Crime

Embattled chief Tom Jackson says he isn't going anywhere

The Ferguson, Mo. police department is denying reports that its chief is set to be replaced amid ongoing protests in a community bracing for a grand jury decision in the shooting death of Michael Brown.

“Nobody in my chain of command has asked me to resign, nor have I been terminated,” Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson told CNN, which reported late Tuesday night that Jackson would step down as part of a broad reorganization that would hand control of the department to the St. Louis County police. CNN, citing unnamed “government officials familiar with the ongoing discussions,” reported the move could come as soon as next week.

That was news to the Ferguson police department, which denied the report but left open the possibility that Jackson could vacate the post. “He has not been told to resign. He has not been fired. If he leaves, it will be his choice alone,” the department posted on Twitter.

Jackson did not immediately return a call or an email seeking comment on the report.

Officer Brian Schellman of the St. Louis County Police says his department is unaware of impending changes. “We have no knowledge of any of that,” Schellman says.

The report comes as the aftershocks of the Aug. 9 shooting continue to reverberate in the St. Louis suburb. A grand jury investigating the shooting of Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, is expected to hand down a decision by mid-November on whether to indict police officer Darren Wilson on murder or manslaughter charges. In recent weeks, the protests have regained steam amid a series of leaked reports that appeared to corroborate Wilson’s claim that the shooting came after Brown assaulted the officer. Local officials say they are worried about the protests that may erupt if Wilson is not indicted.

Jackson has come under withering criticism for his handling of the shooting. As riots roiled the St. Louis suburb in the days after Brown’s death, Jackson resisted the intense pressure to identify the officer who shot him. When he finally fingered Wilson six days later, he did so while releasing a video of an unrelated robbery Brown committed before the attack—which critics considered an attempt to taint the reputation of the dead teen.

The shooting released a wave of mounting frustration between Ferguson’s largely African American population and its heavily white government and police force. Residents have raised questions about what they say is a pattern of racial profiling and the Justice Department has opened a broad civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police department. Outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who visited the troubled city in the aftermath of the shooting, has said his department is investigating the Ferguson force’s record of stops, searches and use of force against residents. Statistics indicate the police force has targeted African Americans at a disproportionate rate.

Oct. 29, 1982: An Australian woman is convicted of murder after courts reject her claim that a dingo took her baby

For years, whether or not you believed Lindy Chamberlain’s story depended on which nightmarish scenario you found more plausible: that a wild dog snatched her sleeping 9-week-old baby from a tent in the Australian outback, or that Lindy herself slashed the infant’s throat and then invented the farfetched story to cover up her crime.

Thirty-two years ago today, on Oct. 29, 1982, a jury went for the latter interpretation and convicted Chamberlain of murder. She was sentenced to a lifetime behind bars. The case gained international notoriety, inspiring the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark, in which Meryl Streep, as Chamberlain, shouts the words that would become a morbid punch line: “The dingo’s got my baby!”

The couple was exonerated after the baby’s knit jacket appeared in 1986, partly buried next to a remote dingo lair. Chamberlain was freed and the guilt was redistributed to those who had vilified her. A mere two years earlier, 77% of Australians polled had believed she was guilty, and not just because of the outrageous story.

One source of suspicion was her religion. Her husband was a pastor in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, then little-known in Australia. Rumors swirled that the church was a cult that practiced infant sacrifice, and that Azaria — the name of Chamberlain’s late daughter — meant “sacrifice in the wilderness” (it means “blessed of God”). Another strike against Chamberlain was the way she carried herself. Stylish and stoic, she never erupted in hysterics in court. She was called cold and calculating. As journalist Julia Baird wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “She was, we were told, more interested in looking pretty than in the death of her child.”

Compared to Chamberlain, dingoes were viewed more warmly, at least initially. In the early 1980s, TIME reports, dingoes had never been known to attack humans — or at least, such cases hadn’t been publicized.

“On television, footage from the Chamberlains’ trial was often accompanied by images of the wild dogs looking more affable than aggressive,” TIME’s Marina Kamenev wrote. Since then, however, dozens of dingo attacks have made the news, including a 2001 mauling that killed a 9-year-old boy.

Those attacks were considered in the most recent inquest into Azaria Chamberlain’s death — the fourth in three decades — which resulted in a 2012 ruling that a dingo had indeed killed, and likely devoured, the baby. When that final report was released, Australians expressed remorse for having jumped to the wrong conclusions, according to Baird.

“Comedians issued public apologies for using Lindy Chamberlain as a punch line; TV hosts were grave and emotional,” she wrote.

Chamberlain, meanwhile, felt vindicated. “No longer will Australia be able to say that dingoes are not dangerous and will only attack if provoked,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We live in a beautiful country, but it is dangerous.”

Read about the reopened Chamberlain case, here in TIME’s archives: Did a Dingo Really Get Her Baby?

The FBI maintains that its fake news article was justified

The FBI created a fake Seattle Times article containing surveillance software in order to track a school bomb-threat suspect in 2007, according to documents obtained by an advocacy group.

The controversy was publicized Monday evening on Twitter by Christopher Soghoian, a technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, who linked to the FBI documents (pages 61-62) obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization. While the FBI’s use of data gathering software in this investigation was reported in 2007 by WIRED, which acquired an FBI affidavit seeking a search warrant for the tool’s use, the latest documents reveal for the first time the FBI’s use of a false news article.

According to the documents, the link to the article was “in the style of the Seattle Times” and used a false Associated Press byline. The article, titled “Bomb threat at high school downplayed by local police department,” was mocked up with subscriber and advertising information.

The link was then e-mailed to the to the MySpace account of the suspect, who police believe was responsible for a series of bomb threats at Timberline High School in Lacey, Wash. When clicked on, the link would deploy FBI software to track his location and computer IP address.

“We are outraged that the FBI, with the apparent assistance of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, misappropriated the name of The Seattle Times to secretly install spyware on the computer of a crime suspect,” said Seattle Times Editor Kathy Best in a statement Monday evening.

AP’s Director of Media Relations Paul Colford also criticized the FBI’s actions, writing in a statement that, “We are extremely concerned and find it unacceptable that the FBI misappropriated the name of The Associated Press and published a false story attributed to AP. This ploy violated AP’s name and undermined AP’s credibility.”

The FBI in Seattle maintains that its technique was justified in locating the suspect, who was arrested on June 14, 2007, two days after the dateline that appeared on the agents’ e-mail correspondence discussing the plan.

“Every effort we made in this investigation had the goal of preventing a tragic event like what happened at Marysville and Seattle Pacific University,” Frank Montoya Jr., an FBI agent overseeing its Seattle operations, told the Seattle Times. “We identified a specific subject of an investigation and used a technique that we deemed would be effective in preventing a possible act of violence in a school setting.”

A spokeswoman for FBI’s Seattle unit also defended the strategy to the Seattle Times, arguing that the FBI did not use a “real Seattle Times article, but material generated by the FBI in styles common in reporting and online media.”

The thief ran off with her mascara, she told Jimmy Kimmel

The high-profile killing has sparked protests in the Philippines

The U.S. Marine accused of killing a transgender Filipina has asked prosecutors to reduce the murder charge to homicide if the case is brought to court, since there is no “probable cause for murder.”

Lawyers for Private First Class Joseph Scott Pemberton presented the motion at a preliminary hearing in the northern Philippine city of Olongapo on Monday, Rappler reports. Pemberton did not attend the hearing.

Jennifer Laude, 26, was found strangled and drowned on Oct. 11 in a motel bathroom where witnesses last placed her together with Pemberton. The case has become politically charged because of a defense agreement giving the U.S. military custody over the suspect.

Last week, Pemberton was transferred to a Philippine military base, and he is now detained at the Philippines’ military headquarters in Manila under joint custody.

According to Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN, Pemberton’s lawyer Rowena Garcia Flores said he did not file an expected counter-affidavit because he had not yet had the “opportunity to examine the case.”

Laude’s killing has sparked widespread protests against the defense agreement between the U.S. and the Philippines, and has also led to calls for greater protection for LGBT people in the country.

On Monday, Laude’s German boyfriend, Marc Suselbeck, was charged with gross arrogance and serious disrespect to Filipino authorities after climbing the fence surrounding the camp where Pemberton was held, and shoving a military guard, the Philippine Star reports.