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2 Killed In Tennessee Church Shooting

2 Killed In Tennessee Church Shooting

KNOXVILLE, Tennessee (CNN) -- A shotgun-wielding man opened fire at a Unitarian church during a children's play Sunday morning, killing two adults and wounding seven others before being overpowered by congregants, officials said.

One of the victims, Linda Kraeger, 61, died at a hospital several hours after the shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, Knoxville municipal spokesman Randall Kenner said.

Also killed was Greg McKendry, a 60-year-old usher and board member at the church, police said earlier in the day.

A suspect, Jim Adkisson, 58, of Powell, Tennessee, was charged with one count of first-degree murder, Kenner said Sunday evening. Video Watch scene at church after shooting »

Adkisson is not believed to have been a member of the Knoxville church, and investigators have not determined a motive for the shooting, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling Owen told reporters.

"[The motive] is one thing we're obviously aggressively pursuing," Owen said.

Five others were hospitalized in either critical or serious condition, police said. iReport.com: Are you there? Share photos, video, accounts

Two other people hurt in the attack were treated and released, Owen said.

Church member Barbara Kemper told The Associated Press that McKendry "stood in the front of the gunman and took the blast to protect the rest of us."

Owen told reporters he couldn't comment on whether McKendry confronted the gunman, but he said McKendry apparently "was the first person [the gunman] encountered" in the sanctuary.

Members of the church said a man entered the building at about 10:15 a.m. and began shooting during a children's production of the musical "Annie." About 200 people in the church were watching the production, which was being put on by 25 children, the AP reported.

No child was shot, and a few church members subdued the man and held him until officers arrived, police said. Church members said one of the tacklers was John Bohstedt, a man who had a part in the musical, the AP reported.

"This was a day the church was looking forward to for a long time, and it turned into a nightmare," Bohstedt told Knoxville television station WBIR.

Ken Kitts said he arrived late and saw a couple and a child running out of the church at "super-fast speed."

"Then everybody else started pouring out of the church, lots of them in costume from this show they were putting on," he said.

Inside, he said, was a scene of "absolute chaos," including wounded people and the gunman, who was pinned to the floor by church members.

"He was face-down in the middle of a bunch of shotgun shells rolling around on the floor," Kitts said.

Owen said investigators are looking into whether Adkisson has a criminal history. Bail was set at $1 million late Sunday.

"We don't know this particular individual. We may never know why," said Steve Drevik, a church member who arrived after the shooting. "All of this will come out in the next couple of days."

Rick Lambert, the FBI agent in charge of the bureau's Knoxville office, said federal agents are assisting Knoxville police with witness interviews and could help analyze evidence from the crime scene. He said the bureau is examining whether the attack was a hate crime.

"Anytime there is a shooting in a church, there is the possibility it could be a hate crime," he said.

The church, on its Web site, describes itself as a community that has worked for social change -- including desegregation, women's rights and gay rights -- since the 1950s.

Police said people were recording videos of the children's performance when the shooting happened, and investigators were reviewing the videos. Information on what, if anything, the videos show of the shooting wasn't immediately available.

The church's minister, Chris Buice, said he was on vacation when the shooting happened but rushed back when he heard what occurred. Sunday afternoon -- after McKendry's death but before Kraeger's -- he spoke briefly to reporters.

"Please pray for this congregation, because we are grieving the loss of a wonderful man," Buice said as he choked back tears.

Sunday's attack was the fourth time in 15 months that an American church became a scene of a fatal shooting.

In December 2007, a 24-year-old former missionary candidate killed two people at a suburban Denver, Colorado, missionary training center and two more at a Colorado Springs megachurch the following day. The gunman, Matthew Murray, killed himself after being shot by a security guard.

The previous August, police said, 52-year-old Eiken Saimon shot and killed three people and wounded five others at a Congregational church in Neosho, Missouri. The attack left three people dead and five wounded.

And that May, in Moscow, Idaho, 36-year-old Jason Hamilton fatally shot a police officer and a sexton at First Presbyterian Church, then killed himself before police stormed the building. Hamilton's wife was found shot to death in the bedroom of their Moscow home after the church shootings.

Original Source : http://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/28/church.shooting/?iref=mpstoryview



Istanbul: Turkey Blames Kurds For Bomb Attacks

Istanbul: Turkey blames Kurds for bomb attacks

Istanbul's governor has blamed two bomb blasts which killed 17 people and injured 150 others in Istanbul on a Kurdish rebel group - but the rebels have denied involvement.






Gov Muammer Guler said police were still investigating the explosions in a packed square on Sunday night, which were the deadliest attack against civilians in Turkey in five years.

"There appears to be a link with the separatist organisation. We are working on that. We hope to get a result at the first opportunity," Mr Guler said.

But Firat, a pro-Kurdish news agency, reported Zubeyir Aydar, a Kurdish rebel leader, as saying that the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, did not carry out the bombing.

"The Kurdish freedom movement has nothing to do with this event, this cannot be linked to the PKK," he was quoted as saying. "We extend our condolences to the families of the victims and to the Turkish people."

While government officials blamed the Kurds, the timing and location of the attacks pointed to a link with a key court case which threatens the future of the Islamic-oriented government.

The attack came on the eve of deliberations by the Turkey's top court on whether to ban the ruling party for allegedly trying to steer the country toward Islamic rule. The government won a strong mandate in elections last year, but is locked in a power struggle with secular circles that have backing in the military and judiciary.

The case before the top court is pivotal in that conflict, which has distracted attention from key policies such as Turkey's troubled bid to join the European Union.

There were reports yesterday that Turkish police had detained three teenagers in connection with the blasts, but Mr Guler would not confirm that report.

Turkey is home to a variety of militants, including Kurdish rebels, Islamic extremists and alleged coup plotters with ties to the secular establishment.

Deniz Baykal, the opposition leader, said security officials told him the type of bombs used were similar to those detonated in attacks in Ankara and Diyarbakir, a mostly Kurdish city, which were blamed on the PKK.

The PKK, which is designated by the EU as a banned terror organisation, is fighting for an independent homeland in Turkey's south and Iraq's north.

The high level of professionalism in the Istanbul bombings, apparently designed to inflict maximum casualties among civilians, was unsettling. Authorities said the vast majority of the deaths and injuries occurred when a curious crowd gathered after an initial, small blast.

"First, they exploded a percussion bomb to grab attention. Then, 10 minutes later, in another trash can, they exploded a fragmentation bomb," said Hayati Yazici, deputy prime minister.

Cihan news agency said the second bomb consisted of a plastic explosive of the same kind used in a suicide attack in a shopping thoroughfare in Ankara in May 2007 that killed seven people.

Cihan said two of the dead were children. Anatolia news agency said one victim was a 12-year-old girl who rushed with her parents onto the balcony of their fourth floor apartment to see what was going on.


Original Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/2464785/Istanbul-Turkey-blames-Kurds-for-bomb-atta cks.html

Cuil Search Engine

Cuil Search Engine

Can Cuil's new search engine capture the salmon of knowledge?

Google has yet another a new challenger for the search engine crown
I'm annoyed with Google at the moment -- it is spamming me with intrusive Google Toolbar adverts on its main page -- so I might just give a rival a try. One launched today is called Cuil (or "cool"), which is "an old Irish word for knowledge," says the site.


This is different from Google in that it displays results in two or three columns (thus reducing what on Google amounts to "the tyranny of the top hit"), quotes enough content to be useful, has an illustration with each entry, and does some clustering, It also claims to focus on content. The site says:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page's coherency.


Cuil's other claim to fame is that it indexes more of the web than anybody else. At the moment, it says: "Search 121,617,892,992 web pages". This is presumably why Google posted a not very useful boast on its blog last week, We knew the web was big...

But Cuil has some obvious drawbacks, even on two minutes' use. For example, it is no doubt a good idea to focus on content, but it gets a bit repetitive if you're faced with hits from basically the same content at different addresses. Another drawback: I searched for [google official blog] without any quotes, and got nothing from Cuil: It simply says:

We didn't find any results for "google official blog"


Yeah, I do wish people would use [square brackets] to show what's typed into a search box, but there you go. The same search in Google correctly finds Official Google Blog and 130m hits, not zero hits. If I'm not using quotation marks, I don't see why Cuil should be so picky about me misremembering Google's official word order.

One thing in Cuil's favour is that its founders and staff have enough background (ie ex-Google employees) and backing to get coverage in The New York Times, TechCrunch, Search Engine Land and even The Guardian.

Whether it will actually do any better than Vivisimo, Teoma, Hakia, Kartoo, Wikia etc is another matter. Google is no longer winning by delivering much better results than the competition (provable here), it's winning by tying in other products (Gmail etc) and because we all love familiar things and don't like unfamiliar ones.

So what can be done about the increasingly bad results that Google produces? The obvious answer is to use multiple vertical-market search engines that focus only on the topic you want. Google did this rather badly and the feature has been quietly buried away where you won't find it. (To be fair, Google Scholar seems to be more successful.)

Scirus is one example, and Kosmix is having a go. But I still wouldn't bet on specialist search engines taking off.....

So, what do you think of Cuil? Or does nobody care any more?

Original Source : http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/07/28/can_cuils_new_search_engine_capture_the_salmon_of_knowledge.html