Israel and Iran are in a state of escalation, with the US on the razor’s edge
February 02, 2023
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In shocking twist, court reinstates conviction of 'Serial' podcast subject Adnan Syed
March 28, 2023
A Maryland appeals court on Tuesday reinstated the conviction of the man at the center of the hit podcast "Serial, who had served more than 20 years in prison for his ex-girlfriend's murder.
Adnan Syed, whose case received worldwide attention through the podcast, had been serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, but was released in September of last year after Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Melissa Phinn vacated his conviction.
However in a 2-1 decision, the Maryland appellate court said Tuesday that the rights of Lee's brother, Young Lee, who lives in California, had been violated because he had not been given adequate time to attend that hearing in-person.
"Accordingly, we vacate the circuit court's order vacating Mr. Syed's convictions, which results in the reinstatement of the original convictions and sentence," the court said.
The appellate court ordered a new hearing giving Young Lee sufficient notice to allow him to attend in-person and where "evidence supporting the motion to vacate is presented."
The court said it was giving the parties 60 days to "assess how to proceed in response" to the decision.
Lee's body was found buried in February 1999 in a shallow grave in the woods of Baltimore, Maryland. The 18-year-old had been strangled.
Syed steadfastly maintained his innocence and prosecutors last year asked Judge Phinn to vacate his conviction, citing the discovery of new information regarding two alternative suspects.
Syed's case earned worldwide attention when it was taken up by "Serial," a weekly podcast that saw a US journalist revisit his conviction and cast doubt on his guilt.
His case has also been the subject of a four-part documentary on the HBO channel called "The Case Against Adnan Syed."
The "Serial" podcast -- a mix of investigative journalism, first-person narrative and dramatic storytelling -- focused its first season on Syed's story in 12 nail-biting episodes.
Both Syed and Lee were high school honor students and children from immigrant families -- he Pakistani, she South Korean -- who had concealed their relationship from their conservative parents.
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A long-running hoax is back, pushed by right-wing internet trolls, and circulated in various forms for almost a decade after major mass shootings, PolitiFact reported on Tuesday.
"Hours after the March 27 school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, social media users began to speculate about the identity of the shooter who killed six people," reported Loreben Tuquero. "'Sooo the school shooter was a trans female identified as Samantha Hyde,' read one Facebook post. The post included a few photos, including one of a blond-haired person holding a gun, and another of a person wearing glasses and smiling. Another Facebook post read, 'Formerly Audrey Hale, Nashville Christian grade school shooter was a transgender female identified as Samantha Hyde, 28… transgender or not I hope it rots in hell!' It featured the same photo of the person wearing glasses and smiling."
In fact, the picture is altered, and not of Hale, the actual suspect in the shooting. Internet trolls have circulated the name "Sam Hyde" as a suspect in a number of mass shootings since 2015. Sam Hyde is actually "a comedian whose name and photos have repeatedly been used by internet hoaxers," said the report.
Moreover, Tuquero continued, the invocation of Hyde is not limited to mass shootings. "PolitiFact has debunked several claims mentioning Hyde and other variations on his name, related to the downing of jets in Ukraine, explosions in Beirut, and even the Chinese spy balloon’s appearance in U.S. airspace earlier this year."
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Hale was initially identified as a woman. However, reports later said that Hale has recently identified using "he/him" pronouns, and goes by "Aiden" on some social media platforms.
Officials have said that Hale, who was killed in the struggle with police, left behind a "manifesto" — though its contents are unclear — and personalized the weapons used in the attack, which were bought legally even though Hale was under treatment for mental health issues.
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Sanctions have been applied to Russia off and on, starting after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but after the invasion, harsher sanctions were applied. The Wall Street Journal reports that they might finally be putting a massive squeeze on the Russian economy.
March marked the one-year anniversary of the war against Ukraine, and with it, the prices of oil and natural gas have surged around the world. For a time, that meant that Russia could increase its own costs of oil and gas, making a more significant profit.
"Those days are over," the report said. "As the war continues into its second year and Western sanctions bite harder, Russia’s government revenue is being squeezed, and its economy has shifted to a lower-growth trajectory, likely for the long term."
The Journal cited Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian Central Bank official who abandoned his country after the invasion.
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"Russia’s economy is entering a long-term regression," he warned.
While global inflation after the pandemic has been a serious problem, the high costs of products generally traded with Russia has sent food and fuel in Europe to soaring prices. Rolling blackouts were utilized throughout 2022 in the U.K., but regulators warn that Germany could run out of gas next winter, the Financial Times reported last week.
Still, NATO has held strong, and Russia's biggest exports, oil and gas, lost large customers.
"Putin considered Germany too dependent on Russian energy, too weak militarily, and too business-minded to mount any significant resistance to his war. He was wrong," wrote Council on Foreign Relations expert Liana Fix and Caroline Kapp.
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The ruble is down over 20 percent against the dollar in the past five months. The military draft has resulted in over 22,000 Russians fleeing to the United States, revealed the latest US Customs and Border Protection data. The draft also means that young people are being pulled from the labor force and sent to war, which is starting to impact businesses.
"There is no sign the economic difficulties are bad enough to pose a short-term threat to Russia’s ability to wage war. But state revenue shortfalls suggest an intensifying dilemma over how to reconcile ballooning military expenditures with the subsidies and social spending that have helped President Vladimir Putin shield civilians from hardship," the Journal explains.
Properties are being seized from Russian oligarchs and quickly driving yachts to islands that refuse to implement sanctions.
“There will be no money next year, we need foreign investors,” said Russian raw-materials billionaire Oleg Deripaska this month.
The meeting between Putin and China's Xi Jinping is further evidence that Russia is increasingly dependent on China. Now that Putin has stashed nuclear weapons on the border of a NATO country, China might face more pressure from the global community about aligning itself with a country ready to start a nuclear war.
Read the rest of the economic analysis in the Wall Street Journal.
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