Former Dallas police Officer Amber Guyger was found guilty of murder Tuesday for fatally shooting her neighbor, Botham Jean, after thinking he was an intruder when she mistakenly entered his apartment.

Guyger, who has been out on a $300,000 bond, faces a maximum of life in prison. She was not immediately taken into custody and the sentencing phase in her trial began Tuesday afternoon with opening statements from Jean's mother.

A gasp could be heard in the packed courtroom when state District Judge Tammy Kemp read the jury's decision. Jean's family later walked out crying and embracing, many wearing red — the victim's favorite color.

Nicaraguan plantation workers told RT that they haven't lost hope of finally getting compensated by major chemical firms whose deadly pesticide, they say, severely damaged their health and had major impacts on their lives.

The pesticide makes men sterile and "also increases cancer rates among women and men," the victims' lawyer Stuart Smith told RT.

The people that were affected by the highly-toxic chemical were not compensated, despite being "significantly hurt," he said.

The US banned the use of the roundworm-killing DBCP, marketed as Nemagon, in 1977. But chemical giants Dow, Shell and Occidental (now OxyChem) continued to sell it overseas, including to Nicaragua, where the substance was sprayed over banana and sugarcane plantations. It was reported that up to 22,000 workers were affected as a result.

At least one person has been killed and ten others injured in an attack at a shopping mall hosting a college in Kuopio, Finland. One of those injured is the suspected perpetrator, who was arrested by responding officers.

According to the local police, violence happened at the premises of a vocational college located at the Herman mall.

Officers had to use firearms to apprehend the sole suspect.

A Russian court has reduced a jail term for young actor Pavel Ustinov to a one-year suspended sentence, after he was earlier convicted of violence against police during an unsanctioned rally in Moscow.

The case garnered a lot of media attention in Russia and abroad after many celebrities and activists came out to support Ustinov and vouch for his innocence. He was due to spend three years and six months in jail, but a Moscow court ruled otherwise on Monday. The actor had earlier been released on bail while waiting for his appeal hearing.

UFC boss Dana White has slammed the "ridiculous" calls from a politician to ban Octagon girls for UFC 243 in Melbourne on Sunday.

Similar to boxing, mixed martial arts deploys scantily-clad females to parade around the cage prior to each round at their events.

That has led to the likes of the beautiful Chrissy Blair, Brittney Palmer, Arianny Celeste and Jhenny Andrade all becoming huge favourites with fight fans across the globe.

But the much-loved girls could be banned from a UFC event in Australia next week after Melbourne's Lord Mayor Sally Capp claimed the "sexist and backward" tradition was "outdated".

"It's 2019, do we really still need scantily clad women to wander around the middle of a fighting ring between rounds?," she said. "Grid girls are no longer part of Formula One, walk-on girls are no longer part of professional darts — surely it's time to move on."

However, UFC president White has hit back at those comments and insists the girls are just as much of the show as the fighters.

"Our Octagon girls, they're as much a part of the UFC brand as anyone, they're ambassadors for our sport," the 50-year-old told The Daily Telegraph.

A review of How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century by Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury Press (December 2019) 304 pages

One of the first things to emerge from Professor Frank Dikötter's eagerly awaited new book How to Be a Dictator is that it is a stressful vocation: there are rivals to assassinate, dissidents to silence, kickbacks to collect, and revolutions to suppress. Quite hard work. Even the most preeminent ones usually meet ignominious ends. Mussolini: summarily shot and strung upside down over a cheering crowd. Hitler: suicide and incineration. Ceausescu: executed outside a toilet block. Or consider the fate of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie: rumoured to have been murdered on orders of his successor Mengistu Haile Mariam, he was buried underneath the latter's office desk. Not the most alluring career trajectory, one might say.

Dikötter's monograph is a study of twentieth century personality cults. He examines eight such cults: those created by Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier, Ceausescu, and Mengistu. For them, cultism was not mere narcissism, it was what sustained their regimes; foregoing cultism, Dikötter argues, caused swift collapse. Consider Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Cambodians were unsure of Pol Pot's exact identity for years, even after he had assumed leadership of the country. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, was in its initial stages merely called "Angkar" — "The Organisation." There was no inspiring iconography. There was no ritualised leader worship. There was only dark terror. Dikötter quotes historian Henri Locard: "Failing to induce adulation and submissiveness, the Angkar could only generate hatred." The Khmer Rouge soon lost its grip on the country. Dikötter makes an obligatory reference: "Even Big Brother, in George Orwell's 1984, had a face that stared out at people from every street corner."

San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities in the US, but its high housing prices and strict zoning have contributed to a homelessness crisis. The city has declared war on its rough sleepers - because housing them is too easy.​

The latest offensive in the city's "war on homelessness" is sidewalk boulders - giant rocks placed along the sidewalk to deter homeless encampments. San Franciscans in the Mission Dolores neighborhood raised $2,000 to line their sidewalk with 24 large boulders to stop the homeless from setting up camp, using and selling drugs, and otherwise lowering the quality of life.​

The plan, so far, has made matters worse - the homeless set up tents anyway, forcing those who actually want to use the sidewalk for its intended purpose to walk on the street, and some locals have taken it upon themselves to remove the rocks - either by pushing them onto the street or (in the case of one enterprising woman) by listing them on Craigslist.​

A documentary tracking the rise of conservative figure Jordan Peterson has faced hurdles getting to the big screen in his home country of Canada, with the creators telling RT the difficulties signal deeper problems in the West.

A psychology professor and author, Peterson first rose to international prominence for his vocal and unapologetic opposition to extreme political correctness and identity politics. The firm stance won him quite a few supporters worldwide - and at least as many critics, who see him as a transgender-hating custodian of the patriarchy, whose 'archaic' views don't deserve any platform in the woke modern world.

Filmmaker Patricia Marcoccia knew Peterson before he became an international phenomenon and she witnessed his meteoric burst into the public consciousness and watched as his profile grew exponentially in recent years. Her observations form the basis of the documentary 'The Rise of Jordan Peterson' which expands on an earlier film aired by Canadian public broadcaster CBC last year.

'Bulletproof hoster' gets shot down

German investigators shut down a "criminally operated data center" in a former NATO bunker that they claim was used to host sites selling drugs, child pornography and illegal botnets.

More than 600 police officers stormed the 'CyberBunker' data center in Traben-Trarbach, western Germany, where they seized roughly 200 servers. Seven people were arrested.
Bunker mentality

Prosecutor Juergen Bauer told reporters that alongside the seven arrests, the long-running investigation has thirteen people aged 20 to 59 under investigation. None of the suspects was at the data center at the time, with the arrests taking place at a local restaurant and in Schwalbach, outside Frankfurt.

There were separate raids in the Netherlands, Poland and Luxembourg.

Among the illegal services allegedly hosted at the German data center were Cannabis Road, Fraudsters, Flight Vamp 2.0, orangechemicals, and the world's second largest narcotics marketplace, Wall Street Market. Police also claim that a large-scale attack on approximately one million Telekom routers at the end of November 2016 was operated via a server in the bunker.

The former NATO facility was acquired in 2013 from the Office for Geoinformation of the Bundeswehr, by an unidentified Dutchman, who is the chief suspect. Press reports at the time describe the site as a multi-story protective structure with a floor space of 5,500 square meters. It has two adjacent office buildings with a total floor space of 4,300 square meters and is set on 13-hectares of land.
A 2012 article in Immobilien Zeitung reveals that the site was already being used as a data center by the military, and has four underground stories reaching a depth of 25 meters.

The Dutchman, now 59, upgraded the bunker "in order to make it available to clients, according to our investigations, exclusively for illegal purposes," regional criminal police chief Johannes Kunz said. "I think it's a huge success... that we were able at all to get police forces into the bunker complex, which is still secured at the highest military level," Kunz added.

"We had to overcome not only real, or analog, protections; we also cracked the digital protections of the data center."

When the bunker was purchased in 2013, the buyer was not identified, but said that he was also involved with CyberBunker, the alleged operator of a Dutch data center in its own Cold War bunker. In 2013, now-defunct data center company 'Bunker Infra' claimed CyberBunker was using images of its bunker, and was not based in the Dutch site.

CyberBunker previously said it would host "services to any Web site 'except child pornography and anything related to terrorism.'" The company's website is now unavailable.

The location of the Traben-Trarbach facility matches that of Calibour, a company that said it operated a NATO-bunker based secure data center. Its website is now also unavailable. The CEO and MD of Calibour, Herman-Johan Xennt, claimed to own CyberBunker as of 2010.

The case against those charged is still developing, and there are as yet no formal identifications or charges. While 200 servers were seized, some reports suggest that there could be as many as 2,000 at the facility. Kunz told reporters the analysis of the data could take years to complete.

Sunday's mass protests in Hong Kong featured a remarkable collection of foreign flags, as activists presumably thought the US and the UK may not be the only world powers that can back them in their raging fight against Beijing.

The anti-government protests in the autonomous Chinese city -once ruled by Britain- went along the usual lines of the past months. Some of the marches went peacefully while, in some spots, more aggressive activists caused disruption with street barricades, Molotov cocktails and acts of vandalism.

Hong Kong police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon spraying hard-to-wash-off blue paint, and arrested many of the protesters.