during my travel back to Canada from an Omicron-related red-listed country. In retrospect, the journey was a cross between a scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal and a chapter from Nyabola’s book, Travelling While Black.
Both works draw on the intersections between race, gender and class in international travel.
Policy aimed only at African countries
My personal experience involves the Canadian government travel policy — designed to address the COVID-19 Omicron variant — that targeted several African countries. It went into effect on Nov. 26, 2021, and by Dec. 18, 2021, was deemed to have “served its purpose and no longer necessary” given Omicron was present in countries around the world.
Nonetheless, the policy is still worth analyzing because such measures don’t occur in a vacuum — they reflect historical precedents and shape future policies. There is a need to examine whether the policy ever truly served the interests of Canadian citizens.
This was done by placing additional requirements on Canadian citizens and permanent residents returning from red-listed countries, defined as having a particularly high risk for new and emerging strains of COVID-19. The only countries on the list were African, even though other nations had higher COVID-19 numbers and the variant was present in those nations at the time.
A Nigerian civil servant receives a COVID-19 vaccine in Abuja, Nigeria, in December 2021.(AP Photo/Gbemiga Olamikan)
An editorial published in the medical journal The Lancet established that the Omicron variant was identified as a result of complex sequencing work done in South Africa when some of the most technologically advanced western countries were unable to conduct the same genome sequencing tests required. Furthermore, it highlighted that unless borders are sealed to travellers from all nations, selective travel bans don’t work.
On Nov. 30, 2021, Canada added Nigeria to the red list. Additional measures required of travellers included enhanced testing, screening and being placed in a designated quarantine facility upon arrival in Canada — regardless of vaccination status or previous test results.
Canada also added an unusual requirement for a valid negative test from a third country within 72 hours of departure to Canada. This measure has received the most criticism from many Canadians, scientists and experts. It meant additional expense and inconveniences for Canadian travellers, including having to travel through insecure and conflict-ridden environments.
A traveller arriving at Pearson International Airport gets a COVID-19 test. The author recounts her chaotic experience travelling to Toronto from Nigeria during Ottawa’s dubious African travel ban.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
Tug of war between airlines, authorities
Despite having been tested in Nigeria, I decided to have my third-country testing done in the United Kingdom.
I assumed PHAC would not have problems with a non-African lab’s test. However, the COVID-19 testing centres at Heathrow Airport are not inside the airport itself, but required entry into the U.K.
This became a problem, as the country no longer allowed entry for non-residents travelling from red-listed countries. My attempts to get a COVID-19 test became a tug-of-war between British Airways and the UK Border Agency. There was much confusion about what the rules were and how to humanely enforce them. I was initially refused entry, which was devastating after more than six hours flying with a toddler.
Ironically, neither my fully vaccinated status nor multiple negative tests mattered to PHAC upon arrival at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. I was tested at the airport and we were taken to a designated quarantine facility.
The sub-standard conditions in these facilities — especially the lengthy wait times for test results and for authorization to leave from PHAC — have received a lot of media coverage.
People quarantine in a hotel near the Vancouver airport.(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)
More testing centres needed most of all
How exactly did any of these measures serve their supposed purpose? Canadian COVID-19 testing centres were backlogged because the focus was on requiring hundreds of travellers to get re-tested and quarantined, instead of taking more proactive domestic measures to ensure Canadians had easy access to testing centres.
Although not all African countries were placed on the red list, Dr. Howard Njoo, Canada’s deputy chief medical officer of health, admitted to factors other than science influencing cabinet decisions.
He said:
“We work … to put together the best advice we can based on the science. Decision-makers take that into account but we recognize there are other considerations at play as well, beyond just strictly sort of technical public health advice that we may be giving to ministers.”
Friday, 14 January 2022 05:39 Written by withinnigeria
A Nigerian national, Kenneth Emeni, who was indicted in April 2021 in connection with a large fraud and money laundering scheme is facing 20 years imprisonment after pleading guilty before a United States jury on Tuesday, January 11, 2022.
According to court documents and statements made in connection with the plea hearing, the 29-year-old, residing in Martinsburg, was involved from at least August 2017 to October 8, 2020, with Kenneth Ogudu, also known as Kenneth Lee, John Nassy, Romello Thorpe, Oluwagbenga Harrison, Ouluwabamishe Awolesi, and others in a money laundering conspiracy that took place in Huntington and elsewhere.
Emeni lived in Huntington from August 2017 to December 2019. As part of the scheme, Emeni’s co-conspirators created online false personas and contacted victims via email, text messaging or online dating and social media websites in order to induce the victims into believing they were in a romantic relationship, friendship or business relationship with various false personas.
The victims were persuaded to send money for a variety of false and fraudulent reasons for the benefit of the false personas.
Emeni’s role in the conspiracy was to let victims transfer money to his bank account that he knew was from unlawful activity.
Emeni admitted that after the victims’ funds were deposited into his account, he kept some of the money for himself and forwarded some of the money to his co-conspirators via wire transfers or Zelle.
Emeni received approximately $42,050 from his co-conspirators’ transfers and transferred approximately $46,197 to his co-conspirators during the money laundering conspiracy. Emeni further admitted that he and his co-conspirators transferred large sums of their fraud proceeds to offshore accounts. From 2018 until 2020, Emeni transferred over $358,846 to accounts in Nigeria and Ghana.
United States Attorney Will Thompson made the announcement and commended the investigative work of the United States Secret Service, the United States Postal Inspection Service, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-Office of Inspector General (FDIC-OIG), the West Virginia State Police and the South Charleston Police Department.Emeni faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced on April 11, 2022. As part of his plea agreement, Emeni agreed to pay $904,126.96 in restitution.
United States District Judge Robert C. Chambers presided over the hearing. Assistant United States Attorneys R. Gregory McVey and Kathleen Robeson are handling the prosecution.
The acting foreign minister in Afghanistan’s Taliban-run cabinet, Amir Khan Muttaqi attends a session of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Council of Foreign Ministers, in Islamabad, Pakistan, in December 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
Last August, the world watched the chaotic and painful American departure from Afghanistan. It led to a profound reckoning: how could two decades of war end in such humiliating defeat at the hands of Taliban militants?
Afghanistan’s history of occupation suggests a deviation from the standard colonial playbook of using military control to extract wealth elsewhere in the Global South. All this has given rise to the erroneous trope that Afghanistan is a “graveyard of empires.”
Complex legacy of colonialism
The reality is more complex. Global South nations struggling with the effects of colonialism are ticking time bombs. Global North control creates simmering resentments and resistance.
My research into entrepreneurship amid post-colonial upheaval finds that colonial interference alters the natural progress of development for these occupied countries. Traumatic political, military and social events create deficits that are not easily fixed. Yet I’ve also found that powerful identities around empowerment and self-determination can survive the extremes of colonialism and occupation.
The 20-year Afghanistan war was not just a military exercise — it was also a moralizing attempt by the Global North to construct institutions in their own image.
Post-colonialism is still very much in play in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen drove out the Soviets in 1989, and the cult-like Taliban surprised everyone, and possibly themselves, with how quickly they took control in the wake of the clumsy U.S. withdrawal.
Taliban special force fighters stand guard outside Hamid Karzai International Airport after the U.S. withdrawal in Kabul, Afghanistan in August 2021. The Taliban seized Kabul after the last U.S. plane left its runway, marking the end of America’s longest war.(AP Photo/Khwaja Tawfiq Sediqi)
First, there was the Eurocentric expectation of mimicry: when confronted by the world’s most powerful military, Afghans were expected to adopt the norms of their occupiers. America and its allies saw themselves as having a superior form of civilization worthy of emulation, doing a favour for Afghans by liberating them from the Taliban.
Second, a hybrid identity was created. Afghanistan became neither Afghan nor American. A puppet government was installed to force an identity onto Afghanistan by their foreign occupier that would be palatable to the Global North.
Third, there was a space of transition. In this space, people reflect on ongoing uncertainties and their history, and reimagine the future; it is here that the colonized resist and push back against occupying forces.
Militiamen loyal to Ahmad Massoud, the founder of the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, stand guard in Panjshir, the last region not under Taliban control following their stunning blitz across Afghanistan, in August 2021.(AP Photo/Jalaluddin Sekandar)
A monster of their own creation
For 20 years, the U.S. was trying to destroy its own flawed, hybrid creation: the Mujahideen. These guerrilla fighters had been trained and armed by Americans to fight in a “death for country,” suicide-bombing style.
This was not the Afghan way. Rather than blowing themselves up, Afghans had preferred to put down their weapons for tea time, hang out with their adversaries and then go back to fighting them the next day.
By installing a corrupt puppet government, the Americans pursued nation-building based on their own western model. This thwarted the natural evolution of Afghan institutions and hung on the country like an ill-fitting suit, with deadly consequences.
The speed with which U.S.-backed president Ashraf Ghani fled, and the occupation government collapsed, heralded a significant transition in Afghanistan. The Taliban stepped into that space of transition with surprising ease.
People walk near a mural of President Ashraf Ghani at Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ghani fled the country in August 2021.(AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
A majority of Afghans, like any occupied people, want to create their own solutions. For this, they often need help. But that help should not be guns pointed at them by a foreign military.
This does not mean Afghans are happy with the Taliban. But the current narrative that the Global North is trying to “save” Afghans is an attempt at damage control over a misadventure that cost so many lives.
Afghanistan has been taken back to the same place it was 20 years ago. That requires reconstructing the narrative, because it’s hard to say you’re promoting human rights when hundreds of thousands have been killed.
The post-colonial situation suggests that, with Afghanistan’s occupiers gone, Taliban rule is a flawed but authentic first step in a long process of transition. This process is more authentic than the one imposed by occupiers, because it allows Afghan society to evolve on its own terms.
Colonialism changes the trajectory of a nation. The political, economic and social structures that normally evolve are interrupted. To prosper, Afghanistan needs partnerships and business investment, not bullets and bombs.
All three men were convicted of murder and other charges by a Glynn County jury in November in the pursuit and fatal shooting of Arbery on Feb. 23, 2020.
A court in the United States has handed life sentences to three white men who killed a black man, Ahmaud Arbery.
Recall that the three men were found guilty of felony murder in November in the fatal shooting of Arbery, a Black Georgia man who was jogging in their neighborhood when they confronted him, have been sentenced to life imprisonment for their crime.
The sentences for Travis McMichael, who shot Arbery; and his father, Gregory McMichael, do not carry the option of parole but their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan will be eligible, Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley said.
All three men were convicted of murder and other charges by a Glynn County jury in November in the pursuit and fatal shooting of Arbery on Feb. 23, 2020.
The McMichaels (father and son) armed themselves and pursued Arbery in a pickup truck after seeing him running in their neighborhood, Satilla Shores.
Their neighbor, Bryan joined the pursuit in his pickup truck and recorded video of the fatal encounter on his cellphone.
The McMichaels and Bryan had been charged with one count of malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, and one count each of false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a felony.
Travis McMichael, who fired at Arbery three times at close range, was convicted of all nine charges. Gregory McMichael was convicted of all charges except malice murder. Bryan was convicted of three counts of felony murder, one count of aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a felony.
The nearly all-white jury deliberated for about 10 hours before delivering its verdict.
Prosecutors said Arbery ran from the men for five minutes. Arbery was eventually trapped between the two pickup trucks and ended up in a confrontation with Travis McMichael, who was armed with a shotgun.
The McMichaels and Bryan were free for several weeks after the shooting. They were arrested only after the video that Bryan recorded was released and the case was taken over by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
On Friday, Janauty 7, Judge Walmsley called Arbery's killing "callous" and said it occurred because "confrontation was being sought."
Before announcing the sentences, the judge asked the courtroom to sit in silence for one minute to illustrate, he said, a fraction of the estimated time Arbery was running in terror from the men before he was killed.
"He left his home to go for a run and ended up running for his life," the judge said.
The sentences follow the request from prosecutor Linda Dunikoski, who recommended that Bryan get a chance at parole and that the McMichaels be denied that possibility. Dunikoski said the father and son showed no remorse or empathy for "the trapped and terrified Ahmaud Arbery."
Arbery's parents and sister, who spoke before the sentences were handed down, asked the judge to give the men the maximum punishment allowable.
"The man who killed my son has sat in this courtroom every single day next to his father. I'll never get that chance to sit next to my son ever again. Not at a general table. Not at a holiday. And not at a wedding," Ahmaud Arbery's father, Marcus Arbery, said before the sentence was announced.
"His killers should spend the rest of their lives thinking about what they did and what they took from us and they should do it behind bars because me and my family have to do it for the rest of their life."
Attorneys for all three men have said they intend to appeal the convictions.
Sunday, 02 January 2022 11:39 Written by OASESNEWS
Betty White, Hollywood icon and trailblazing television star is dead.
The 99-year-old Emmy-award winning actress died of natural causes at her California home.
Her agent and close friend, Jeff Witjas later confirmed her death to People magazine.
Witjas in a statement wrote: “Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever.
“I’ll miss her terribly and so will the animal world that she loved so much. I don’t think Betty ever feared passing because she always wanted to be with her most beloved husband, Allen Ludden. She believed she would be with him again.”
Betty White’s more than eight-decade career had her in unforgettable roles on “The Golden Girls” ‘Boston Legal and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”.
She died less than three weeks before her 100th birthday.
Saturday, 01 January 2022 15:33 Written by OASESNEWS
A 16-year-old high school junior has been fatally shot by her father after being mistaken for an intruder, authorities in Ohio said.
The incident happened in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Dec. 29, in Canal Winchester, about 15 miles from Columbus.
Police say a 911 caller reported around 4:30am that someone had been shot in their home after the security system went off. The caller has been identified as the teen’s mother, who can be heard on the call telling authorities her daughter was shot in the garage by her father, who believed she was someone breaking in.
Audio of the call captures the shock and distress of both parents as they plead with 16-year-old Janae Hairston to wake up.
She was rushed to Mount Carmel East Hospital but succumbed to her injuries about an hour later.
Police are investigating the case and are expected to forward it to the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office, but it was not immediately clear if charges would be filed.
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