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Class bullying clue to girl's death
4/29/2014 5:12:34 PM
- Two of Cofreces' alleged attackers were her classmates, officials say
- The 17-year-old student went home after attack, was taken to hospital the next day
- A friend said one of the alleged attackers told the victim she had a snobby face
(CNN) -- Authorities are investigating whether it was an extreme case of bullying that led to the death of a 17-year-old student in Argentina, after she was attacked by two women and another girl last week.
Naira Cofreces died Sunday of multiple injuries, including bruising to the left side of her brain, officials said.
"First there was a verbal altercation and then she was kicked, punched and Naira's head was smashed against a wall," Judge Maria Laura Durante told Telam, the Argentine state news agency. The judge also said this is a case of "aggravated homicide because there might've been premeditation."
Officials say the teen was attacked last Wednesday at about 10 p.m., after leaving the night school she attended in the city of Junín, about 260 kilometers (161 miles) west of Buenos Aires. Her attackers, ages 17, 22 and 29, were waiting for her after school. The two younger ones were her classmates. All three have been arrested and charged with aggravated homicide, authorities said.
"There's no clear motive. We have testimony that suggests the motive could've been another girl or because they (the victim and her friends) acted as if they were more beautiful than the rest and dressed better than them," Durante told Telam.
A close friend of Cofreces told CNN affiliate Channel 9 the dispute started over differences that the victim and her alleged attackers had over looks and demeanor.
"She (one of the attackers) would tell her that she had a snobby face, an old woman's face, that she thought she was more beautiful than her and that she walked as if she were a model. That's how the whole problem started," said the friend, who was not identified because she's a minor.
Cofreces went home after the attack, but was taken to Agudos General Hospital the following morning. "She came the day after she was beaten up, we did a tomography and discovered a big hematoma on the left side of her brain, so we decided to operate," Dr. Carlos Garbe told Telam.
A new tomography revealed more bruising of the brain. leading to a second surgery. "After the second surgery, she continued to show complications which worsened until she died," Garbe said.
Cofreces was pronounced dead Sunday night, four days after the attack.
The incident has caused a public outcry in Argentina. Nestor Ribet, education undersecretary for the Buenos Aires Province, says he has sent counselors to Junín to work with students and their families at the school where the attack took place.
"We're talking about the death of a 17-year-old child. Nobody can explain why this happened," Ribet told Telam. "There is really nothing that can explain this."
Why you'll hate Internet 'fast lane'
4/29/2014 1:02:45 PM
- The FCC might allow Internet service providers to charge more for a "fast lane"
- Corynne McSherry: High costs will go to customers; Internet competition will be stifled
- She says other advanced countries pay far less and get faster service than Americans
- McSherry: On May 15, the public can weigh in on FCC's decision and voice concerns
Editor's note: Corynne McSherry is the intellectual property director at Electronic Frontier Foundation. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- Recently, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, came under fire for reportedly proposing exceedingly weak "open Internet rules." If the reports are correct, the FCC will allow broadband providers like Comcast to make special deals that give some companies preferential treatment, as long as those deals are "commercially reasonable."
In other words, rather then requiring broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic more or less equally, the FCC will permit them to create an Internet "fast lane" and shake down content providers like Netflix, Google and Amazon for the right to travel in it.
Guess who will really end up paying for the fast lane? Yep -- you, the customers.
The price will be higher than you think. Not only will you have to pay more for the services you already use, but you will also lose out on emerging services that will be crushed by the new costs.
YouTube and Netflix may be able to "pay to play." But innovative competitors -- the next Facebook, Twitter or YouTube being dreamed up in someone's garage right now -- may not.
The proposed rules aren't all bad. The FCC will also require ISPs to be more transparent about the deals they make so customers will know what they are getting. The FCC will also caution ISPs against making deals that favor their own affiliated businesses (we're looking at you, Comcast -- no special favors for your friends at NBC Universal).
Unfortunately, even "transparency" is tougher to enforce than many might think, because so much of our connectivity depends on secret agreements between various kinds of Internet service providers.
The devil is in the details. The good news is that we will have a chance to look at those details in a few weeks and tell the FCC what we think. The FCC will be voting on the new rules at its May 15 meeting. If it votes to adopt them, it must publish the proposed rules in advance and respond to public concerns about them. The problem is that most people don't know how this process works, and so they don't participate. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation is building a tool that will make that easier; visit our site next month at www.eff.org)
The Internet is too important to leave to bureaucrats who seem more beholden to the ISPs than the public. We need to let the FCC know we will not tolerate rules that let ISPs pick and choose how well Internet users can connect to one another.
If we really want to stop net discrimination, we need to foster a genuinely competitive market for Internet access. Right now, subscribers have few ISP options in many markets. If subscribers and customers had adequate information about their options and could vote with their feet -- i.e., switch providers -- ISPs would have strong incentives to treat all network traffic fairly.
Moreover, they would also have an incentive to improve our Internet speeds. Most Americans don't realize it, but the United States is falling behind when it comes to high-speed Internet. We pay much more for much less than subscribers in other developed countries like Sweden, South Korea and Japan.
Subscribers in those countries are getting Internet service that is 100 times faster than the fastest connection in the United States -- for a fraction of the average U.S. cable bill. That's appalling. We can do better, but only if we start demanding more from ISPs.
Already, our lagging Internet speeds are likely to have serious consequences. "What's at stake is whether the new jobs, new ideas, new services of the 21st century will come from the United States or they'll come from Stockholm, Seoul, Beijing, where kids are already playing in the virtual sandboxes of these very high capacity networks," noted Susan Crawford, a legal scholar who has served on President Obama's science and tech team.
Our ISPs have no incentive to invest in building powerful, competitive, networks. Why should they? It's not like their customers are going anywhere.
Fortunately, efforts are under way to address this. For example, all around the country, cities are investing in their own broadband networks, some successfully. Fostering strong alternatives in high-speed Internet access won't be easy, and community broadband alone won't be the panacea. But it's a start, and a movement the FCC should support.
We'll need more experiments like these if we want the Internet to continue to be an extraordinary platform for free expression, innovation and commerce. So let's make sure the FCC hears us loud and clear: Reject "pay to play" and resist monopolies so that everyone benefits, not just the powerful Internet service providers.
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Execution in U.S. halted after inmate's vein 'exploded'
4/30/2014 4:54:27 AM
- NEW: Anti-death penalty advocate says the state government "acted in sin"
- Witnesses say the inmate moved, seemingly tried to talk well after being given drugs
- The inmate, Clayton Lockett, later suffered what appeared to be a heart attack -- and died
- "The doctor observed the line and determined that the line had blown," an official says
(CNN) -- A vein on an Oklahoma inmate "exploded" in the middle of his execution Tuesday, prompting authorities to abruptly halt the process and call off another execution later in the day as they try to figure out what went wrong.
The inmate, Clayton Lockett, died 43 minutes after the first injection was administered -- according to reporter Courtney Francisco of CNN affiliate KFOR who witnessed the ordeal -- of an apparent heart attack, Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton said.
That first drug, midazolam, is supposed to render a person unconscious. Seven minutes later, Lockett was still conscious. About 16 minutes in, after his mouth and then his head moved, he seemingly tried to get up and tried to talk, saying "man" aloud, according to the KFOR account.
Other reporters -- including Cary Aspinwall of the Tulsa World newspaper -- similarly claimed that Lockett was "still alive," having lifted his head while prison officials lowered the blinds at that time so that onlookers couldn't see what was going on.
Dean Sanderford, Lockett's attorney, said that he saw his client's body start "to twitch (and) he mumbled something." Then "the convulsing got worse, it looked like his whole upper body was trying to lift off the gurney."
Yet the office of Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin issued a statement indicating "execution officials said Lockett remained unconscious after the lethal injection drugs were administered."
After the ordeal, Patton told reporters that Lockett, a convicted murderer, had been sedated and then was given the second and third drugs in protocol.
"There was some concern at that time that the drugs were not having the effect, so the doctor observed the line and determined that the line had blown," he said, before elaborating that Lockett's vein had "exploded."
"I notified the attorney general's office, the governor's office of my intent to stop the execution and requested a stay for 14 days for the second execution scheduled this afternoon," said Patton, referring to the execution of Charles Warner.
Dianne Clay, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general's office, said Tuesday night that her office was "gathering information on what happened in order to evaluate."
The state's governor ordered an investigation and issued an executive order granting a 2-week delay in executions.
"I have asked the Department of Corrections to conduct a full review of Oklahoma's execution procedures to determine what happened and why during this evening's execution of Clayton Derrell Lockett," Fallin said in a statement.
The constitutionality of lethal injection drugs and drug cocktails has made headlines since last year, when European manufacturers -- including Denmark-based Lundbeck, which manufactures pentobarbital -- banned U.S. prisons from using their drugs in executions. Thirty-two states were left to find new drug protocols.
Opinion: End secrecy in lethal injections
According to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, its protocol includes midazolam, which causes unconsciousness, vecuronium bromide, which stops respiration, and potassium chloride, which is meant to stop the heart.
Lockett was convicted in 2000 of a bevy of crimes, including first-degree murder, first-degree rape, kidnapping and robbery in a 1999 home invasion and crime spree that left Stephanie Nieman dead and two people injured.
His final moments gave new life, at least temporarily, to Charles Warner.
Warner was convicted in 2003 for the first-degree rape and murder six years earlier of his then-girlfriend's 11-month-old daughter, Adrianna Waller.
The state decided to put off his execution set for Tuesday. But it has given no indication this delay will be indefinite despite calls from the likes of Adam Leathers, co-chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who accused the state of having "tortured a human being in an unconstitutional experimental act of evil."
"Tonight, our state government has acted in sin and violated God's law," Leathers said. "We will pray for their souls."
Notably, Lockett and Warner -- who were both held at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester -- had been at the center of a court fight over the drugs used in their execution.
They'd initially challenged the state Department of Corrections' unwillingness to divulge which drugs would be used, only for the department to budge and disclosed the substances.
But Lockett and Warner didn't stop there, taking issue with the state's so-called secrecy provision forbidding it from disclosing the identities of anyone involved in the execution process or suppliers of any drugs or medical equipment.
Oklahoma's high court initially issued stays on their executions, only to lift those stays last week in ruling the two men had no right to know the source of the drugs intended to kill them.
Warner's attorney, Madeline Cohen, said that further legal action can be expected given how "something went horribly awry" Tuesday.
"Oklahoma cannot carry out further executions until there's transparency in this process," Cohen said. "...I think they should all be looking at themselves hard. Oklahoma needs to take a step back."
Death penalty Fast Facts
Death penalty in the United States gradually declining
CNN's Eliott C. McLaughlin and Ross Levitt contributed to this report.
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