A terrified coyote found wandering San Francisco’s Mission District is recovering at a Silicon Valley wildlife center, rescuers said Friday.
The coyote might have inadvertently hitched a ride into the big city in a car, moving truck or shipping container, said Rebecca Dmytryk, director of the group WildRescue, a nonprofit that helped the animal.
City animal control officers found the female coyote, known as No. 57, hungry and delirious near the corner of Capp and 18th streets on Jan. 18. “She was petrified, disoriented,” Dmytryk said. “She was at the end of the dead-end alley, facing away from people, hiding her head in the corner. She’d given up.”
Rescuers corralled the coyote and found she was emaciated, dehydrated and covered in fleas and ticks.
“Coyotes are really, really smart, and they just don’t usually act that way,” Dmytryk said. “If she were in her own neighborhood and she knew her way, she would have taken off.”
The dog is gaining weight and strength at the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley, said Ashley Kinney, the wildlife rehabilitation supervisor who has been treating No. 57.
“She is actually doing really well; she is definitely improving,” Kinney said. “We hope to move her into our coyote pen with the other coyotes soon.”
Eventually, No. 57 will be released back into the wild, Kinney said.
Anyone who might have seen the coyote stumbling around the Mission should call the wildlife center at (408) 929-9453, rescuers said.
“Did they see an animal jump out of a car or a delivery truck?” Dmytryk asked. “If so, they should call.”
New Delhi: A man has been sentenced by a fast track court here to 10 years in jail for illegally confining and raping a minor girl in his house.
Rejecting a plea for leniency on the ground that the convict had a wife and two children to support, Additional Sessions Judge Virender Bhat, who heads the fast track court at Dwarka, handed down rigorous imprisonment to 27-year-old Mohammed Arif saying he took advantage of a “defenseless” minor girl to commit rape which “is the most hated crime in the society”.
Protests against Delhi gangrape. AP
The court said taking too sympathetic view for such crime would be counter productive in the long run and against social interest.
“The victim was a minor as well as defenseless girl and the convict (Arif) took advantage of her such state and committed the ghastly act of rape on her while confining her in a room of the house in which he was residing,” the judge said and also imposed a cost of Rs 35,000 on the convict.
The prosecution had said that on December 16, 2011 evening, Arif had pulled the girl into his house in West Delhi while she was on her way home and had raped her.
She was returning from the nearby market where she had gone to buy eatables, the prosecution had said.
It also said that Arif had threatened to kill her if she revealed the incident to anyone.
The counsel for the accused had pleaded for a lesser punishment saying he has two minor children and wife and he is the sole earner in the family. The court, however, rejected the counsel’s submission saying, “The social impact of the crime, when it relates to the sexual assault upon a woman, which has a great impact upon the social order and public interest, cannot lost sight of while sentencing a convict.
“These kind of crimes require exemplary treatment and any liberal attitude shown by imposing meagre sentence and taking too sympathetic view would be counter productive in the long run and against the social interest which needs to be cared for and strengthened by adopting a deterrent sentencing policy,” the court said.
A CCTV video released by Turkish police on Jan. 29 shows a woman identified by cops as Sarai Sierra, 33, right, walking outside a shopping mall in Istanbul, Turkey.
Turkish police detained a man in Istanbul Friday after questioning him about online messages he exchanged with a missing Staten Island woman.
Sarai Sierra, a 33-year-old mother of two, went missing while vacationing alone in Istanbul. She was last heard from on Jan. 21, the day she was due back home. RELATED: SARAI SIERRA, STATEN ISLAND MOM MISSING IN TURKEY, WAS TO MEET MAN SHE KNEW ONLINE DAY SHE VANISHED: REPORTS
A police official in Istanbul said the man currently held by authorities had been in contact with Sierra during her stay in the city.
A double Olympic judo gold medalist was convicted on Friday for raping a student, capping a terrible week for the sport after claims a national coach beat athletes with a bamboo sword.
Masato Uchishiba was sentenced to five years in prison for the assault on a teenage member of a college judo club he was coaching, a court official said, after she drunkenly fell asleep in a Tokyo hotel.
Uchishiba, 34, was feted as a national hero after bringing home a gold medal from the 2004 Athens Olympics, an achievement he repeated at the 2008 Beijing Games.
Prosecutors said the incident occurred in September 2011, when the women’s judo club from Kyushu University of Nursing and Social Welfare had been on a visit to Tokyo.
After a night of drinking and karaoke, the teenager, whose exact age was not given but who was believed to have been 18 or 19 at the time, fell asleep in her hotel room and awoke to find Uchishiba raping her.
“When she became aware, she resisted by saying, ‘What are you doing? Stop.’ But he turned up the volume of the television and covered her mouth with his hand,” prosecutors said, according to NHK.
The victim is not being identified publicly because of the nature of the crime.
Uchishiba, who is married, pleaded not guilty and maintained throughout the trial that the sex with the teenage student had been consensual. He said he would appeal the decision.
The All Japan Judo Federation barred Uchishiba from all judo activities in January 2012.
The verdict comes after a torrid week for judo, in which the coach of the national women’s team resigned after admitting claims that he beat his athletes with a bamboo sword were “more or less true.”
Ryuji Sonoda, who took the team to the London Olympics, acknowledged allegations of violence against his charges, including face-slapping and verbal abuse.
Sonoda, a 39-year-old former world judo champion, told a tightly-packed press conference: “I would like to deeply apologize for causing trouble to all the athletes and people concerned with what I have done and said.”
The media storm that engulfed judo, a popular sport in Japan that is usually a reliable source of Olympic medals, comes as Tokyo launches its international campaign for the right to host the 2020 Games.
The nation’s education and sports minister on Thursday ordered swift action to contain a scandal that observers say could badly dent Japan’s chances of beating Istanbul and Madrid for the 2020 Olympiad.
A hand grenade explosion has injured five people in Medellin’s Comuna 8 district, local media reported on Friday.
Newspaper El Tiempo reported that criminals launched the hand grenade at a passing public transport bus, leaving three children and two adults injured.
The 8th Commune, located in the east of Colombia’s second largest city, has suffered from high degrees of violence and forced displacement during 2012 due primarily to high levels of gang warfare.
Violence in Medellin's west forces 100s from school
Friday, 01 February 2013 04:42 Adriaan Alsema
A surge in violence in the west of Medellin is keeping hundreds of children from attending class because going to school simply has become too dangerous. Government officials are no longer allowed entry in the area, while the city's increasingly controversial mayor insists the situation is under control.
Some 200 children have stopped attending the Eduardo Santos school and other educational facilities in the Comuna 13 district after rival gangs imposed "invisible borders" that can not be crossed by locals and a 6PM curfew that disallows children taking the late shift to walk home.
"Some 200 minors have stopped attending the local educational facilities," a local who out of fear of repercussions refused to say his name told Colombia Reports. His claim was corroborated by a former teacher who also requested to remain anonymous.
Locals from the troubled zone have told this website stories about multiple cases of people being dragged from their houses by hooded men to never return, shootings with semi-automatic and automatic guns and increased pressure on taxi drivers to pay protection money. However, these stories are difficult to corroborate because the gangs have also begun intimidating journalists trying to report from the Comuna 13.
Juan Fernando Rojas of the Antioquia journalist association APA said colleagues from newspaper Q'hubo and state television stations Teleantioquia and Telemedellin have been intimidated by gang members while attempting to report on the increasingly alarming situation. The same thing has happened in the opposite side of town, the Comuna 8, a press release by the APA said.
According to an anonymous government official, the gangs also no longer allow municipal workers to enter the higher neighborhoods of the Comuna 13.
Over the past week, intense gang fighting has taken place in broad daylight. The police, say locals, failed to intervene.
"Before they waited until nightfall at least," said one of the locals. "Now they no longer wait. They don't care about firing shots at any hour of the day."
One of these battles lasted as long as four hours, during which police simply stayed away, several locals said.
A reporter from newspaper El Tiempo, specialized in Medellin's gang conflict, said the war is due to tensions between certain factions of local crime syndicate "Oficina de Envigado" and territorial gains in the city made by neo-paramilitary organization "Los Urabeños" who are taking advantage of the weakened Oficina. According to the journalist, the tensions in the city's underworld are also causing violence in the Comunas 1, 3, 6 and 8.
Despite the apparent security crisis in the neighborhood, Mayor Anibal Gaviria insisted the security situation in the neighborhood has improved.
"We do not disregard the violence that affects our citizens but we know that this situation is in decline," said Gaviria on Monday, contradicting the most recent figures from the coroner's office that indicated a 70% increase in homicides in the first ten months of his administration.
ISTANBUL, Turkey — A suicide bomber attacked the U.S. Embassy in the Turkish capital of Ankara, killing one Turkish security guard along with the bomber, Ankara Govenor Aladdin Yuksel told Turkish news media.
The explosion went off at the entrance used by embassy personnel and their visitors, after a lone suicide bomber passed through the X-ray machine, Turkish news media reported. News reports said that there is no damage inside the embassy and that all personnel have been moved to safe rooms inside the building. Turkish television footage showed a door blown out and pieces of the wall around it scattered in front of the entrance.
The Turkish daily newspaper Sabah posted a shaky video that was taken at the scene shortly before the area was closed off, showing Turkish police officials angrily asking that filming be stopped. Police said they suspected a second bomb, which is why they blocked off the area.
There has been no claim of responsibility. VIDEO: U.S. Embassy in Turkey attacked
According to Turkish media, the suicide bomber was a middle-aged man of non-identified nationality. The Vatan newspaper, whose reporter witnessed the explosion, said it was severe and damaged the surrounding buildings and cars nearby.
Francis Ricciardone, the U.S. ambassador in Ankara, said Turkish and U.S. officials will work together to determine who carried out the attack. Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, expressed his sorrow.
"I am offering my condolences to the relatives of those who lost their lives, and my best wishes to everyone at the American Embassy and the foreign ministry," he said. "Our whole security apparatus is working full force on finding the ones responsible for this attack, and we are hoping to clarify the matter shortly."
Turkey, a member of NATO, has come under attack from a number of groups operating on its territory including Kurdish separatists, leftists and Islamist militants, with the last major attack in Ankara in 2007 blamed on a solo suicide bomber: It killed nine people and injured 120.
Aaron Stein, an analyst at the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies at King's College in London, said: "This could be a lone wolf, it could be linked to groups in Syria, it could be al-Qaeda. My initial reaction is that this was similar to the 2003 attacks in Istanbul (against British targets which killed 58), which were linked to al-Qaeda."
At this point, it's difficult to even speculate who might have been behind the attack, said Marina Ottaway, a Middle East analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
There are multiple terrorist groups operating in the region. The PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, has launched the most violent attacks in Turkey, but it has no incentive to provoke the United States, Ottaway said.
The Kurds have generally good relations with the United States. It was largely the United States that maintained a no-fly zone over northern Iraq to protect the Kurds there from Saddam Hussein's murderous pogroms against them.
Al Nursra Front, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, seems an unlikely suspect because it has used very few suicide attacks and its fighters have been focused on a ground war in Syria, taking military bases and cities, she said. "This would be a distraction," she said.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed and Syrian-allied Shiite militia in Lebanon, has launched suicide attacks against the United States in the past and it could be using the recent Israeli airstrike in Syria as a motive, Ottaway said.
A terrified coyote found wandering San Francisco’s Mission District is recovering at a Silicon Valley wildlife center, rescuers said Friday.
“She was petrified, disoriented,” Dmytryk said. “She was at the end of the dead-end alley, facing away from people, hiding her head in the corner. She’d given up.”
Olympic judo gold medalist Uchishiba gets 5 years for rape
Masato Uchishiba was sentenced to five years in prison for the assault on a teenage member of a college judo club he was coaching, a court official said, after she drunkenly fell asleep in a Tokyo hotel.
Uchishiba, 34, was feted as a national hero after bringing home a gold medal from the 2004 Athens Olympics, an achievement he repeated at the 2008 Beijing Games.
Prosecutors said the incident occurred in September 2011, when the women’s judo club from Kyushu University of Nursing and Social Welfare had been on a visit to Tokyo.
After a night of drinking and karaoke, the teenager, whose exact age was not given but who was believed to have been 18 or 19 at the time, fell asleep in her hotel room and awoke to find Uchishiba raping her.
“When she became aware, she resisted by saying, ‘What are you doing? Stop.’ But he turned up the volume of the television and covered her mouth with his hand,” prosecutors said, according to NHK.
The victim is not being identified publicly because of the nature of the crime.
Uchishiba, who is married, pleaded not guilty and maintained throughout the trial that the sex with the teenage student had been consensual. He said he would appeal the decision.
The All Japan Judo Federation barred Uchishiba from all judo activities in January 2012.
The verdict comes after a torrid week for judo, in which the coach of the national women’s team resigned after admitting claims that he beat his athletes with a bamboo sword were “more or less true.”
Ryuji Sonoda, who took the team to the London Olympics, acknowledged allegations of violence against his charges, including face-slapping and verbal abuse.
Sonoda, a 39-year-old former world judo champion, told a tightly-packed press conference: “I would like to deeply apologize for causing trouble to all the athletes and people concerned with what I have done and said.”
The media storm that engulfed judo, a popular sport in Japan that is usually a reliable source of Olympic medals, comes as Tokyo launches its international campaign for the right to host the 2020 Games.
The nation’s education and sports minister on Thursday ordered swift action to contain a scandal that observers say could badly dent Japan’s chances of beating Istanbul and Madrid for the 2020 Olympiad.