Austin personal injury attorney Chip Evans said the state ranks among
the worst in the nation for motorcycle safety. Texas is behind only
South Carolina and Mississippi in the number of number of motorcycle
fatalities per registered motorcycles.
Texas is the third leading state in the nation in the rate of motorcycle
fatalities per registered motorcycles. Personal injury attorney Chip
Evans said that the numbers are alarming, though not surprising.
"Too many drivers simply aren't informed about how to safely share the
road with motorcyclists," said Chip Evans. "We decided to run the
numbers to find out how serious the problem is in our state, and the
results were not encouraging for Texas bikers."
The firm compared the number of registered motorcycles against the
number of motorcycle fatalities in all 50 states using data from 2015,
the most recent year for which comprehensive statistics for both
categories were available. The firm found that the rate of motorcycle
deaths per registered motorcycles was highest in South Carolina,
Mississippi, Texas, Florida and North Carolina.
May is Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month, a safety campaign which
encourages drivers to safely share the road with motorcyclists. Safety
advocates say that drivers should always leave plenty of space between
their vehicle and a motorcycle. Drivers should also be aware that
judging the distance and speed of a motorcycle is different than it is
with other vehicles, said Evans.
"If you see a motorcycle approaching at an intersection, you should
think twice before making a left turn," Evans said. "These vehicles
might be closer and traveling faster than you realize. That's just one
example of how drivers can make roads safer for themselves and bikers."
In 2015, there were 387,149 motorcycles registered for use in Texas, according to Statista. That same year, there were 422 motorcycle fatalities, per the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
By comparison, California had slightly more motorcycle fatalities, 449,
though they had more than double the number of registered motorcycles,
828,883.
In conjunction with Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month, the Texas Department of Transportation annually launches its "Share the Road: Look Twice for Motorcycles"
campaign. TxDOT said 493 riders lost their lives and 2,006 were
seriously injured in Texas motorcycle crashes in 2016. Evans said those
numbers show that the problem is getting worse.
"All motorists have experienced a growing threat on our roads," Evans.
"Over the past two years, vehicle fatalities have soared. Unfortunately,
motorcyclists are also a casualty in this disturbing trend."
About Chip Evans:
Chip Evans is the owner and lead lawyer at the Evans Law Firm.
He has more than 15 years of experience as a trial lawyer representing
Plaintiffs. He is licensed in all the Texas State Courts and in the
Western District of Texas Federal Court. He is also a member of the
Million Dollar Advocates Forum and the American Board of Trial
Advocates.
About the Findings:
Our research was based on numbers from Statista and the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration. The number of registered vehicles was
divided by the number of fatalities. For consistency and accuracy, we
limited our research to 2015. That was the latest year for which
motorcycle registration estimates were current. Source
President Donald Trump studiously avoided the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” in his speech at the Arab Islamic American Summit in Saudi Arabia on May 21.
He instead accentuated the positive, calling the meeting a “historic and unprecedented gathering of leaders – unique in the history of nations” and stressing mutual respect and a desire to “form closer bonds of friendship, security, culture and commerce.”
He went on to say:
“America is a sovereign nation and our first priority is always the safety and security of our citizens. We are not here to lecture – we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be or how to worship. Instead, we are here to offer partnership – based on shared interests and values – to pursue a better future for us all.”
This elaboration of Trump’s “America First” approach to the world must have been welcomed by foreign policy realists. Realists would like it because it marks a turn away from the emphasis, or at least lip service, that the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations paid to things like human rights and democracy.
In my experience as a foreign policy expert and former U.S. ambassador, I have found that realists believe nationalism is still as much the driving force as it has been since the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the 30 Years War and established a system of international relations based on nation-states.
Under realist theory, every country tries to maximize its power in a zero-sum game because the international system lacks any supervision from any supranational entity. For realists, it’s always anarchy out there. Putting America first is just a recognition that every country puts itself first.
What the Trump doctrine leaves out
Trump’s declaration of his America First approach was mirrored by Secretary of State Tillerson’s recent remarks to employees of the State Department. Tillerson stressed that the job of State Department employees is to promote American prosperity and security with little regard for the internal issues of other countries that are not related to those two goals.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaking to State Department employees. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
From these two speeches, it’s clear that our “shared interests and values” do not include things that could be divisive, like respect for human rights and democracy.
The assembled leaders would likely have been pleased to hear that – most of them are autocrats, if not outright dictators. No official list of attendees was readily available, but a careful review of photos from the summit showed that about 55 nations were represented. Looking at where those countries fall on the rankings that the NGO Freedom House every year indicates why the audience was so receptive.
In its annual report, Freedom House assigns a numerical grade to 195 countries and 14 territories based on their score on 25 indicators derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Their total grade, which ranges between zero and 100, puts them into one of three broad categories – free, partially free or not free. Nearly half of the countries represented at the summit are rated not free, 40 percent as partially free and only 9 percent free, based on rankings from Freedom House.
Besides the United States, the only other nations at the summit categorized as free were Benin, Guyana, Senegal, Tunisia and Suriname. The U.S. was the most democratic country in the room, according to its Freedom House score of 89. None of the 27 countries in the world that rank higher than that were present.
While considerable progress has been made in recent decades in terms of increasing respect for these rights and liberties, 2016 was not a good year to the Freedom House Report. It registered net declines in these values in 67 countries and improvement in only 36. With the policy Trump described, in my opinion, chances for a better year in 2017 are greatly diminished.
A receptive audience
Many in the crowd must have been enthusiastic about Trump’s speech because governments that have little respect for human rights don’t like democracy. In addition, autocrats prefer decision-making to be confined to a small elite since it improves the economic opportunities provided by corruption.
They won’t have to worry about American criticism under the Trump doctrine, since all that matters to America now is jobs and fighting terrorism. The fact that democracy and respect for political rights and civil liberties is the best way to combat terrorism is something that doctrine fails to take into account.
There was one other thing Trump has said repeatedly in the past that he did not say at the summit. He did not call the press “the enemy of the people.” But that was unnecessary, as nearly everyone in the audience probably already believes that.
Salman Abedi’s suicide bombing in Manchester on May 22 was immediately met with speculation that he may have been working with a jihadist group or network, perhaps even the Islamic State (IS). Sources linked to IS soon took credit for the attack. It then transpired that Abedi had recently travelled to Libya, and his father and brother have since been arrested in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
It’s still unclear whether Salman Abedi was indeed connected with IS or some other group, but his visit to Libya is ominous and telling. The country remains a haven for radical Islamist terror groups, among them IS – groups that won’t be rooted out any time soon.
It’s far from surprising that Libya is still ravaged by violence. The country has been a failing state since its revolution in 2011. It was long host to two rival governments: one based in Tripoli consisting of Islamic hardliners, and a more moderate one based in the eastern city of Tobruk, comprising moderates who were elected to the UN-backed House of Representatives in June 2014. In March 2016 the House of Representatives was able to move back to Tripoli as part of a plan to create an internationally recognised “unity government”, but the security situation is still incredibly weak.
Relatively free and fair elections have been held before, and further ones are set for 2018, but Libya is still is awash with militias and terrorist groups some of which date back to the fall of longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
When Gaddafi was killed, thousands of militias popped up to carve out their own territory. They were joined by various other terrorist groups keen to make Libya their base. The country is ideal for their purposes: to this day, it has porous borders, no working unified security force, an abundance of loose weapons, and various things that can be smuggled to finance terrorist missions. Chief among these are oil and people; indeed, most of the terror groups’ financing actually comes from human smuggling, which reportedly generates up to US$323m for IS and other jihadist groups.
All over the place
IS controlled the coastal town of Sirte for more than a year, but lost control of it at the end of 2016. The group currently holds no territory, and its remaining fighters fled Sirte and have been moving around the country in small groups. These fugitive militants and sleeper cells are hard to locate and eliminate, and while theirs is not the most powerful group in Libya, they continue to wreak havoc, undermining the new Libyan government by cutting off power and water supplies.
IS is far from the only player. It faces competition from a number of Islamist extremist groups, most notably Ansar al-Sharia Libya (ASL) and the Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade (ASMB). ASL is a major jihadist group that emerged in 2011 during the Libyan civil war, and is based in the north-eastern city of Benghazi, where it mounted the infamous September 2012 attacks on the US consulate. But though ASL and IS are both extremist Salafist jihadist groups, they continue to have tensions with one another. ASL refused to swear allegiance to IS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; instead, it has made connections with al-Qaeda affiliates in North Africa.
ASMB, meanwhile, is another Islamist militant group that aims to implement Sharia Law, specifically within the eastern Libyan town of Derna, where it imposed strict social codes. IS came to Derna in 2014 and started to take over much of ASMB’s resources; the groups clashed for months, and IS was eventually forced out. All three groups then came into direct conflict with one another in 2015 when IS assassinated ASMB leader Salim Derby, a member of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, which included both AMB and ASL.
Both ASMB and ASL’s appeal is mostly local. ASL has focused on charity work, enticing the local population to join it by providing basic services. ASMB, meanwhile, was one of the first groups to take up arms in the revolution, and many Libyans gave it credit for restoring order in the areas where it operated.
In contrast, IS is not in the business of providing public goods; it is instead focused on luring international recruits, preferring to use its Libyan base and resources to plot and stage attacks on the West. Though it originally relied on Libyan recruits who came home from fighting in Iraq and Syria, it is now recruiting foreign forces from Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan, and most notably, Europe. Joining IS’s Libyan affiliate is appealing to European wannabe fighters because they can travel to Libya by boat and avoid government detection.
And so the fight goes on. All the while, an alarmingly large number of Britons are still travelling to the Middle East and North Africa to join jihadist organisations. More than 850 are known to have gone, most of them under the age of 30. Groups such as those in Libya have a strong social media presence, and they are good at appealing to foreign fighters who want to join a cause and find a sense of belonging. IS and its ilk may be losing ground, but their appeal to Western would-be jihadists endures.
Gunmen attacked buses and a truck taking a group of Coptic Christians
to a monastery in southern Egypt on Friday, killing 26 people and
wounding 25 others, witnesses and the Health Ministry said.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said the unidentified gunmen had arrived in three four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Eyewitnesses
said masked men stopped the two buses and a truck and opened fire on a
road leading to the monastery of Saint Samuel the Confessor in Minya
province, which is home to a sizeable Christian minority.
Security forces launched a hunt for the attackers, setting up dozens of checkpoints and patrols on the desert road.
The grand imam of al-Azhar, Egypt's 1,000-year-old center of Islamic
learning, said the attack was intended to destabilize the country.
"I call on Egyptians to unite in the face of this brutal terrorism," Ahmed al-Tayeb said from
Germany, where he was on a visit.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi called a meeting of security
officials, the state news agency said. The Health Ministry put the toll
at 26 dead and 25 wounded.
Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population
of 92 million, have been the subject of a series of deadly attacks in
recent months.
About 70 have been killed since December in bomb attacks on churches in the cities of Cairo, Alexandria and Tanta.
Those attacks were claimed by Islamic State. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Friday's attack. (Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein, Omar Fahmy and Mohamed Abdellah;
Writing by Giles Elgood; Editing by Louise Ireland and Gareth Jones) Source
Apartheid spy Craig Williamson (far right).-Book Review:Spy - Uncovering Craig Williamson by Jonathan Ancer; Jacana Media, Johannesburg, March 2017
One can judge a book’s bleakness by the photograph on its cover. The Mephistophelian figure holding a tea cup is Craig Williamson: police informant, Cold War spy and apartheid assassin.
Prizewinning journalist Jonathan Ancer’s goal is clear from the get-go. He wants to expose the man on the cover in all his infamy in order to set himself free.
It’s no surprise, then, that there’s no place in these pages for the political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” – those who perpetuate terrible deeds are mostly thoughtless functionaries.
For Ancer the man on the cover of the book – not apartheid, nor his handlers – was responsible for a two-decade career of falsehood, cover-up, betrayal, and murder. These were Williamson’s choice, and his alone.
Class, rather than race at the core
So who is (or was) Williamson?
Born into an English-speaking Johannesburg family, Williamson was schooled at one of the city’s great institutions, St John’s College. Gently, Ancer opens to the idea that class, rather than race, may have been at the core of Williamson’s inability to tell right from wrong.
Awkward and always overweight, the boy was bullied and in turn learned to bully. Other writers might have been tempted to position a propensity for violence at the centre of their narrative. Ancer is near playful when discussing Williamson’s school days.
But trawling through old copies of the school magazine, Ancer discovers that when they emerged, Williamson’s politics were of a raw racist strain which was integral to the search for a white South African patriotism after the Second World War.
In 1966, Williamson won a school debating-cum-mock election by drawing on the racial ideology espoused by the (now long-forgotten) Republican Party, a right wing splinter group of the National Party.
If this was the direction of his politics, his “gap year” confirmed it: his national served was not with apartheid’s South African Defence Force (SADF), as was the case for most young white men, but with the South African Police (SAP).
It was 1968. Maintaining domestic order and the travails of white-ruled Rhodesia, were uppermost in the thinking of prime minister John Vorster, apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd’s successor. Their National Party embarked on a charm offensive towards English-speakers: an approach that drew on the pervasive anti-Communism of the time.
So, young Williamson’s choice of national service in the SAP – which was then at the sharp end of racial repression – didn’t seemed untoward, even in Johannesburg’s supposed more liberal white English-speaking northern suburbs.
Student politics
After his year in the SAP, he enrolled to read Politics and Law at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Here Williamson began his decade-long career of subterfuge. He immersed himself in student politics: first, through the Wits Students’ Representative Council (SRC) and, later, the leftist National Union of South African Students (Nusas).
During these years, Williamson interacted with (and reported on) several generations of student leaders from almost every English-speaking university. Interviewed by Ancer, several of them report that suspicions about Williamson abounded, but the liberal impulse to believe, to forgive, to understand, stayed any serious investigations of a double life.
After Nusas, and purportedly without a passport, Williamson was catapulted (accompanied by his medical student wife, Ingrid) into the Geneva-based International University Exchange Fund (IUEF). This Nordic-funded body fronted for liberation movements across the world, but particularly in southern Africa.
This was when the police informant turned to espionage by passing information to apartheid’s notorious Special Branch (SB). Despite Williamson’s hints to the contrary, there’s no hard evidence that he passed on deep Cold War secrets to western intelligence agencies.
But, here, regretfully, Ancer leaves an intriguing question hanging. Might Williamson not have been working for the British, too?
This question isn’t asked out of mischief or malice. It simply connects the dots. Williamson’s Scottish-born father, Herbert, had a claim on British citizenship. If these were exercised the son might have travelled under the cover of British papers; and maybe he even worked as a double agent.
Imperfect infiltrator
In Geneva the ever-dutiful, ever-practical Williamson was drawn into the
IUEF, eventually becoming deputy to its Swedish Director, Lars-Gunner Erikson.
He immediately absented himself from the IUEF and called his SB handler, General Johann Coetzee, who flew to Europe to accompany Williamson (and Ingrid) back to South Africa.
Williamson continued to work in apartheid’s cause: building its international work, serving on various security bodies, and participating in South Africa’s wicked policy of regional destabilisation. It was in servicing the latter that the Cold War spy turned into an apartheid assassin.
Personal anguish
If Ancer is measured in the early part of the narrative, he draws from the depth of his craft – and his personal anguish - to describe Williamson’s role in the assassinations of three people. Journalist, academic and political activist, Ruth First, was killed by a parcel bomb in her office in Maputo, Mozambique. Fellow anti-apartheid activist, Jeanette Schoon, and her six-year old daughter, Katryn, suffered the same fate in Lubango in Angola.
For these killings and the bombing of the ANC Office in London, Williamson appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Amnesty Committee in September 1998. He was, according to an eyewitness, “not even remotely apologetic” for his role in these atrocities. But within the legal technology of the TRC process, Williamson’s 21-day performance was sufficient enough to be granted the amnesty he sought.
But what incenses Ancer – and should incense us all – is that the man on the cover’s sole interest was in reproducing what he regarded as his birthright: wealth and racial privilege. This is a beautifully written and meticulously researched book; it’s story told with disarming intellectual honesty and great passion. It’s destined become a minor classic about apartheid’s ruinous path.
