Man takes teacher hostage, barricades self inside classroom at elementary school
November 1, 2017 by admin
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A parent has taken a teacher hostage and is barricaded inside Castle View Elementary School in Riverside, school district officials said Tuesday.
The district was notified about the situation just after 11:20 a.m., Riverside Unified spokesman Justin Grayson said.
The door to a room is blocked with the male parent and a female teacher inside, said Riverside Police Officer Ryan Railsback. It was not immediately clear which room the man and hostage were in.
The incident began when the parent arrived before 11:15 a.m. and got into a confrontation with a teacher, Railsback said. The parent did not appear to follow the school district’s safety procedures and check in with the front desk, he added.
On campus, the parent was confronted by a male teacher and the parent struck that teacher in the face, Railsback said. A witness told KABC that the teacher’s face was bloodied and his nose was broken. The teacher was treated at a nearby hospital, police said.
The parent then went into a classroom and took a female teacher hostage, police said. The two have been in there ever since.
“He’s not responding to our commands to come out so far,” Railsback said. Witnesses did not report seeing any weapons on the man, police said.
Smoke was briefly seen coming out of the room, but Railsback said he didn’t have any information about it. It did not appear to be toxic, he said.
Police evacuated all students from the campus and began releasing them to their parents after 1 p.m. All students were accounted for, Grayson said. It was not immediately clear whether the man had a firearm.
Officials said students would be released to parents or guardians with proper photo identification.
joseph.serna@latimes.com
For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.
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UPDATES:
3:30 p.m.: This article was updated with details about the beginning of the incident.
2:20 p.m.: This article was updated with information on student releases.
1:40 p.m.: This article was updated with details about the hostage.
1:15 p.m.: This article was updated with details about the campus evacuation.
This article was originally published at 12:55 p.m.
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Tech Executives Are Contrite About Election Meddling, but Make Few Promises on Capitol Hill
November 1, 2017 by admin
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The most pointed exchanges were aimed at Facebook, which admitted on Monday before the hearings that more than 126 million users potentially saw inflammatory political ads purchased by a Kremlin-linked company, the Internet Research Agency. Facebook has drawn particular ire from lawmakers for its early brushoff of fake news and foreign interference on its site, which its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, dismissed as a “crazy idea” just after the election.
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Eric Thayer for The New York Times
Since then, the company has scrambled to appease lawmakers by promising to hire more than 1,000 people to manually review political ad purchases and to make the funding of those ads public.
“The foreign interference we saw was reprehensible,” Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, told senators.
The companies also acknowledged they were struggling to keep up with the threat of foreign interference.
“The abuse of our platform to attempt state-sponsored manipulation of elections is a new challenge for us — and one that we are determined to meet,” Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, said.
At the heart of the companies’ problems are business models that reward viral content — which can include misinformation — and an enormous advertising business that is automated and unable to easily spot ads purchased by foreign governments.
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Eric Thayer for The New York Times
In a sign of the shifting political winds for tech giants, Republicans, who have been more restrained in their criticism of the companies, were more skeptical on Tuesday. In one contentious exchange, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, pressed Mr. Stretch on whether Facebook could possibly police all of its advertisers.
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“I’m trying to get us down from La-La Land here,” Mr. Kennedy said. “The truth of the matter is, you have five million advertisers that change every month. Every minute. Probably every second. You don’t have the ability to know who every one of those advertisers is, do you?”
Mr. Stretch acknowledged that Facebook could not track all of those advertisers.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, the chairman of the crime and terrorism subcommittee that held the hearing, said the risk went beyond Russia to other American adversaries. Talking to reporters afterward, he alluded to potential regulation of political advertising online.
“It’s Russia today; it could be Iran and North Korea tomorrow,” he said. “We need to do is sit down and find ways to bring some of the controls we have on over-the-air broadcast to social media to protect the consumer.”
Facebook, Twitter and Google have not publicly opposed a bipartisan proposal to require reports on who funds political ads online, similar to rules for broadcast television. In private, their lobbyists have praised voluntary efforts to disclose political ad funding and have resisted many aspects of the bill.
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Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said the legislation was essential before the midterm elections in 2018.
“Our midterms are 370 days away, and we don’t have time to mess around with dialogue anymore,” Ms. Klobuchar said in an interview after the hearing. Ms. Klobuchar introduced the bill with Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.
During the hearing, some Republicans also sought to play down the Russian effort to tip the election in favor of President Trump, stressing incorrectly that the Kremlin’s agents did not favor a particular presidential candidate in last year’s election.
“Russia does not have loyalty to a political party in the United States,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “Their goal is to divide us and discredit our democracy.”
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That assertion was at odds with the conclusion of American intelligence agencies that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump, going beyond just posting disruptive content on social media. Russian operatives also hacked Democratic email accounts and released messages embarrassing to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
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Mr. Graham asked Mr. Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, to confirm that the pattern of activity Facebook saw from Russia was more focused on sowing chaos in the United States than in bolstering Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
“During the election, they were trying to create discord between Americans, most of it directed against Clinton,” Mr. Graham said, addressing Mr. Stretch. “After the election, you saw Russian-tied groups and organizations trying to undermine President Trump’s legitimacy. Is that what you saw on Facebook?”
Mr. Stretch agreed. But the question was narrowly tailored, apparently intended to distance the broader Russian interference from the backing of Mr. Trump.
Though the companies made promises to work with government officials, Mr. Stretch stopped short of agreeing to some suggestions.
In one heated exchange, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, asked him to reject political ad purchases in foreign currencies.
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“How did Facebook, which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points and instantly transform them in the personal connections with its user, somehow not make the connection that electoral ads, paid for in rubles, were coming from Russia?” Mr. Franken said.
But Mr. Stretch hemmed, saying the rejection of a foreign currency to buy political ads would not solve the problem of foreign interference.
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“The reason I’m hesitating on foreign currency is it’s relatively easy for bad actors to switch currencies,” Mr. Stretch said. “So it’s a signal, but not enough.”
That response failed to satisfy Mr. Franken, who interrupted with exasperation.
“My goal is for you to think through this stuff a little bit better,” Mr. Franken said, raising his voice.
This week, the companies admitted that the abuse of their platforms was much greater than previously acknowledged. In addition to Facebook’s admission, Google said that agents who were also from the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency uploaded more than 1,000 videos on its YouTube platform. Twitter said the Russian agency published more 131,000 messages on Twitter.
On Wednesday, the top lawyers for all three companies will appear before the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are conducting their own investigations into the Russian election meddling.
Tuesday’s hearing exposed a much deeper struggle for Facebook, which is trying to tread a delicate line as a technology platform while also fighting against hate speech, violence and misinformation on its site.
“I like that they are contrite, but these issues are existential they aren’t taking any structural changes,” said Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University. “These are Band-Aids.”
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