A Mafia hit man who is said to hate "rats" is under suspicion in the slaying of former Boston crime boss and longtime FBI informant James "Whitey" Bulger, who was found dead just hours after he was transferred to a West Virginia prison, a former investigator briefed on the matter said Wednesday.
The official said that Fotios "Freddy" Geas and at least one other inmate are believed to have been involved in Bulger's killing. The longtime investigator was not authorised to discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.
AFFECTING: Journalists around the world read Jamal Khashoggi’s last column in this video. The readers included CNN’s Jake Tapper, The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah, The NYT’s Nick Kristof, writer Mona Eltahawy, columnist Barkha Dutt and The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan. (Here’s the text.)
IMPUNITY: The Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 324
journalists "have been silenced through murder worldwide" in the past
decade. In 14 countries, journalists have been slain with impunity, Poynter’s
Kristen Hare reports
The mayor lives five blocks away. He said Fred Rogers, of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," had lived three blocks away. David Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, lives three blocks away.
Mayor Bill Peduto said his police had no idea there was a man
with an AR-15 and three handguns with such hatred toward Jews and fear of
immigrants that he would enter a synagogue and kill 11 people. Among the
fallen: two developmentally disabled brothers, an 88-year-old retired
accountant who showed up in case he was needed to lead services and a
97-year-old woman taken these days by her daughter, who escaped with a bullet
wound in her arm.
A Holocaust survivor, who said saboteurs stopped his
train to Auschwitz during World War II, missed Saturday's slaughter only
because he pulled into his nearby handicapped parking
spot four minutes late.
"Because this was our neighborhood, caught in the crossfire
of the strains of the global village, and for once — sadly, so very sadly — the hurt was ours, and the victims were ours, and the
need to heal is ours," wrote the Post-Gazette's Shribman. The
spotlight shone here, he wrote, and "we know, given the tempo of
tragedy in these times that are ours, that the title won’t be ours for
long."
"Unless we see courageous action, the Squirrel Hill
massacre will be just another on the list, albeit one with an asterisk for
me," agreed David Michael Slater, who grew up across the street from the
synagogue, in an first-person essay for the AP. "We’re a ruptured and
bleeding nation in a cage of our own making. I only wish I had the magic key to
unlock our hardening hearts."
Slater concluded with Mr. Rogers' words: "Won’t you be my
neighbor?"
A look at the suspected gunman's social past found many clues to
violent views and raised this question, asked by Amanda Carpenter on CNN: Why
are hate-mongers allowed to spew and rile themselves up for violence on social
media? In this case, she may have been referring to Gab, the social
network preferred by neo-Nazis and the sort who get bounced from other social
sites. (See more below.)
There's a lot to process from the weekend attack in Pittsburgh's
Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Here are a few highlights:
— The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette dove into Gab in the wake of the
shooting, finding it "reeling,
defiant."
— Snapshots of the fallen. The accused shooter faces 29 criminal counts, including hate crimes and 11 counts of murder.
— Snapshots of the fallen. The accused shooter faces 29 criminal counts, including hate crimes and 11 counts of murder.
— A survivor's tale: He thought it was falling furniture.
— White House: Don't link Pittsburgh killing to our rhetoric.
— Mayor Peduto: President Trump has the wrong idea with bolstering synagogue security as a
response. "The approach that we need to be looking at is how we take the
guns, which is the common denominator of every mass shooting in America, out of
the hands of those who are looking to express hatred through murder,” Peduto
said.
— Stronger Than Hate: After the synagogue slaughter, Tim
Hindes came up with a new version of the Pittsburgh Steelers logo to show
support. He shared it to Facebook. Soon, it circulated worldwide. Every share,
he said, is a victory for tolerance.
— The Jewish resettlement agency slandered by
the arrested gunman, Robert Bowers, has brought in families of many faiths
over its 130-plus years, including those of novelist Gary Shteyngart,
Google co-founder Sergey Brin and WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum. "They
bought our airline tickets," from the Soviet Union in 1980, said
"CBS This Morning" co-host Bianna Golodryga, who was 18 months old at the
time.
Quick hits
GUN-STORE AD ATOP SYNAGOGUE SLAUGHTER STORY: The Providence
Journal apologized for the placement of a gun-store ad
atop its Pittsburgh mass shooting story. “The timing of the front page
advertising stick-on is very unfortunate given the horrible news
event," Janet Hasson, regional vice president and publisher of the
paper, said in a statement. (h/t Jill Geisler)
TOO MANY MASS SHOOTINGS: The Houston Chronicle had intended to
have a front page story Sunday marking nearly a year after a gunman killed 26
people and wounded 20 in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The Pittsburgh
shooting took that spot, editor Nancy Barnes tweeted.
FACEBOOK MISCHIEF: The social network
deleted posts from readers who wanted to share a New York Times article on
famine in Yemen, which threatens 13 million people. Why? Facebook initially
said a photo of a severely malnourished girl violated its terms of service; after public
outrage, the social network restored the posts.
WHY RUN THAT IMAGE
ON YEMEN?: The NYT explained why it choose to run Tyler Hicks’
jarring photos from Yemen, which were more unsettling and jarring that it
customarily allows. What is happening in Yemen is no natural disaster; the
famine, disease and ruined lives are the decision of neighboring leaders waging
war and enforcing an embargo against Yemen. Of the photos, the NYT wrote: “They
are brutal. But they are also brutally honest. They reveal the horror that is
Yemen today. You may choose not to look at them. But we thought you should be
the ones to decide.”
SLAIN: A radio host and engineer in a news truck was fatally shot by
gunmen in Mexico's Guerrero state. Gabriel Soriano was 40, wrote Teresa Mioli for
the UT Knight Center’s Journalism in the Americas blog.
MILO: Instagram deleted a post from Milo Yiannopoulos praising the recent mail bombs sent to prominent
Democratic officials and donors, The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reported.
NO MORE: Caitlyn Jenner renounced President Trump after the
administration’s consideration to remove legal protection for transgender
people. “I must learn from my mistakes and move forward,” Jenner said.
HAHA: Czech president “joked” about inviting members of the press to
a banquet — at the Saudi Embassy. The group Reporters
Without Borders demanded an apology and added: “It is sickening to see him take
his cynicism to this level.” Last year, the same president said journalists
should be liquidated because there are too many of them. He also greeted
journalists at a press conference with a dummy Kalashnikov.
LEAVING McCLATCHY: Tim Grieve, vice president of news for McClatchy, said he’ll step down after the midterm
elections. Grieve said he’ll be starting a new venture in the media space.
CEO Craig Forman will supervise the newspaper company’s four regional editors
after Grieve’s departure, with the assistance of Andrew Pergam, vice president
of video and new ventures. Pergam will head real-time news, the reinvention
team and the news desks.
HIRED: Yara Bayoumy of Reuters is moving to become national security
editor of The Atlantic. Bayoumy worked on the security team at Reuters after
more than a decade for the news service, including a stint in Yemen.
TEEN
POWER: A
14-year-old cartoonist from Manhattan may have prompted the Scholastic Art and
Writing Contest to alter terms so winners could retain the
copyright to their work. Sasha Matthews sent a tweet to the organization and
decided to withhold her entry after seeing this restrictive wording. A reply
said the tweet generated a lot of discussion — and now the terms have been
changed. “I was hopeful that they would do something about it, I didn’t really
think that they would but they did,” Matthews told the West Side Rag’s Lisa
Kava. “And I’m very happy.”