Random News and Notes 30 January

We start the RNN for this penultimate day of January with news about Don Lemon. The former CNN host and three others were arrested in connection with the church disruption on 18 January in Minnesota. Lemon, Trahern Jeen Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lydell Lundy face charges for conspiracy against rights and FACE Act violations.

According to reports, Lemon was indicted by a grand jury looking into the case. Now for the perp walk. . .

Anyone remember CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle during the ‘Summer of Love’? And does the name Antonio Mays Jr. ring a bell? Well, a King County, Washington jury ruled the City of Seattle negligent in the 2020 CHOP zone shooting death of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr., citing delayed emergency response as a proximate cause, and awarded his family $30.5 million in damages.

Trial evidence revealed Seattle officials ordered police not to enter the zone after Mays’ shooting, medics fled a designated casualty area due to perceived danger, and barricades installed by the city hindered timely aid, with a medical expert testifying the teen’s wounds were survivable if treated within minutes.

Unlike the other killing in CHOP/CHAZ, Mays’ death remains unsolved. The $30 million awarded to Mays’ family exceeds the settlement given to the family of St. Floyd.

StopICE.net, a crowdsourced network run by Sherman Austin for tracking suspected ICE vehicles with over 4,300 license plates and 538,000 subscribers, was defaced late Thursday through Friday morning. Hackers overwrote its database with a meme of Tom Homan. The landing page displayed a message mocking developers and claiming user data from about 30,000 accounts—including some government emails—went to federal agencies.

The site quickly recovered by afternoon. Pro-enforcement accounts were calling it karma. This editor calls it bad coding. If the hackers got in far enough to overwrite the database, they got in far enough to scrape it first.