Indian techie Srinivas Kuchibhotla's killer pleads guilty to hate crimes

A US Navy veteran who yelled "Get out of my country!" before killing Indian engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla and injuring two others at a bar in Kansas City last year, has pleaded guilty to three federal hate-crime charges.

Adam Purinton, 53, who is already serving life in prison on a state murder charge, pleaded guilty in US District Court in Kansas City on Monday to three federal hate-crime charges alleging that he targeted the men because of their actual and perceived race, colour, religion and national origin.

He had earlier in March pleaded guilty to first-degree murder of 32-year-old Kuchibhotla and two counts of attempted first-degree murder in state court in the shootings of the Indian tech worker's friend Madasani and a bystander.

The US Attorney's Office in Kansas had filed hate crime charges against Purinton last June.

UK hate crimes surge on Brexit, terror attacks

The UK has registered a 29 per cent surge in hate crimes in the wake of Brexit and terrorist attacks in the country, according to new Home Office figures released today.

There were 80,393 offences in 2016-17, compared with 62,518 in 2015-16, the largest increase since the UK Home Office began recording figures in 2011-12.

The number of hate crime incidents recorded by British police forces reached a record monthly level of 6,000 incidents in June this year.

This peak was higher than the previous monthly peak of 5,500 in July 2016, seen in the aftermath of the referendum in favour of Briatain's exit or 'Brexit' from the European Union (EU).

"The increase over the last year is thought to reflect both a genuine rise in hate crime around the time of the EU referendum and following the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack (March 2017), as well as ongoing improvements in crime reporting by police," the Home Office report noted.

The crimes continued to rise after the Westminster Bridge attack on the Houses of Parliament when terror suspect Khalid Masood rammed a car into pedestrians and stabbed a policeman on duty at the Parliament gates, followed by the Manchester suicide bombing in May and terror attacks in London in June.

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Amid the blaring headlines, routine reports of hate-fueled violence

Last Wednesday, July 19, was something of a busy news day. There was word North Korea was making preparations for yet another provocative missile test. The Supreme Court, in its latest ruling in the controversial travel ban case, said that people from the six largely Muslim countries covered by the immigration enforcement action could enter the U.S. if they had a grandparent here, refusing to overturn a ruling that grandparents qualified as "bona fide relatives." And then, late in the day, President Donald Trump gave a remarkable interview to The New York Times, one that, among other things, laid into Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The day also produced its share of what, sadly, has come to qualify as routine news: A Muslim organization in Sacramento, California, received a package in the mail that included a Koran in a tub of lard; police in Boise, Idaho, identified a teenage boy as the person likely responsible for scratching racist words on a car; in Lansing, Michigan, police launched a search for a suspect in the case of an assault against a Hispanic man. The victim had been found with a note indicating his attacker had been motivated by racial animus.

The specter of hate incidents and crimes — some of them fueled by the nastiness of the 2016 presidential campaign — felt white hot months ago. The issue remained high-profile as several horrific murders — a South Asian immigrant slain in Kansas City, a homeless black man butchered near Times Square in New York — generated outrage and national news coverage.
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