Descendant of Jack the Ripper victim calls for new police inquest – National & International News
Descendant of Jack the Ripper victim calls for new police inquest.
Landlords price gouge residents displaced by LA fires.
Hunter Biden prosecutor hits back over Presidential pardon.
NATIONAL NEWS
Landlords price gouge residents displaced by LA fires
On Tuesday, it will be a week since wildfires broke out in different suburbs of Los Angeles. So far, the fires have burned through more than 60 square miles, torched more than 12,000 structures, and killed at least 24 people. While the fierce Santa Ana winds that fuel the fire have quieted over the weekend, forecasters expect them to pick up tomorrow, potentially putting more areas in danger.
As of Monday morning, over 92,000 people were under evacuation orders. Many thousands of those have lost everything and are now looking for shelter. Rent in LA is high at the best of times and the rental market has been unusually tight and competitive for the past four years. Now rents have skyrocketed even further as landlords and property managers take advantage of the emergency and desperate demand for housing.
California has a price gouging law which prohibits increasing prices by more than 10% during a state of emergency. However, some landlords have increased their prices by as much as 45% in the past week. Working class people who were barely able to pay rent before are now competing with higher earners for the same apartments. One of the most destructive fires decimated Pacific Palisades, one of LA’s wealthiest enclaves. Wealthier residents are more able to pay the (illegal) premium and meet new demands from landlords for anywhere from 3 to 12 months’ rent up front.
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Hunter Biden prosecutor hits back over Presidential pardon
Department of Justice special counsel David Weiss, who oversaw the federal prosecutions of President Biden’s son Hunter, has released his final report on Hunter’s cases. Weiss took the opportunity to rebuke President Biden’s justification for issuing a blanket pardon for his son covering more than 10 years.
Hunter had been convicted, but not yet sentenced, for a gun possession violation and was soon to face tax evasion charges. The House Oversight Committee was also investigating Hunter’s ties to business entities in the Ukraine and Romania.
In language that echoed Donald Trump, President Biden accused the DOJ of pursuing politically motivated charges against his son. He characterized the prosecution of his son as a “miscarriage of justice”.
In his report, Weiss wrote that President Biden could not “rewrite history” by vilifying “The public servants at the Department of Justice based solely on false accusations”.
“Politicians who attack the decisions of career prosecutors as politically motivated when they disagree with the outcome of a case undermine the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system,” Weiss continued. “The president’s statements unfairly impugn the integrity not only of Department of Justice personnel, but all of the public servants making these difficult decisions in good faith”.
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INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Descendant of Jack the Ripper victim calls for new police inquest
A descendant of Catherine Eddowes, the fourth canonical victim of Jack the Ripper, has backed a call for a fresh police inquest into the slayings. In the fall of 1888, the impoverished London district of Whitechapel was terrorized by a series of five brutal slayings of women, most but not all of them prostitutes. Eddowes was killed in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, September 30th, 1888. Her viciously mutilated body was found less than an hour after that of the third canonical victim, Elizabeth Stride, and several blocks away.
Police never arrested anyone for the slayings nor named a suspect. Over the years, independent researchers (calling themselves Ripperologists) have come up with myriad potential culprits, including a member of the royal family, an eccentric American doctor, a struggling artist, and most recently a cartman for a local butcher.
One name that has consistently come is Aaron Kosminski. Kosminski was a Polish-Jewish immigrant who was known to have mental health issues, the exact nature of which is unclear. Shortly after the 5th victim was murdered, Kosminski’s family committed him to an asylum, where he remained for the rest of his life. There were no more “Ripper” murders after Kosminski was committed.
Karen Miller, Eddowes’ descendant, has joined a call by Ripperologist Russell Edwards for a new police inquest into the murders. Edwards’ case for a new inquiry rests largely on theories promoted in his 2014 book, “Naming Jack the Ripper”. Edwards favors Kosminski as the culprit.
Miller hopes a new inquest will deliver some justice for the victims and restore their humanity, which is often overshadowed by the famous, if unnamed, perpetrator. “The name Jack the Ripper has become sensationalized. It has gone down in history as this famous character,” says Miller. “People have forgotten about the victims, who did not have justice at the time. Now we need this inquest to legally name the killer”.
“New evidence”
Edwards’ theory of the case is based on “new evidence” in the form of a tattered piece of cloth, purportedly a shawl belonging to the Eddowes (or to Kosminski, as Edwards insists). In 2014, Edwards commissioned Dr. Jari Louhelainen to carry out a DNA study on the shawl.
Dr. Louhelainen identified two stains on the shawl, which he believed, but could not confirm, were blood and semen. Cells from the semen stain were tested against DNA samples provided by a descendant of Kosminski’s family, while the bloodstain was tested against the DNA of Karen Miller.
Edwards’ book proclaimed that the DNA results connect the shawl to both Eddowes and Kosminski, confirming Edwards’ belief that Kosminski was Jack the Ripper. This claim was met with much fanfare in the press with many headlines proclaiming that the case was solved at last. However, there are serious problems with Edwards’ evidence.
Case (not quite) closed
Problems quickly arose when it came to Dr Louhelainen’s results. Firstly, the analysis was carried out by comparing mitochondrial DNA, which survives better than genomic DNA, but is far less precise. Secondly, Louhelainen has never published his results in a peer-reviewed study, meaning that his methodology and full results have not been evaluated by other scientists in his field.
Other DNA specialists found a serious flaw in what little Louhelainen did reveal (in Edwards’ book). Louhelainen claimed to have found a mutation linking Miller’s DNA to the stain on the shawl that was present in only 1/290,000 individuals. In fact, Louhelainen’s colleagues pointed out that what he found was a different mutation that is present in 99% of Europeans.
Therefore, the identification of the DNA contributions as belonging to Eddowes and Kosminski rely heavily on the provenance of the shawl and the likelihood that it is connected to those two individuals. Unfortunately for Edwards’ theory, the provenance of the shawl is also doubtful. Police and news records from the time mention no articles at the Eddowes crime scene which match the description of the shawl (which some believe is actually a table runner).
Nevertheless, Edwards contends that the shawl was taken from the crime scene by Sergeant Amos Simpson of the Metropolitan London Police and remained in his family. However, there is no evidence that Simpson was present at the crime scene or had any involvement with the Ripper investigation. In 1888, Simpson had for many years been posted to a district that was well outside the City of London. This makes it vanishingly unlikely that any articles from the Eddowes crime scene or any of the Ripper murders ever came into his possession.
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