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2 men sentenced for sexual assaults of passengers on flights to Seattle
Two men accused of sexually assaulting passengers on planes during flights to Seattle were sentenced Thursday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington said in a statement that Abhinav Kuma, of India, got 15 months in prison. Kumar, 39, was convicted of abusive sexual contact following a three-day trial in May.
Kumar was arrested at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Feb. 18 for allegedly groping the breast of a juvenile while she was trying to sleep on an Emirates flight from Dubai to Seattle, according to court records and trial testimony.
CBS Seattle affiliate KIRO-TV reports that the victim was 17. Prosecutors wanted a 21-month sentence, arguing Kumar took advantage of a vulnerable teenager, causing her lasting trauma. The victim described the assault as a “persistent, haunting presence” in her life.
Desmond Bostick, of Federal Way, Washington, was sentenced to nine months in prison for assault with intent to commit a felony. He pleaded guilty to the crime as part of a plea agreement in April and will serve three years of supervised release following his time behind bars.
While seated in the last row of a plane during a flight from San Diego on June 20, 2023, Bostick repeatedly touched the thigh of a woman in the middle seat next to him, prosecutors said. He also grabbed her buttocks twice when she stood up to let a passenger in the window seat exit and reenter the row.
After the plane landed, the woman reported Bostick’s actions to the flight crew. A federal grand jury returned an indictment in the case in September and Bostick was located and arrested by the FBI on Feb. 9. Bostick admitted as part of the plea agreement that he touched the woman with sexual motivation, prosecutors said.
According to KIRO, U.S. District Judge Jamal N. Whitehead, who imposed both sentences, told Bostock that “to characterize your conduct as a ‘lapse of judgment’ would be to divorce your conduct from its true ugliness.”
U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman said in the statement that, “”The Western District of Washington continues to see an increase in cases involving sexual assault aboard aircraft, and we have a zero-tolerance policy. These cases demonstrate that there are real consequences for this predatory behavior.”
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Malcolm Gladwell on “Revenge of the Tipping Point”
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Malcolm Gladwell’s life has changed; he has not
On Tuesday, a new Malcolm Gladwell book comes out. And if history is any guide, it will be a bestseller. “They’re stories about ideas,” he said. “They have characters. They have plots. I’m usually trying to say something about the world.”
His first book, “The Tipping Point,” published in 2000, established the Gladwell recipe: he explores a theme through anecdotes and little-known scientific studies. “‘Tipping Point’ was about the epidemic as an incredibly useful way of understanding how ideas move through society,” Gladwell said. “And epidemics have rules. Let’s learn the rules, right?”
His seven New York Times bestsellers have sold 23 million copies in North America alone. His fee for corporate speeches is $350,000. His fans have downloaded a quarter-billion episodes of his podcast, “Revisionist History,” and he founded a company called Pushkin Industries to produce it.
In other words, Gladwell has come a long way from the small Canadian town where he grew up, son of a British father and a Jamaican mother, whom he describes as “subversive,” someone who would write notes to excuse her son from class with a blank space. “I would just fill out the date,” said the man who skipped a lot of school.
He attended the University of Toronto, but his best education was the ten years he worked for the Washington Post. “I knew nothing about newspapers,” he said. “I was so raw. I was 23, I think, or 24. Bob Woodward was two rows away from me. I learned at the feet of the greatest journalists of my generation.”
In 1996, Gladwell joined The New Yorker. He wrote about why, in the 1990s, New York’s crime rate plummeted in an article called, “The Tipping Point.” A book followed. It introduced a recurring Gladwellian theme: hidden patterns in the way the world works.
He’s a world-class contrarian, about college (“You should never go to the best institution you get into, never; go to your second or your third choice. Go to the place where you’re guaranteed to be in the top part of your class”); about working from home (“It’s not in your best interest to work at home. … If you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live, right? Don’t you want to feel part of something?”); about football (“I think the sport is a moral abomination”).
Gladwell says he enjoys being provocative: “Of course!” he said. “I like poking the bear. I mean, journalists should poke the bear.”
Gladwell’s fans love his storytelling, and the A-ha! moments they bring. His critics, on the other hand, have described his writing as “generalizations that are banal, obtuse, or flat wrong,” and “simple, vacuous truths [dressed] up with flowery language.” “I’m with the idea that not everyone’s gonna like my work,” Gladwell said. “100% of people don’t like anything.”
In a 2021 “Sunday Morning” interview, Gladwell said, “I would rather be interesting than correct.” He called that “an overly provocative way of saying things! No, I think what I meant was, if I turn out not to be right, I’m not devastated. I accept that as the price of doing business.”
Gladwell often turns his mistakes into new chapters or podcast episodes. In “The Tipping Point,” he explained that New York’s crime drop was the result of “broken windows policing.” As he described it, “Little crimes were tipping points for big crimes.” But that philosophy led to New York’s policy of “stop and frisk.”
“Doing 700,000 police stops a year of young Black and Hispanic men is deeply problematic,” Gladwell said. “We were wrong. I was part of that. I’m sorry.”
Which brings us to the new book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point.” “The original ‘Tipping Point’ is a very optimistic, rosy book about the possibilities for using the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change,” he said. “In the last 25 years, I spent a lot of time thinking about the other side of that problem, which is, what happens when people use the laws of epidemics in ways that are malicious or damaging or self-interested?”
The book’s stories range from topics as obscure as cheetah reproduction, to stories as big as the Holocaust. He writes that almost nobody talked about the Holocaust, or even called it that, until NBC aired a miniseries called “Holocaust” in 1978. “And what changed happened like [snaps fingers]. I mean, it was just there was a tipping point in our understanding of the Holocaust,” he said.
This book arrives at a tipping point in Gladwell’s own life. In a span of five years, he got engaged, had two children, turned 61, and moved from Manhattan to pastoral Hudson, New York. “It’s a lot to handle. There isn’t a single person who ever lived whose parents did not say, ‘This is a lot!'” he laughed. “I have become the person that, you know, I once despised, and nothing makes me happier.”
He also despises Ivy League colleges, accusing them of prioritizing their own reputations over focusing on their students.
Has parenthood affected his outlook on any of the things that he’s written about before? “Well, it’s prepared me for the possibility that I will be a massive hypocrite!” Gladwell laughed. “So, you know, it’s one thing to write about what you should do with your kids when you don’t have them.”
For all his success, Malcolm Gladwell maintains that nothing has changed in his approach, his work ethic, or his contrarianism. “It hasn’t changed what I do,” he said. “I don’t farm out my research; I still go on reporting trips. It hasn’t gotten old. In fact, my great regret is I don’t have time to do more.”
READ AN EXCERPT: “Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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Story produced by Wonbo Woo. Editor: Remington Korper.
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Coldplay on their record-breaking world tour
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