Republicans avoid talk of race, guns after Charleston shooting

By Andy Sullivan and James Oliphant11 hours ago

Clinton and other Democrats are appealing to a racially diverse voter base that has been frustrated by an inability to tighten gun laws after other mass shootings. Those voters are also increasingly vocal about heavy handed law-enforcement tactics in black communities following a series of police killings of unarmed African-American men.

Republicans, meanwhile, have successfully loosened gun restrictions across the country in recent years while catering to core voters who are overwhelmingly white.

Clinton cited past mass shootings as she called for the United States to confront the toll taken by racial prejudice and gun violence. "How many people do we need to see cut down before we act?" she said in Las Vegas.

Several Republican candidates issued statements expressing condolences in the wake of the attack. But unlike Clinton and President Barack Obama, they did not call for action to reduce similar attacks. Few were willing to label the murders a hate crime, although police in Charleston said the attack was racially motivated.

"There's a sickness in our country, there's something terribly wrong, but it isn't going to be fixed by your government," the libertarian-leaning Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told a group of religious conservatives in Washington. "It's people not understanding where salvation comes from."

Speaking at the same event, Texas Senator Ted Cruz did not mention the race or possible motivation of the suspected shooter, 21-year-old Dylann Roof. The young man's Facebook profile showed him wearing a jacket emblazoned with flags of apartheid-era South Africa and of the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, both formerly ruled by white minorities.

"A sick and deranged person came and prayed with an historically black congregation for an hour and then murdered nine innocent souls,” Cruz said, without referring to the race of the shooter.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a leading contender, did not mention the attack in his 20-minute speech.

There is little incentive for the Republican Party to press deeply into the episode since the party's voters overwhelmingly favor expansive gun rights.

Their opposition, backed by the powerful National Rifle Association, ensured Obama failed in his bid to expand background checks on gun buyers after a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.

Obama acknowledged on Thursday that further efforts in Washington to tighten gun controls were likely to be futile, saying the "politics in this town foreclose" attempts to limit gun rights.

Americans, too, are divided on the subject of gun control, with 48 percent supporting government restrictions and 41 percent saying they should not be regulated, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in April. Some 61 percent of Republicans oppose firearms regulation, while Democrats support it by an equal proportion.

Beyond the gun issue, the voters who will choose the next Republican nominee are overwhelmingly white - in 2012, they made up 90 percent of voters in the Republican primary contests.

That means there is little incentive -- and perhaps a real downside -- for conservatives to grapple head-on with racial tensions spurred by the Charleston shootings.

Some comments by voters at the event attended by Paul, Cruz and others bore that out.

“I'm tired of hearing that every time someone shoots someone from another race that it's racially motivated,” said John Cartree, 78, of Columbia, Mo.

Charleston Church Shooting: Inside the Minds of (Surprisingly Young) Hate Crime Perpetrators

Jenna BirchJune 18, 2015

Dylann Storm Roof, center, the suspect in the Charleston, S.C., shootings, is escorted from the Shelby Police Department in Shelby, N.C., on Thursday. (Photo: AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

The details of the Wednesday-night shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., are still emerging, but what we do know is chilling.

The 21-year-old suspect, Dylann Storm Roof, reportedly entered the church during a prayer meeting just after 8 p.m. He asked for Rev. Clementa Pinckney and sat quietly next to the pastor for nearly an hour before opening fire.

He reloaded five times. He said he was there “to kill black people.” He said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” He killed nine people — six women and three men. Only three inside the church survived, two unharmed.

Police gather outside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church after nine people were shot during a prayer meeting on June 17. (Photo: David Goldman/AP Photo)

The more details authorities uncover about the young Roof, who was reportedly “cooperative” when authorities picked him up 200 miles away from Charleston on Thursday morning, the more he appears to fit the profile of many other hate-crime perpetrators: a young man under the age of 25 with deeply held beliefs and disturbing motivations.

Hate alone is not a crime. However, a crime such as murder, arson, or vandalism on the basis of prejudice is considered hate crime. Congress has defined it as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”

Dylann Storm Roof, the suspect in the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.(Photo: Lexington County Detention Center/Associated Press)

Data suggests that 50 percent of those who commit hate crimes are under 25. They are also frequently male. Roof — if it is confirmed that he did commit the crime in Charleston — is both. Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney were 21 and 22, respectively, when they stood trial for murdering Matthew Shepard, a gay man from Wyoming, in 1998. In 2012, Deryl Dedmon, 19, John A. Rice, 18, and Dylan Butler, 20, all pled guilty to killing a 47-year-old African-American man, James Anderson, in Mississippi.

Why young men?

There are several reasons, according to Robert J. Sternberg, PhD, a professor of human development at Cornell University and editor of The Psychology of Hate. Young men are more available to commit hate crimes, as they’re less likely to have been incarcerated already. And they’re often looking to make a name for themselves.

A photo of Dylann Storm Roof from his Facebook page, wearing a leather jacket stitched with two flags that are symbols of white supremacy — one from apartheid-era South Africa and the other from Rhodesia during its time of white rule. (Photo: Dylann Storm Roof/Facebook)

In the Charleston shooting, one victim was told by the shooter that she would be left unharmed in order to spread the word. “Her life was spared, and [she was] told, ‘I’m not going to kill you, I’m going to spare you, so you can tell them what happened,’” Dot Scott, president of the NAACP in Charleston, told CNN. She said she learned this information from the victim’s family.

“[Young men] are more testosterone driven” and can sometimes displace their anger, Sternberg tells Yahoo Health. “They are young enough to have a false sense of themselves. In particular, they believe they are omnipotent — can do whatever they want — and invulnerable — can get away with it without consequences — because they are too smart to get caught.”

Related: Why Don’t We Study Gun Violence the Way We Study Car Accidents?

Plus, the brain is not fully developed until roughly age 25, which also factors in the element of youth, says Herbert Nieburg, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Law and Justice Policy Studies at Mitchell College in New London, Conn.

“The adolescent brain is more susceptible to impulsivity, spontaneity, and acting before you think,” Nieburg tells Yahoo Health. “The perpetrators also often tend to be really alienated and peripheralized — they see themselves as not accepted and not wanted.”

While there’s no sign that Roof was bullied or an extreme outcast in high school, one of his classmates did say he was “kind of wild,” spouting racial slurs and engaging in attention-seeking behaviors such as pill-popping. Yet, another one of his high school peers said he went largely unnoticed. “A lot of people don’t remember seeing him,” Adam Martin told the Daily Beast. “I had classes with him, [which] is why I remember him.”

Hate crimes are usually very layered

Nieburg says that hate crimes are obviously not drug motivated, as so many crimes are, and they’re not simply mass killings, or someone murdering for purely psychological reasons, as was the case in Newtown, Conn., and the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., both in 2012. A hate crime tends to culminate from an existential dilemma, especially for young perpetrators.

“It’s deeper — it’s sociological, it’s anthropological,” he explains. “They don’t like the world and see it as a screwed-up place.”

Related: The History of Mass Killings in the U.S. Over the Last 25 Years

Perpetrators are confusedly disturbed, creating “a story about the vile nature of the target,” Sternberg says. “The story might be that they are subhuman, insect-like, reptilian, defilers of purity, destroyers of civilization, or whatever.”

To anyone looking in, hate crimes are heinous acts of nonsensical violence. Sternberg adds that the story line the perpetrator has concocted is absolutely “silly on its face,” just “not to the believer.” Therefore, most crimes of this nature are the perfect storm, stemming from “triangular” motives. There’s a negation of intimacy, there’s passion, and there’s commitment.

“Viewing the targets as less than human, as vile, as even beneath contempt, the perpetrator comes to believe that the targets are getting what they deserve,” Sternberg says. “The perpetrator also passionately believes in the inherent awfulness of the targets. He or she — usually he — feels highly motivated to act on his feelings of rage and anger.”

The final element is a deeply rooted belief in the rightness of their cause. “The perpetrator is committed to his belief,” Sternberg says. “It’s not something he just thought of on the spur of the moment, but rather something he has come to believe and hold, over time, with conviction.”

According to the Daily Beast, there’s not a lot of information on Roof’s Facebook page. However, a few telling details have emerged in images. In one photo, he is wearing a coat adorned with two flags representing times of apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia. In another photo, the suspect is shown sitting atop his car with an ornamental license plate depicting a Confederate flag.

Ultimately, hate crimes are complex tragedies, the result of long-held misguided convictions and internal struggles colliding with a moment of impulsivity. “Every criminal has a story, a play, or a novel their life is adhering to,” Nieburg says. “In young people I see, it’s one of alienation.”

There’s never an excuse for a hate crime; there are only unfortunate reasons we can trace after the fact. Sadly, until the darkest parts of society change, it’s the victims who will continue to be caught in the crossfire.

Across US, over 130 prison escapees on the loose

By JENNIFER PELTZ5 hours ago

This May 20, 2015, file photo released by the New York State Police shows Richard Matt. Matt and accomplice David Sweat escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. on June 6, 2015, and are still at large. Matt is among more than 160 state prison escapees nationwide who are listed as on the loose, The Associated Press found in a coast-to-coast survey. (New York State Police via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — Somewhere out there are an admitted killer who crawled through a Texas prison's ventilation ducts, a murderer who apparently escaped from an Indiana institution in a garbage truck, and a Florida convict who got other inmates to put him in a crate at the prison furniture shop and had himself delivered to freedom by truck.

They're among more than 130 state prison escapees nationwide who are listed as on the loose, The Associated Press found in a coast-to-coast survey.

Most have been gone for decades, meaning the chances of finding them have dwindled dramatically — that is, if they're even alive.

Still, "you don't forget about them," said former Oklahoma corrections chief James Saffle, who worked for 11 years tracking escaped convicts. "Sometimes, some little action they take will trigger something."

For the past two weeks, up to 800 federal, state and local law enforcement officers have been searching the woods and swamps around a maximum-security state prison in far northern New York for two convicted killers who used power tools to break out. The hunt is still in the early and intensive on-the-ground phase.

After the sightings wane and the dragnets come up empty, some states regularly revisit escape cases, keep an eye on vanished prisoners' associates and check fingerprint databases, death certificates other sources for new leads.

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This May 21, 2015, photo released by the New York State Police shows David Sweat. On Saturday, June …

But investigators largely have to hold out hope that they will get a tip out of the blue or that the convict will slip up, perhaps by contacting a relative or getting arrested for another crime.

Successful escapes from secure, fenced prisons are rare. At least 24 states say they have no such prisoners at large.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported about 2,000 state and federal inmates escaped or went off without leave in 2013. But the figure doesn't indicate how many were caught and does not distinguish between breaking out of prison and walking away from work release or other unfenced settings.

The AP asked all states for a current total of escapees from secure, locked state prisons where they were held full time. Some states — including California, the most populous — couldn't immediately provide an answer, and others responded only for recent decades, so the total is almost certainly higher than the 134 the AP counted.

Officials say most of the breakouts are decades old because prisons have become more secure. Some escapees have probably died. One 1955 absconder from Illinois would now be 112. One escape on Alabama's list happened in 1929.

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FILE - In this April 25, 1977, file photo, Joanne Chesimard, member of the Black Panther Party and B …

Some fugitives' whereabouts are no mystery.

Joanne Chesimard was granted asylum in Cuba after her 1979 escape from the New Jersey prison where the former Black Panther was serving a life sentence in the killing of a state trooper. Jose Fernando Bustos-Diaz, the Texas inmate who squeezed through the ventilation system in 2010 to get out of a 35-year sentence for cutting his boss' throat, is believed to be in Mexico.

But others could be anywhere, as New York officials acknowledged after Richard Matt and David Sweat cut their way out of Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, close to the Canadian border, on June 6.

In the early going, law officers can search on the ground and send out a "bolo" — for "be on the lookout for" — through a federal clearinghouse that disseminates alerts electronically to virtually every U.S. criminal justice agency. It's a crowded message center: By the end of 2014, there were 13 million active records, including wanted notices, lists of sex offenders and stolen property records.

Investigators also "have to crawl into the mind of the fugitive," said Howard Safir, a former U.S. Marshals Service operations chief and New York City police commissioner.

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Chart shows number of prison escapees by state; 2c x 5 inches; 96.3 mm x 127 mm;

Pursuers try figure out their target's past addresses, associates, likes and dislikes, even survival skills, looking into such things as whether the convict had military experience or grew up hunting and fishing.

Captures often are quick. But after six months, a fugitive's trail generally goes pretty cold, said Chuck Jordan, president of the National Association of Fugitive Recovery Agents. Pursuing decades-old cases is complicated by the difficulties of working with paper records and the passage of time.

Prison systems say they keep pushing.

Michigan said it reviews all escapees' cases every six months and runs their fingerprints through databases every few years in the hope of a match. The Ohio State Highway Patrol checks criminal records, death certificates and social media annually for clues on cold cases, spokesman Lt. Craig Cvetan said.

"You don't say, 'Well, if we haven't found the person by five years, we're not going to do anything else with it,'" he said.

A convicted killer who escaped a California prison work camp in 1975 was arrested in 2011 after authorities heard his dying mother had sought to contact him. They checked her phone records. A 1977 fugitive from the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was caught last year after facial-recognition technology matched an old photo of him with the present-day Florida driver's license he obtained under an alias. A North Carolina thief who spent four decades on the run simply called Kentucky authorities in April, saying he wanted "to get this behind me."

"Nobody lives on an island," Safir said. "It's very hard not to leave some trail these days."

___

Kurds emerge as key force in fight against IS 'caliphate'

By W.G. Dunlop2 hours ago

Baghdad (AFP) - Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria have emerged as some of the most effective forces battling the Islamic State jihadist group in the year since IS declared a cross-border "caliphate".

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Iraq's Kurds defended their autonomous region, gained control of a swathe of long-disputed territory during IS's sweeping offensive and retook areas they lost to the jihadists, coming out better than most in a war with no real winners.

In neighbouring Syria, Kurdish forces defended the town of Kobane against IS in a months-long battle, retook the key hub of Tal Abyad on the Turkish border this month and fought the jihadists in other areas.

International air support played a key role in the success of Kurdish forces in both countries.

The Kurds -- who are estimated to number 10-15 percent of Syria's population and 15-20 percent of Iraq's -- are fighting a common enemy, but they are distinct communities with their own agendas.

And while they have had successes, the Kurds have also paid a heavy price in lost lives, destroyed homes and economic troubles in both countries.

Thousands of Iraqi federal security personnel fled a brutally effective IS offensive last June, clearing the way for the Kurds to gain or solidify control over territory claimed by both them and Baghdad.

But IS drove Kurdish peshmerga forces back toward their regional capital Arbil in August in an offensive that might have ended in disaster if the US had not begun bombing the jihadists.

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Kurdish fighters rest in a house on the outskirts of the Syrian town of Kobane, also known as Ain al …

-- 'We will not leave' --

Backed by air support from a US-led coalition, Iraqi Kurds were able to retake territory lost to the jihadists and defend against IS attacks elsewhere.

After fighting for these areas, the Kurdish region is especially unlikely to relinquish them, and while the federal government's position is too weak to dispute this now, analysts say it will be a problem down the road.

"We made sacrifices and gave blood, and therefore we will not leave them and will defend these areas... until the end of this war," said Mustafa Qader, the Kurdish regional minister responsible for the peshmerga forces.

"Until now, we have 1,200 martyrs, and there are close to 7,000 wounded," he said.

"I believe that the Kurdistan region will not easily surrender these areas to the Iraqi government," Qader said, though he added: "It is possible that an agreement will be reached."

In Syria, the Kurds carved out autonomous areas in the country's northeast in the chaos of the country's civil war after Syrian government troops withdrew.

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Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters stand next to an Islamic State group sign at the entrance to the no …

The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and allied forces -- with US-led air support -- defended Kobane for months against jihadists trying to seize the city on the Turkish border, in a significant psychological victory for anti-IS forces.

The YPG and Syrian rebels also retook the town of Tal Abyad from IS, a major blow for the jihadists, who used it as a gateway to and from Turkey.

"Kurds are arguably the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria. They are well-organised, disciplined and are big believers in their cause," analyst Sirwan Kajjo said.

-- Over 1.2 million displaced --

"They have managed to defeat the Islamic State in several areas. But the US air strikes also play a big role in this," said Wladimir van Wilgenburg, an analyst at the Jamestown Foundation.

But the price has been high.

"The Kurds have suffered immensely under IS threats. During the Kobane crisis, thousands of Kurds fled to Turkey," said Kajjo.

"Despite the liberation of their city, the vast majority of them have not been able to return to their homes because they're totally destroyed," he said.

And in other Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria, "the economic conditions have been very tough. Prices are skyrocketing and goods are increasingly becoming unavailable."

In Iraq, the Kurdish region has had to cope with a huge number of people fleeing violence for territory it controls -- over 1.2 million from June last year to the beginning of this month, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

The Kurdish region's image as a safe haven from the violence plaguing other parts of Iraq also took a hit from bombings in Arbil and IS's presence near Kurdish territory, said Nathaniel Rabkin, the managing editor of the Inside Iraqi Politics newsletter.

And the cost of the war, exacerbated by a vastly expanded frontier for the peshmerga to defend, has added strain to an economy already hit by long-running disputes with Baghdad over finances and oil.

"The economic crisis... caused major problems and revealed how vulnerable they are to the vagaries of regional security and international oil prices," said Zaid al-Ali, author of "The Struggle For Iraq's Future".

Ultimately, "no one is coming out very well in this conflict," Ali said.

Netanyahu denounces UN's Ban over Gaza children remarks

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