Thousands take to Baltimore streets
BALTIMORE – Thousands of protesters took to the streets Saturday to demand answers in the case of Freddie Gray, the largest rally since the 25-year-old black man died in police custody.
Signs in hand – with slogans such as “Jail Killer Police!” and “Unite Here!” – demonstrators filled two city blocks and marched two miles to City Hall, where the crowd overtook the grassy plaza adjacent to the building.
Tanya Peacher, a Baltimore resident, said she’d never attended a protest in the city before, but watching a video of Gray’s arrest motivated her.
“I looked at my son,” she said, “and thought ‘That is my son.’”
Late Friday, Deputy Commissioner Kevin Davis said Gray should have received medical attention at the spot where he was arrested – before he was put inside a police transport van handcuffed and without a seat belt, a violation of the department’s policy.
Londoner may have bluffed ‘flash crash’
NEW YORK – He operated from a modest suburban London home he shared with his parents, far from the city’s glamorous financial center. He used off-the-shelf software anyone can buy.
Yet, if U.S. authorities are correct, Navinder Singh Sarao managed to send a jolt of fear through the world’s markets by helping to set off the 2010 “flash crash,” in which the Dow Jones average plunged 600 points in less than seven minutes.
Just how big a role he played has been hotly debated since the federal complaint was unsealed earlier last week, but the idea that a little-known investor had even a small part is deeply troubling, say traders and market experts.
“If this guy can do it,” asks finance professor James Angel of Georgetown University, “who else is doing it?”
In an age of rapidly advancing computer power, the fear is that it’s not just big banks and hedge funds that can create chaos on exchanges and wipe out the savings of millions of ordinary investors. Someone working from home might be able to do it, too.
Soldiers honored for WWI Gallipoli effort
GALLIPOLI, Turkey – For the first time at age 95, Bill Grayden has come to Gallipoli, where his father stormed the beach and took a bullet through his lung during the ill-fated British-led World War I invasion.
Grayden was among thousands of Australians and New Zealanders who made the pilgrimage from the southern hemisphere to this distant peninsula in Turkey. They joined world leaders at a dawn service Saturday marking exactly 100 years since the invasion, which had aimed to secure a naval route from the Mediterranean to Istanbul through the Dardanelles and take the Ottomans out of the war.
During the emotional ceremony, Britain’s Prince Charles and the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand spoke of the heroism of the soldiers from their countries and other Allied nations.
“For so many, the rising sun that day would be their last,” Australia’s Chief of Defense, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, told the crowd of thousands gathered at Anzac Cove near the landing site.
That was not the case for Bill Grayden’s father, Len. Five days after the landing, the elder Grayden was found wounded and nearly motionless on the field. During the heat of battle, someone noticed a slight hand movement, and he was evacuated to a hospital ship and ultimately survived. The subtle moment that determined his fate demonstrates how small differences can substantially change the course of history.
Italy marks its 70th of anti-Nazi uprising
ROME – Italy on Saturday celebrated the 70th anniversary of a partisan uprising against the Nazis and their fascist allies near the end of World War II.
President Sergio Mattarella marked Liberation Day by laying a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier in Rome.
The anniversary marks the day in 1945 when the Italian resistance movement proclaimed an insurgency as the Allies were pushing German forces out of the peninsula.
Within days, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who headed a Nazi puppet state in northern Italy, was captured, shot and hung by his feet in a Milan square, along with his mistress.
“He was on a train going to Switzerland disguised as a German,” recalled George Bria, an Associated Press correspondent who covered the Allied push into Italy. “Plain, ordinary German soldier, with his mistress and some other fascist officials, also disguised. Well, the partisans got wind of this, and they captured them.”
Associated Press
