Biodun Iginla, BBC News

Biodun Iginla, BBC News

Sunday, October 30, 2016

British banker's defense pleads his sexual disorder in HK double murder trial

 Mon Oct 31, 2016 | 05:H:12  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME
British investment banker Rurik Jutting was a narcissistic sexual sadist, according to a British psychiatrist presenting evidence in his defense against charges of murdering two Indonesian women in his Hong Kong apartment.
Opening Jutting's defense, lawyer Tim Parker called on Dr Richard Latham, a consulting forensic psychiatrist with Britain's National Health Service who has worked on between 50 to 75 similar cases.
Latham told the Hong Kong court that Jutting suffered from recognized disorders from cocaine and alcohol abuse on top of his other personality disorders of sexual sadism and narcissism.
Jutting, a Cambridge University graduate who previously worked at Bank of America Corp in Hong Kong, has been accused of murdering Sumarti Ningsih, 23, and Seneng Mujiasih 26, two years ago
The women's bodies were found in Jutting's luxury high-rise Hong Kong apartment. Ningsih's mutilated body was found in a suitcase on the balcony, Mujiasih's was found inside the apartment with wounds to her neck and buttocks, the prosecutor told the court.
Jutting has pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of "diminished responsibility", but guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.
The trial has attracted international scrutiny since it began last week with media flying in from Britain to cover the case and the court room perpetually full.Jutting who also studied at the prestigious Winchester College, one of Britain's most famous and oldest private schools, captured hours of footage on his iPhone of him torturing Ningsih. He also filmed rambling monologues where he discussed the murders, binged on cocaine and explained his violent sexual fantasies.
"The thing I never had before in a case is the video recordings he made himself because they give you a direct view of what he was like around the time of these two killings," Latham told the court.
The prosecution team showed the graphic and shocking footage last week and highlighted his consumption of abnormally large doses of cocaine.
Video evidence shown in the courtroom showed Jutting telling police he was consuming 10 packs of cocaine a day - each costing HK$1,000 and that he ingested up to 20 grams of cocaine just before the second murder.

The defense and prosecution were largely in agreement over the physical evidence, but the dispute may lie in psychiatric and psychological evidence provided by the defense to determine whether it was a case of murder or manslaughter.
Murder carries a mandatory life sentence, while manslaughter carries a maximum of life though a shorter sentence can be set.
Dressed in a pale blue shirt, Jutting was clean shaven with short cut hair, looked attentive during the session. His loss of weight has been in stark contrast to initial court appearances when he looked heavily overweight and wore a thick dark beard.
Jutting, a former vice president and head of Structured Equity Finance & Trading (Asia) at Bank of America, had expressed “job depression" in his series of filmed monologues that he termed the "narcissistic ramblings of Rurik Jutting."

Film MOGADISHU, MINNESOTA thrusts Minneapolis Somalis into unwanted spotlight

Mon Oct 31, 2016 |  04H:25  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME
(Disclosure: Biodun Iginla divides his time among New York, Minneapolis, and London. He has extensive contacts with the West Bank of the Somali community in Minneapolis. He is also a close friend of Kathryn Bigelow.)
An HBO television drama created by an Oscar-winning director and a Canadian-Somali rapper has infuriated many in Minnesota's Somali community who say the show will perpetuate unfair stereotypes of Muslims.
Minneapolis has the largest number of Somalis outside Mogadishu.
Touted as a window into the lives of Somalis in Minneapolis adjusting to life in the U.S. Midwestern city, many community members instead fear "Mogadishu, Minnesota" will stoke Islamophobia if it airs. Filming on the pilot episode was scheduled to end last week.
At a time when opposition to immigrants and anti-Muslim sentiment have featured heavily in rhetoric by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Minnesota's Somali community members, especially men, are worried the possible TV drama will brand them as potential terrorists.
"I'm completely against it," Mahmoud Mire, 20, a first-generation Somali-American, said of the show. "As Muslims, as blacks and as refugees, people have their misconceptions about us already."
Those feelings have been echoed by others in protests against the show. Somali residents in one Minneapolis housing complex voted earlier this month to block crews from filming in their building.
Even the involvement of Somalia's best-known celebrity, Canadian-Somali rapper K'naan Warsame, as writer, director and executive director has not quelled mistrust. He is working with executive producer Kathryn Bigelow, who won an Oscar as best director in 2010 for "The Hurt Locker."
HBO officials declined to discuss the issues around the pilot other than to confirm the cast and provide a short synopsis, describing it as "a family drama that grapples with what it means to be American – among the Somalis of Minneapolis."
The filming of a pilot does not ensure it will air or be made into a full series.
Somalis began to arrive in Minnesota's Twin Cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, fleeing a civil war in their Horn of Africa nation. There are around 39,000 living in the state of 5.5 million people, according to U.S. census data from 2014. That is up from around 32,000 in 2010.
Somali-Americans are particularly sensitive about how they are perceived after a trial earlier this year at which three young men from the community were convicted of trying to join Islamic State. Six others pleaded guilty to supporting the militant group in a case that some in the community denounced as an example of government entrapment.
Then last month a 20-year-old Somali-American stabbed 10 people at a shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, before being fatally shot by an off-duty police officer. An Islamic State-linked media outlet described the attacker as a "soldier" of the group.
"Anything that happens with Somalis, our community is thrown under the bus," said Mubashir Jeilani, 21, a Somali-American from Minneapolis. He is executive director at the West Bank Community Coalition (WBCC) in the city's Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, the hub for the area's Somali community.
'GREAT DISTRUST' 
In the current environment, many Somali-Americans in Minnesota are leery of Hollywood storytellers.
"There is a great distrust between this community and the directors and producers in Hollywood," said Jaylani Hussein, 34, who immigrated to Minneapolis from Somalia in the early 1990s when he was around 10 years old. He is now executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group.
Hussein decries movies such as "Captain Phillips" in 2013, which dramatizes an attack by Somali pirates on a U.S.-flagged cargo ship, and Ridley Scott's 2001 film "Black Hawk Down" about a failed U.S. military mission in Mogadishu, for their portrayals of Somalis as pirates or terrorists.
"There are real consequences in the stories we tell," he said.
EARLY CONCERNS
The backlash to "Mogadishu, Minnesota" started last year after early reports on the show, which the Hollywood Reporter said in December 2015 was titled "the Recruiters."

The trade publication, quoting an unnamed source, described how the drama would "draw open an iron curtain behind which viewers will see the highly impenetrable world of Jihadi recruitment."
The filming of the pilot is expected to have employed some 350 people and to have generated roughly $4 million in spending for the local economy, Minnesota officials said. But that failed to impress many in the local community.
In September, protesters objecting to the show interrupted a K'naan concert in Minneapolis and clashed with police.
K'naan has met several times with community members and local organizations to address their concerns. The WBCC's Jeilani said K'naan assured him the show would portray the community as more than just a "hub for recruitment."
K'naan could not be reached for comment. Last month he told a Somali journalist that the project was "pretty historic," and that he had hired Somalis to work on the production in an effort to train a new generation of filmmakers.
While a local Somali city councilman has publicly backed the TV show, others say they remain skeptical due in part to Bigelow's involvement, which brought considerable buzz in Hollywood.
"Kathryn Bigelow is notoriously known for being successful by projecting a very negative view of Muslims," said CAIR's Hussein.
Bigelow's most successful films have centered on U.S. military operations in Muslim countries. "Zero Dark Thirty" in 2012 was about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, while "The Hurt Locker" depicted a bomb disposal team in Iraq.
Bigelow's agent could not be reached for comment.

Turkey fires thousands more civil servants, shuts media outlets


© Ilyas Akengin / AFP | Turkish police officers stand guard in front of court house in Diyarbakir, Turkey, on October 30, 2016, as two co-mayors accused of “terrorism” are transported to the court house

Latest update : 2016-10-31  01H:55  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME


Turkey said it had dismissed a further 10,000 civil servants and closed 15 more media outlets over suspected links with terrorist organisations and U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Ankara for orchestrating a failed coup in July.

More than 100,000 people had already been sacked or suspended and 37,000 arrested since the failed coup, in an unprecedented crackdown the government says is necessary to root out all supporters of Gulen from the state apparatus.
Thousands more academics, teachers, health workers, prison guards and forensics experts were among the latest to be removed from their posts through two new executive decrees published on the Official Gazette late on Saturday.
Opposition parties described the move as a coup in itself. The continued crackdown has also raised concerns over the functioning of state.
"What the government and Erdogan are doing right now is a direct coup against the rule of law and democracy," Sezgin Tanrikulu, an MP from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), said in a Periscope broadcast posted on Twitter.
The decrees have ordered the closure of 15 more newspapers, wires and magazines, which report from the largely Kurdish southeast, bringing the total number of media organisations closed since the emergency rule in July to nearly 160.
In another move set to anger President Tayyip Erdogan's opponents, the ability of universities to elect their own rectors was also abolished. Erdogan will from now on directly appoint the rectors from the candidates nominated by the High Educational Board (YOK).
The extent of the crackdown has worried rights groups and many of Turkey's Western allies, who fear Erdogan is using the emergency rule to eradicate dissent. The government says the actions are justified following the coup attempt on July 15, when more than 240 people died.
Lale Karabiyik, another CHP lawmaker, said the move was a clear misuse of the emergency rule decrees and described it as a coup d'etat on the high education system. Pro-Kurdish opposition said the decrees were used as tools to establish a 'one-man regime'.
The government extended the state of emergency imposed after the coup attempt for three months until mid-January. Erdogan said the authorities needed more time to wipe out the threat posed by Gulen's network as well as Kurdish militants who have waged a 32-year insurgency.
Ankara wants the United States to detain and extradite Gulen so that he can be prosecuted in Turkey on a charge that he masterminded the attempt to overthrow the government. Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, denies any involvement.
Speaking to reporters at a reception marking the Republic Day on Saturday, Erdogan said the nation wanted the reinstatement of the death penalty, a debate which has emerged following the coup attempt, and added that delaying it would not be right.
"I believe this issue will come to the parliament," he said, and repeated that he would approve it, a move that would sink Turkey's hopes of European Union membership. Erdogan shrugged off such concerns, saying that much of the world had capital punishment.

Date created : 2016-10-30
  • TURKEY

    Clashes rock Turkey's Diyarbakir after arrest of Kurdish mayors
  • TURKEY

    Turkey detains Gulen brother over botched coup
  • TURKEY

    Blast rocks Mediterranean resort in Turkey
0 COMMENT(S)