Suspect in Amsterdam stabbing rampage was Ukrainian, police say
The man suspected of stabbing five people in central Amsterdam on Thursday is a 30-year old Ukrainian national from the eastern Donetsk region, local police said on Saturday.
The man is suspected of having wounded five random people, using multiple knives, during a stabbing rampage near the busy Dam Square on Thursday afternoon.
He was arrested quickly after the incident with the help of bystanders, sustaining an injury to his leg.
The man, who police said had checked in to an Amsterdam hotel on Wednesday, will be brought before a judge on April 1 to decide on his further detention.
Police on Saturday were still unclear about the motive for the stabbing and said investigations were ongoing.
The victims were a 26-year-old man from Poland, a 73-year-old Belgian woman, a 19-year-old woman from Amsterdam and a 67-year-old woman and a 69-year-old man, both American nationals.
The Polish man had been released from hospital by Friday, while the other victims were still in hospital but in a stable condition, police said.
Meanwhile The Mayor of Amsterdam has given a 'hero's medal' to an English tourist who chased a knifeman through busy alleys and pinned him to the ground, bringing an end to his rampage.
Footage shows a man, in casual clothes, kneeling on top of the suspect and threatening to punch him as he waits for police while shoppers file past him near the central Dam's Square on Thursday.
In a message on Instagram, Mayor Femke Halsema thanked him for his heroic actions.
He received a hero's badge in her official residence, she told reporters.
"He is a very modest British man," Halsema told Amsterdam news channel AT5. "He has no desire to become famous. He is now mainly concerned with the victims, he feels responsible for them."
She said the man made a decision in 'a split second for which there should be a lot of appreciation'.
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Hamilton Spectator
an hour ago
- Hamilton Spectator
ICE is using no-bid contracts, boosting big firms, to get more detention beds
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — Leavenworth, Kansas, occupies a mythic space in American crime, its name alone evoking a short hand for serving hard time. The federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term 'the big house.' Now Kansas' oldest city could soon be detaining far less famous people, migrants swept up in President Donald Trump's promise of mass deportations of those living in the U.S. illegally. The federal government has signed a deal with the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp. to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued without seeking competitive bids. ICE has cited a 'compelling urgency' for thousands more detention beds, and its efforts have sent profit estimates soaring for politically connected private companies, including CoreCivic, based in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and another giant firm, The Geo Group Inc., headquartered in southern Florida. That push faces resistance. Leavenworth filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic after it tried to reopen without city officials signing off on the deal, quoting a federal judge's past description of the now-shuttered prison as 'a hell hole.' The case in Leavenworth serves as another test of the limits of the Republican president's unusually aggressive tactics to force migrant removals. To get more detention beds, the Trump administration has modified dozens of existing agreements with contractors and used no-bid contracts. One pays $73 million to a company led by former federal immigration officials for 'immigration enforcement support teams' to handle administrative tasks, such as helping coordinate removals, triaging complaints or telling ICE if someone is a risk to community safety. Just last week , Geo Group announced that ICE modified a contract for an existing detention center in southeastern Georgia so that the company could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants — and earn $66 million in annual revenue. 'Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,' said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger during an earnings call last month with shareholders. A tax-cutting and budget reconciliation measure approved last month by the House includes $45 billion over four years for immigrant detention , a threefold spending increase. The Senate is now considering that legislation. Declaring an emergency to expedite contracts When Trump started his second term in January, CoreCivic and Geo had around 20 idle facilities, partly because of sentencing reforms that reduced prison populations . But the Trump administration wants to more than double the existing 41,000 beds for detaining migrants to at least 100,000 beds and — if private prison executives' predictions are accurate — possibly to more than 150,000. ICE declared a national emergency on the U.S. border with Mexico as part of its justification for authorizing nine five-year contracts for a combined 10,312 beds without 'Full and Open Competition.' Only three of the nine potential facilities were listed in ICE's document: Leavenworth, a 2,560-bed CoreCivic-owned facility in California City, California, and an 1,800-bed Geo-owned prison in Baldwin, Michigan. The agreement for the Leavenworth facility hasn't been released, nor have documents for the other two sites. CoreCivic and Geo Group officials said last month on earnings calls that ICE used what are known as letter contracts, meant to speed things up when time is critical. Charles Tiefer, a contract expert and professor emeritus of law at the University of Baltimore Law School, said letter contracts normally are reserved for minor matters, not the big changes he sees ICE making to previous agreements. 'I think that a letter contract is a pathetic way to make big important contracts,' he said. A Kansas prison town becomes a priority CoreCivic's Leavenworth facility quickly became a priority for ICE and the company because of its central location. Leavenworth, with 37,000 residents, is only 10 miles (16 kilometers) to the west of the Kansas City International Airport. The facility would hold men and women and is within ICE's area of operations for Chicago, 420 miles (676 kilometers) to the northeast. 'That would mean that people targeted in the Chicago area and in Illinois would end up going to this facility down in Kansas,' said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center. Prisons have long been an important part of Leavenworth's economy, employing hundreds of workers to guard prisoners held in two military facilities, the nation's first federal penitentiary, a Kansas correctional facility and a county jail within 6 miles (10 kilometers) of city hall. Resistance from Trump country The Leavenworth area's politics might have been expected to help CoreCivic. Trump carried its county by more than 20 percentage points in each of his three campaigns for president. But skeptical city officials argue that CoreCivic needs a special use permit to reopen its facility. CoreCivic disagrees, saying that it doesn't because it never abandoned the facility and that the permitting process would take too long. Leavenworth sued the company to force it to get one, and a state-court judge last week issued an order requiring it . An attorney for the city, Joe Hatley, said the legal fight indicates how much ill will CoreCivic generated when it held criminal suspects there for trials in federal court for the U.S. Marshals Service. In late 2021, CoreCivic stopped housing pretrial detainees in its Leavenworth facility after then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, called on the U.S. Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons . In the months before the closure, the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders detailed stabbings, suicides, a homicide and inmate rights violations in a letter to the White House . CoreCivic responded at the time that the claims were 'false and defamatory.' Vacancies among correctional officers were as high as 23%, according to a Department of Justice report from 2017. 'It was just mayhem,' recalled William Rogers, who worked as a guard at the CoreCivic facility in Leavenworth from 2016 through 2020. He said repeated assaults sent him to the emergency room three times, including once after a blow to the head that required 14 staples. The critics have included a federal judge When Leavenworth sued CoreCivic, it opened its lawsuit with a quote from U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson — an appointee of President George W. Bush, a Republican — who said of the prison: 'The only way I could describe it frankly, what's going on at CoreCivic right now is it's an absolute hell hole.' The city's lawsuit described detainees locked in showers as punishment. It said that sheets and towels from the facility clogged up the wastewater system and that CoreCivic impeded the city police force's ability to investigate sexual assaults and other violent crimes. The facility had no inmates when CoreCivic gave reporters a tour earlier this year, and it looked scrubbed top to bottom and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. One unit for inmates had a painting on one wall featuring a covered wagon. During the tour, when asked about the allegations of past problems, Misty Mackey, a longtime CoreCivic employee who was tapped to serve as warden there, apologized for past employees' experiences and said the company officials 'do our best to make sure that we learn from different situations.' ICE moves quickly across the U.S. Besides CoreCivic's Leavenworth prison, other once-shuttered facilities could come online near major immigrant population centers, from New York to Los Angeles, to help Trump fulfill his deportation plans. ICE wants to reopen existing facilities because it's faster than building new ones, said Marcela Hernandez, the organizing director for the Detention Watch Network, which has organized nationwide protests against ICE detention. Counties often lease out jail space for immigrant detention, but ICE said some jurisdictions have passed ordinances barring that. ICE has used contract modifications to reopen shuttered lockups like the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall Facility in Newark, New Jersey, and a 2,500-bed facility in Dilley, Texas, offering no explanations why new, competitively bid contracts weren't sought. The Newark facility, with its own history of problems, resumed intakes May 1, and disorder broke out at the facility Thursday night. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat who previously was arrested there and accused of trespassing, cited reports of a possible uprising, and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed four escapes. The contract modification for Dilley, which was built to hold families and resumed operations in March, calls its units 'neighborhoods' and gives them names like Brown Bear and Blue Butterfly. The financial details for the Newark and Dilley contract modifications are blacked out in online copies, as they for more than 50 other agreements ICE has signed since Trump took office. ICE didn't respond to a request for comment. From idle prisons to a 'gold rush' Private prison executives are forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars in new ICE profits. Since Trump's reelection in November, CoreCivic's stock has risen in price by 56% and Geo's by 73%. 'It's the gold rush,' Michael A. Hallett, a professor of criminal justice at the University of North Florida who studies private prisons. 'All of a sudden, demand is spiraling. And when you're the only provider that can meet demand, you can pretty much set your terms.' Geo's former lobbyist Pam Bondi is now the U.S. attorney general. It anticipates that all of its idle prisons will be activated this year, its executive chairman, George Zoley, told shareholders. CoreCivic, which along with Geo donated millions of dollars to largely GOP candidates at all levels of government and national political groups, is equally optimistic. It began daily talks with the Trump administration immediately after the election in November, said Hininger. CoreCivic officials said ICE's letter contracts provide initial funding to begin reopening facilities while the company negotiates a longer-term deal. The Leavenworth deal is worth $4.2 million a month to the company, it disclosed in a court filing. Tiefer, who served on an independent commission established to study government contracting for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said ICE is 'placing a very dicey long-term bet' because of its past problems and said ICE is giving CoreCivic 'the keys to the treasury' without competition. But financial analysts on company earnings calls have been delighted. When CoreCivic announced its letter contracts, Joe Gomes, of the financial services firm Noble Capital Markets, responded with, 'Great news.' 'Are you hiding any more of them on us?' he asked. ___ Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan. Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman in Miami and Morgan Lee, in Santa Fe, N.M., contributed reporting. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
I deserted my unit in Ukraine. Now I'm going back to war
In between last-ditch prayers to God, Volodymyr could only think of one person to blame for what he feared would be his final moments on earth. Russian mortars were hammering down on his hideout in an abandoned house on the front line in Ukraine's Donetsk region, while first-person view drones hunted for his exact position. 'I don't believe in God,' says the 23-year-old, but as the explosions shook the walls in the dead of night, he hedged his bets. Five hours earlier, he and a few other soldiers had been sent to reinforce a position they were told was 750 metres from the Russian lines, behind layers of Ukrainian defences. But when their armoured vehicle deposited them, the Russians were just 100m away – and the promised stocks of grenades, mortars and fellow infantry were nowhere to be seen. Under heavy fire, the men sprinted for cover. Internally, Volodymyr cursed his commander. This was the second poorly planned operation he had been ordered to carry out in weeks. After a bloody rescue following 12 hours of hiding, Volodymyr, known as 'Vova', told his commander to either transfer him to a different brigade or he would desert. The commander refused. So Vova simply walked away, hitch-hiking at first before taking a train home to his wife. In doing so, the former barista became one of tens of thousands of absconders, a number whose growing size has forced Ukraine to stretch its armed forces in new and elastic ways. Until September last year, soldiers who left their posts faced a prison sentence of up to 12 years. With their name added to a list for investigation by military police, they could be arrested at the post office, in the bar or trying to cross a checkpoint. Deserters from the front line faced harsher penalties than those who went AWOL from a base or on leave. But the situation on the battlefield means Ukraine must carefully husband its reserves of manpower. Vladimir Putin's forces outnumber the Ukrainian military by a factor of at least two to one, with around 2.35 million soldiers to 900,000. According to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, Moscow is now recruiting up to 50,000 men a month. With roughly a quarter of the population, Ukraine manages around 27,000. In response, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law allowing deserters to avoid punishment if they agreed to rejoin the army. Initially, they were given a deadline of Jan 1 2025. That was extended to the end of March, and then again recently to Aug 30. More than 100,000 cases of absconding have been registered with the prosecutor's office since the war began, with almost two-thirds in the last year. Kyiv cannot afford to jail so many able-bodied men – let alone shoot them, as Putin's forces have done. It has left deserters in a surprisingly powerful position, whether they present themselves to authorities – as around 6,000, including Vova, did in the first month – or are rounded up by police. Held in reserve battalions, they are visited by recruiters from various units in desperate need of manpower. Soon after the law changed, Ukraine's elite 47th Brigade published an advert specifically aimed at absconders. Men like Vova cannot be forced back to the front; they pick whichever unit makes them the best offer. In his office above a theatre in Kyiv, Roman sits back in his chair and flicks through his phone. The recruitment officer for the Da Vinci Wolves, part of the 59th Brigade, has a 'million' chats with deserters, he says. Once he has filtered the list, he will attempt to persuade the best of them to join the battalion, one of the most disciplined and respected in the armed forces. 'When I start the conversations, nobody wants to fight,' he says. 'Who would?' Soldiers can be discharged if they have disabled parents or three children. Some prefer prison to returning to the front. In his early calls, Roman asks if the men have any STIs, heart problems or a history of trouble with the law. Then he will lay out his cards: men can be offered a different specialism, such as being a drone pilot, moving them back from the zero line. Roman understands only too well the horrors of that place. A combat medic built like a boxer, he has been temporarily reassigned to the recruitment office to recover from Bakhmut. 'There were just endless barrages of artillery fire, just pouring down on you,' he says. 'Planes, rockets, artillery, infantry, constant assaults.' He cannot count the number of men he treated. In one final assault before Ukraine retreated, he was the only man of 20 not to be killed or wounded. His brother was among the victims. 'After that, I kind of hit rock bottom,' he says. In this office role, he tries to understand those who fled 'just as a human being', while assessing whether he would be willing to fight alongside them when the time comes for him to return to the front. Vova's case is a relatively easy one. Stick thin, with large brown eyes and bony hands, the young man wants to fight – and is open to joining the Da Vinci Wolves. They fought near his position on the front, and he has seen social media clips of their exploits. In addition, Roman can offer him a return to the role of reconnaissance drone pilot. It was Vova's commander's decision to transfer him into the infantry that sparked his desertion. '[The commander] was in the infantry himself and didn't know anything about this business [drone warfare], to put it bluntly,' he says. Such shifts contribute to a fair amount of desertions. According to Ukrainian Pravda, a local news site, more than 1,200 members of the 155th Mechanised Brigade absconded over five months, after hundreds were forced into the infantry. Vova's paperwork is still incomplete; other units can still secure his signature. Outside a reserve battalion barracks, Roman tells Vova that if he does well, he might even be sent abroad for extra drone training. As the men speak, a soldier who goes by the call-sign 'Psycho' walks over. His combat style might be guessed by the tattoos that adorn his body: 'Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!' spirals manically up his right arm, towards a ring of assault rifles around his elbow. Given a lift to meet his girlfriend in town, Psycho speaks gently about deserters. He joined the army as a teenager in 2015 and has seen more war than all but a few of the surviving soldiers of that generation. When deserters join up, he asks why they left. One told him once that he had slept with a major's wife, he says, laughing. 'We are all human. If you're not scared, you're crazy.' Veterans recognise that conscripts – who just weeks ago may have been teachers or IT workers – can struggle to adapt to the front. In Psycho's case, he realised after his first assault in Luhansk, in 2015, that there would be 'dead people, meat and all that unpleasant stuff'. It helped to steel his mind for the next time. Like the deserters, the army itself is in a bind. Despite Western pressure, Mr Zelensky is unwilling to lower the conscription age to 18. Instead, the army now offers 18- to 24-year-olds large bonuses, including a $20,000 one-off payment, to sign up. Take-up has nevertheless been slow, admits Roman: perhaps 10 a month come to him in the recruitment office. Meanwhile, the government has repeatedly extended the term of existing soldiers, who have no end to their service in sight. One knock-on effect of the deserters' reform might be to gradually 'squeeze out and starve the worst of the brigades' through a process of 'natural selection', says Gil Barndollar, a former infantry officer in the US marines and a senior research fellow at the Catholic University of America. More soldiers now feel at liberty to quit poorly led battalions. 'It's better for these people to end up in good positions. But it does create a problem for the army and I suspect these worst brigades are going to get starved of men,' he added. Before he heads back into the barracks, Vova shakes hands with Roman. The meeting seems to have stiffened his resolve to sign up with the Da Vinci Wolves. Asked whether he felt relief when he walked away from the front line, he demurs. He will only feel relief when he's back 'serving in a brigade I want to'. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
In Joyce Carol Oates' luridly seductive ‘Fox,' a pedophile teacher ends up dead
'Fox' opens in October of 2013 with the grisly discovery of a wrecked white Acura and a dismembered body at the bottom of a South Jersey ravine. Joyce Carol Oates calmly winds the mystery backward through the repulsive actions of the deceased before he meets an untimely death, building fear alongside fascination before she finally reveals how he came to his end — and at whose hand. Francis Fox, pedophile, is a smug, deceitful middle school English teacher, practiced in the art of seduction and the rewards and punishment psychology of B.F. Skinner. Fox has been moving from school to school for years, disguising his identity to escape the consequences of his actions. When he vanishes from the Langhorne Academy and his disappearance is investigated by Det. Horace Zwender, there is no dearth of likely suspects: He has wronged everyone from his college girlfriend to the academy's headmistress; he has abused girls at multiple schools. He's lied to everyone, and nobody truly knows him. 'Fox' has the bones of a potboiler but is supported by the sinew of the author's elegant structure and syntax. She draws on natural imagery and a haunting sense of the macabre, castigating the reader's too-easy assumptions. The book incorporates a delightfully complicated, interwoven cast of characters in small-town New Jersey; elements of class, gentrification and divided families create opportunity for misunderstanding and misdirection. The novel is a whodunit, but to reduce it entirely to that distinction would be inaccurate. Like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's 'Lolita,' which Oates' protagonist references and dismisses frequently, Fox's story is inescapably abhorrent yet enthralling. As Nabokov wrote of his own novel, it lacks a moral, and a moral center. That's not the point, though. Oates understands, as always, how to keep us on the hook. Discussions of Fox's likability are also moot: He's repulsive and unreliable, a monster. His graphic, dehumanizing actions are meant to turn stomachs. He's a known liar. The author carefully reveals the story of Fox's fate, circling the Wieland wetlands ravine again and again. There are any number of sympathetic suspects, or perhaps an easy, less disturbing explanation. One thing is clear: Almost every character believes that Francis Fox deserved to die. There are hard lines of propriety between Fox and the rest of the world, and despite — or perhaps because of — that, Oates makes plain that seduction, narrative and instruction each entail the exercise of power. When the teacher, typically a loner, learns that other faculty members 'encounter maddening students … whom, however hard they try, they can't seduce,' he muses: 'Seduce is not the word. No. Can't reach is the preferable term.' Oates leads us through Fox's lurid world, drawing deliberately uncomfortable parallels between his calculated actions and the work of novelists and teachers, each of whom must also use enticement and enchantment to reach their mark. Her dark protagonist is highly educated, allowing him to deftly anticipate the actions of his potential victims and accusers. The DNA of 'Fox' is thus in art and literature: Francis Fox uses both to develop his outer and inner life. Fox imagines his girls as Balthusian waifs, attracting him with a distracted air of seduction. He obsessively disdains 'Lolita,' remarking often on the impractical physicality of Humbert's sexual relationship; in doing so, he reveals his unhealthy fixations and predilections. 'Fox' similarly explores Edgar Allan Poe's life. Poe is credited with writing the first American detective story, and Oates writes in the same vein. But Fox is fixated on Poe's dead-girl literature and his real-life marriage to a child bride. Oates seems to posit that we allow whatever entertains, and we return to whatever has entertained before. She picks at the American lionization of our creative heroes, especially those with asterisks next to their names because they've abused young women. That society allows such men to become heroes is as troubling as her protagonist's actions. It appears that she wants us to indict us, too. Fox calls himself alternately 'Mr. Tongue' or 'Big Teddy Bear' when he brings his eager seventh-grade charges to his basement office to snuggle, kiss and photograph, luring them there with the promise of comments on their writing and drugging them with benzo-laced treats. 'It was his strategy,' Oates writes, 'as soon as possible in a new term, to determine which girls, if they were attractive, were fatherless. For a fatherless girl is an exquisite rose on a branch lacking thorns, there for the picking.' The lurid scenes where Fox abuses students like Genevieve, his favorite 'Little Kitten,' in his locked office are vile. Yet in addition to fitting the stereotypical profile of a pedophile, he also wields abusive and cold-blooded coercion in the classroom. Following the 'principle of intermittent reinforcement, in which an experimental subject is rewarded for their effort not continuously, or predictably, but intermittently, or unpredictably,' he grades 'in a way designed to shatter her defenses: it will be impossible for her not to feel relief, gratitude, some measure of happiness when her grade improves, thus she will be conditioned to seek a higher grade.' This is a chilling reminder that artistic mentors can be abusive in many different ways. Francis Fox torments his pupils at every level, using calculated psychology to entice and to destroy. 'Fox' hauntingly explores the way that beguiling figures can inspire, create and shape art. Oates presents the idea of malignant artistic inspiration. One of Fox's charges keeps his darkest secrets in a 'Mystery-Journal.' The mystery of Fox's death gets resolved, yet Oates doesn't end there: Her ending changes who has the power. Twisted expectation and manipulated attention are both hallmarks of artistic creation. In the wrong hands — like Francis Fox's — they're instruments of torture. In the author's, they're tools. The allusive nature of 'Fox' and its twist ending shows how greatness that comes from awfulness can be inconveniently, unquestioningly good. What do we do with the idea that the worst offenses can also sometimes create art? Readers, consumers and audiences haven't yet come to peace with that, just like we haven't come to terms with how to separate art from a monstrous artist. Oates wants us to turn pages and squirm. Partington is a teacher in Elk Grove and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
