Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2021/01/10/arnold-schwarzenegger-slams-trump-riot-wields-conans-sword/6615933002/

BOSTON (AP) — One Twitter wag joked about lights flickering on and off at the White House being Donald Trump signaling to his followers in Morse code after Twitter and Facebook squelched the president for inciting rebellion.

Though deprived of his big online megaphones, Trump does have alternative options of much smaller reach. The far right-friendly Parler may be the leading candidate, though Google and Apple have both removed it from their app stores and Amazon decided to boot it off its web hosting service. That could knock it offline for a week, Parler’s CEO said.

Trump may launch his own platform. But that won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts anticipate growing pressure on all social media platforms to curb incendiary speech as Americans take stock of Wednesday’s violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-incited mob.

Twitter ended Trump’s nearly 12-year run on Friday. In shuttering his account it cited a tweet to his 89 million followers that he planned to skip President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration that it said gave rioters license to converge on Washington once again.

Facebook and Instagram have suspended Trump at least until Inauguration Day. Twitch and Snapchat also have disabled Trump’s accounts, while Shopify took down online stores affiliated with the president and Reddit removed a Trump subgroup. Twitter also banned Trump loyalists including former national security advisor Michael Flynn in a sweeping purge of accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol insurrection. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers.

In a statement Friday, Trump said: “We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”

Experts had predicted Trump might pop up on Parler, a 2-year-old magnet for the far right that claims more than 12 million users and where his sons Eric and Don Jr. are already active. Parler hit headwinds, though, on Friday as Google yanked its smartphone app from its app store for allowing postings that seek “to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.” Apple followed suit on Saturday evening after giving Parler 24 hours to address complaints it was being used to “plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.” Public safety issues will need to be resolved before it is restored, Apple said.

Amazon struck another blow Saturday, informing Parler it would need to look for a new web-hosting service effective midnight Sunday. It reminded Parler in a letter, first reported by Buzzfeed, that it had informed it in the past few weeks of 98 examples of posts “that clearly encourage and incite violence” and said the platform “poses a very real risk to public safety.”

Parler CEO John Matze decried the punishments as “a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace. We were too successful too fast,” he said in a Saturday night post, saying it was possible Parler would be unavailable for up to a week “as we rebuild from scratch.”

Earlier, Matze complained of being scapegoated. “Standards not applied to Twitter, Facebook or even Apple themselves, apply to Parler.” He said he “won’t cave to politically motivated companies and those authoritarians who hate free speech.”

Losing access to the app stores of Google and Apple — whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones — severely limits Parler’s reach, though it will continue to be accessible via web browser. Losing Amazon Web Services will mean Parler needs to scramble to find another web host — in addition to the re-engineering.

Gab is another potential landing spot for Trump. But it, too, has had troubles with internet hosting. Google and Apple both booted it from their app stores in 2017 and it was left internet-homeless for a time the following year due to anti-Semitic posts attributed to the man accused of killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Microsoft also terminated a web-hosting contract.

Online speech experts expect social media companies led by Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube to more vigorously police hate speech and incitement in the wake of the Capitol rebellion, as Western democracies led by Nazism-haunted Germany already do.

David Kaye, a University of California-Irvine law professor and former U.N. special rapporteur on free speech believes the Parlers of the world will also face pressure from the public and law enforcement as will little-known sites where further pre-inauguration disruption is now apparently being organized. They include MeWe, Wimkin, TheDonald.win and Stormfront, according to a report released Saturday by The Alethea Group, which tracks disinformation.

Kaye rejects arguments by U.S. conservatives including the president’s former U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, that the Trump ban savaged the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting free expression. “Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country,” Haley tweeted.

“It’s not like the platforms’ rules are draconian. People don’t get caught in violations unless they do something clearly against the rules,” said Kaye. And not just individual citizens have free speech rights. “The companies have their freedom of speech, too.”

While initially arguing their need to be neutral on speech, Twitter and Facebook gradually yielded to public pressure drawing the line especially when the so-called Plandemic video emerged early in the COVID-19 pandemic urging people not to wear masks, noted civic media professor Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Zuckerman expects the Trump de-platforming may spur important online shifts. First, there may be an accelerated splintering of the social media world along ideological lines.

“Trump will pull a lot of audience wherever he goes,” he said. That could mean more platforms with smaller, more ideologically isolated audiences.

A splintering could push people towards extremes — or make extremism less infectious, he said: Maybe people looking for a video about welding on YouTube will no longer find themselves being offered an unrelated QAnon video. Alternative media systems that are less top-down managed and more self-governing could also emerge.

Zuckerman also expects major debate about online speech regulation, including in Congress.

“I suspect you will see efforts from the right arguing that there shouldn’t be regulations on acceptable speech,” he said. “I think you will see arguments from the democratic side that speech is a public health issue.”

___

Associated Press writers Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, and Amanda Seitz in Chicago contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-media-social-media-coronavirus-pandemic-dd9816678b27b9e387ea1c270f18adc5

A gunman was shot dead by police after they said he went on a shooting spree around the Chicago area overnight, killing four victims and wounding at least three others.   

The shootings began in Chicago on the South Side at the 5300 block of South East End Avenue around 1:50pm local time on Saturday afternoon, when a suspect identified as Jason Nightengale, 32, opened fire on a 30-year-old University of Chicago student while he was sitting in his car, killing him.

Jason Nightengale, the 32-year-old suspect, was previously charged for domestic battery, among other charges

The deceased student has not been identified publicly, nor have any of the other shooting victims so far.

‘It is with great sadness that we inform our community that a current student of the University was shot and killed this evening in a parking garage of the Regents Park apartment complex at 5035 S. East End Avenue,’ the school said in an emailed statement. 

According to The Chicago-Tribune, Nightengale next turned his sights on an apartment building at the 4900 block of South East End Avenue.

Once inside, Nightengale allegedly shot a 46-year-old security guard for the building, who later died at a hospital.

‘He proceeded to walk into the building and I think she told him he had to leave the building and then he shot her,’ a neighbor told ABC7 Chicago.

‘So then she began to run and he shot her again. She was a good person. She has two kids that I know of.’ 

He also shot a 77-year-old woman on the right side of her head while she was retrieving her mail – she’s in critical condition at the hospital.

About 45 minutes later, Nightengale found his way through the backdoor of a different apartment building at the 5500 block of South East End Avenue, where he took an elevator up to the 19th floor.

Once there, he saw a man he knew because a relative of Nightengale’s once lived in the building.

The shooting spree Nightengale allegedly went on spanned from Chicago to Evanston

This map details the spate of shootings that led Nightengale from Chicago to Evanston

Nightengale pushed the man into an apartment and forced him to surrender the keys to a red Toyota, which Nightengale then took off in, police said.

He drove to a convenience store in Brainerd at the 9300 block of South Halsted Street, which he attempted to rob around 3pm.

During the robbery, Nightengale shot and killed a 20-year-old man and shot an 81-year-old woman in the back and the neck.

The woman was taken to the hospital, where she is currently in critical condition.

An hour later, Nightengale was in the Washington Heights neighborhood in the 10300 block of South Halsted Street, where he allegedly shot a 15-year-old girl in the head while she was in the car with her mother.

She was also taken to a hospital, where she is in critical condition.

Nightengale’s day of violence ended in Evanston, where two more shootings occurred

In the first, Nightengale took a hostage at an IHOP and shot her; she later died of her injuries

Nightengale’s next believed move was to return to the area of the convenience store shooting, where police were investigating the incident.

Nightengale opened fire on the police, but didn’t strike any of the cops, who declined to return fire on him.

The trail goes cold on Nightengale from there until 5:35pm when shots were fired inside of a CVS in Evanston, which is located about a half-hour drive from Chicago.

Evanston police chief Demitrous Cook was unsure of who fired first in the final shootout

Investigators worked tireless on Saturday to catch up to Nightengale as he terrorized Illinois

After the shooting that killed Nightengale, police recovered this firearm from the scene

Nobody was hit by a bullet inside of the CVS.

Nightengale then ran across the street to an IHOP, where he allegedly took a woman hostage before shooting her in the neck.

‘As I was parked over here by IHOP, there was a body over here shot up on the ground,’ witness Israel Lopez told ABC7 Chicago. 

Overall, Nightengale killed four victims before he himself was killed by the police

Nightengale also wounded three and each of those people are in critical condition

It remains unclear what Nightengale’s motives were for the various violent shootings

WGN News reporter Bronagh Tumulty updated her condition on Sunday morning, tweeting, ‘now hearing the woman who was held hostage and shot in Evanston, has passed away.’

The woman’s death has yet to be confirmed publicly by the police, but she would be Nightengale’s fourth victim. 

 Bronagh Tumulty tweeted news of the fourth victim passing away on Sunday morning

After the IHOP shooting, Nightengale ran east into a Dollar General parking lot, where he was shot dead by Evanston police during an exchange of gunfire.

‘There was an exchange of gunfire. I’m not sure who fired first,’ Evanston police chief Demitrous Cook told the Tribune. Officers were wearing body-worn cameras during the shootout.

None of the officers were hurt during the final shootout.

‘These police officers come out here and put their lives on the line every day,’ Chief Cook said.

No motive for any of the shootings has been revealed yet.

Nightengale was charged in domestic battery cases at least five separate times over the past ten years, though each charge was eventually dismissed.

Nightengale has a lengthy history of arrests dating back to 2005, including charges of domestic battery, theft, reckless conduct, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon

ABC7 Chicago reports Nightengale has previously been arrested for numerous crimes, including gun and drug violations, criminal trespass, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, theft, domestic violence, and reckless conduct.

He had also posted a series of disturbing social media posts, at least one showing him with a weapon.

‘My brother was not and hadn’t been in his right mind for a long time,’ a person claiming to be Nightengale’s sister wrote on Facebook, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. ‘My condolences to any families affected by his mental break.’

On LinkedIn, Nightengale listed various occupations as a janitor, cab driver, and security investigator, though the owner of the security firm had no recollection of him when asked by the Sun-Times. 

Source Article from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9131501/Gunman-32-goes-shooting-spree-Chicago-area-killing-four-shot-dead-police.html

The acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin (left), is overseeing the massive criminal investigation of Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol.

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The acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin (left), is overseeing the massive criminal investigation of Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Tasos Katopodis/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

The acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin, says “hundreds” of people may ultimately face charges related to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, which interrupted a session of Congress and left five people dead.

Sherwin spoke with NPR’s Martin Kaste in an exclusive interview Saturday evening about the multiagency investigation, the challenges officials face and what they’ll be looking for.

Sherwin says he doesn’t want to “Monday morning quarterback” the U.S. Capitol Police, but the fact that they allowed hundreds of potential suspects to leave the scene has made his job more difficult. Now he says staffers are putting in “24-hour shifts” to identify suspects, searching for evidence online and saving it before it can be deleted.

He says there’s likely to be a wide array of criminal charges, ranging from destruction of federal property to murder. He also expects to find evidence of coordination among at least some of the rioters.

At the same time, Sherwin is careful about what to call the violence at the Capitol. He says it’s not his place to make political judgments.

“I don’t want this tyranny of labels saying this was sedition, this was a coup,” Sherwin says. “But what I will say is, it was criminal.”

And, he says, if the evidence points to crimes by elected officials — such as incitement of violence — he’s prepared to bring the appropriate charges.

Below are highlights of the interview, edited for length and clarity.

I’m sure you have many sources of intel before an event like this. Did you get warnings about the possibility of violence?

Of course, there were warnings. I mean, look, you scrub social media, there is all types of intelligence indications. So, of course, there were warnings on social media, the different platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and we were cognizant of those. There’s always outliers, but, yeah, there were warnings that people were going to coalesce and protest, and some individuals said, “Yeah, we’re going to take back our house.” So, yeah, those warnings were out there.

What is your job looking like right now? Your department, your people?

So, look, we’re in the crucible of it right now. I was looking back through the history of the [Justice] Department, and, you know, you look at Oklahoma City, obviously 9/11, and obviously those were tremendously unbelievable investigations and incidents in American history. … But this is different, I think, for a couple of reasons. One is the scale of suspects. We have potentially thousands of people that may have information about crimes … meaning there could be hundreds of people charged. I don’t think there’s any similar case in DOJ history that compares to that. Also, the litany of crimes that may have been committed. So we’re looking at everything — in a very limited period of time — we’re looking at everything from destruction of property to theft of property, to unauthorized access to restricted areas, to potential theft of national security information, to potential murder, to potential excessive [police] force investigations.

On Thursday you were quoted saying the conduct of “all actors” would be examined, which was interpreted to mean President Trump might face charges. Is that what you meant — the man who gave the speech at the start of the day could be looking at charges?

Look, I meant what I said before. In any criminal investigation, I don’t care if it’s a drug trafficking conspiracy case, a human trafficking case or the Capitol — all persons will be looked at, OK? If the evidence is there, great. If it’s not, you move on. But we follow the evidence. If the evidence leads to any actor that may have had a role in this and if that evidence meets the four corners of a federal charge or a local charge, we’re going to pursue it.

How convinced are you that there was some kind of a plan or coordination between at least some of these people?

I don’t think there was an overall command and control. However, I would not be surprised if we find loose affiliations of groups that were organized and had plans in place. Look, we saw in some of these individuals we identified — they look paramilitary almost, right? You’ve got the uniform, you’ve got communication, you have all the paraphernalia. Those show indications of affiliation and a command and control. So I believe we are going to find those hallmarks. But I think we’re weeks, if not months, out to understanding how clear that picture is.

The fact that so many people streamed out of the Capitol afterward, how does that affect your job now in finding people and arresting them?

I don’t want to Monday-morning-quarterback what the Capitol Police did when people flooded the Capitol and breached it, destroyed material, stole materials and left. But what I can tell you is, yes, there were very few people that were detained at the time of the incident and hundreds fled without being stopped. So, of course, it makes our job difficult. That’s why we have to reengineer what happened through cell site data, social media postings, witness statements, video camera footage. This is a process that’s going to take a while. But that’s why we’ve got all hands on deck trying to identify and move very quickly, charging both federal and local charges as soon as possible.

Clearly crimes were committed at the Capitol, but there are people who earnestly believe a lot of the things those people were saying. How do you as a U.S. attorney pursue these cases without this becoming politicized?

You pursue this case like any other case. You remove the politics. I don’t want to sound flippant, but it’s really not rocket science. You look at the evidence, you gather video, you gather witness statements, you scrub social media. And if that conduct fits a federal or local charge, they’re going to be charged, divorced of individual politics.

What’s your shorthand for describing what happened at the Capitol on Wednesday? What do you call it?

This is unprecedented. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a “crime scene” with such a diversity of charges, with such a large group of individuals on such a large grounds, in such egregious conduct.

Some people call this a coup. Some call it a riot. Where do you fall in that?

I don’t want this tyranny of labels saying this was sedition, this was a coup. But what I will say is, it was criminal. I’m a prosecutor. I’m not a political scientist. But what happened was criminal, and I’ll leave the labels, whatever it was, in terms of a coup or sedition, to the political scientists that I’m sure are going to look at this for decades. But as I sit here as a prosecutor, what we’ve seen and what we’ll prove and what we’ll charge is criminal conduct.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2021/01/10/955314373/d-c-s-acting-u-s-attorney-calls-scope-of-capitol-investigation-unprecedented

“I think the best thing would for the country to heal would be for him to resign, the next best thing is the 25th Amendment,” Kinzinger told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos.

“That’s why I call on Vice President Pence to do it,” he added. “This is the thing that just gets us out of the debate in Congress, it doesn’t victimize Donald Trump, it makes him look as bad as he has been here.”

Kinzinger also said that he doesn’t think impeachment is “the smart move” right now.

“I think it victimizes Donald Trump again and I think there’s a moment that we’re in right now where Donald Trump, he’s looking really, really bad,” Kinzinger said. “I’ll vote the right way you know if I’m presented with that I just think it’s probably not the smartest move right now but I think that’s going to be out of my hands.”

Kinzinger did add that he felt impeachment would be the right move if “we had more than basically 10 days left of the administration.”

“Yeah he’ll be impeached a second time but also exonerated in theory a second time, depends on how that trial goes, if they can do it when he’s out of office, Kinzinger said. “I think there’s a lot of ideas with censure — with preventing him from being able to run again. You know the reality is we just don’t have a lot of time in this administration left which right now is a good thing.”

Ocasio-Cortez said she backs impeachment.

“We’re also talking about complete barring of the president — or rather of Donald Trump — from running for office ever again,” she added. “And in addition to that the potential ability to prevent pardoning himself from those charges that he was impeached for.”

Stephanopoulos pressed Ocasio-Cortez, bringing up a letter from House Republicans saying it would further divide the country.

“What happened on Wednesday, was insurrection against the United States. That is what Donald J. Trump engaged in and that is what those who stormed the Capitol engaged in,” she said. “And so when we talk about healing, the process of healing is separate and, in fact, requires accountability. And so if we allow insurrection against the United States with impunity, with no accountability, we are inviting it to happen again.”

She then criticized her colleagues for downplaying the severity of what happened at the Capitol.

“Perhaps my colleagues were not fully present for the events on Wednesday, but half of — we came close to half of the House nearly dying on Wednesday,” she said.

Kinzinger said that he agreed that the lives of members of Congress were at risk Wednesday.

“I think we were very close to actually having members of Congress killed,” he said. “We were blessed on the one hand to not lose any members of Congress, but we lost five people and it’s disgusting.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked members to be prepared to return to Washington this week in a letter, a signal that the House could take up and pass the impeachment article to the Senate after it is formally introduced on Monday. A draft article of impeachment circulating among House Democrats Friday would charge Trump with “incitement of insurrection.”

Stephanopoulos on Sunday pressed Ocasio-Cortez on the timing of impeachment, bringing up concerns that it could hold up legislation and confirmations at the beginning of President-elect Joe Biden’s administration. She said that addressing what happened takes precedence over the Senate acting on Biden’s nominees.

“I think we need to review what actually happened on Wednesday,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The National Guard was requested by the D.C. Council, and was rejected. We are talking about and we are hearing about a complete and utter lack of preparation. The chief of the D.C. Capitol Police lied to House administration Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren about the preparations of what happened.”

“If we do not take corrective action right now, we are talking about those same potentially compromised element elements, being in charge of the president’s security, during the inauguration,” she added. “With profound respect, I believe that the president’s safety and the safety of the United States Congress and in the security of our country.”

“It takes precedent over the timing of nominations and the timing of potential confirmations,” she said. “This is an immediate danger right now.”

Ocasio-Cortez also said she did not think impeachment is the only remedy.

“We are looking towards multiple avenues. And I don’t — I do not believe that those avenues are mutually exclusive,” she said referencing the 25th and 14th Amendments.

“I don’t believe any of these avenues are competitive with one another. They all — they all frankly provide their own form of relief and their own forms of accountability and so I do not believe that this is a question of deciding or debating between which of these avenues we should pursue. I believe we should take an all-of-the-above approach,” she added.

On Sunday, Stephanopoulos pressed Kinzinger on why so few Republicans had spoken out against the president.

“I think a lot of it is fear,” he said. “You know there’s fear that infects so many sides of the debate right now.”

“We got Vice President Pence, one of the most faithful guys to Donald Trump, is now public enemy number one in Trump world,” he added. “I think that’s what it comes down to, but if you’re going to be fearful — just my humble opinion — if you’re going to be fearful in this job. It may not be the right job for you at this moment in time.”

Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey told Fox News on Saturday that he thought the president had “committed impeachable offenses.”

And later on “This Week,” Trump ally and former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he thought the president committed impeachable offenses.

“If inciting to insurrection isn’t, then I don’t really know what is,” the ABC News contributor said.

Source Article from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-represents-clear-present-danger-congress-country-ocasio/story?id=75152926

Vice President Pence plans to attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

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Vice President Pence plans to attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

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Vice President Pence plans to attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, a source familiar with the decision tells NPR.

The decision comes a day after President Trump announced on Twitter that he would not attend the inauguration.

Trump has spent weeks falsely claiming the election was rigged, culminating in a violent mob of his supporters overtaking the Capitol Wednesday and leading to the deaths of five people.

Biden said on Friday that he was glad Trump decided not to attend and that Pence is “welcome to come. I’d be honored to have him there.”

The decision is Pence’s second high-profile split from Trump, after standing loyally behind him for years. Despite pressure from Trump, Pence affirmed Biden’s victory when Congress finished tallying Electoral College votes early Thursday morning. Trump had called for Pence to show “extreme courage” by rejecting the certification process.

Former presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton are also expected to attend the inauguration.

The congressional committee that plans the inauguration ceremony said that the swearing-in will take place on the Capitol’s West Front as planned, despite the events of Wednesday. Security will be tight. The team planning the ceremony has advised people to not travel to Washington because of coronavirus risks, and said the event’s “footprint will be extremely limited, and the parade that follows will be reimagined.”

Trump will be the first president in recent history to not attend the swearing in of his successor.

Tamara Keith contributed reporting.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2021/01/09/955331598/pence-will-attend-biden-inauguration

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Authorities believe they have identified the location of the two so-called black boxes of the Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed into the Java Sea carrying 62 people.

Soerjanto Tjahjono, head of Indonesia’s national transportation safety committee, said Sunday that divers were being dispatched to try to recover the cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders.

Crews using helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and search-and rescue ships spent the day looking for and retrieving debris from the Boeing 737-500 that went down minutes after taking off from the capital, Jakarta, on Saturday afternoon. Authorities have also found human body parts and expect to use DNA testing to identify the victims, a Jakarta police spokesman said.

The plane, which was on a domestic flight to Pontianak on Indonesia’s Borneo island, was delayed before it took off Saturday afternoon due to inclement weather. Shortly after it was airborne, it made an unexpected turn, flying northwest, prompting air-traffic control to ask the plane to report its direction, the transportation ministry said. Seconds later, the aircraft disappeared from the radar, at 2:40 p.m. local time.

Authorities began search operations near a series of islands on the outskirts of Jakarta called Kepulauan Seribu, or Thousand Islands. They homed in on the area near Laki Island where the waters appeared of an unusual color and flow, potentially indicating an oil spill and burned fuselage connected to the crash, an air force official, Henri Alfiandi, said in a televised interview Sunday.

Source Article from https://www.wsj.com/articles/indonesia-plane-crash-search-finds-body-parts-life-vests-and-aisle-sign-11610262684

Local fishermen retrieve suspected debris and hand it to search and rescue teams

Indonesian authorities say they have found the location where they believe a Boeing 737 passenger plane crashed into the sea shortly after take-off from the country’s capital Jakarta on Saturday.

The Sriwijaya Air jet was carrying 62 people when it disappeared from radar four minutes into its journey to Pontianak in West Kalimantan province.

On Sunday, signals thought to be from the jet’s flight recorder were traced.

More than 10 ships have now been deployed to the site with navy divers.

“We have detected signals in two points, this could be the black box,” the chief of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, Bagus Puruhito, said.

Debris believed to belong to the Sriwijaya Air flight that disappeared shortly after take-off from Jakarta

Investigators are also analysing items they believe to be wreckage from the aircraft, including a wheel and what they say could be part of the plane’s fuselage.

A spokesman for the Jakarta police, Yusri Yunus, said two bags had been received from the search and rescue agency.

“The first bag contained passengers’ properties, another bag contained body parts,” he told reporters, adding: “We are still identifying these findings.”

Indonesian investigators inspect an item they believe could belong to the missing plane

Search and rescue efforts were suspended overnight but resumed early on Sunday. Four planes have also been deployed to help with the search.

Teams of divers have been deployed to the area believed to be the site of the crash

The missing aircraft is not a 737 Max, the Boeing model that was grounded from March 2019 until last December following two deadly crashes.

What happened to the aircraft?

The Sriwijaya Air passenger plane departed Jakarta airport at 14:36 local time (07:36 GMT) on Saturday.

Minutes later, at 14:40, the last contact with the plane was recorded, with the call sign SJY182, according to the transport ministry.

The usual flight time to Pontianak, in the west of the island of Borneo, is 90 minutes.

The aircraft did not send a distress signal, according to the head of national search and rescue agency Air Marshal Bagus Puruhito.

It is thought to have dropped more than 3,000m (10,000ft) in less than a minute, according to flight tracking website Flightradar24.com.

Witnesses said they had seen and heard at least one explosion.

Indonesia map

Fisherman Solihin, who goes by one name, told the BBC Indonesian service he had witnessed a crash and his captain decided to return to land.

“The plane fell like lightning into the sea and exploded in the water,” he said. “It was pretty close to us, the shards of a kind of plywood almost hit my ship.”

A number of residents of an island near where the plane disappeared told the BBC they had found objects they thought were from the plane.

Who was on board the flight?

There were thought to be 50 passengers – including seven children and three babies – and 12 crew on board, though the plane has a capacity of 130. Everyone on board was Indonesian, officials say.

Relatives of the passengers have been waiting anxiously at the airport in Pontianak, as well as at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.

Family members of missing passengers wait for news at Pontianak airport, Indonesia

“I have four family members on the flight – my wife and my three children,” Yaman Zai told reporters through tears.

“[My wife] sent me a picture of the baby today… How could my heart not be torn into pieces?”

What do we know about the plane?

According to registration details, the plane was a 26-year-old Boeing 737-500.

It was in good condition, Sriwijaya Air chief executive Jefferson Irwin Jauwena told reporters. Take-off had been delayed for 30 minutes due to heavy rain, he said.

Sriwijaya Air, founded in 2003, is a local budget airline which flies to Indonesian and other South-East Asian destinations.

The plane went missing about 20km (12 miles) north of the capital Jakarta, not far from where another flight crashed in October 2018.

A total of 189 died when an Indonesian Lion Air flight plunged into the sea about 12 minutes after take-off from the city.

That disaster was blamed on a series of failures in the plane’s design, but also faults by the airline and the pilots.

It was one of two crashes that led regulators to pull the Boeing 737 Max from service. The model resumed passenger flights in December after a systems overhaul.

The BBC’s Jerome Wirawan in Jakarta says the latest events will bring up difficult questions and emotions in Indonesia, whose airline industry has faced intense scrutiny since the Lion Air crash.

Source Article from https://news.yahoo.com/indonesia-boeing-737-passenger-plane-005612735.html

**Video shows how Twitter, Facebook banned posts wishing for President Trump’s death from COVID-19 last year**

BOSTON (AP) — One Twitter wag joked about lights flickering on and off at the White House being Donald Trump signaling to his followers in Morse code after Twitter and Facebook squelched the president for inciting rebellion.

Though deprived of his big online megaphones, Trump does have alternative options of much smaller reach, led by the far right-friendly Parler — even if Google and Apple both removed it from their app stores.

Trump may launch his own platform. But that won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts anticipate growing pressure on all social media platforms to curb incendiary speech as Americans take stock of Wednesday’s violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-incited mob.

Twitter ended Trump’s nearly 12-year run on Friday. In shuttering his account it cited a tweet to his 89 million followers that he planned to skip President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration that it said gave rioters license to converge on Washington once again.

Facebook and Instagram have suspended Trump at least until Inauguration Day. Twitch and Snapchat also have disabled Trump’s accounts, while Shopify took down online stores affiliated with the president and Reddit removed a Trump subgroup. Twitter also banned Trump loyalists including former national security advisor Michael Flynn in a sweeping purge of accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol insurrection. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers.

In a statement Friday, Trump said: “We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”

The “immense power that the social media platforms have as gatekeepers of public discourse” had been flexed as never before — a power that should be troubling even for supporters of the Trump ban, tweeted Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Experts are betting Trump pops up on Parler, a 2-year-old magnet for the far right that claims more than 12 million users and where his sons Eric and Don Jr. are already active. Parler hit headwinds, though, on Friday as Google yanked its smartphone app from its app store for allowing postings that seek “to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.” and Apple threatened to do the same, giving Parler a 24-hour ultimatum.

Apple told Parler executives in an email Friday it got complaints the app was being used to “plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”

Parler CEO John Matze complained on his site of being scapegoated. “Standards not applied to Twitter, Facebook or even Apple themselves, apply to Parler.” He said he “won’t cave to politically motivated companies and those authoritarians who hate free speech.”

Losing access to the app stores of Google and Apple — whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones — severely limits Parler’s reach, though it will continue to be accessible via web browser. Another potential landing spot for Trump is Gab — though both Google and Apple booted it from their app stores in 2017.

Online speech experts expect social media companies led by Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube to more vigorously police hate speech and incitement in the wake of the Capitol rebellion, as Western democracies led by Nazism-haunted Germany already do.

David Kaye, a University of California-Irvine law professor and former U.N. special rapporteur on free speech believes the Parlers of the world will also face pressure from the public and law enforcement as will little-known sites where further pre-inauguration disruption is now apparently being organized. They include MeWe, Wimkin, TheDonald.win and Stormfront, according to a report released Saturday by The Althea Group, which tracks disinformation.

Kaye rejects arguments by U.S. conservatives including the president’s former U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, that the Trump ban savaged the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting free expression. “Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country,” Haley tweeted.

“It’s not like the platforms’ rules are draconian. People don’t get caught in violations unless they do something clearly against the rules,” said Kaye. And not just individual citizens have free speech rights. “The companies have their freedom of speech, too.”

While initially arguing their need to be neutral on speech, Twitter and Facebook gradually yielded to public pressure drawing the line especially when the so-called Plandemic video emerged early in the COVID-19 pandemic urging people not to wear masks, noted civic media professor Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Zuckerman expects the Trump de-platforming may spur important online shifts. First, there may be an accelerated splintering of the social media world along ideological lines.

“Trump will pull a lot of audience wherever he goes,” he said. That could mean more platforms with smaller, more ideologically isolated audiences.

A splintering could push people towards extremes — or make extremism less infectious, he said: Maybe people looking for a video about welding on YouTube will no longer find themselves being offered an unrelated QAnon video. Alternative media systems that are less top-down managed and more self-governing could also emerge.

Zuckerman also expects major debate about online speech regulation, including in Congress.

“I suspect you will see efforts from the right arguing that there shouldn’t be regulations on acceptable speech,” he said. “I think you will see arguments from the democratic side that speech is a public health issue.”

Get the latest headlines on FOX8.com below: 

Source Article from https://fox8.com/news/kicked-off-twitter-donald-trump-seeks-new-online-megaphone/

Earlier in December, Mr. Trump made a third call, this one to Gov. Brian Kemp, urging him to convene a special session of the Georgia legislature in hopes that lawmakers would overturn the election results.

Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger have rejected all of Mr. Trump’s efforts to get them to help him overturn the election results, even though both are conservative Republicans and Trump supporters. Mr. Trump has publicly attacked both men, spreading a baseless conspiracy theory about Mr. Raffensperger’s brother and promising that he would back a candidate in the Republican primary to challenge Mr. Kemp, who is up for re-election next year.

In a television interview on Monday, Mr. Raffensperger was asked if his office would open an investigation into the president’s phone call with him. He replied that because he had been on the Jan. 2 call, he might have a conflict of interest and suggested instead that such an investigation might be in the works by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis.

Last week, a spokesman for Ms. Willis said that no investigation had been opened. But Ms. Willis, in a statement released last week, did not rule out the possibility, and called the news of the president’s call to Mr. Raffensperger “disturbing.”

The U.S. attorney in Atlanta faced similar pressure related to false claims of election fraud.

Shortly before the U.S. attorney, Byung J. Pak, abruptly resigned on Monday, the acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, relayed Mr. Trump’s dissatisfaction with his efforts to investigate false claims of mass voter fraud in his district, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the phone call.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Pak was also upset when he discovered that Mr. Trump had criticized him during his phone call last Saturday with Mr. Raffensperger.

While Mr. Trump did not call out Mr. Pak by name, he falsely claimed that not enough had been done to uncover mass voter fraud in Fulton County, where Atlanta is. He added, “You have your never-Trumper U.S. attorney there.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/georgia-presidential-election-results.html

EVANSTON, Ill. (CBS) — A man went on a shooting spree through multiple South Side neighborhoods and then north all the way to Evanston on Saturday – leaving three people dead and several others injured – before he was shot dead by police.

A building security guard in Kenwood and a University of Chicago student were among those who were shot and killed. The man also returned to one of the crime scenes and shot at officers, police said. The suspect, identified as Jason Nightengale, 32, also took a woman hostage and shot and wounded her in Evanston, according to Chicago Police Supt. David Brown.

The first incident happened in the 5000 block of South East End Avenue in the Kenwood neighborhood during the 1 p.m. hour, Brown said. He said Nightengale entered a garage and shot a 30-year-old man dead in his car, and the University of Chicago confirmed that the victim was a student there.

The university said the building where the shooting happened in the Regents Park apartment building at 5035 S. East End Ave.

“This is deeply painful news for the University community and our South Side neighborhood. The University will provide support for members of our community affected by this incident,” the university said. “We will have more information to share with the University community as it becomes available and once we know family members of this student have been notified.”

Afterward, Brown said, Nightengale went to another building on the next block north – identified as The Barclay condominium complex at 4940 S. East End Ave. Nightengale entered the vestibule of the building, took out a gun, and began firing shots – striking two women.

One of the women, who was working as a security guard at the desk for the building, was killed in the shooting, Brown said. The other, a 77-year-old woman who was retrieving her mail, was shot in the head and was left in critical condition, Brown said.

CBS 2’s Steven Graves spoke to a resident who remembers the security guard who was shot and killed as a loving mom.

“I guess the person wanted to use the phone, and I guess she was explaining to him he couldn’t use the phone, and he proceeded to walk into the building – I think she told him, like, he had to leave the building – and then he shot her,” the resident said.

At 2:45 p.m., Nightingale went into a building in the 5500 block of South East End Avenue in Hyde Park and took the elevator to the 19th floor, Brown said. A relative of Nightengale’s had apparently once lived in the building.

Nightengale found a man he knew on the 19th floor and pulled a gun on him, and pushed the man into his own apartment, Brown said. He made the man give up the keys to his vehicle and then returned downstairs took off in the vehicle – a red Toyota, Brown said. That man was not shot or injured.

At 3 p.m., Nightengale made his way several miles to the south and west to the 9300 block of South Halsted Street in the Brainerd neighborhood, Brown said. He announced a robbery in a store on the block and fired shots, striking a 20-year-old man in the head, Brown said. That man was pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

Nightengale also shot an 81-year-old woman in the back and neck in the same store, Brown said. She was left in critical condition, Brown said.

At 4 p.m., Nightingale found his way 1.25 miles south to the 10300 block of South Halsted Street in the Fernwood neighborhood, where a 15-year-old girl was in the back seat of a car being driven by her mother, Brown said.

The window shattered and the girl realized she had been shot, Brown said. She was left in critical condition.

Nightengale then returned to the store where he had shot and killed the man and wounded the 81-year-old woman in the 9300 block of South Halsted Street, where police had set up a crime scene and were investigating, Brown said. He fired at the officers, but none were struck.

By 4:45 p.m., Nightengale had made his way some 25 miles north to Howard Street and Western Avenue on the cusp of the West Rogers Park neighborhood and north suburban Evanston.

He walked into a CVS store at 101 Asbury Ave. – the Evanston extension of Western Avenue – and announced a robbery, Brown said. Evanston police Chief Demitrous Cook said Nightengale also “accosted” a woman in the store.

Afterward, Nightengale ran across the street to the IHOP at 100 Asbury Ave. and took a different woman hostage, Cook said. He then shot that woman in the neck and left her in critical condition, Cook said.

Nightengale then ran off east on Howard Street to the parking lot of a Dollar General at 2341 W. Howard St. on the Chicago side of the street, where he engaged with officers, Cook said.

Evanston police officers shot and killed Nightengale, Brown and Cook said.

Evanston police tweeted a photo of a gun they said was recovered from Nightengale.

Cook said late Saturday there was no further threat to the community.

Also From CBS Chicago:

Source Article from https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2021/01/09/police-officers-shoot-man-dead-after-he-took-woman-hostage-shot-her-in-evanston-ihop-incident-may-be-linked-to-earlier-chicago-shootings/

Federal prosecutors have charged three individuals in connection with Wednesday’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, the Department of Justice announced Saturday, including a man seen on video carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern and another wearing a bearskin headdress.

Adam Johnson, 36, of Florida was arrested in the state Friday and booked into the Pinellas County Jail just days after he was allegedly caught on camera carrying Pelosi’s lectern, according to the release. He has been charged with one count of knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; one count of theft of government property; and one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

Jacob Anthony Chansley, who allegedly was the man seen in photos dressed in horns, bearskin headdress and face paint, was taken into custody Saturday, according to the release. The Arizona man has been charged with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

It was not immediately clear Saturday whether Johnson or Chansley had an attorney.

The insurrection on Capitol Hill on Wednesday shocked the nation as a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters laid siege to America’s symbol of democracy, determined to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Derrick Evans, a West Virginia state lawmaker allegedly among the rioters who stormed the Capitol building, has been charged with one count of knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; and one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol Grounds. A federal magistrate judge in West Virginia released him on his personal recognizance after he appeared in court Friday afternoon, according to court records.

Evans has denied taking part in the destruction and violence and has since deleted the clip, but not before it was shared on social media and aired by CNN affiliate WCHS. In another video posted to his Facebook page Wednesday morning, he laughs as he predicts a riot.

The Republican state lawmaker has said he only filmed the event as an “independent member of the media to film history,” though it does not appear he has any experience working as one.

His lawyer, John Bryan, previously told CNN in a statement Thursday that his client “had no choice but to enter” the Capitol due to the size of the crowd he was in, and that “it wasn’t apparent to Mr. Evans that he wasn’t allowed to follow the crowd into this public area of the Capitol, inside which members of the public were already located.”

There are now 17 known federal criminal defendants related to the Capitol riots. Some are people who grew violent with police, some are photographed in the building during the destruction, and some are people who allegedly brought guns and ammunition and, in the case of one man, Molotov cocktails, around the Capitol.

Source Article from https://www.wdsu.com/article/doj-announces-charges-against-man-carrying-pelosi-s-podium-and-others-in-us-capitol-riot/35169800