Month: April 2019

With its terracotta-tiled stone houses perched on a rocky crag overlooking rugged countryside, it might seem like the perfect Italian hill town.

But San Piero Patti has been losing inhabitants to ageing and migration for decades and has now decided to offer its empty houses for sale at €1 (90p) each in a bid to inject new life into the community.

New owners will be obliged to restore the often dilapidated homes, using traditional stone, timber and terracotta roofing and employing, where possible, local artisans.

On the plus side, they will be a 15 minute drive from the nearest beach and on the edge of the Nebrodi national park, a protected zone of lakes and forested mountains.

The council of the tiny town, known as “the pearl of the Nebrodi”, voted unanimously this week to embark on the project, which was first mooted earlier this year.

San Piero Patti has taken its lead from another town in Sicily, Gangi, which attracted worldwide interest in 2014 when it started selling off its abandoned houses for one euro.

“It all started with the example of Gangi, which has been a great success – a lot of their houses have been sold,” Salvatore Fiore, the mayor of San Piero Patti, told The Telegraph.

The task now is to identify how many houses will be offered for sale, with the council contacting their owners.

The hope is that the first homes will be available by early next year.

“We in the very early stages and I can’t yet say how many houses will be up for sale. But they will be available to anyone – foreign buyers will be welcome, absolutely.”

He is taking advice from the former mayor and now deputy mayor of Gangi, Giuseppe Ferrarello, where dozens of houses have been sold to foreign families.

While not in as sharp a demographic decline as many towns and villages in Italy, San Piero Patti has nevertheless dropped from a population of around 4,000 two decades ago to 3,000 today.

The town’s problems are emblematic not just of Sicily but of the whole of the “Mezzogiorno” as the south of Italy is known.

A report released this week painted a dispiriting picture of the economic and social decline of the region.

The number of families in which every adult is unemployed has nearly doubled since 2010, from 362,000 to 600,000, according to the study by  Svimez, a business association.

High rates of unemployment are leading to “rising marginalisation and social decline”, the report said.

In the last 16 years, 1.8 million people have left Italy’s south, half of them young people aged between 15 and 34, in search of better opportunities in Italy’s north or abroad.

Police in New Mexico have found the remains of a young boy buried inside a remote desert encampment, where 11 starving children were discovered last week.

The body has not yet been formally identified, but is believed to be that of four-year-old Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, whose mother reported him as abducted by his father, Siraj Wahhaj, in December.

Wahhaj, 39, is due to appear in court in New Mexico on Wednesday charged with child abuse, in connection with the 11 filthy and hungry children.

His two sisters, Subhannah, 35, and Hujrah, 38, were charged alongside him, as was Subjannah’s husband Lucas Morten. Wahhaj’s wife Jany Leveille, 38, was also facing charges of child abuse and expected to appear before the judge.

The saga began in December, when Wahhaj told the boy’s mother he was taking their severely disabled child, who suffered from seizures and was unable to walk, to the park.

He never returned to their home in Georgia, and the boy’s mother reported it to the police, saying Wahhaj intended to perform an “exorcism” on his son because Abdul-Ghani was “possessed by the Devil.”

She later said that was a mistranslation, and Wahhaj merely intended to pray for their son.

New Mexico authorities had long suspected the father and son might be at the compound after learning about the abduction in May, said Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe. Family members told The Telegraph that Wahhaj owned land there.

But there was not enough evidence for a search warrant, and surveillance of the property did not identify the pair there.

That changed on Thursday, when they received a note from a child inside the compound, saying they were starving and thirsty.

After a day-long standoff with Wahhaj and Morten, both of whom were heavily armed, the police entered the compound on Friday and rescued the children, arresting all five adults.

Interviewed by police, at least two of the children said the toddler, Abdul-Ghani, was at the compound in poor health and died there. They said “Uncle Lucas,” believed to be Lucas Morten, washed the child’s dead body twice, then buried him in a tunnel on the compound.

"I had no probable cause to go onto this property,” said Sheriff Hogrefe. “In hindsight I wish there was. But we would not have been there lawfully.”

Traditionally seen as harbingers of death or symbols of evil, crows are often considered to be pests, but a French park has taken advantage of their innate intelligence and trained the birds to pick up litter.

Six crows have been taught to patrol a popular historical theme park in the western Vendée region and clear up, collecting cigarette ends and other rubbish in return for food.

When a bird deposits a cigarette butt or a piece of rubbish in a box, a tasty morsel of food is dispensed as a reward. Some crows have already started work and others will begin on Monday.

The trained birds are rooks, which are considered “particularly intelligent” members of the crow family, according to Nicolas de Villiers, head of the Puy du Fou park. 

“In an affectionate, supportive atmosphere, they like to communicate with humans and establish a relationship through play,” he said. “The goal is not just to clear up, because visitors are generally careful to keep things clean, but also to demonstrate that nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment.”  

The rooks are quick workers, able to fill a bucket with rubbish in less than 45 minutes, Mr Villiers said.

A park falconer hatched the idea of putting them to work. Christophe Gaborit, who is accustomed to training birds of prey, said: “They were motivated by the reward and they soon understood how the game worked.”

Crows have long had a negative image. The collective noun for a group  is a ‘murder’. To the Celts, the black-feathered carrion eaters symbolised evil. Many people still believe they are a bad omen. They can damage crops by eating seeds and grain. They are noisy and have been known to attack cars and wrench off windscreen wipers.

Yet crows are highly sociable and so intelligent that some biologists say they are as smart as the average seven-year-old child.

They make tools, tearing strips from leaves and using them to winkle bugs out of tree trunks. Experiments have shown them to be capable of solving relatively complex puzzles. They will bend wire to fashion hooks, even if they have never encountered wire before.

In Aesop’s fable, “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a thirsty crow drops stones into a jug of water to raise the level enough to take a drink. 

Scientists tested whether crows are really clever enough to do this by placing them in a room with a worm in a tube of water just below pecking distance, with a small pile of pebbles nearby. The crows dropped the pebbles into the water until the worm came within reach. 

They avoided objects that would float in the water and those too large for the container, demonstrating a grasp of volume displacement acquired by children between the ages of five to seven.

Frédéric Jiguet, an ornithologist at the Paris Museum of Natural History, said crows are capable of recognising individual human faces. “I captured a series of crows in a park, tagged them and released them. They didn’t like it. Many weeks later, I returned to the park with colleagues, and the crows I had tagged attacked me but ignored the others.”

He said the term, “bird-brained” was a misnomer as what matters is not the size of an animal’s brain, but its size in relation to the size of the animal. By that standard, the brains of many birds are comparable to those of primates.

Mr Villiers said visitors to his theme park, the second most visited in France after Disneyland Paris, were entranced by the crows’ performance as cleaners. He said it was like seeing a fable acted out, with “nature teaching mankind one of life’s lessons”.

One of the women accusing Harvey Weinstein of rape told the film producer “I love you” and repeatedly sought to meet with him, according to a series of emails filed in court by the former film mogul’s lawyers.

Weinstein, 66, was charged on May 25 with four counts of sexual assault and two of rape. Five days later a Grand Jury indicted him, allowing the case to proceed to trial.

Yesterday (FRI) Weinstein’s lawyers filed court documents seeking to dismiss the charges, which claim the producer was “in a long-term, consensual, intimate relationship” with the accuser.

Benjamin Brafman, the high-powered celebrity lawyer representing Weinstein, produced a selection of emails from 400 communications between Weinstein and the unnamed woman.

The woman has accused Weinstein of raping her on March 18, 2013, in New York City.

Mr Brafman sought to undermine her accusations by producing a series of emails which he claimed demonstrated affection, even four years after the night in question.

“I love you, always do,” she wrote on February 8, 2017. “But I hate feeling like a booty call. 🙂 ”

The emails were made public after Mr Brafman won permission from the judge in New York. They were from his work email, which he was prevented accessing due to Weinstein Company bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware.

Weinstein had been seeking access to the emails since October, shortly after his ouster from the company, arguing that they would help him defend himself from sexual misconduct allegations, both in civil and criminal court. The bankruptcy court granted him access in May.

Mr Brafman characterised the conversation as part of “an exchange of more than 400 warm, complimentary and solicitous emails”, stating that “never once in those communications claiming to have ever been harmed by Mr Weinstein.”

She emailed Weinstein to ask for his help with securing membership of private members’ club Soho House, and also suggested bringing her mother to meet Weinstein.

“I hope to see you sooner than later,” she wrote on April 11, 2013 – a little under a month after the alleged incident.

The next day she wrote: “I appreciate all you do for me, it shows,” and on April 17 followed up with: “It would be great to see you again, and catch up!”

In August 2013 she wrote to give him her new phone number, saying: “Just wanted you to have it. Hope you are well and call me anytime, always good to hear your voice.”

On September 11, 2013, she wrote: “Miss you big guy.”

The exchange continued for years, with her writing in July 2014: “There is no one else I would enjoy catching up with that understands me quite like you.”

Mr Brafman argued that evidence in the producer’s favour was previously withheld from the Grand Jury. He accused Cyrus Vance, the district attorney of being in a “rush to prosecute” Weinstein, and depicted him as being under “unprecedented pressure” to bring charges – citing as evidence a New York Daily News front page with Weinstein in a “wanted” poster, and a New York Times front-page article arguing that Mr Vance’s job was at stake if he did not bring charges.

Mr Brafman also sought to dismiss charges brought by the two other women.

Actress Lucia Evans has accused Weinstein of forcing her to perform oral sex on him in 2004. Mimi Haleyi, a former assistant at his production firm Weinstein Company, has accused him of forcibly performing oral sex on her in a brutal assault.

Mr Brafman said that “neither case is corroborated by any physical or forensic evidence” and attempted to discredit both women.

He said Evans accused Weinstein of assault “during daytime hours at Mr Weinstein’s transparent glass-enclosed office with four employees stationed within feet of Ms Evans.”

He also described Ms Haleyi’s accusations as being “not credible,” noting how she made the accusations at a press conference with famed womens’ rights lawyer Gloria Allred.

More than 80 women, including Salma Hayek, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Lupita Nyong’o have accused Weinstein of sexual harassment or assault.

Weinstein has denied all accusations of abuse, but admitted to inappropriate behaviour.

He is currently on bail, and is due back in court in New York on September 20 for a pre-trial hearing.

The UK government has announced it will end funding for some aid programmes in rebel-held areas of Syria, which have become too risky ahead of an imminent government offensive.

The Department for International Development determined the programmes in Idlib, northwestern Syria, to be "unsustainable" as pro-regime forces begin to move in.

An attempt to create an independent police force would also be scrapped from September, while projects funding local councils were being reviewed and would likely be halted by the end of the financial year.

Instead, the focus in northern Syria is now on basic life-saving needs, providing medicines and medical equipment and water and sanitation support.

General Adeeb al-Shallaf, founder of the Free Syrian Police (FSP), a force of 3,300 mostly unarmed officers in Syria, confirmed that the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark had all cut funds.

"As the situation on the ground in some regions has become increasingly difficult, we have reduced support for some of our non-humanitarian programming, but continue to deliver vital support to help those most in need and to improve security and stability in the country," a UK government spokeswoman said.

It is feared a Syrian government and Russian attack on the province of Idlib – the last remaining rebel stronghold – would be a bloodbath.

Some 2.7 million people are trapped in Idlib, which is controlled by a complex patchwork of jihadists and more moderate rebels.

However, the UK government also announced last week that British aid money is to be used for the first time to protect civilians from deadly airstrikes by providing them with early warnings of attacks through social media.

The government has spent £152 million pounds on humanitarian programmes in Syria for the financial year 2017-2018.

Britain had increased its aid as well as supply of armoured vehicles and training to Syria’s opposition in 2013.

In 2011, the United States adopted a policy that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must leave power. But Washington and its Western allies, including Britain, have subsequently watched Assad’s forces, backed by Iran and then Russia, claw back territory and secure his position.

Researchers probing mysterious ailments afflicting more than three dozen diplomats and their families in Cuba and China believe they may be the victims of unconventional microwave weapons.

People affected claim they heard intense high-pitched sounds before falling ill with nausea, dizziness and severe headaches. Doctors said they exhibited symptoms of concussion.

Now it seems doctors are investigating whether the mysterious ailments may have their roots in Cold War technology that once sparked fears scientists were developing mind control weapons.

Until now experts suggested the affected diplomats may have been targeted with sonic weapons and a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association made no mention of microwaves as a possible cause.

But the lead author of that paper, Douglas Smith, the director of the Centre for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that microwave weapons were now the main suspect and that his team is increasingly certain the diplomats suffered brain injury.

"Everybody was relatively sceptical at first," he said, "and everyone now agrees there’s something there."

He added that researchers and diplomats joke about the ailments as the “immaculate concussion” because the cause remains so elusive.

Problems first emerged in Cuba in 2016. The US recalled more than half its staff from the recently established embassy and accused Havana of failing to protect American personnel.

Cuba, for its part, denied any knowledge of the incidents.

In June 2018, the State Department announced that eerily similar incidents had happened in China.

The latest theory will revive interest in the use of microwaves as weapons, something both the US and the Soviet Union researched during the Cold War.

It built upon the Frey effect – named for Allan Frey, an American scientist who found that the brain can be tricked by microwaves into perceiving phantom sounds, spawning an entire industry of mind control conspiracy theories.

Some applications attempted to beam comprehensible language into a target’s head while US Navy researchers explored how to use sounds powerful enough to cause pain or immobilise the subject.

While some efforts may sound far-fetched, the idea of false sensations tallies with the accounts of diplomats who reporting hearing loud buzzing and grinding sounds with no apparent external cause.

The suspect in a deadly shooting at a Florida video game tournament had previously been hospitalised for mental illness, according to court records in his home state of Maryland reviewed by The Associated Press.

Divorce filings from the parents of 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore say that as an adolescent he was twice hospitalised in psychiatric facilities and was prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant medications.

The records show Katz’s parents disagreed on how to care for their troubled son, with his father claiming his estranged wife was exaggerating symptoms of mental illness as part of their long and bitter custody battle. The couple divorced in 2007.

Katz opened fire Sunday at a gaming bar inside a collection of restaurants and shops in Jacksonville. He killed two people and wounded 10 others before fatally shooting himself during the "Madden NFL 19" tournament, authorities said.

Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams has declined to comment on the gunman’s motive.

The suspect’s father, Richard Katz of Baltimore, and his mother, Elizabeth Katz of Columbia, Maryland, did not respond to phone messages Sunday or Monday. Efforts by the AP to reach them at their homes were also unsuccessful.

The Howard County, Maryland, divorce filings say that David Katz played video games obsessively as a young adolescent, often refusing to go to school or to bathe. Elizabeth Katz, a toxicologist at the Department of Agriculture, said she confiscated some of her son’s gaming equipment after finding him playing in the wee hours.

"His hair would very often go unwashed for days. When I took his gaming equipment controllers away so he couldn’t play at 3 or 4 in the morning, I’d get up and find that he was just walking around the house in circles," the mother said, according to a transcript in the court files.

At one point, she put his gaming controllers in her bedroom behind a locked door and he punched a hole in the door, she said.

Elizabeth Katz said her youngest son had increasing difficulty concentrating following his parents’ split. A judge awarded custody of the boy to his mother, with visitation rights to the father.

At times David "curled up into a ball," refused to attend school and sobbed, she said. She asserted that her ex-husband instructed David not to take Risperidal – an anti-psychotic medication prescribed to him. The father claimed in court filings that David was not "diagnosed as psychotic."

He missed large stretches of school while under his mother’s supervision. He was admitted to the nearby Sheppard Pratt mental health system for about 12 days in late 2007. Court documents say a psychiatrist at that time administered antidepressants. He later spent about 13 days at Potomac Ridge, a mental health services facility in Rockville.

Richard Katz, a NASA engineer, said his ex-wife had "an obsession with using mental health professionals and in particular psychiatric drugs to perform the work that parents should naturally do." He said she routinely gave false information to mental health care providers. He described one incident in which his son was handcuffed by police after locking himself in his mother’s car in an attempt to avoid going to a mental health appointment with her.

Federal law requires gun buyers to disclose whether they have ever been involuntarily committed to a mental institution. Maryland state law also prohibits the sale or transfer of a gun to someone who has been diagnosed with a mental disorder or who has a history of violent behavior.

In recent weeks, Katz legally purchased the two handguns he carried from a gun store in Baltimore, the sheriff said.

The sheriff, who said Katz did not fire both weapons, did not say whether Katz disclosed his past hospitalisations on the form for the required federal background check.

By the time Katz was 15, the divorce records show, the father asserted that Elizabeth Katz "routinely" called the police for "trivial matters." In a transcript of a 2010 phone call, the mother phoned a 911 dispatcher, accusing David of "abusing" her by coming home late after a visitation with his father. She then insisted he was "assaulting" her by trying to gain control of the cable cord to the television. She complained to the dispatcher that he was rolling his eyes and laughing.

"You’ll roll your eyes. Fine. You’ll pay. Where are you going to be tomorrow?" she said in the transcript, addressing her son. The dispatcher encouraged her not to say anything further until a police officer arrived. He was eventually sent to a wilderness therapy program in Utah called RedCliff Ascent for nearly 100 days.

According to the father’s version of events, the relationship between mother and son got increasingly worse.

Elizabeth Katz put David’s clothes in suitcases on at least two occasions and asked him to leave, including once on Mother’s Day in 2007. In court filings, the father asserted that David "routinely expresses his anger" toward her. He claimed that when David was staying with him, the boy showed no signs of behavioral problems and was "generally lively, communicative" and "playful."

In a 2010 letter, David Katz wrote a letter to a magistrate judge saying he wanted to live with his father and describing his mother as "pretty crazy." He said she called the police to the family’s home about 20 times and "gets drunk." He blamed her for his poor grades.

Despite the problems, Katz graduated from Hammond High School in Columbia in 2011. He went on to attend the University of Maryland, though he did not earn a degree.

Katz used the gamer tags "Bread" or "Sliced Bread" when competing. The game’s maker, EA Sports, lists a David Katz as a 2017 championship winner.

On the Madden competition circuit, Katz was known to barely speak to fellow gamers and sometimes exhibited an erratic playing style, according to other competitors.

"We’ve always known he was a little off and stuff just because he wasn’t social at all," Shay Kivlen, 21, of Seattle, said Monday in an interview.