Black Immigrant Daily News

A shooter opened fire in a Walmart in Virginia, leaving six people dead, police said, in the country’s second high-profile mass killing in a handful of days. The assailant is also dead.

The store in Chesapeake was busy just before the shooting Tuesday night with people stocking up ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, a shopper told a local TV station.

Officer Leo Kosinski couldn’t say how the shooter died but said that he didn’t believe police fired shots. It was not clear who the shooter was or what their motive might be.

“I am devastated by the senseless act of violence that took place late last night in our city,” Mayor Rick W West said in a statement posted on the city’s Twitter account Wednesday. “Chesapeake is a tightknit community and we are all shaken by this news.”

Joetta Jeffery told CNN she received text messages from her mother who was inside the store during the shooting. Her mother, Betsy Umphlett, was not injured.

“I’m crying, I’m shaking,” Jeffery said. “I had just talked to her about buying turkeys for Thanksgiving, then this text came in.”

A database run by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University that tracks every mass killing in America going back to 2006 shows this year has been especially bad. The US has now had 40 mass killings so far this year, second to the 45 that occurred for all of 2019. The database defines a mass killing as at least four people killed, not including the killer.

The attack at the Walmart came three days after a person opened fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado, killing five people and wounding 17. Earlier in the year, the country was shaken by the deaths of 21 when a gunman stormed an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Tuesday’s shooting also brought back memories of another at a Walmart in 2019, when a gunman police say was targeting Mexicans opened fire at a store in El Paso, Texas, and killed 22 people.

The shooting had apparently stopped when police arrived at the store in Chesapeake, which is Virginia’s second-largest city and lies next to the seaside communities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

Mike Kafka, a spokesman for Sentara Healthcare, said in a text message that five patients from the Walmart were being treated at Norfolk General Hospital. Their conditions weren’t immediately available.

Walmart tweeted early Wednesday that it was “shocked at this tragic event.”

US Senator Mark Warner said in a tweet that he was “sickened by reports of yet another mass shooting, this time at a Walmart in Chesapeake.”

State Senator Louise Lucas echoed Warner’s sentiment, tweeting that she was “absolutely heartbroken that America’s latest mass shooting took place in a Walmart in my district.”

By ALEX BRANDON

Associated Press

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The hearing in the Guyana-Venezuela border controversy continued before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Tuesday, with Guyana’s Co-Agent and Advisor on Borders, Carl Greenidge, describing Venezuela’s preliminary objections to the case as long on rhetoric but short on facts.

During the hearing at the Hague-based ICJ on Tuesday, presentations were made dismantling Venezuela’s illegitimate claims on Guyana’s territory. Greenidge noted that Venezuela has absolutely failed to articulate proper grounds for its case.

“As will no doubt have been apparent to the Court throughout this hearing, Venezuela’s arguments in support of its preliminary objections have been rather long on allegations and rhetoric and somewhat short on substance. One thing, however, is abundantly clear. Venezuela really does not want this court to determine the merits of Guyana’s claims.

“Why, one might ask, is that the case? Is it that Venezuela is concerned that a judgement in the case will, in its very essence, involve a determination of the rights of the UK? Or is it because Venezuela recognises that the legal and factual merits of Guyana’s claims, are overwhelming and a hearing will yield only one possible outcome?” Greenidge questioned.

He further noted that Venezuela is more interested in continuing to hold onto a falsehood, than a final and legal pronouncement on the truth. He reaffirmed that Guyana has no interest in a negotiation conclusion of the border controversy, but a legal one.

“Instead of proceeding to determine the merits of Guyana’s claim, Venezuela urges the court to decline to exercise jurisdiction. So that the dispute between both parties could instead be resolved through a process of negotiation.”

“By making that argument, Venezuela once again invites the court to condemn the parties to perpetual deadlock. And the indefinite continuation of a controversy which has blighted their relations for the entirety of Guyana’s existence as a sovereign state,” Greenidge, a former Foreign Affairs Minister, said.

Meanwhile, one of Guyana’s international lawyers in the case, King’s Counsel Phillipe Sands noted that Venezuela has so far failed to provide any credible grounds for why the 1899 Arbitral Award should be vacated. Sands, a Professor of International Law at University College London, also pointed out inconsistencies in Professor Christian Tams’s arguments on behalf of Venezuela.

“In the first round, Professor Tams still recognised the need to establish the wrongful conduct of the arbitral tribunal. Although he did shift the argument, in part, to the wrongful conduct of the British Government or its legal team. If a tribunal is corrupt, he said, someone must have corrupted it,” Sands said.

“But in the second round, as I’m sure you will have noticed, the argument had completely changed. The court heard not a single word, about the wrongful conduct of the arbitrators. And now, the case is entirely about the wrongful conduct of the United Kingdom.”

According to the lawyer, Tams’s presentation is premised that the wrongful conduct of a party should invalidate the arbitral award. However, Sands noted that there is no precedent of an arbitral award being set aside because of the conduct of a party or counsel. He noted that it is the conduct of the arbitrators that is relevant.

Venezuela has been seeking to block Guyana from having its substantive application before the ICJ heard, on spurious grounds that include its claims that the United Kingdom should have been made a party to the case instead of Guyana.

Venezuela has also claimed that the 1899 arbitral award is void due to what it claims was fraud by the UK at the time. The ICJ subsequently revealed in a statement that the date for the court to rule on the preliminary objections, will be announced later.

Guyana’s legal team is headed by Co-Agent and Counsel, Sir Shridath Ramphal, and includes member of the Bars of the United States Supreme Court and the District of Columbia, Paul S Reichler; and Professor Emeritus of the University Paris Nanterre, former Chairman of the International Law Commission and member of the Institut de Droit International, Alain Pellet.

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, in January 2018, decided that the case should be settled by the ICJ after exercising the powers vested in him to decide how the controversy should be settled by the 1966 Geneva Agreement between Guyana, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom.

He resorted to judicial settlement after the good offices process between Guyana and Venezuela failed. Within the framework of the 1966 Geneva Agreement between the two countries, the Secretary General conducted good offices from 1990 to 2017 to find a solution to the border controversy.

The Spanish-speaking nation is laying claim to more than two-thirds of Guyana’s landmass in Essequibo and a portion of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in which more than nine billion barrels of oil have been discovered over the past six years.

Guyana, among other things, is asking the ICJ to adjudge and declare that the 1899 Award is valid and binding upon Guyana and Venezuela and that Venezuela is internationally responsible for violations of Guyana’s sovereignty and sovereign rights, and for all injuries suffered by Guyana as a consequence.

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Counsel for former Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Deputy Chief Elections Officer (DCEO) Roxanne Myers, whose name has come up several times in witness testimonies at the 2020 elections Commission of Inquiry (CoI), is seeking to cross-examine said witnesses.

Attorney-at-Law Nigel Hughes of Hughes, Fields and Stoby, confirmed in an interview with this publication that he wrote to the CoI.

Hughes is representing Myers at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Courts on various electoral fraud related charges.

“I wrote enquiring whether I would be allowed to cross-examine the witnesses, on behalf of one of my clients,” Hughes said, adding that the letter was sent on Monday and he has so far not received a response. While this publication was unable to reach CoI Secretary Javed Shadick, he was quoted in sections of the media indicating that the commission will soon respond.

Meanwhile, Hughes was asked if Myers herself would be taking the stand during the CoI’s public hearings. The commission has been vocal in calling for persons who have been implicated in testimony to come forward and testify. According to Hughes, he is unaware of any such plan and was moreover doubtful that Myers would be testifying.

The CoI was last held on November 10. The CoI took a break following the testimonies of several witnesses and is expected to resume its work from November 28 and continue until the middle of December.

The November 10 hearing, heard testimony from Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) Chief Executive Officer Sase Singh, who was a scrutineer during that period and Information Technology (IT) Manager Aneal Giddings.

Singh told the commission that he was a supernumerary agent for the PPP/C and on March 4, 2020, after former Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo took ill and had to be escorted from the Region Four Command Centre at the Ashmins Building by medical officials, the then Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield provided two new Deputy Returning Officers (DROs) to continue the verification process.

However, Singh recalled that there was a “fundamental difference” with the process after the two GECOM officials were using pre-prepared spreadsheets and not the SoPs, as was done prior, to verify the votes. He said that Lowenfield had explained that this new method would add efficiency to the process.

He disclosed that he had no idea what was on the spreadsheets, how they were prepared, by whom, using which data and when. Despite objections by the agents from the various political parties, Singh said the GECOM officials continued using the spreadsheets to reconcile their figures with that of the SoPs in possession of the party agents and observers present.

Copies of these SoPs are given to agents of political parties and accredited observers at the polling station after votes are counted. The stakeholders then use their copies to verify figures being used by the Returning Officers to ascertain the votes from each district.

During this verification process, however, stakeholders continuously observed discrepancies between the figures being called out from the spreadsheets and those contained in 17 out of 21 SoPs verified. According to Singh, this led to loud outbursts and objections by the party agents, resulting in CEO Lowenfield intervening.

He noted that while Lowenfield did not enquire from the DROs where the figures on the spreadsheets were derived from, he did conduct an exercise with a sample of three SoPs from the 21 and reverted to the original procedure during which the discrepancies with the spreadsheet numbers were confirmed.

Giddings recalled that on March 5, 2020, at about 10:45h, he and his staff in the Tabulation Centre, which is separate from the area where the District Four votes were being reconciled, were informed that there was a bomb threat to the building and that they should evacuate.

The Manager said they immediately complied with the exception of his deputy, who remained to back-up the data they had compiled thus far on a flash drive after which he also left.

Other persons who testified on previous days include Assistant Police Commissioner and former Divisional Commander for Region Four, Edgar Thomas; Chief Elections Officer Vishnu Persaud and Ronald Stewart, who was in charge of security for GECOM during that fateful period.

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