Transcript for Officer’s Failed Search Caught on Tape
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
“id”:14042539,”title”:”Officer’s Failed Search Caught on Tape “,”duration”:”3:00″,”description”:”Nancy Garrido videotapes a parole officer as he conducts a surprise search.”,”url”:”/2020/video/jaycee-dugard-exclusive-officers-failed-search-caught-tape-phillip-nancy-garrido-video-us-14042539″,”section”:”2020″,”mediaType”:”Default”
The head of the United Nation’s cultural organization said today that the continued looting and destruction of ancient artifacts – most recently ISIS’s “bulldozing” of one of Mesopotamia’s greatest cities – constitutes nothing less than a “war crime.”
“I condemn in the strongest possible manner the destruction of the archaeological site of Nimrud site in Iraq. This is yet another attack against the Iraqi people, reminding us that nothing is safe from the cultural cleansing underway in the country: It targets human lives, minorities, and is marked by the systematic destruction of humanity’s ancient heritage,” Irina Bokova, Director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said today. “We cannot remain silent. The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime. I call on all political and religious leaders in the region to stand up and remind everyone that there is absolutely no political or religious justification for the destruction of humanity’s cultural heritage.”
Heritage Images/Getty Images
PHOTO: A gate at the Northwest Palace in Nimrud, Iraq, 1977.
Bokova’s statement came a day after Iraqi television reported that ISIS militants had “bulldozed” Nimrud, the second capital of the Assyrian Empire founded during the 13th century B.C., which lies approximately 20 miles south of Mosul, according to the UN. The Associated Press reported that the discovery of treasures in Nimrud’s royal tombs in the 1980s was “one of the 20th century’s most significant archaeological finds.”
“[Nimrud’s] frescos and works are celebrated around the world and revered in literature and sacred texts,” Bokova said.
Beyond the human toll of countless of ISIS’s alleged war crimes – including the systematic murder of unarmed civilians and prisoners, persecution of minorities and the use of young women as sex slaves – academics and officials have said ISIS has targeted for destruction anything that doesn’t conform to their twisted interpretation of Islam, no matter the cultural value.
Last week video emerged that appeared to show ISIS militants taking sledgehammers to artifacts in a museum in Mosul, pushing over statues and drilling into other ancient treasures. Some of the statues appear to have metal rods inside them, suggesting they’re replicas, but others just crumble when they hit the floor.
“These antiquities and idols behind me were from people in past centuries and were worshiped instead of God,” an unidentified man says in the video. “When God Almighty orders us to destroy these statues, idols and antiquities, we must do it, even if they’re worth billions of dollars.”
Obtained by ABC News
PHOTO: In a video released by the terror group ISIS in February 2015, militants purportedly destroy artifacts in a museum in Mosul, Iraq.
But ISIS is hardly above stealing ancient treasures for financial gain. David Cohen, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the U.S. Treasury Department, named looting as one financial supply line for ISIS and said the group “lay[s] waste to thousands of years of civilization in Iraq and Syria by looting and selling antiquities.”
In January ISIS purportedly stole around 2,000 books from the Central Library of Mosul, loading up the texts including children’s stories and poetry, and trucking them away, according to The New York Times. They left only the Islamic texts.
“These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah,” a bearded militant reportedly told locals. “So they will be burned.”
Looting has been a major problem for cultural heritage since the outset of the Syrian civil war. As noted by the website TraffickingCulture.org, satellite images show the destruction at one site, the ancient Syrian city of Apamea, that took place just between 2011 and 2012. An image from the latter period shows the ground covered in pockmarks, presumably thousands of holes dug by looters.
Google Earth
PHOTO: Google Earth satellite photos taken in 2011 (left) and 2012 (right) show the purported impact of looting on the land.
In 2013, the International Council on Museums issued an “emergency red list” identifying categories of Syrian artifacts that are in danger of being looted so that museums, private collectors, auction houses and art dealers would know not to buy them.
“Objects from these sites are highly coveted in the international art and antiquities markets and therefore subject to theft, looting and illicit trafficking,” the notice says.
“What started as opportunistic theft by some has turned into an organized transnational business that is helping fund terror,” Michael Danti, an archaeologist at Boston University, told The Wall Street Journal last month. “It’s the gravest cultural emergency I’ve seen.”
Bokova said ISIS’s latest acts in Iraq must not be tolerated by the world.
“I call on all of those who can, especially youth, in Iraq and elsewhere, to do everything possible to protect this heritage, to claim it as their own, and as heritage of the whole of humanity,” she said. “I appeal also to all cultural institutions, museums, journalists, professors, and scientists to share and explain the importance of this heritage and the Mesopotamian civilization. We must respond to this criminal chaos that destroys culture with more culture.”
Transcript for An Inside Look at the Rarely Seen Secret Service Boot Camp
Back and art the White House fence jumpers were generally gets all the way inside. That one had his picture right got absolutely there’s a lot of time a point nine layered approach that we had. At that particular day we had convergence pillars we’ve learned from that and we continue to enhance or. Security measures at the White House that your doesn’t happen again and of the first things that we’ve focused on the street. She checked. Front. We’ll go back. He. After. What was so different about. There’s a lack of discipline I think individual like this when you think they’ve gotten a boat unfair rap that we have not received in the when you fail and we have failed we don’t have helped us to correct and we all want to correct you wanna fix but would you fail to. No excuse.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
“id”:29499672,”title”:”An Inside Look at the Rarely Seen Secret Service Boot Camp”,”duration”:”1:31″,”description”:”ABC News got an exclusive look at how the officers are trained to guard the president.”,”url”:”/Politics/video/inside-rarely-secret-service-boot-camp-29499672″,”section”:”Politics”,”mediaType”:”Default”
President Barack Obama says America’s racial history “still casts its long shadow” despite a half-century of progress toward a more perfect union.
In Selma, Alabama, Obama stood in solidarity and remembrance Saturday with survivors of a civil rights era that he was too young to know.
He joined civil rights marchers of 50 years ago at the bridge where police brutality on “Bloody Sunday” galvanized America’s opposition to racial oppression in the South and hastened passage of historic voting rights for minorities.
Thousands from across the U.S. packed the riverside town for commemorations of the march on March 7, 1965.
The 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday
Obama said in his prepared remarks that police discrimination against blacks is not confined to Ferguson, Missouri — but that it’s also no longer endemic or sanctioned by law in America.
Witnesses say Boko Haram militants are rampaging through northeast Nigerian villages and selectively killing men, boys and members of the same tribe as Chadian forces that have dealt major blows to the Nigerian Islamic extremists.
Mohammed Seit of Kala-Balge village says Boko Haram fighters separated and killed people of the Shuwa-Arab community while sparing people from the Kanuri tribe to which most Boko Haram militants belong.
Seit says scores have been killed and homes in dozens of villages burned down in the past five days.
Nigeria’s neighbor, Chad, has spearheaded a regional offensive and seized back major border towns from Boko Haram in recent weeks.
Separately, housekeeper Aminatu Mommodu says 68 men and boys as young as 12 were killed in an attack Tuesday on a village near Gwoza.
Taser International, the stun-gun maker emerging as a leading supplier of body cameras for police, has cultivated financial ties to police chiefs whose departments have bought the recording devices, raising a host of conflict-of-interest questions.
A review of records and interviews by The Associated Press show Taser is covering airfare and hotel stays for police chiefs who speak at promotional conferences. It is also hiring recently retired chiefs as consultants, sometimes just months after their cities signed contracts with Taser.
Over the past 18 months, Taser has reached consulting agreements with two such chiefs weeks after they retired, and it is in talks with a third who also backed the purchase of its products, the AP has learned. Taser is planning to send two of them to speak at luxury hotels in Australia and the United Arab Emirates in March at events where they will address other law enforcement officers considering body cameras.
The relationships raise questions of whether chiefs are acting in the best interests of the taxpayers in their dealings with Scottsdale, Arizona-based Taser, whose contracts for cameras and storage systems for the video can run into the millions of dollars.
As the police chief in Fort Worth, Texas, successfully pushed for the signing of a major contract with Taser before a company quarterly sales deadline, he wrote a Taser representative in an email, “Someone should give me a raise.”
The market for wearable cameras that can record arrests, shootings and other encounters has been growing fast since the killing last August of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. President Barack Obama has proposed a $75 million program for departments to buy the cameras to reduce tensions between officers and the communities they serve.
City officials and rival companies are raising concerns about police chiefs’ ties to Taser, not only in Fort Worth but in such cities as Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Salt Lake City.
“Department heads need to be very careful to avoid that type of appearance of an endorsement in a for-profit setting,” said Charlie Luke, a Salt Lake City councilman. “It opens up the opportunity for competitors of these companies to essentially do what we’re seeing here — complaining about that public process.”
He said he was surprised when he learned last year that the city’s police department had purchased Taser cameras using surplus money, bypassing the standard bidding process and City Council approval. The department declined to say how much it has spent acquiring 295 body cameras and Taser’s Evidence.com video storage program and hasn’t responded to a month-old public records request.
The city’s police chief, Chris Burbank, said that his relationship with Taser, which includes company-paid travel to Taser-sponsored conferences, is appropriate. He recently recorded at the company’s request a promotional video in which he praised Evidence.com.
Burbank said he does not receive speaking fees and believes he hasn’t violated a city code prohibiting paid product endorsements on public time. He said he accepts Taser’s speaking invitations to promote the best ways of using body cameras. But Luke, the city councilman, questioned what value Salt Lake City gets from Burbank’s trips.
