Media Today

[Rick Plant]

Republicans claim to be "pro life" and now they are bringing back executions.

Arizona to carry out first execution since 2014

A Native American man convicted of murdering a college student more than four decades ago was to be put to death Wednesday in Arizona, marking the southwestern US state's first execution since 2014.

Clarence Dixon, 66, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection in Florence State Prison at 10:00 am (1700 GMT). He would become the sixth person executed this year in the United States, according to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center.

His lawyers have filed multiple appeals, arguing their client, who is blind, is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and does not know why he faces capital punishment.

"Mr. Dixon really doesn't understand the claim because he lives in his head.... He lives in these alternate realities," lawyer Eric Zuckerman said Tuesday at a hearing before a San Francisco court which rejected his appeal.

A final request for a stay of execution was denied on Wednesday by the US Supreme Court.

Dixon stabbed, raped and strangled 21-year old student Deana Bowdoin in Tempe in January 1978, just days after being found not guilty of a different attack because of his psychological state.

Later he was sentenced to life in prison for a separate sexual assault in 1986, and through DNA testing he was linked to and convicted of Bowdoin's killing.

The execution will be Arizona's first after an eight-year hiatus following the botched execution of an inmate who suffered agonizing convulsions for two hours as he was injected with 15 doses of a chemical cocktail before he died.

Doubts about the legality of lethal injections -- suspected of causing unlawful suffering -- abound, and pharmaceutical companies have begun refusing to supply the chemicals, leading to a sharp nationwide decline in executions.

Officials in the state, where 113 prisoners including Dixon are on death row, have also authorized the gas chamber for carrying out capital punishment.

Arizona prison authorities are considering using hydrogen cyanide, the main component of Zyklon-B, a chemical infamously associated with the Holocaust.

Dixon was offered a choice of lethal injection or the gas chamber. His silence meant he was due to be given a lethal injection.

Arizona has set June 8 for the execution of Frank Atwood, sentenced to death in 1987 for the murder of an eight-year-old girl. He has been given two weeks to choose between lethal injection or being gassed with lethal chemicals.

Agence France-Presse

[Rick Plant]

Man died while burying girlfriend he allegedly strangled, authorities say

A 60-year-old man who strangled his girlfriend died of a heart attack while burying her body in their South Carolina backyard, investigators said.

Deputies found Joseph Anthony McKinnon's body Saturday after neighbors called and reported an unconscious man in a yard in Trenton, the Edgefield County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

As they investigated McKinnon's death, deputies found a body wrapped in trash bags in a freshly dug hole and determined it was his girlfriend, Patricia Ruth Dent, 65, investigators said.

An autopsy on Dent determined she had been strangled and neighbors told officers they saw McKinnon digging a hole in his yard the day before, deputies said.

An autopsy on McKinnon determined he died of a heart attack. Deputies said it appeared he was nearly done filling the grave when he set the shovel down, walked away and collapsed.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-carolina-man-joseph-anthony-mckinnon-died-burying-girlfriend-he-strangled/

[Rick Plant]

Passenger with no flight experience lands plane in Florida after pilot incapacitated



A passenger without flying experience landed a small plane at a Florida airport after the pilot was rendered "incoherent" by a medical emergency, US media reported Wednesday.

The unwitting pilot, the only passenger on the single-engine Cessna 208, relied on air traffic control to guide his landing at Palm Beach International Airport, some 68 miles (110 kilometers) north of Miami, NBC reported.

Officials at Fort Pierce, north of Palm Beach, received an emergency call around noon on Tuesday from the passenger, saying, "I've got a serious situation here," NBC reported.

"My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane."

Asked for his position he said, "I have no idea" but that he could see the Florida coastline.

"Maintain wings level and just try to follow the coast, either north or southbound," the air traffic official told him. "We're trying to locate you."

Watch:

Air traffic controller Robert Morgan said his experience as a flight instructor helped him guide the passenger, whose name has not been released, as he landed the plane.

"He was very calm, he just said, 'hey, I just don't know how to fly, you know, I don't know how to stop this thing if I do get it on the runway," Morgan told CNN.

"I felt like I was gonna cry because I had so much adrenaline built up" after the incident, Morgan added, saying the passenger gave him a hug and thanked him for helping him get safely back to his pregnant wife.

The condition of the pilot or the nature of the medical emergency was not immediately released, but Palm Beach Fire Rescue said a patient was transported to a hospital after the plane touched down.

Watch:

 

Agence France-Presse

[Rick Plant]

Climate change takes hold in North Carolina's ghost forests
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/12/ghost-forests-carolina-climate-change/

[Rick Plant]

Naomi Judd died of self-inflicted firearm wound, Ashley Judd reveals

CNN — Ashley Judd and her family wanted the world to hear from them how Naomi Judd died.

The younger Judd appeared in an interview with Diane Sawyer, which aired on Thursday on “Good Morning America.” She said her family had agreed that she share the cause of death of her mother.

“She used a weapon,” Ashley Judd said. “A firearm. So that’s the piece of information we are very uncomfortable sharing.”

She and her sister Wynonna Judd announced on April 30 that they had lost their mother “to the disease of mental illness.” She was 76.

Ashley Judd said she and her family wanted to shed light on mental illness, explaining that it is “important to make the distinction between the loved one and the disease.”

Judd said the family reluctantly shared the cause of death before it became public in some other way. She also revealed that she was the one who discovered her mother, who had been outspoken about her battle with depression, after it happened.

“I have both grief and trauma from discovering her,” said Judd, who began the interview by thanking everyone for the support she and her family have received in the wake of their grief.

The matriarch died the day before she and her daughter Wynonna, who made up the country music duo The Judds, were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Ashley Judd said her mother “couldn’t hang on” to be recognized by her peers.

“That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside of her,” Judd said. “Because the barrier between the regard in which they held her couldn’t penetrate into her heart and the lie the disease told her was so convincing.”

The Judd sisters attended the ceremony and honored their mother.

CMT will air a televised memorial for Judd on Sunday.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/12/entertainment/naomi-judd-cause-of-death/index.html

[Rick Plant]

New body camera footage undercuts Georgia sheriff's defense of deputies' search of Black lacrosse team bus

Body camera footage contradicts claims by a Georgia sheriff about his deputies' actions during a traffic stop involving a women's lacrosse team from historically Black university Delaware State.

Liberty County Sheriff William Bowman claimed "no personal items on the bus or person(s) were searched" during the April 20 stop, which deputies justified as a lane violation, but body cam footage obtained by Delaware Online/The News Journal shows deputies rummaging through players' backpacks and bags, just as the women have been alleging.

“How do we go from being in the wrong lane to going through our bags?” asks one player as a deputy first walks on board the bus.

The deputy says a dog can be brought on board to search for narcotics while the deputy who pulled over the bus "is conducting his business."

"This what we do," the deputy says, and then tells the women that law enforcement stops commercial vehicles because drugs, “large amounts of money” and children being trafficked might be on board.

Another deputy with a K-9 unit then gets on board the bus, and deputies said the dog alerted them to possible narcotics, which they said would allow them to search the bus and the team's belongings.

Bus driver Tim Jones, who is Black, told deputies he drove in the left lane to pass another vehicle, but the deputies said Georgia law prohibits vehicles with six wheels and air brakes from driving in that lane, although the statute specifically excludes buses and motorcoaches.

"Simply stopping a bus filled with African Americans and subjecting them to that (search) raises grave civil rights concerns," said Gerald Griggs, president of Georgia’s state NAACP chapter and a civil rights attorney. "The actual search of the baggage and running the dog all up on the bus, they’re going to need something (more) to do that, and I have some serious concerns about whether they did.”

Watch video in link: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2022/05/11/body-camera-footage-contradicts-sheriffs-account-georgia-bus-stop/9729651002/

[Rick Plant]

Astronomers capture image of Milky Way's supermassive black hole for the first time



On Thursday, the Center for Astrophysics announced the first images of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*.

"The result provides overwhelming evidence that the object at the heart of our galaxy is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies," the Center for Astrophysics explained on its website. "The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — which includes scientists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) — using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes."

"The image, described today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, is a long-anticipated look at the massive object that sits at the very center of the Milky Way," the institution added. "Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, compact and very massive in our galaxy’s core. This strongly suggested that the object — known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* — was a black hole; today’s image provides the first direct visual evidence of it."

Black holes are hyperdense objects with gravity wells too strong for light to escape. Smaller ones are formed by the core collapse of massive stars; the much larger ones at the center of most galaxies are more mysterious in origin.

This is not the first time a black hole has been imaged. In 2019, a groundbreaking image was revealed of the black hole at the heart of M87, a distant elliptical galaxy. That black hole is 1,500 times larger than the one at the center of the Milky Way, which is itself estimated to be four million times the mass of our Sun.

Despite this, the images look remarkably similar.

"The researchers had to develop sophisticated new tools that accounted for the gas movement around Sgr A*," noted the report. "While M87* was an easier, steadier target, with nearly all images looking the same, that was not the case for Sgr A*. Because of this, today's image of the Sgr A* black hole is an average of the different images the team extracted, finally revealing the giant lurking at the center of the Milky Way galaxy."

Agence France-Presse