A video released Wednesday shows the last few minutes in the life of Michael Blair who died in a hail of gunfire last year from a Fort Bend County sheriff's deputy.

In the last seconds of the video, Blair - holding a knife but already struck several times by a stun gun - appears to stumble toward the deputy standing in the bathroom doorway at the family's Rosenberg-area home.

The deputy shouts for the man to stop, then begins firing.

The video appears to show the deputy continuing to shoot almost a dozen times, the pistol following Blair as he collapses to the floor.

Anguished screams from family members can be heard as they are hustled out of the home.

Community activist Quanell X on Wednesday called the shooting "nothing less than a cold-blooded execution."

Blair's family gave the video to the Houston media and said they intended to hand over a copy to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

It was never provided to local investigators, so was not taken into account by a Fort Bend County grand jury that declined to issue an indictment in the case.

A Fort Bend County Sheriff's official said the department could not comment on something it hasn't seen.

"We consider it evidence and it needs to be turned over to the proper authorities," said sheriff's spokesman Bob Haenel.

The deputy, an 11-year veteran, was sent to the home in the 7000 block of Dawn Bloom on Nov. 4, because Blair had locked himself in a bathroom and was threatening to harm himself, officials said.

Blair's family said they called 911 only after several hospitals told them that was the proper course in the case of someone who was possibly suicidal.

"All this family wanted was somebody to help. This young man did not have to die," the activist said, standing outside the U.S. Attorney's Office in downtown Houston.

The video shows the deputy standing with another officer in front of a closed bathroom door.

"If you don't open this door, we're going to kick it in," the deputy said.

"We want to do this the easy way. Don't make us do it the hard way."

After several attempts jiggling the knob, the door opens slightly, allowing the deputy to see inside the bathroom.

"He's got a knife. He's got a knife," the deputy yells, as the doors shuts again.

He kicked open the door and shouted at Blair to "Stay down. Stay down."

He told the other officer to use the Taser and continued ordering Blair to drop the knife.

The video shows the deputy trying to coax Blair to disarm himself, telling him he didn't want to shoot him.

"We're trying to help you. Let it (the knife) go. Do it now," the deputy said.

The confrontation lasted about 20 minutes.

"All we're asking is that someone recognize what we recognize - that was brutality," said Blair's mother, Kimberly Blair-Olaniyi.

Quanell X would not say why an apparently hidden camera was aimed at the bathroom door during the violent confrontation.

He said the family wanted to release the video after local investigations were concluded.

"These cases are always lies and truths are not told," he said. "We have a tape to expose those lying hypocrites."

The activist said the man's family wants a federal civil rights investigation into Blair's death and will likely file a lawsuit.

"We forgave that officer," Blair's mother said. "We want him to live a long life so he will always remember my son and how he murdered him in that bathroom."

The sheriff's office was creating a crisis intervention team and training the deputies to deal with mental health problems at the time Blair was fatally shot. Haenel said the 10-member team is now operational.

Read more at Source

» Read More...

Today at the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona, Samsung unveiled its latest flagship Android smartphone, the Galaxy S5. Samsung mobile honcho J.K. Shin opened the presentation by saying his company asked customers what they most wanted in a phone. The answers boiled down to a desire for simplicity, nice design, fitness features, long battery life and a good camera.

Here’s a list of most of the specs:

Screen

The phone sports a 5.1-inch OLED display – ever so slightly larger than the S4′s 5-inch display; the screen’s resolution remains unchanged at 1080p. Samsung has infused a couple of neat environment-specific features, such as the ability for the display to adjust its levels relative to your surrounding lighting conditions (indoors or outdoors, for example) and an extra low dimming mode for use in dark rooms or if you don’t want people looking at your screen from over your shoulder.

Battery

Samsung promises up to 10 hours of web surfing over an LTE cellular connection, or up to 12 hours of video playback. There’s a new “ultra power saving” mode that will shut down all but the most essential features and turn the screen to black and white, so when you’re just about out of juice, you’ll be able to squeak out enough usage to communicate in an emergency. Samsung says you’ll get up to 24 hours of usage with 10% of your battery left.

Cameras

The rear-facing camera gets a slight bump, jumping to 16 megapixels (up from 13 in last year’s model). Autofocus speed has been increased, and the actual image sensor is larger than the S4′s; it’s been paired with an image processing chip as well, and it’s capable of shooting 4K video. There’s also a “selective focus” feature that lets you finesse which areas of a photo receive more focus and which are blurred more for a DSLR-like look. Finally, there’s a real-time high dynamic range (HDR) mode that’ll let you preview what an HDR-enhanced photo would look like next to a non-HDR version of the same photo.

Build

“Aluminum? Finally aluminum?!” Sorry. No aluminum here this time around. The case is still polycarbonate – a fancy word for plastic. There’s a perforated back, though, which looks somewhat similar to the Galaxy Note 3. Color options include black, blue, white and gold.

Galaxy S5

The phone is also water- and dust-resistant. Samsung says you can watch videos in the tub, for instance, but that you shouldn’t submerge the phone underwater. Tough but fair.

On the back of the phone, right under the camera sensor, there’s an integrated heart-rate monitor — the first of its kind in a smartphone. Hold your finger against the monitor and it’ll tell you your pulse.

Data Connections

The Galaxy S5 sports fifth-generation Wi-Fi (a first for smartphones, says Samsung) that can be paired with the LTE cellular connection to accelerate overall download speeds.

Security

There’s an integrated fingerprint scanner appears on-screen above the home button. You’ll have to actually swipe your finger, so it’s different from Apple’s TouchID sensor. You can use the sensor to unlock the phone, log in to a handful of apps (such as PayPal), and to protect certain files and settings on the phone from others.

Software

The modifications made to stock Android (it’s running the latest version, 4.4.2 — Kit Kat) look flatter and somewhat less overwhelming than past efforts, with a thin, modern font and simple graphic app circles. Things generally look more grown-up than in past years. Not too grown up, though. It looks fun but not hokey.

Processor, Memory and Storage

samsung galaxy s5

Samsung

Samsung didn’t really touch on the Galaxy S5′s processor during its MWC presentation, so it’s likely that horsepower might vary by market: some phones might ship with Samsung’s own Exynos chips, while others might ship with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, for example. We’ll see 16- and 32-gigabyte storage options, but the amount of RAM hasn’t been revealed (it’s believed to be three gigabytes). We’ll know more once we get closer to launch.

Speaking of a launch date…

Availability

The Samsung Galaxy S5 will be available starting April 11 in 150 countries. No word on pricing, but here in the U.S., it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the phone to start around $200 with a two-year contract and to be available on all major carriers.

» Read More...

Pretoria, South Africa (CNN) -- Former South African President Nelson Mandela has been getting kidney dialysis and opens his eyes when people talk to him, a source with direct knowledge of the situation said Friday.

Mandela, who is on life support, is not in a vegetative state, the source said.

The anti-apartheid icon has been hospitalized for nearly a month for a recurring lung infection.

Considered the founding father of South Africa's democracy, Mandela became an international figure while enduring 27 years in prison for fighting against apartheid, the country's system of racial segregation. He emerged from prison in 1990 and became the nation's first black president four years later.

His lung problems started during his years in prison under South Africa's now-defunct apartheid regime.

He was admitted to a Pretoria hospital on June 8, and since then, varying accounts of his medical condition have emerged.

His health had declined so sharply last week that his family was considering whether to take him off life support before his condition improved, a court document released Thursday revealed.

The document, known as a certificate of urgency, was filed by his family on June 26 in a burial dispute.

It stated that Mandela, 94, had "taken a turn for the worst and that the Mandela family have been advised by the medical practitioners that his life support machine should be switched off."

"Rather than prolonging his suffering, the Mandela family is exploring this option as a very real probability," it added.

The following day, however, South African President Jacob Zuma announced that Mandela's condition had improved from critical to critical but stable.

South Africa township voices 'still thanking Papa Madiba'

Another document filed by Mandela's family in the burial dispute described his health as "perilous" and stated that fears that his death is drawing near were justified.

Mandela remained in critical but stable condition Thursday, Zuma's office reported after he visited Mandela. It denied reports that Mandela was in a "vegetative state."

The court battle pitted 16 members of Mandela's family against his grandson, Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela, also known as Mandla, over where three of the anti-apartheid icon's deceased children should be buried.

Mandla Mandela lost his case Wednesday, which meant the return of the remains of the three relatives to the family graveyard in Qunu, Nelson Mandela's boyhood home, could go ahead.

They were reburied Thursday in the family compound.

But the dispute brought a public chiding from another hero of the anti-apartheid cause, retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

In a statement carried by the South African Press Association late Thursday, Tutu urged the family not to "besmirch" Mandela's name in his last days.

Investigators have been gathering evidence against Mandla Mandela in a "grave tampering" case and expect to hand it to a senior prosecutor next week, Mthatha police said Friday, according to the South African Press Association.

By : Robyn Curnow, CNN

July 5, 2013 -- Updated 1423 GMT (2223 HKT)

» Read More...

(CNN) - Google+ has been a hit in the tech community, with early adopters praising its clean design and features like Circles and group video chat.

But some of those same folks are now miffed, saying the social-networking site is being too aggressive in booting users who don't sign up with their real names.

Over the weekend and into Monday, multiple tech blogs were reporting what appeared to be an uptick in the number of people removed from Google+ for signing up under assumed names.

"Google Profiles are designed to be public pages on the web, which are used to help connect and find real people in the real world," a Google spokeswoman said in an email. "By providing your common name, you will be assisting all people you know - friends, family members, classmates, co-workers, and other acquaintances - in finding and creating a connection with the the right person online."

The email did not specifically address complaints about the policy and account deletions.

The Google+ content policy says, "To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles," users must use the name their friends, family or co-workers usually call them.

"For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable," the policy reads.

Limor "Ladyada" Fried, a noted figure in the open-source hardware community, briefly had her account suspended over the weekend. Her name is an assumed one but one by which she's well-known (she recently was featured in a cover story in Wired magazine).

Her account was reinstated.

Former Google employee Kirrily Robert, who goes by the single name "Skud," said she also had her account suspended when she used the nickname to sign up.

She wrote that she expected the nickname issue to come up and largely wanted to test how the site dealt with it.

"I thought it would be interesting and educational for someone who understands the system quite well (my recent ex-Googler status helps with this) to poke at it from outside and see how it appears to work," she wrote on her personal blog. "My goals were, firstly, to help highlight the problems with the policy, and secondly, to test out and document the processes around it. This seems to be going well so far."

On the blog TechCrunch, Jon Evans wrote a strongly worded post saying he likes Google+ but calling its name policy stupid.

"It's too bad that the service has sacrificed a pile of goodwill over the last week by repeatedly publicly shooting themselves in the foot," he wrote.

Evans suggests that Google, which allows a "nickname" to be used along with the user's real name, limit how often a nickname can be changed and then let users decide which of their social circles see which name.

"Voila. Accountable identities and pseudonymity, all in one package: problem solved," he wrote. "You can thank me later, Google. After you reinstate all those accounts."

Critics note that dissidents and whistle-blowers have used social media like Facebook and Twitter under assumed names to fight corruption and contribute to political causes. Their safety might be jeopardized if they used their real names, critics say.

Facebook's policy also requires users to register for the site with their real names. That site's terms and conditions state: "We reserve the right to remove or reclaim [a user's name] if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user's actual name)."

Tech writer Robert Scoble (Google+'s sixth most-followed user,according to Social Statistics), has hosted a running dialogue about the naming controversy on his account.

Scoble wrote early Monday that he talked with Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president for Google's social networking products, and quoted him as saying that Google has made some mistakes while trying to nail down the naming policy.

According to Scoble, Gundotra said there is no intention to require legal names, just to delete obviously fake and offensive ones.

"After running through his reasoning, mostly to have a nicer, more personal, community, I feel even stronger that Google is on the right track here even though I feel they weren't fair or smart in how they spun up these new rules," Scoble wrote. "But Vic convinced me to hang in there and watch their decisions over the next few weeks."

By Doug Gross, CNN

» Read More...