MILWAUKEE (AP) — Milwaukee prosecutors have enough evidence to try a 62-year-old white man accused of throwing acid on a Latino man's face during a racist attack that's being prosecuted as a hate crime, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Clifton Blackwell is charged with first-degree reckless injury. Prosecutors say he attacked Mahud Villalaz in Milwaukee in November after accusing him of being in the country illegally and invading the United States. Villalaz suffered second-degree burns.
Blackwell's lawyer asked for the case to be dismissed and that request was denied. Blackwell is due in court Feb. 3 to enter a plea.
His attorney, Gary Rosenthal, did not immediately return a voicemail left at his Milwaukee office on Wednesday.
If he's convicted on the reckless injury charge, Blackwell could face up to 25 years in prison. But designating the case as a hate crime and charging him with use of a deadly weapon could add sentence enhancers of 10 years more in prison.
Blackwell remains in custody on a $20,000 bond.
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UND And NASA Partner To Colonize Mars
When the first international mission in the University of North Dakota’s (UND) Inflatable Mars/Lunar Habitat (IMLH) was launched last fall, four students from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Peru entered the facility to spend two weeks running experiments to help NASA and their program to explore the moon and Mars. After the successful completion of the mission, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, accompanied by U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND), visited the UND John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences, calling the work being done there “second to none.” At UND to also discuss future collaborations, Bridenstine explained the university’s importance to the Mars/Lunar program. “The University of North Dakota is delivering – on behalf of NASA – technology that is helping us understand the earth, helping us understand the earth’s atmosphere, helping us better predict weather events and the climate. Beyond that, the University of North Dakota is helping us with human space flight. What happens here enables us to do more than ever before.” He confirmed, “UND will be part of NASA’s future space exploration efforts.” According to Pablo de León…
Editor’s Note: Lethal machines able to make decisions on their own are likely to become reality in the near future. But the ethics regarding such weapons are being considered now.
(AP)(THE CONVERSATION) Robotics is rapidly being transformed by advances in artificial intelligence. And the benefits are widespread: We are seeing safer vehicles with the ability to automatically brake in an emergency, robotic arms transforming factory lines that were once offshored and new robots that can do everything from shop for groceries to deliver prescription drugs to people who have trouble doing it themselves. But our ever-growing appetite for intelligent, autonomous machines poses a host of ethical challenges.
Ethical Dilemmas
Rapid advances have led ethical dilemmas.
These ideas and more were swirling as my colleagues and I met in early November at one of the world’s largest autonomous robotics-focused research conferences – the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. There, academics, corporate…
Can Hate Speech Be Quarantined?
Editor’s Note: Is it possible to deal with online hate speech without using censorship? Two university researchers are proposing it can be done by using cyber security techniques.
The spread of hate speech via social media could be tackled using the same “quarantine” approach deployed to combat malicious software, according to University of Cambridge researchers. Definitions of hate speech vary depending on nation, law and platform, and just blocking keywords is ineffectual: graphic descriptions of violence need not contain obvious ethnic slurs to constitute racist death threats, for example. As such, hate speech is difficult to detect automatically. It has to be reported by those exposed to it, after the intended “psychological harm” is inflicted, with armies of moderators required to judge every case.
This is the new front line of an ancient debate: freedom of speech versus poisonous language. Now, an engineer and a linguist have published a proposal in the journal Ethics and Information Technology that harnesses cyber security techniques to give control to those targeted, without…
US Lags Behind Other Countries In Math
Editor’s Note: The latest PISA results have found that while the math performances of 15-year-olds in the U.S. are not declining, they are still behind their international peers.
American students may not be reading any better, but they’re moving up in rankings of educational achievement worldwide because many of their peers in other countries are performing worse. And while their math performance may not be declining, 15-year-olds in the United States still lag the scores of their peers in dozens of other countries. Overall, the latest global snapshot of achievement shows American students scoring above average in reading and science, but below average in math. The 2018 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, shows several Asian school systems at the top. The best-performing across all three measures was a group of four Chinese provinces — Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. PISA seeks to test not only what students know, but whether they can apply that knowledge to solve problems. About 600,000 15-year-old students in nearly 80 nations and educational systems took…
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