New Florida passenger train unveiled

WEST PALM BEACH — After years of failed attempts to bring higher-speed rail service to the Sunshine State, officials with Brightline relished a historic moment Wednesday, showing off the first train set delivered to their operations center in this South Florida city.

According to ustoday.com, the two locomotives and four passenger coaches, collectively dubbed "BrightBlue," arrived in West Palm Beach last month and were put on public display for the first time Wednesday. The set will soon be followed by four more - BrightOrange, BrightPink, BrightRed and BrightGreen - with the hopes of starting regular service by this summer.

If all goes according to plan, it will be the first privately run and operated rail service launched in the United States in over 100 years. And for passengers, it will mark the culmination of years of efforts to create a higher-speed rail option between the tourist havens of Orlando and Miami.

Brightline president Mike Reininger said he expects about 3 million passengers a year in the first phase of operations, which will run between stations in West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami. By the time rail lines and stations are completed to Orlando, possibly by 2018, Reininger said they hope to lure up to 5.5 million passengers per year.

During a media tour Wednesday, officials from Brightline and Siemens, the California company that built the cars, showed off the new train set and the operations facility where they will be serviced.

The two locomotives feature 16-cylinder, 4,000 horsepower engines that will both be running when the train is moving. Russ Harvey of Siemens said local laws limit the train's speed to 79 mph throughout the heavily-populated South Florida region. Once it gets a bit farther north on its way to Orlando, it can kick it up to 125 mph. And, if it were allowed, Harvey said it could go even faster.

"It can go 125 mph not even at full throttle," Harvey said with a grin.

The 32-inch wide aisles allow wheelchairs and strollers to easily pass through. The seats - 19 inches wide in the standard "Smart" coaches, 21 inches wide in the higher-end "Select" coach - are designed to recline in a way that doesn't interfere with passengers seated behind. All rows have power outlets, and tables include pop-up charging stations with power outlets and USB connections.






Each car has a large storage area that holds bicycles and larger bags. And each bathroom is designed to be completely hands-free, including doors, faucets and toilets that all operate with the wave of a hand.













Reininger said the Wi-Fi service on the train will be "continuous, powerful and free." And he said the trains will introduce a new concept - train stations built at the same level of the passenger coaches, meaning people won't have to climb up and down stairs to board.

The BrightBlue train set was pulled 3,000 miles from the Siemens factory in Sacramento, Calif., to the operations facility in West Palm Beach. That means the first test runs will start next week, with officials placing 40-pound bags of sand on each of the train's 240 seats to begin testing how it runs with passengers aboard.

After that, they expect to receive another train set per month, ending up with five sets that will begin operations this summer.

Members of ISIS nabbed in intelligence undercover

An undercover officer smashed a terror cell drumming up support for Islamic State extremists after he spent nearly two years infiltrating meetings to record their inflammatory speeches.

According to the telegraph.co.uk, the officer identified only as Kamal forged close relationships with the Luton chapter of a banned group linked to hate preacher Anjem Choudary as he collected evidence, a court heard.

Equipped with a false identity including a fake name, fake wife and fake business, he spent 20 months recording hundreds of encounters, and meetings where scores of people heard speeches praising Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Isil).

In one rant, one of the gang spoke of 40 truck bombs “driving down Oxford Street”, the Old Bailey was told.

Speeches were delivered to up to 100 people, including young children, and the group praised Isil and urged others to travel to Syria to fight.

Zaiur Rahman, 39, was convicted of arranging meetings after putting up a marquee in his back garden to host the Luton chapter of Al-Muhajiroun. Meetings were also held in a nearby Methodist church hall.

Mohammed Choudry, 23, was found guilty of encouraging support for Isil, while Mohammed Istiak Alamgir, 37, Rajib Khan, 38, and Yousaf Bashir, 36, were convicted of similar offences last summer.

The invitation-only gatherings in June and July 2015 featured speeches calling for gay people to be thrown from buildings, the court heard.



One was held on the anniversary of the London Tube bombings while in another Choudry spoke of “40 trucks driving down Oxford Street full of explosives”.

Choudry, who is married with a young child, told his audience: “My brothers, there is a wave coming. Either you be part of it or you drown. Either you like it or you don't like it.'

Anjem Choudary, who was last year jailed for five-and-a-half years, spoke at one of the meetings in Rahman's garden.

Those attending the speeches included Shazib and Junead Khan. Junead Khan is serving a life sentence for plotting to kill a US soldier in the UK, while Shazib Khan is serving a 13-year jail term for plans to fight alongside Isis in Syria.

Rahman, from Luton, was convicted of three counts of arranging meetings in support of a proscribed organisation, while Choudry, from Maidenhead, Berkshire, was convicted of one count of encouraging support for a proscribed organisation.

Judge Michael Topolski QC told the pair they had been convicted “of arranging meetings and speaking at a meeting in support of a vicious terrorist organisation, who's members and supporters, just like you two, have hijacked and corrupted the principles and practices of an ancient and revered religion for its own purposes”.

Kamal accompanied Rahman and Choudry to a meeting where the speaker praised the massacre of 12 journalists at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The court heard a secret recording where the speaker says: “It's a great day, it's excellent news.”

Alamgir also collected money at the talks to pay the legal fees of convicted terrorist Omar Bakri Muhammed - Anjem Choudary's mentor, seen by many as the head of Al-Muhajiroun.

Speaking after the verdict, Commander Dean Haydon, head of Scotland Yard’s counter terrorism command, said: "These men were closely associated with Al-Muhajiroun, a dangerous group which has inspired and influenced numerous terrorists.

"Speeches like theirs inspire the terrorists of tomorrow and I am immensely pleased with the excellent work of my officers and Bedfordshire Police.”

All five men will be sentenced at a later date.

Nigeria Prison nmates hits 47,817 awaiting trial

No fewer than 47,817 inmates are currently awaiting trial in Nigerian prisons out of a total number of 69,200 detai-nees, according to www.vanguardngr.com.

The Country Director of Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, CURE-Nigeria, Mr. Sylvester Uhaa made this known at a roundtable for criminal justice actors in Benue State, put together by his organization in conjunction with the Benue State High Court of Justice, Makurdi.

Uhaa lamented that many detainees stayed on pre-trial longer than convicts and far longer than they would have stayed in prison if they had been convicted.

He said, “As a result the prisons are overstretched and overcrowded with many holding thrice their designated capacities.

They have also become breeding grounds for diseases and criminality, with huge consequences on prison inmates, their families and society.

In addition, there are either no or too little rehabilitation programs available in the prisons.”

He said the situation in the prisons had become almost impossible to manage and often resulting in jail breaks. “This situation is a time bomb we are all sitting on, and when it explodes, none of us, no matter how safe we think we are, will be spared”, he added.

Uhaa urged President Muhammadu Buhari and state Governors to take immediate steps to address the issue by decongesting the prisons in the country and also place emphasis on justice and prison reforms and prisoner rehabilitation and reintegration.

The most technologically advanced country in the world

The Baltic nation of Estonia only has 1.3 million citizens stands out from its Eastern European neighbors in that it has an advanced economy and a high standard of living. And it’s a technology paradise. You may know it as the home of Skype. But there’s a lot more to the tiny country than that.

In Estonia, voting, signing documents and filling out tax returns is done online, thanks to X-Road, an online tool that coordinates multiple online data repositories and document registries. X-Road provides all Estonians — ordinary citizens, enterprises and government officials — with unparalleled access to the data they need to do business, get licenses, permits and other documents that would take days, weeks or even months in other countries.

X-Road is built with scalability in mind, so that the growing number of services and repositories can easily be attached to the system. Although this digital backbone alone is rather impressive, it’s just one of many products in tech-forward Estonia.

Instead of being held back by its past and falling victim to ailments that plague many post-communist countries, such as corruption, a bloated government and an obsolete education system, Estonia has decided to start with a clean slate and invest in its future. To transform its society into a community of tech-savvy individuals, children as young as 7 are taught the principles and basics of coding. (In comparison, only one in four schools in the U.S. teaches computer programming.)

Such strong foundations have yielded impressive results: Estonians are driven, forward-thinking and entrepreneurial, and the same goes for the government. It takes only five minutes to register a company there and, according to The Economist, the country in 2013 held the world record for the number of startups per person. And it’s not quantity over quality: Many Estonian startups are now successful companies that you may recognize, such as Skype, Transferwise, Pipedrive, Cloutex, Click & Grow, GrabCAD, Erply, Fortumo, Lingvist and others. By the way, Estonia uses the euro.

If all this sounds enticing and you wish to become an entrepreneur there, you’re in luck; starting a business in Estonia is easy, and you can do it without packing your bags, thanks to its e-residency service, a transnational digital identity available to anyone. An e-resident can not only establish a company in Estonia through the Internet, but they can also have access to other online services that have been available to Estonians for over a decade. This includes e-banking and remote money transfers, declaring Estonian taxes online, digitally signing and verifying contracts and documents, and much more.

E-residents are issued a smart ID card, a legal equivalent to handwritten signatures and face-to-face identification in Estonia and worldwide. The cards themselves are protected by 2048-bit encryption, and the signature/ID functionality is provided by two security certificates stored on the card’s microchip.

But great innovations don’t stop there. Blockchain, the principle behind bitcoin that also secures the integrity of e-residency data, will be used to provide unparalleled safety to 1 million Estonian health records. The blockchain will be used to register any and all changes, illicit or otherwise, done to the health records, protecting their authenticity and effectively eliminating any abuse of the data therein.

While there are many lessons that the U.S. and the rest of the world can learn from Estonia, these are especially important: A country must be willing to adapt and change the infrastructure of both the government and the economy if needed, and to continually optimize them. A nation needs to understand that a change of mindset should be thorough and start with the young. An education system should be designed in a way that doesn’t cripple young minds, or overburden them with too much irrelevant information. And, finally, if you want entrepreneurship to thrive, it is necessary to remove bureaucratic and technical obstacles at all levels.
How close is your country to Estonia in technology? Let me know in the comment section below.

Basket Mouth Is Now A Knight

Popular comedian Basket mouth has become a knight of the United Kingdom.

In a statement posted on his social media wall, he said " I am humbled, God is truly amazing. Your majesty, thank you for the great honour. Yours truly, Sir Okpocha Bright.

Meanwhile congratulatory messages have been pouring in since his post on social media. One of them is from his friend and comedian, Bovi, who wrote "Say hello to the latest knight in town, Sir Bright Okpocha, the Ogwi Microphone 1 of United Kingdom."

We say congratulations to him.

Girl, 12, livestreams her own suicide on Facebook after she was 'sexually abused by a relative'

The horrific suicide video of a 12-year-old girl has gone viral.

Katelyn Nicole Davis, of Cedartown Georgia, streamed herself on Facebook live on December 30, saying that she had been sexually abused by a family member. She continued filming as she hanged herself in the front yard of her Cedartown home.

Police rushed to Davis's home to save the girl on the evening of her suicide, but she was pronounced dead after being taken to Polk Medical Center’s Emergency Room.

The video - which ends with the girl hanging from the tree for around 20 minutes as the sun sets, while a woman off-camera can be heard calling her name - was then removed from her Facebook page.

According to Coosa Valley News Wednesday, Davis posted on her blog on December 27 that she had been sexually abused by a relative.

A January 1 capture of a blog purporting to be Davis's, but written under the pseudonym 'Dolly' - a name she used in other social media - lists abuse from a male relative including being hit with a studded belt. She adds he 'tried to rape me.'

It goes on to allege that the man told her to hang herself after she asked him to 'stop being so perverted in front of my younger siblings.'

In a second post the same day, the writer says she is suffering from depression and discusses different methods of committing suicide.

She ends by asking her readers to advise her on how to deal with depression.

In the weeks since her death, however, the Polk County Police Department has been flooded with calls from as far abroad as Britain, alerting them to websites sharing the video.

One was from a California police officer who saw the video on the night of Davis's death. 

'We want it down as much as anyone for the family and it may be harmful to other kids,' said Polk County Police Chief Kenny Dodd.

Rapper jailed for 23 years after raping, beating and torturing woman with hot iron in three day ordeal

Courtney Hutchinson, known as rapper DVS and 1ARDA on social media, held the 20-year-old in his flat before she managed to escape and flee naked into the street.

The 32-year-old even burnt her with an iron in scenes that mirrored British film The Intent in which he burns a man in a similar way as he is strapped to a table.

He even filmed his real life savage attack on his phone as he forced the woman to beg for her life while he told her to call her mum and say goodbye.

The attack on the victim began on February 5 last year when she drove to a flat Hutchinson used near London’s City Airport, east London.

He immediately began attacking, punching and kicking her.
Afterwards he forced her to eat a meal before going to bed before becoming even angrier then next morning and repeatedly hitting the victim.

He went on to push the legs of a chair into her stomach, drag her around the flat by her hair and whip her repeatedly with a phone charger cable.

Hutchinson pressed a heated iron onto her exposed skin several times before holding it above her face and demanding she burn herself as she pleaded with him to stop.

The force of his attack left the woman with 40 injuries, including a fractured eye socket, broken nose, dislocated shoulder, stab wound to the hand and severe burns.

Hutchinson told the victim that she would die the next day, and then raped her.
On the third day Hutchinson continued his assault, also forcing her into a hot shower and stamping on her burns.

He filmed her, making her state on camera that she was a bad person.

Throughout the entire ordeal he kept her naked until she finally saw an opportunity to escape.

The victim was taken to the Royal London Hospital and continues to receive treatment for the injuries inflicted.


Hutchinson pleaded guilty to rape, false imprisonment and GBH with intent on the second day of his trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court in July.

Yesterday, he was jailed for life and was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Detective Sergeant Jimi Tele, from Newham police, said: ‘I would like to praise the bravery and determination of the victim of this truly harrowing ordeal.

‘Her resoluteness in coming forward and working with the police in securing the imprisonment of a truly dangerous offender is worthy of the highest recognition.

‘Courtney Hutchinson subjected his victim to the most shocking and repeated levels of violence.
‘It was her determination, in company with the skill of the investigation team, that allowed the full severity of the attack to be revealed and that ultimately led to Hutchinson’s arrest and conviction.’

Hutchinson, of Brixton, south London, will also remain on the sex offenders register for life.

Dylann Roof given death sentence for killing nine black church members

During the massacre in 2015, he walked into a Bible study group and sat listening for almost an hour before he took out a hand gun and opened fire, according to metro.co.uk.

He said he acted to try and bring back segregation or start a race war by killing congregation members at the historically black church of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In his confession to the FBI, he said he felt that he ‘had to do it’. Speaking today, he said ‘I still feel that way.’
Roof, who is white, faced either life in prison or execution for the slayings on June 17, 2015. The same jury which found him guilty was tasked with deciding his sentence, and reached their conclusion after about three hours.

When asked by police why he ‘had to do it’, the killer replied: ‘I had to do it because somebody had to do something.’
He said he ‘was sitting there for 15 minutes’ thinking about whether he should carry out the attack.
‘I knew I could have just walked out because they didn’t say anything to me about the thing on my belt,’ he said in an FBI interview. ‘So I could have walked out, that’s what I was just thinking.
‘Then I just, like, I don”t know just like, I don’t want to say spur of the moment but I just finally decided I had to do it. And that’s pretty much it.’

His legal team said they were sorry that ‘despite our best efforts, the legal proceedings have shed so little light on the reasons for this tragedy,’ a veiled referenced to the mental issues they wanted to present during sentencing.

The juriors’ decision means Roof will be the first American to get the death penalty for federal hate crimes.
He was convicted last month of all 33 federal charges against him.

During sentencing, he represented himself and told jurors he didn’t have a mental illness.
But he didn’t offer any remorse or ask that his life be spared.

After the verdict today, the brother of Cynthia Hurd, one of Roof’s victims, said jurors made the right decision in sentencing him to death.

Malcolm Graham said it ‘sends a strong message’ that hate crimes will not be tolerated.
Graham said there is ‘no room in a civilised society for hatred, racism and discrimination.’

Elderly woman in wheelchair ‘pushed onto train tracks and smashed in the head with a rock’

A man has been held on suspicion of attempted murder after a woman in a wheelchair was ‘pushed onto train tracks and then beaten with a rock’.

CCTV footage from the station in Poland shows the disabled woman, 72, on the platform along with a figure dressed in black.

The film appears to show him push her wheelchair onto the rails, then jump down and start to beat her head with a rock

Other passengers then appear to pull him off her in the incident, which happened in the town of Leszno in south-western Poland.

The woman, whose name has not been released, was on her way to hospital and needed to change trains there during her journey from her home town of Czestochowa.

On the first train, she met a 33-year-old man, who is also unnamed, from the town of Ruda Slaska, and they spent the journey in conversation.

When they arrived at Leszno, he offered to help her catch her next train by pushing her in her wheelchair.
But he is then alleged to have pushed her to the edge of the railway platform and shoved her off, sending her over the edge and onto the tracks below.

The man then jumped down after her, picked up a large stone and started repeatedly hitting her in the head with it.

He had hit her more than a dozen times before witnesses spotted what was happening and ran over to pull the man off the woman and push him to the ground.

An ambulance was called and the woman was taken to hospital where she is being treated for multiple injuries including head wounds and broken ribs.

Police arrested the man and charged him with attempted murder.

He is being examined by psychiatrists to decide whether he is fit to stand trial.

FIFA approves the expansion to 48-team World Cup

The members of FIFA approved a measure on Tuesday that would expand the field of the World Cup from its current 32 teams to 48, a change that will be implemented in 2026.

The new format will see an initial round with 16 groups of three teams, with the top two teams advancing in each, leaving a field of 32.

Beyond concerns about diluting the talent with an expanded field, FIFA must also answer questions about how the extra two games for each team will affect the quality of play in the World Cup, and how wise it is to mess with the proven formula of the most beloved international soccer tournament in the world, according to Fox Sports.

New FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been a proponent of the expanded World Cup, initially proposing a 40-team tournament before eyeing an even larger field.