- Former congressional candidate and pro wrestler arrested in Vegas murder of man who was wrongly imprisoned for cold-case killing CBS News
- Retired wrestler and ex-congressional candidate suspected in Las Vegas killing surrenders to police Yahoo! Voices
- Ex-WWE star, congressional candidate suspected of murder turns himself in syracuse.com
- Report: Death threat over cocaine led to deadly altercation, arrest warrant for former Nevada Congressional candidate Fox 5 Las Vegas
- Dan “Big Dan” Rodimer, retired wrestler, sought in Nevada killing The Dallas Morning News
Tag Archives: wrongly
Post Office Scandal: Wrongly convicted pregnant sub-postmaster ‘collapsed’ following sentence – Sky News
- Post Office Scandal: Wrongly convicted pregnant sub-postmaster ‘collapsed’ following sentence Sky News
- Prison. Bankruptcy. Suicide. How a software glitch and a centuries-old British company ruined lives CNN
- Sunak’s plan to overrule courts on Post Office scandal could set a dangerous precedent – but other options would mean stumping up cash The Conversation Indonesia
- Fresh spotlight on Post Office scandal reopens old wounds for its victims Financial Times
- The abuse of unaccountable power is at the wicked heart of the Post Office scandal The Guardian
People wrongly believe their friends will protect them from Covid
A study published Thursday found that while people in the friend zone are good for your mental health, when it comes to an infectious disease like Covid, your friends might make you even more vulnerable to it. It’s what two scholars who happen to be BFFs found with the five studies they published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Hyunjung Crystal Lee and Eline De Vries are assistant and associate professors and marketing specialists who specialize in consumer behavior and business psychology in the Department of Business Administration at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
It’s long been known that friendship, while psychologically beneficial, can warp a person’s perception of risk. Risk perception comes from a person’s ability to judge the severity and probability of a negative outcome. Past studies have shown people tend to feel safer when they have a close relationship with someone, and that can lead them to make emotional rather than rational decisions.
The researchers showed this through five different experiments with a wide variety of people throughout the course of the pandemic.
Lee said she and De Vries were interested in the work because as they were living through the pandemic, they started wondering what makes people take risks and what conditions would make people feel vulnerable or invulnerable.
“And then we went down the rabbit hole,” De Vries added.
It’s what they call the “friend shield effect.”
“The idea was that we perceive our friends like a shield. We feel safe when Covid-19 is associated with friendship,” De Vries said — even if we shouldn’t.
The first experiment involved junk food. The professors divided up participants into two groups. One was asked to think about a close friend. The other group was asked to think about a distant acquaintance. Both wrote down memories of those people. Then they were given an article that argued eating unhealthy snacks could increase a person’s risk to develop severe Covid. The article also mentioned that hand sanitizers and masks were protective.
The groups were then allowed to shop online from a store that offered travel-size hand sanitizer and masks and Cheez-Its and king-size Twix bars and Mars bars. The group that thought about their close friends first were much more likely to buy junk food than protective items, despite the warnings.
A second experiment divided participants into three groups. None had ever had Covid. They then were told to imagine that they had been infected by a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger. Then they were asked how much they would spend on health protection in the next couple of months. Those who imagined they got sick from strangers or people that they weren’t close to planned to buy about the same amount. Those who got sick from friends planned to spend half as much. The experiment confirmed that “positive emotions can make people relatively oblivious to risks and likely engage in risky behavior,” the study said.
A third experiment involved people who had Covid-19 at one point in the pandemic and knew how they got sick after being exposed to Covid. Those who were exposed by a friend or family member were much less likely to think that they’d get it again when compared to those who got sick after exposure by an acquaintance or stranger.
The fourth study compared how people with a strong sense of boundaries felt about their risk of catching Covid when visiting a favorite burger joint. Those who clearly categorized others into a friend or acquaintance category were less hesitant to go out to eat with a friend rather than an acquaintance. Those with blurrier boundaries — whether the person was a friend or an acquaintance — didn’t have their choice to dine indoors impacted in this kind of risky situation.
The fifth experiment looked at people’s friendships and factored in political ideology. Earlier research has shown that politically conservative people draw sharper distinctions between who is a friend and who is an acquaintance.
In that experiment, people were asked to imagine going to a favorite coffee shop by themselves, with a close friend or an acquaintance. They were asked how crowded they thought the coffee shop would be and how likely they thought they’d get sick after being exposed to someone there. They were also asked how they would describe themselves politically. Conservatives thought the coffee shop would be less crowded and they’d be less likely to get sick if they were going with a friend rather than if they were going with an acquaintance.
“The people who had the clearest boundaries of who is a close friend and who they are distant from show the greatest friend shield effect and feel more invulnerable to Covid,” De Vries said.
In total, these studies repeatedly seem to show that people just aren’t good at perceiving risks when friends are involved, even if the risk was beyond this person in their social circle. This is what the study called an “irrational potentially dangerous bias,” since limited interaction with others is the most protective behavior in a pandemic.
Kaileigh Angela Byrne, who did not work on these studies but has conducted research on risk taking in the pandemic, said these experiments made “really interesting reading” and build on work that shows “when trust is high, risk perception is low.”
“Risk seems less threatening when it’s associated with something positive, like a friend or friends, so it makes sense that going to a favorite coffee shop with friends, even in the height of a pandemic, would feel okay, even if it really isn’t,” said Byrne, an assistant professor of psychology at Clemson University.
Byrne’s research has also found that people who identify as conservatives have a decreased perceived risk for engaging in social activities during the pandemic. In part, she said, this is because the pandemic was politicized, and their strong sense of boundaries about who is a friend further reduces their perceived risk.
The studies, she said, seemed to create realistic scenarios, and while they are experiments, “there is a fair connection between intention and actual behavior.”
Byrne believes the designers of public health campaigns should keep this research in mind. It’s good for people’s mental health to stay connected with friends, but people should be encouraged to meet in safer spaces such as at a park or some other outdoor venue, she said.
“I think it is certainly possible to maintain social interaction in a pandemic, while still making efforts to reduce the risk of infection,” Byrne said.
Some public health guidance encouraged people to limit interaction to close circles of friends, but De Vries and Lee hope their study will inform public health policy going forward. People should be reminded to be careful even with close friends.
“We would like a more holistic response,” Lee said. “Risk perception was more neglected in the current pandemic strategy.”
“Hopefully, we will never need this information in the future and we won’t have another pandemic, but if we do, we should take this into account. Perception matters,” Lee added.
‘Black Panther’ Director Ryan Coogler wrongly targeted as bank robber
Bank staffers mistakenly thought Ryan Coogler was staging a robbery, so they called cops, and the famed director actually ended up in handcuffs, briefly.
According to an Atlanta PD report, obtained by TMZ, Coogler was detained after stopping in a Bank of America to make a transaction back in January – a completely legal transaction but that’s not how one teller took it.
Coogler walked in rocking shades and a COVID face mask – not uncommon, of course – but he handed the teller a withdrawal slip that had a note written on the back.
We’re told his message read, “I would like to withdraw $12,000 cash from my checking account. Please do the money count somewhere else. I’d like to be discreet.” Understandable, considering the amount of money he was getting but this led to the teller thinking something suspicious was going down, and cops were called for an attempted robbery.
When officers arrived, they detained 2 people waiting outside for Ryan in an SUV and then went in and brought the director himself out in handcuffs.
After an investigation, the police say this was all just a huge mistake and the fault lies with the BoA employee, who’s described in the report as a pregnant Black woman.
According to the report, when the teller went to make the transaction on her computer, it triggered some sort of an alert. So, she told her boss Coogler was attempting to rob the bank, and they called 911.
In the end, cops realized this was a screw-up, and Ryan had actually done nothing wrong. Sounds like Ryan wasn’t too pleased. The report notes he asked for badge numbers of all the responding officers once everyone was released.
He’s been in GA a lot over the past year, filming the sequel to “Black Panther,” which itself has been a drama-filled process with cast injuries and alleged COVID conspiracy talk. And now…this.
Origin of rocket on course to slam into moon wrongly identified
The object now on target to hit the moon was first made public by Bill Gray, an independent researcher focused on orbital dynamics and the developer of astronomical software. He identified it in 2015 as the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon rocket, used that same year to launch the US Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR.
The object, initially called WE0913A by asteroid spotters, had gone past the moon two days after DSCOVR’s launch, he said.
“I and others came to accept the identification with the second stage as correct. The object had about the brightness we would expect, and had showed up at the expected time and moving in a reasonable orbit,” Gray said on his website.
A new identification
Over the weekend, however, Gray said he had gotten the object’s origins wrong after communicating with Jon Giorgini of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which doesn’t track space junk but does keep careful track of a lot of active spacecraft, including DSCOVR.
“Jon pointed out that JPL’s Horizons system showed that the DSCOVR spacecraft’s trajectory did not go particularly close to the moon. It would be a little strange if the second stage went right past the moon, while DSCOVR was in another part of the sky. There’s always some separation, but this was suspiciously large,” Gray said.
“Analysis led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies indicates the object expected to impact the far side of the Moon March 4 is likely the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 booster launched in 2014,” according to a NASA statement released Monday.
“It is not a SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage from a mission in 2015 as previously reported. This update results from analysis of the object’s orbits in the 2016 — 2017 timeframe.”
Gray said he subsequently reviewed his data and has now landed on a different explanation: He said that the object was the third stage of the Chinese Long March 3C rocket used to launch its lunar orbiter in 2014.
The rocket stage is expected to hit the moon at 7:26 a.m. ET on March 4. However, the impact will be on the far side of the moon and not visible from Earth. The rocket will likely disintegrate on impact and create a crater about 10 to 20 meters (32.8 feet to 65.6 feet) across.
Need for official monitoring of space junk
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said identifying space junk is “never easy” in deep-space orbit, but he said Gray’s new identification was likely right. “I’d give at least 80% and maybe 90% odds.”
He explained, “It’s especially hard for these things in chaotic deep space orbits where you pick something up several years after it was last seen and try and backtrack it to match it with a known mission.”
McDowell said the confusion over the identity of the rocket stage highlighted the need for NASA and other official agencies to be monitoring deep space junk more closely, rather than relying on limited resources of private individuals and academics.
There are about 30 to 50 lost deep-space objects like the rocket stage that have been missing for years, but no space agencies have systematically kept track of space debris so far away from Earth, he said.
“It’s not like LEO (low Earth orbit) stuff where the traffic is high so junk is a danger to other spacecraft. But you’d think it would be a good idea to know where we have dumped things.”
He added, “It’s not a very high priority, but you would think the world could afford to hire at least one person to do this properly, and maybe require space agencies to make public their deep space trajectories.”
More spacecraft are going into this sort of orbit in the future, Gray said, and some thought should be put into keeping “outer space clean.” There are simple steps that government agencies and corporations launching rockets could take such as making the last known orbital data elements publicly available.
Ben Affleck Hit Back At Accusations That He “Blamed” Jennifer Garner For His Alcoholism And Said That He Was Wrongly Made Out To Be An “Awful Guy” – BuzzFeed News
- Ben Affleck Hit Back At Accusations That He “Blamed” Jennifer Garner For His Alcoholism And Said That He Was Wrongly Made Out To Be An “Awful Guy” BuzzFeed News
- Ben Affleck responds to ‘not true’ media coverage of Stern interview: ‘It’s the exact opposite of who I am’ Yahoo Entertainment
- Ben Affleck Addresses Response to Howard Stern Interview and Talks About Batman & George Clooney Jimmy Kimmel Live
- Ben Affleck Addresses Jennifer Garner Divorce Comments: ‘The Exact Opposite of Who I Am’ PEOPLE
- Ben Affleck says he felt ‘trapped’ in his marriage to Jennifer Garner CNN
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Alice Sebold Apologizes to Man Wrongly Convicted of Raping Her
Alice Sebold, the best-selling author of the memoir “Lucky” and the novel “The Lovely Bones,” apologized publicly on Tuesday to a man who was wrongly convicted of raping her in 1982 after she had identified him in court as her attacker.
The apology came eight days after the conviction of the man, Anthony J. Broadwater, was vacated by a state court judge in Syracuse, N.Y., who concluded, in consultation with the local district attorney and Mr. Broadwater’s lawyers, that the case against him was deeply flawed.
As a result of the conviction, Mr. Broadwater, 61, spent 16 years in prison before being released in 1998 and was forced to register as a sex offender.
In a statement posted on the website Medium, Ms. Sebold, who described the rape and the ensuing trial in “Lucky,” said she regretted having “unwittingly” played a part in “a system that sent an innocent man to jail.”
“I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you,” she wrote. “And I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will. It has taken me these past eight days to comprehend how this could have happened.”
Ms. Sebold’s statement was reported earlier by The Associated Press. Her publisher, Scribner, said she was not available for additional comment.
Scribner said last week that it had no plans to update the memoir’s text based on Mr. Broadwater’s exoneration. But on Tuesday, the company said it would cease distribution of “Lucky” while it and Ms. Sebold “consider how the work might be revised.”
Mr. Broadwater, in an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, said he was “relieved and grateful” for Ms. Sebold’s apology.
“It took a lot of courage, and I guess she’s brave and weathering through the storm like I am,” he said. “To make that statement, it’s a strong thing for her to do, understanding that she was a victim and I was a victim too.”
Ms. Sebold was 18 and a student at Syracuse University when the rape that led to Mr. Broadwater’s wrongful conviction occurred.
In “Lucky,” which was published in 1999, she gives a searing account of the assault and of the trauma she subsequently endured. She also writes in detail about the trial and about how she became convinced she had recognized Mr. Broadwater, whom she referred to with a pseudonym in the book, as her attacker after passing him on street months after the rape.
The memoir chronicles mishaps in the case, including the fact that a composite sketch of her attacker, based on her description, did not resemble him. The book also describes Ms. Sebold’s fear that the prosecution might be derailed after she identified a different man, not Mr. Broadwater, in a police lineup.
Later, she identified Mr. Broadwater as her attacker in court. After a brief trial, he was convicted of first-degree rape and five other charges.
“Lucky” started Ms. Sebold’s career and paved the way for her breakout novel, “The Lovely Bones,” which also centers on sexual assault. It has sold millions of copies and was made into a feature film.
Although Ms. Sebold gave Mr. Broadwater the fictitious name Gregory Madison in the memoir, he said he had been forced to suffer the stigma of being branded a sex offender even after being released from prison.
He had always insisted he was innocent and was denied parole several times for refusing to acknowledge guilt. He took two polygraph tests, decades apart, with experts who determined that his account was truthful.
He tried repeatedly over the years to hire lawyers to help prove his innocence. Those efforts were unsuccessful until recently, when a planned film adaptation of “Lucky” helped raise new questions about the case.
Timothy Mucciante, who was working as executive producer on the film version, said in an interview with The Times that he had started to doubt Ms. Sebold’s account after reading the memoir and the script earlier this year.
Mr. Mucciante said he had been struck by how little evidence was presented at Mr. Broadwater’s trial. He said he had been fired from the production after raising questions about the story. (The feature film was dropped after losing its financing, Variety reported.)
“It seemed like Anthony was wronged,” Mr. Mucciante told The Times.
Mr. Mucciante hired a private investigator, Dan Myers, who had spent 20 years with the Sheriff’s Office in Onondaga County, N.Y., before retiring as a detective in 2020. After finding and interviewing Mr. Broadwater, Mr. Myers became convinced he had been falsely accused.
Mr. Myers, who shares office space with a law firm, recommended that Mr. Broadwater hire one of the lawyers there, J. David Hammond. Mr. Hammond reviewed the investigation and agreed that there was a strong argument for setting the conviction aside.
In their motion to vacate the conviction, Mr. Hammond and a second lawyer, Melissa K. Swartz, argued that the case rested entirely on two flawed elements: Ms. Sebold’s courtroom identification of Mr. Broadwater and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
Mr. Mucciante’s production company, Red Badge Films, is now working on a documentary about the case, “Unlucky,” with a second production company, Red Hawk Films. Mr. Broadwater and those who helped vacate the conviction are also participating.
In her statement, Ms. Sebold expressed sorrow that in seeking justice for herself, she had harmed Mr. Broadwater beyond the 16 years he was incarcerated “in ways that further serve to wound and stigmatize, nearly a full life sentence.”
She also sounded anguished over a question that remains unresolved.
“I will also grapple,” she wrote, “with the fact that my rapist will, in all likelihood, never be known.”
‘Out of control’: Small Australian firm wrongly named as Taliban hashish partner
SYDNEY, Nov 25 (Reuters) – A small Australian medical consulting firm got caught up in an unexpected publicity storm on Thursday after being wrongly named as agreeing with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to bankroll a $450 million hashish processing plant in the Central Asian country.
A report by Afghanistan’s Pajhwok Afghan News said representatives of Australia-based Cpharm had met with counter-narcotic officials at the Ministry of Interior to discuss producing medicines and creams at the factory, offering a legal use of cannabis, which is widespread there.
The report was picked up by a host of global outlets including the Times of London, which ran its own story naming the Australian company. Verified Twitter accounts linked to the BBC and Middle Eastern news outlet Al Arabybia repeated the claim about the Australians.
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But Cpharm Australia, a family business with 17 staff from the regional centre of Maitland, has never spoken to the Taliban and has no dealings overseas or involving cannabis, it told Reuters.
“We’re just trying to work out what we’re going to do to stop it,” Cpharm Australia’s chief financial officer, Tony Gabites, said by phone from the company’s headquarters, located 166 km (100 miles) from Sydney.
“We’ve had probably 40 or 50 calls today. It’s just out of control and it’s just all lies, media guys … not doing any due diligence on what they want to publish,” he said.
Gabites suspected the reports stemmed from a tweet from a Taliban-linked account which named a company called Cpharm, referring to another organisation elsewhere in the world with a similar name.
Cpharm Australia provides medical advice about pharmaceutical products and is not a manufacturer so would not take on a manufacturing contract in any case. It also would not be able to raise $450 million, Gabites added.
The company may take legal recourse if it lost business due to wrongly reported Taliban dealings – a potential violation of sanctions – but did not expect to be impacted long-term.
“Most of the companies we deal with would look at that article and laugh,” Gabites said.
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Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Leslie Adler
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Mared Foulkes took own life after being wrongly told she failed exam
A British pharmacy student tragically took her own life after being wrongly told she had failed an exam and could not progress to the third year of her degree, an inquest into her death found this week.
Mared Foulkes, 21, of Menai Bridge, Anglesey, received an email from Cardiff University on July 8, 2020 indicating that she’d failed the assessment, the BBC reported.
However, the results email did not include the fact that she had passed a retake of the exam, according to the outlet.
The evening Mared received the email, she drove to a bridge in north Wales, where her body was discovered, according to the report.
Her test result was later updated to a pass, but it was too late, Wales Online reported.
North West and North Wales Coroner Katie Sutherland determined Thursday that Mared’s cause of death was suicide, according to the local reports.
During the conclusion of the inquest, Mared’s parents Glyngwyn and Iona Foulkes said they were in “disbelief” at the “complicated and confusing” way the university dealt with its students, The Daily Post reported.
“We are sad at the outcome that could and should have been so different,” they said. “Now we’re left with memories, photographs and memories of her kindness, her fine qualities, gestures and of all that she gave to our family, her brother and her friends. We cry easily and often, our tears are uncontrollable and exhausting when unprompted memories remind us that we are totally bereft.”
“We’re not the first parents to express disbelief at the poor communications between universities and students and we’re sorrowful that we won’t be the last,” the grieving parents added. “We entrusted her wellbeing to the university and now we very much hope that Cardiff University will attend to the coroner’s prevention of future death report.”
The coroner said that Cardiff University’s system for informing students of their results could be confusing — and urged the institution to look at urgent improvements, according to the BBC.
Prof Mark Gumbleton, head of Cardiff’s school of pharmacy, said Mared took her first practical test on March 26 as part of a module called formulation sciences.
She failed, but passed the retake on April 24 — which wasn’t accounted for in the email.
Gumbledon called the emailing system standard practice, but added: “Lessons are always to be learned.”
“We acted within the regulations, but we need to move towards a simpler system of ratifying grades,” he said. “The challenge is to avoid a situation where we create confusion. I believe the university is looking at this and changes are going to take place.”
Cardiff University said its “thoughts and sympathies” were with Mared’s family and friends.
“Whilst we believe we acted within university regulations, we fully accept that lessons can and should be learnt,” the university said. “Changes are already being considered and we will cooperate fully with the coroner’s verdict.”