AUTO RACING

Man arrested after Darlington bomb threat

A Darlington, S.C., man was arrested after threatening to bomb Darlington Raceway, the track where NASCAR is expected to resume its season on Sunday following a two-month postponement due to the coronavirus.

Michael Donovan Avin, 46, was charged with possession, threatened or attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction for an act of terrorism following an investigation by the Darlington County sheriff’s office, according to the arrest warrant.

The warrant states that Avin left phone messages at the Darlington Raceway on April 27, “describing a possible explosive device and the results it may create to further his cause.” Investigators also alleged that Avin indicated in a letter written to another location in Darlington County that he had access to 125 tons of bomb-making materials.

Avin is in custody at the W. Glenn Campbell Detention Center awaiting a bond hearing while the case remains under investigation, according to the sheriff’s office.

Darlington Raceway and NASCAR declined to comment on the matter.

COLLEGE BASKETBALL

Alabama State hires ex-NBA guard Williams

Former NBA point guard Mo Williams is Alabama State’s new head coach.

Williams spent 14 seasons in the NBA, winning a championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016.

He played with Utah as a rookie and had stints with the Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Clippers, Portland Trail Blazers, Minnesota Timberwolves and Charlotte Hornets. Williams also had two stops with the Cavaliers, retiring after the championship season.

Williams spent the past two seasons as an assistant for California State University at Northridge, under coach Mark Gottfried.

Williams was an All-star in his first season in Cleveland, in 2008-09, when he averaged a career-best 17.8 points. During his career, Williams averaged 13.2 points and 4.9 assists.

The NCAA is pushing back its deadline for early entrants to the NBA draft to withdraw and return to school, though it will wait to set a new date. The deadline was June 3, which would’ve come 10 days after the completion of the NBA scouting combine. But with the combine postponed amid the coronavirus pandemic, NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt

• said Wednesday that college sports’ governing body won’t set a new deadline until the NBA has determined its revised timeline for the predraft process.
• Georgia Tech and Georgia State announced Wednesday that the city rivals will play a three-game men’s series beginning in December, their first matchup during the regular season since 2008. The Yellow Jackets will host Georgia State on Dec. 16 at McCamish Pavilion, followed by another game on the Georgia Tech campus during the 2021-22 season. The Panthers will host the Jackets in 2022-23.

Courtney Paris

• is returning to Oklahoma as an assistant coach. Paris was the 2007 AP national player of the year as a sophomore and was selected Big 12 player of the year three times. She left Oklahoma with 20 NCAA Division I records. One of her most notable feats was an NCAA-record 112 consecutive double-doubles. Paris joins the Sooners after a 10-year WNBA playing career. She twice led the WNBA in rebounding and won a title as a member of the Seattle Storm.

NBA

League switches to Wilson game balls

Wilson will begin manufacturing game balls for the NBA again starting with the 2021-22 season.

Next season will be Spalding’s 37th and final season in that role for the NBA. Wilson, the NBA’s original manufacturer, will also provide game balls for the WNBA, the G League and, when it begins, the Basketball Africa League.

The WNBA will switch to the Wilson ball in 2022.

Former Celtics guard John McCarthy dies

John McCarthy, who won an NBA title with 1964 Boston Celtics and helped the Canisius Golden Griffins to a pair of NCAA tournament appearances in the 1950s, has died. He was 86.

Canisius said Mr. McCarthy died Saturday of natural causes in the Buffalo suburbs, where he grew up and lived most of his life.

Mr. McCarthy spent six seasons in the NBA, playing guard from 1956 to 1964. He closed his career by playing 28 games with the Red Auerbach-coached Celtics, who were in the midst of winning eight consecutive titles.

In 1960, while with the St. Louis Hawks, Mr. McCarthy registered 13 points and had 11 rebounds and 11 assists to become the NBA’s first player to post a triple-double in his first career playoff game. Only three other players — Magic Johnson, LeBron James and Nikola Jokic, in 2019 — have matched that feat.

ELSEWHERE

Theresa Feaster of Providence is the first woman on the coaching staff for the U.S. national junior team as video coach. She joins Ted Donato, Kris Mayotte and Steve Miller assisting Nate Leaman

• , who is also the head coach at Providence. That’s where where Feaster is heading into her ninth season and fifth as director of men’s hockey operations.
• Miami prosecutors dropped the domestic-violence case against former University of Miami and Miami Dolphins running back

Mark Walton

• , six months after his most recent arrest — one that might have ended his NFL career. Walton had been charged with aggravated battery on a person known to be pregnant. The alleged victim was his live-in girlfriend. The Dolphins moved quickly to cut Walton, who was on a zero-tolerance policy with the team after a string of early 2019 arrests in South Florida. He was actually serving a league-imposed suspension for those incidents when arrested on the most recent charge. The Dolphins quickly released him.

The sister of legendary NBA player Kevin Garnett was arrested in South Carolina on Tuesday after allegedly trying to rob two check cashing stores and telling employees she had a bomb.

Ashley Danyelle Phelps, 37, was taken into custody after trying to rob a Check Into Cash store in Greenville on Monday and then an Advance America the next day, according to TMZ. She allegedly told employees at both stores that she had a bomb, according to the gossip website.

Phelps was charged with two counts of armed robbery, two counts of making a bomb threat and attempted armed robbery, according to Greenville News. She was booked into the Greenville County Jail.

Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ryan Flood said she entered the businesses, demanded money and threatened to detonate an explosive.

Garnett and Phelps have not spoken to each other for some time after the two had a falling out, according to TMZ.

T.J. Miller, who appeared in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and also in the movie “Ready Player One,” has been arrested on federal charges after making up a story last month about a woman having a bomb on an Amtrak train heading to Connecticut, a U.S. Attorney’s spokesman said Tuesday.

Todd “T.J.” Miller, 36, of New York, N.Y., was charged with intentionally conveying to law enforcement false information about an explosive device on a train, Thomas Carson said. He was arrested Monday night at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, N.Y., and released on $100,000 bail after his appearance Tuesday in U.S. District Court in New Haven.

According to the criminal complaint, the actor called 911 on March 18 while on an Amtrak train in New Jersey and provided a description of a woman on the train who he said “has a bomb in her bag.” He said she kept checking her bag without taking anything out and seemed to want to get off the train and leave her bag behind.

By the time Amtrak investigators learned of the call and stopped the train — which Miller identified as Amtrak train 2256 — it had left Penn Station in New York City and was in Connecticut. The train was stopped in Westport, passengers were told to get off, and members of the Connecticut State Police bomb squad searched the train but found no explosives.

Amtrak police also stopped a second train, Amtrak 2258, which police said is the train on which Miller actually was riding before he got off in New York. There was no bomb on that train, either, although police found the woman who matched his description of the woman with the bomb, the complaint said.

Investigators learned that Miller seemed intoxicated when he boarded the train, where he drank two glasses of wine and two double scotch and soda drinks, police said. An attendant in the first class car also told them that Miller was involved in a “screaming match” with the woman, which included profanity, but the woman denied having had a loud argument, police said.

The female passenger, who police said smelled as if she, too, had been drinking, told investigators Miller had been admonished by the attendant for talking too loudly on his cellphone. He also made an unwelcome comment about her hair, after which she shot him a dirty look, she said.

Investigators also learned that Miller had been ordered off the train at Penn Station because of his intoxication.

Miller had a chance to retract what he said in his initial 911 call about the woman with the bomb when an Amtrak police officer called his cellphone after Miller got off the train. But Miller went on to provide more detail about the woman, although he changed his description of her hair from brown to red, according to police. He also said, “This is the first time I’ve ever made a call like this. … I am worried for everyone on that train. Someone has to check that lady out,” police said.

The false report inconvenienced 1,145 rail travelers, according to the FBI agent who wrote the criminal complaint. The two trains that were searched were delayed more than an hour, and other trains were delayed as well, the complaint said.

Besides “Silicon Valley” and the recently released film “Ready Player One,” he also appears in “Deadpool,” “Office Christmas Party” and “The Emoji Movie.”

World Rugby will be overdosing on fury. Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu has just let the coke out of the bag and there is nothing they can do about it. Our favourite Samoan casually said that some top All Blacks have taken cocaine and World Rugby can’t even slap a ban on him. The secret is out, if he is to be believed.

Fuimaono-Sapolu was responding to a tweet by Welsh rugby writer Paul Williams that said Karmichael Hunt had been caught with “sniff” again and was wasting his career. The former Samoan midfield back wrote: “You’ll find loads of ballers do it. Heaps in Super Rugby including some of your favourite All Blacks.”

Doubtless a few outraged folk in the shires will be appalled that Fuimaono-Sapolu should be smearing All Blacks without showing any evidence, but in the past 12 months police have caught Kevin Proctor, Jesse Bromwich, Karmichael Hunt, James O’Connor and Ali Williams all apparently involved in purchases of coke. Former Highlander turned Scotland international John Hardie was suspended last year for alleged coke use. 

Work out the probabilities. This is the police who caught most of these guys, not drug testers. Coke is out of the system in two to four days, so only follicle testing would pick it up, which World Rugby won’t do. Logically loads of players are taking the odd hit. The players’ union helps some with counselling and treatment but will never release the names.

READ MORE:
* Scottish star haunted by ABs loss
* NZ rugby ripe for picking, says kilted Kiwi
* Barrett snubbed for honours
​* The stats the ABs don’t want

World Rugby has no interest in positive tests for recreational drugs, because its sponsors like a sport that pretends to be squeaky clean. So the authorities prefer to shoot the messenger. They have certainly fired enough bullets at Fuimaono-Sapolu in the past, but happily they can’t stop this lawyer, and activist, from talking.

Fuimaono-Sapolu points out: “One beer has close to the same fat content as a big mac. Cocaine has zero. Dudes want the high without the fat…Beer means you have to do cardio for 3 days to work it off. Why waste your time when there’s a fat free option.”

The Samoan tweeted that we have already seen coke-fuelled test matches and that it does far less harm to society than alcohol. But rugby has a lot of alcohol sponsors and so the authorities want their players to get their high on the sponsors’ product.

Although this is entirely coherent, these views will not go down well with the suits in the Dublin Oval Ball Office. They do not like Fuimaono-Sapolu, but then they do not like free speech. World Rugby bans writing on wristbands. They ban mouthguard messages. They ban comments on referees. Soon they will ban thinking for yourself.

Fuimaono-Sapolu first encountered these attitudes in school in New Zealand. He says he was marked wrong as a kid for answering that Maori discovered New Zealand. The prescribed Western answer was Captain Cook, but even he had a Polynesian navigator to show him the way.

Fuimaono-Sapolu has long spoken out against authority. His is not idle rant. He described referee Nigel Owens as “a biased prick” at the 2011 World Cup after the Welshman officiated the game between South Africa and Samoa.

It was key game that had a bearing on Wales’s future at the tournament. And yet a Welshman was appointed to officiate by a committee that was chaired by another Welshman. Samoa also had a three-day turnaround on their big games compared to the eight enjoyed by their tier one rivals. It was a scandal but it was Fuimaono-Sapolu who got the ban.

He told L’Equipe: “We learned what World Rugby is really about. Match fixing. Money. And oppression.”

I doubt that the appointment of France to host the 2023 World Cup will have greatly changed Fuimaono-Sapolu’s view. Professional rugby is a game run by the colonial powers at the expense of the poorer nations.

New Zealand’s own Greg McGee recently cited Fuimaono-Sapolu as one of his sporting heroes “for having the guts to challenge the Samoan and international rugby patriarchies”.

Good on McGee, but he could have added the New Zealand rugby patriarchy to that list. Fuimaono-Sapolu once said: “If Hitler had an interest in rugby and fronted the money and showed the All Blacks, told them to come tour Nazi Germany, the All Blacks would.”

Many were outraged, but it made me laugh. New Zealand rugby took South Africa’s diamonds when the rest of the world were boycotting a country that slaughtered people during apartheid. So was it really such a stretch?

Fuimaono-Sapolu is protesting against the injustices that are rife in rugby. He is protesting against the eligibility rules that allow Gordon Tietjens to coach in Samoa on a salary greater than the prime minister. He is protesting against rules that allow New Zealand coaches to colonise the world, but forbade Jerry Collins from ever pulling on a Samoan jersey.

It outrages Fuimaono-Sapolu that his countrymen can be poached by New Zealand schools and then stopped for ever playing for their country again. He said: “This ridiculous rule allows the old white men in World Rugby to possess your identity. It is contrary to Article 15(2) of the United Nation’s declaration of Human Rights that says: ‘No one shall be denied the right to change his nationality’.”

Good on him for speaking out against the consistently biased judiciaries that taint the World Cup. One of the judges on these panels even once tried to confiscate Fuimaono-Sapolu’s passport without the slightest legal justification for doing so.

I wrote at the last World Cup of “colonial injustice” and said: “We are fed up with Pacific Islanders, Eastern Europeans and South Americans being handed out ludicrously long sentences by a judiciary that is dominated by countries that still seem to think they own the world.”

So imagine how Fuimaono-Sapolu feels when he is on the direct receiving end of a system that initially gave Alesana Tuilagi five weeks for running through a Japanese defender with a high knee action, but gave Sean O’Brien and David Pocock a combined total of one week for a punch and for a knee off the ball.

Well this is how he feels: “Surely SURELY any intelligent, fair minded, rugby loving person can see the disgusting treatment of tier 2 teams and players! SURELY!”

The tragedy for Fuimaono-Sapolu is that he has been grievously unsupported by players in New Zealand and Australia who all seem under the corporate yoke. Where is today’s Anton Oliver? Richie McCaw sits on a panel that absurdly makes Beauden Barrett the World Rugby Player of the Year again, not a title that a player is ever likely to win in a Samoan shirt – Beauden, blondish poster boy, good for business.

When did McCaw ever speak out on behalf of anything? No wonder he was a school prefect. But as Fuimaono-Sapolu says: “If Richie McCaw said anything about the GCSB, the whole of New Zealand would be up in arms against it.”

Instead there is just a lone voice coming from the Pacific. It is full of sorrow, it is full of passion and it is full of anger. Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu is paddling against the rugby tide with a teaspoon. Maybe a few more of us, and a few more current players, could jump on board and do something to help.

 – Stuff

World Rugby will be overdosing on fury. Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu has just let the coke out of the bag and there is nothing they can do about it. Our favourite Samoan casually said that some top All Blacks have taken cocaine and World Rugby can’t even slap a ban on him. The secret is out, if he is to be believed.

Fuimaono-Sapolu was responding to a tweet by Welsh rugby writer Paul Williams that said Karmichael Hunt had been caught with “sniff” again and was wasting his career. The former Samoan midfield back wrote: “You’ll find loads of ballers do it. Heaps in Super Rugby including some of your favourite All Blacks.”

Doubtless a few outraged folk in the shires will be appalled that Fuimaono-Sapolu should be smearing All Blacks without showing any evidence, but in the past 12 months police have caught Kevin Proctor, Jesse Bromwich, Karmichael Hunt, James O’Connor and Ali Williams all apparently involved in purchases of coke. Former Highlander turned Scotland international John Hardie was suspended last year for alleged coke use. 

Work out the probabilities. This is the police who caught most of these guys, not drug testers. Coke is out of the system in two to four days, so only follicle testing would pick it up, which World Rugby won’t do. Logically loads of players are taking the odd hit. The players’ union helps some with counselling and treatment but will never release the names.

READ MORE:
* Scottish star haunted by ABs loss
* NZ rugby ripe for picking, says kilted Kiwi
* Barrett snubbed for honours
​* The stats the ABs don’t want

World Rugby has no interest in positive tests for recreational drugs, because its sponsors like a sport that pretends to be squeaky clean. So the authorities prefer to shoot the messenger. They have certainly fired enough bullets at Fuimaono-Sapolu in the past, but happily they can’t stop this lawyer, and activist, from talking.

Fuimaono-Sapolu points out: “One beer has close to the same fat content as a big mac. Cocaine has zero. Dudes want the high without the fat…Beer means you have to do cardio for 3 days to work it off. Why waste your time when there’s a fat free option.”

The Samoan tweeted that we have already seen coke-fuelled test matches and that it does far less harm to society than alcohol. But rugby has a lot of alcohol sponsors and so the authorities want their players to get their high on the sponsors’ product.

Although this is entirely coherent, these views will not go down well with the suits in the Dublin Oval Ball Office. They do not like Fuimaono-Sapolu, but then they do not like free speech. World Rugby bans writing on wristbands. They ban mouthguard messages. They ban comments on referees. Soon they will ban thinking for yourself.

Fuimaono-Sapolu first encountered these attitudes in school in New Zealand. He says he was marked wrong as a kid for answering that Maori discovered New Zealand. The prescribed Western answer was Captain Cook, but even he had a Polynesian navigator to show him the way.

Fuimaono-Sapolu has long spoken out against authority. His is not idle rant. He described referee Nigel Owens as “a biased prick” at the 2011 World Cup after the Welshman officiated the game between South Africa and Samoa.

It was key game that had a bearing on Wales’s future at the tournament. And yet a Welshman was appointed to officiate by a committee that was chaired by another Welshman. Samoa also had a three-day turnaround on their big games compared to the eight enjoyed by their tier one rivals. It was a scandal but it was Fuimaono-Sapolu who got the ban.

He told L’Equipe: “We learned what World Rugby is really about. Match fixing. Money. And oppression.”

I doubt that the appointment of France to host the 2023 World Cup will have greatly changed Fuimaono-Sapolu’s view. Professional rugby is a game run by the colonial powers at the expense of the poorer nations.

New Zealand’s own Greg McGee recently cited Fuimaono-Sapolu as one of his sporting heroes “for having the guts to challenge the Samoan and international rugby patriarchies”.

Good on McGee, but he could have added the New Zealand rugby patriarchy to that list. Fuimaono-Sapolu once said: “If Hitler had an interest in rugby and fronted the money and showed the All Blacks, told them to come tour Nazi Germany, the All Blacks would.”

Many were outraged, but it made me laugh. New Zealand rugby took South Africa’s diamonds when the rest of the world were boycotting a country that slaughtered people during apartheid. So was it really such a stretch?

Fuimaono-Sapolu is protesting against the injustices that are rife in rugby. He is protesting against the eligibility rules that allow Gordon Tietjens to coach in Samoa on a salary greater than the prime minister. He is protesting against rules that allow New Zealand coaches to colonise the world, but forbade Jerry Collins from ever pulling on a Samoan jersey.

It outrages Fuimaono-Sapolu that his countrymen can be poached by New Zealand schools and then stopped for ever playing for their country again. He said: “This ridiculous rule allows the old white men in World Rugby to possess your identity. It is contrary to Article 15(2) of the United Nation’s declaration of Human Rights that says: ‘No one shall be denied the right to change his nationality’.”

Good on him for speaking out against the consistently biased judiciaries that taint the World Cup. One of the judges on these panels even once tried to confiscate Fuimaono-Sapolu’s passport without the slightest legal justification for doing so.

I wrote at the last World Cup of “colonial injustice” and said: “We are fed up with Pacific Islanders, Eastern Europeans and South Americans being handed out ludicrously long sentences by a judiciary that is dominated by countries that still seem to think they own the world.”

So imagine how Fuimaono-Sapolu feels when he is on the direct receiving end of a system that initially gave Alesana Tuilagi five weeks for running through a Japanese defender with a high knee action, but gave Sean O’Brien and David Pocock a combined total of one week for a punch and for a knee off the ball.

Well this is how he feels: “Surely SURELY any intelligent, fair minded, rugby loving person can see the disgusting treatment of tier 2 teams and players! SURELY!”

The tragedy for Fuimaono-Sapolu is that he has been grievously unsupported by players in New Zealand and Australia who all seem under the corporate yoke. Where is today’s Anton Oliver? Richie McCaw sits on a panel that absurdly makes Beauden Barrett the World Rugby Player of the Year again, not a title that a player is ever likely to win in a Samoan shirt – Beauden, blondish poster boy, good for business.

When did McCaw ever speak out on behalf of anything? No wonder he was a school prefect. But as Fuimaono-Sapolu says: “If Richie McCaw said anything about the GCSB, the whole of New Zealand would be up in arms against it.”

Instead there is just a lone voice coming from the Pacific. It is full of sorrow, it is full of passion and it is full of anger. Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu is paddling against the rugby tide with a teaspoon. Maybe a few more of us, and a few more current players, could jump on board and do something to help.

 – Stuff

On December 28, Andrew Finch was shot and killed in Wichita, Kansas due to a hoax that went too far. Swatting is the act of calling in hostage situations and other threats on people and is–as much as I hate to say it–popular with some of the seedier sides of the gaming community. In this case, Tyler Barriss called in a false murder and hostage situation to a random address in Wichita over a Call of Duty match that he wasn’t even a part of. He was contacted by one player, who had gotten an incorrect address from the other player.

Barriss called in the hoax to Wichita police which resulted in an innocent and unarmed man being killed by police officers when they arrived and he answered the door. Barriss was arrested the following day. Now he may face felony charges for the wrongful death. The warrant filed in Kansas says that Barriss is charged with raising a false alarm, which is a felony that carries a penalty of up to 34 months in prison, though the state may decide to file additional charges after reviewing the case.

The most serious charge he could be brought up on would be second degree murder, which carries a 20 year sentence. If they settle for involuntary manslaughter, that could result in a maximum prison time of about 10 years. Barriss is being extradited from Los Angeles where he resides, to Kansas. The Kansas authorities must pick up Barriss by February 2.

Barriss is no stranger to the prison system or calling in false threats. In 2015, he called in bomb threats to a California TV station twice. In May 2016, he was sentenced to two years. He got out in January of 2017 and was quickly picked up again for violating a protective order that same month. He was sentenced to another year in prison, and again got out early on August 24, 2017.

During the month of December, Barriss used his Twitter profile “SWAuTistic” to claim responsibility for numerous bomb threats, including the Call of Duty World League competition in Dallas, and the Net Neutraility meeting that was held by the FCC. He was quite smug about his victories, tweeting “l swatted FCC and MLG Dallas l’m not busted yet. if you can’t pull off a swat without getting busted you’re not a leet hacking God its that simple.”

Brian Krebs, or Krebs On Security, reports that Barriss is a notorious swatter that has called in a lot of false threats, calling him a “serial swatter.” In an interview with YouTuber KeemStar, Barriss was completely unapologetic, saying “it is what it is,” and claiming that he doesn’t believe the death was his fault.

I don’t think that I should not do jail time, but I don’t think I should do life or get charged with murder, that’s all. I’m not saying that I’m saying I shouldn’t do any time at all though, because admittedly yeah I was involved. So if I get caught and charged, then so be it, and I’ll do whatever time they give me. I’ll serve whatever sentence because it is what it is.

At this time, it seems that the only charges being filed against Barriss are those in relation to the swatting death of Andrew Finch.  It doesn’t appear that any charges have been filed for the other bomb threats that were made in December.

[Source: TIME, The Daily Beast]