Sunday, August 19, 2018

Police chief defends tasing woman, 87, cutting flowers with knife

By The Associated Press

Posted Aug 17, 2018 at 1:47 PM

CHATSWORTH, Ga. — A Georgia police chief said an officer was justified in using a Taser to stun an 87-year-old woman after she didn’t obey commands to drop a knife in her hand.

Martha Al-Bishara was charged with criminal trespass and obstructing an officer Friday, when police held her at gunpoint before bringing her to the ground with a jolt from the electrified prongs of a stun gun.

Relatives said Al-Bishara doesn’t speak English and was merely out cutting dandelions with a kitchen knife near her home in Chatsworth, about 85 miles north of Atlanta.

“An 87-year-old woman with a knife still has the ability to hurt an officer,” Chatsworth Police Chief Josh Etheridge told the Daily Citizen-News of Dalton.

“There was no anger, there was no malice in this,” Etheridge said. “In my opinion, it was the lowest use of force we could have used to simply stop that threat at the time.”

Etheridge responded along with two other officers Friday after an employee of a local Boys and Girls Club called 911 to report a woman with a knife was walking outside and would not leave.

“She’s old so she can’t get around too well, but,” the employee said on the 911 recording. “Looks like she’s walking around looking for something, like, vegetation to cut down or something. There’s a bag, too.”

When Al-Bishara didn’t follow commands to drop her knife, Etheridge said, he tried to communicate with her by taking his own pocket knife and throwing it on the ground.

But Al-Bishara’s relatives said the officers should have shown more patience.

“If three police officers couldn’t handle an 87-year-old woman, you might want to reconsider hanging up your badge,” said Solomon Douhne, the woman’s great-nephew.

How The Hell Did A Teenager Hack Apple's Secured Servers?

by Tyler Durden

Fri, 08/17/2018 - 22:25

An Australian teenager whose name has been withheld is facing serious charges by authorities over a massive data breach of Apple’s secured network.

Apple said on Friday no customer information was compromised after Australian media reported a boy, 16, from the southern city of Melbourne, hacked into the world’s most valuable company from his parent’s basement many times over the last year, The Age newspaper reported, citing statements by the teenager’s lawyer in Children’s Court. He was summoned to a Melbourne court on Thursday.

Apple contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation which launched a major international investigation, The Age said, quoting statements made in court. The FBI then passed the case to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), where they later tracked down the teen and found software that had enabled the hacking.

The AFP raided the teen’s family home in Melbourne and seized two laptops, a mobile phone, and a hard drive. Court documents said the teenage hacker stored 90 gigabytes of Apple secured files and customer accounts in a folder titled “hacky hack hack,” the newspaper said. Authorities also said he readily spoke about his illegal activities on Facebook-owned instant messenger WhatsApp.
Here is what the court heard:

“Two Apple laptops were seized and the serial numbers matched the serial numbers of the devices which accessed the internal systems,” a prosecutor said.
“A mobile phone and hard drive were also seized and the IP address … matched the intrusions into the organization.
“The purpose was to connect remotely to the company’s internal systems.”

The teen’s lawyer told the courtroom his client had become so popular in the international hacking community that even mentioning the case in detail could expose him and his family to unwanted risk.

Crown Prosecutors also acknowledged that Apple was “very sensitive about publicity,” as it seems the story has not been widely reported.

Hot, wet summer unkind to Central Mass. crops

By Elaine Thompson
Telegram & Gazette Staff

Posted Aug 16, 2018 at 9:25 PM

Updated Aug 17, 2018 at 9:05 AM

It was so hot and dry during the spring that Jeff Howe decided to plant some melons and winter squash in a low area at his 200-acre farm.

But Mr. Howe, who owns the New Braintree-based Howe Farm and Gardens, hadn’t counted on so many lingering days of hot, wet weather this summer.

In the past 30 days alone, Central Massachusetts has received two to three times the normal rainfall, according to the National Weather Service. More rain is in the forecast for Friday and Saturday.

The result is that Mr. Howe and some other farmers and nursery operators are seeing signs of disease on their plants, as well as fewer customers and other problems caused by the wet humid weather.

“I thought we would have a dry summer and the winter squash would do good down there. But that didn’t happen,” Mr. Howe said this week. “There’s been so much wet weather that the fields can’t drain quick enough and it’s hurting the crops quite a bit.”

Mr. Howe, who also operates a farm stand in Paxton, said the 20 to 25 low-lying acres where he planted winter squash and melons are under water.

“That section is pretty much done. The vine crops that lay low lay in it (rain and mud) and get saturated,” he said, adding that his farm has a lot of clay soil, which retains the rain. “There’s nothing you can do about it. Just pick what you can and hope for the best.”

Other farmers - including Whittier Farms’ Wayne Whittier and his children, John Whittier and Samantha Staebner - are waiting for their land to dry out so they can assess any damage.

Mrs. Staebner said the fields at the 400-acre Sutton farm are currently too muddy and soft for a tractor and other heavy equipment, which would just sink into the ground and damage the crops.

“It’s been so hot, sticky, humid, and with all the rain, we have to wait to see if any fungus or disease has started on any of the crop,” she said. “We’ll start checking in a couple of days if this sunshine sticks around.”

She said workers continue to pick vegetables, but some blueberries were lost as a result of the weather.

“When it rains, you can’t pick the blueberries because they won’t keep. You have to use them or freeze them right away,” she explained. “This rain has been so heavy at times that it has just knocked the blueberries right off the bushes.”

Amy E. Parker said the weather has wiped out some of her more than 4,000 lavender plants at The Farm at SummitWynds in Holden.