OCCRP: How a Montenegrin Gang Used Open-Source Intelligence to Kill. “Hitmen working for a criminal group active in Montenegro and Serbia used open-source intelligence techniques, poring over apartment listing sites, satellite images, and tourist photos posted online, to track down and kill the leader of a rival clan as he hid out in Greece.”
BBC: Why TikTok sleuths descended on Nicola Bulley’s village. “I am walking the same route that Nicola Bulley, 45, followed before she disappeared, along the river in the small Lancashire village of Saint Michael’s on Wyre. It’s also the same route that amateur social media sleuths take when they come to look into the case themselves. They have been turning up in their numbers, prompted by rumours, speculation and conspiracy on social media viewed and shared by millions of people who have never been anywhere near this village.”
LAist: Civil Rights Pioneer Myrlie Evers-Williams Has Donated Her Archival Collection To Pomona College. “Myrlie Evers-Williams, a leader of the civil rights movement, has donated her archival collection to Pomona College, where she received her degree in sociology in 1968. Evers-Williams, 89, became known nationally following the 1963 assassination of her husband, NAACP official Medgar Evers, in the driveway of their Mississippi home.”
Library of Congress: Library Opens New Web Archive Collection, Features Programs for Black History Month. “A new web archive collection from the Library of Congress documents the civil unrest sparked by the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The Protests Against Racism Web Archive contains a selection of websites documenting protests against racism and police brutality against Black people, as well as grass roots movements and activism calling for police reform.”
NBC News: ‘Doppelganger murder’: Woman accused of killing Instagram lookalike in plot to fake her own death. “A family dispute, a missing woman, and a body that had been stabbed to death found in the woman’s car by her parents: These things, authorities in Germany now say, are not as they once seemed.”
UVA Today: Details, But No Big Revelations in Latest Kennedy Assassination Documents. “In December, the National Archives released 13,173 documents containing details on the shooting under terms of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. UVA Today spoke with Steve Gillon, a non-resident senior faculty fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, which studies the U.S. presidency, to see if this document dump shed any new light on the assassination.”
CBS News: Professor sues TikToker who accused her in University of Idaho murders. “A professor at the University of Idaho has filed a defamation lawsuit last week against the internet personality Ashley Guillard, who alleged to have solved the prominent murder cases and whose TikTok videos have repeatedly alleged that the school’s history department chair was involved in the fatal stabbings of four students last month.”
New York Post: How Dallas homemaker Mary Ferrell became main collector of JFK assassination records. “Ferrell became so influential in the community of JFK historians that two years before her death in 2004, a Boston-based financier started a non-profit to digitize her trove of documents. Now based in Ipswich, Mass., the Mary Ferrell Foundation Inc has sued the federal government to obtain classified documents related to Kennedy’s death.”
CNN: National Archives releases thousands of JFK assassination documents. “The National Archives on Thursday released thousands of previously classified documents collected as part of the government review into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The cache of over 13,000 documents is the second of two JFK assassination-related document dumps that President Joe Biden ordered last year when the White House postponed a public release because of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
USA Today: Over 80 schools changed their names in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. See our database. “Using public school directory files from the National Center for Education Statistics, USA TODAY built a comprehensive database and interactive map of school name changes nationwide since 2020. Reporters analyzed thousands of rows of data and reviewed local news publications to put together a picture of what happened in each case. The database includes schools that changed names through the end of 2021. But the list of schools shedding old names keeps growing.”
Washington Post: Buffalo massacre report seeks to punish broadcasters of homicide live streams. “The New York attorney general on Tuesday called on the state legislature to pass new laws to deter the live-streaming of homicides, following an investigation that concluded the alleged gunman accused of killing 10 people in Buffalo was radicalized online and then used social media to plan and promote his rampage.”
NBC News: ‘What are they hiding?’: Group sues Biden and National Archives over JFK assassination records. “The country’s largest online source of JFK assassination records is suing President Joe Biden and the National Archives to force the federal government to release all remaining documents related to the most mysterious murder of a U.S. president nearly 60 years ago.”
Northeastern University School of Law: 1,000 Racial Homicides Investigated in Unprecedented Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. “The Archive brings together evidence demonstrating the extensive scale and scope of killings between 1930 and 1954 in the Jim Crow South. Many of the 1,000 cases of anti-Black killings were mishandled by local police and prosecutors or went unreported until investigated by Northeastern students in law and journalism and their faculty. Built on open-source architecture, the Archive offers users the opportunity to learn about how violence affected people’s lives, defined legal rights and shaped politics during the Jim Crow era.”
USA Today: Livestreamed violence compounds America’s horror and inspires copycats, experts say. When will it stop?. “The violence across Tennessee’s second-largest city that left four dead and three injured is the latest example of why advocates have been pushing tech companies since the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, to draft policies against livestreamed attacks and quickly scrub the videos from their platforms.”
Salt Lake Tribune: Utah cold case investigators unveil nationwide resource aimed at solving railroad killings. “The database currently has more than 1,000 entries, spanning crimes ranging from the 1960s to 2012, and still more are being added. At least 12 of the cases originated in Utah. Volunteers have pieced together information from newspapers, police and court records and even railroad documents, and they soon hope to visit train archives in other states that may contain more information.” The database is not publicly-available because the information has not been scrubbed of personal information, but the Cold Case Coalition is happy to search it for law enforcement of family of missing persons.
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