Biden seeks video game industry input on guns

WASHINGTON (AP) — Looking for broader remedies to gun violence, Vice President Joe Biden is reaching out to the video game industry for ideas as the White House seeks to assemble proposals in response to last month’s massacre at a Connecticut elementary school.

Biden is scheduled to meet with video game representatives Friday as the White House explores cultural factors that may contribute to violent behavior.

The vice president, who is leading a task force that will present recommendations to President Barack Obama on Tuesday, met with other representatives from the entertainment industry, including Comcast Corp. and the Motion Picture Association of America, on Thursday.

Friday’s meeting comes a day after the National Rifle Association rejected Obama administration proposals to limit high-capacity ammunition magazines and dug in on its opposition to an assault weapons ban, which Obama has previously said he will propose to Congress. The NRA was one of the pro-gun rights groups that met with Biden during the day.

NRA president David Keene, asked Friday if the NRA has enough support in Congress to fend off legislation to ban sales of assault weapons, indicated it does. “I do not think that there’s going to be a ban on so-called assault weapons passed by the Congress,” he said on NBC’s “Today.”

In previewing the meeting with the video game industry, Biden recalled how the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York lamented during crime bill negotiations in the 1980s that the country was “defining deviancy down.”

It’s unclear what, if anything, the administration is prepared to recommend on how to address the depiction of violence in the media.

White House press secretary Jay Carney last month suggested that not all measures require government intervention.

“It is certainly the case that we in Washington have the potential, anyway, to help elevate issues that are of concern, elevate issues that contribute to the scourge of gun violence in this country, and that has been the case in the past, and it certainly could be in the future,” Carney said then.

In a statement, a half dozen entertainment groups, including the Motion Picture Association of America, said they “look forward to doing our part to seek meaningful solutions.”

On gun control, however, the Obama administration is assembling proposals to curb gun violence that would include a ban on sales of assault weapons, limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines and universal background checks for gun buyers.

“The vice president made it clear, made it explicitly clear, that the president had already made up his mind on those issues,” Keene said after the meeting. “We made it clear that we disagree with them.”

Opposition from the well-funded and politically powerful NRA underscores the challenges that await the White House if it seeks congressional approval for limiting guns and ammunition. Obama can use his executive powers to act alone on some gun measures, but his options on the proposals opposed by the NRA are limited without Congress’ cooperation.

Obama has pushed reducing gun violence to the top of his domestic agenda following last month’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman slaughtered 20 children and six adults before killing himself. The president put Biden in charge of an administration task force and set a late January deadline for proposals.

“I committed to him I’d have these recommendations to him by Tuesday,” Biden said Thursday, during a separate White House meeting with sportsmen and wildlife groups. “It doesn’t mean it’s the end of the discussion, but the public wants us to act.”

The vice president later met privately with the NRA and other gun-owner groups for more than 90 minutes. Participants in the meeting described it as an open and frank discussion, but one that yielded little movement from either side on long-held positions.

Keene told NBC there is a fundamental disagreement over what would actually make a difference in curbing gun violence.

Richard Feldman, the president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association, said all were in agreement on a need to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But when the conversation turned to broad restrictions on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons, Feldman said Biden suggested the president had already made up his mind to seek a ban.

“Is there wiggle room and give?” Feldman said. “I don’t know.”

White House officials said the vice president didn’t expect to win over the NRA and other gun groups on those key issues. But the administration was hoping to soften their opposition in order to rally support from pro-gun lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Biden’s proposals are also expected to include recommendations to address mental health care and violence on television, in movies and video games. Those issues have wide support from gun-rights groups and pro-gun lawmakers.

As the meetings took place in Washington, a student was shot and wounded at a rural California high school and another student was taken into custody.

During his meeting with sporting and wildlife groups, Biden said that while no recommendations would eliminate all future shootings, “there has got to be some common ground, to not solve every problem but diminish the probability that our children are at risk in their schools and diminish the probability that firearms will be used in violent behavior in our society.”

Several Cabinet members have also taken on an active role in Biden’s gun violence task force, including Attorney General Eric Holder. He met Thursday with Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest firearms seller, along with other retailers such as Bass Pro Shops and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

The president hopes to announce his administration’s next steps to tackle gun violence shortly after he is sworn in for a second term. He has pledged to push for new measures in his State of the Union address.

___

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

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Plenty of Theories, and Enemies, in Killing of 3 Kurds in Paris

Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The brother of Sakine Cansiz (on poster), one of three Kurdish activists found shot on Thursday, said his family was convinced that it was a professional assassination.

PARIS — With her signature long hennaed hair, fiery resolve and olive-green military fatigues, Sakine Cansiz was a feminist, guerrilla fighter and former political prisoner as adept at wielding a machine gun as organizing political protests from a jail cell.

One day after she and two other Kurdish activists were killed in the heart of Paris, speculation abounded regarding Ms. Cansiz, 55, and whether she had been the main target.

One of her brothers, Metin Cansiz, and activists interviewed Friday said her main role in recent years was to raise money and provide political support for the separatist group she helped found, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. Ms. Cansiz may also still have been involved in providing arms for the rebels.

Echoing many analysts, Mr. Cansiz said the family was convinced that his sister had been the victim of a professional assassination. It was aimed, he said, at disrupting recently started peace talks that seek to end decades of bloody conflict between the Turkish government and the P.K.K., which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

Ms. Cansiz was a close ally of a crucial player in the talks with Turkey, the P.K.K.’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

“My sister supported the peace process, and she paid with her life,” Mr. Cansiz said as family members and hundreds of mourners gathered at a Kurdish cultural center not far from the locked, unlabeled office where Ms. Cansiz and the other two women, Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez, were found fatally shot early Thursday. “Whoever did this wanted to kill the process.” 

Many Kurdish rebels said they believed that Turkish nationalists were behind the killings. But there were competing suspicions. Some rebels speculated that Iran  sponsored the attack as a way to destabilize Turkey, which has taken a stand against an Iranian ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Friday that he believed that the killings bore the signs of an internal feud. In any case, the contours of Ms. Cansiz’s shortened life suggest that she would have had plenty of enemies.

Born to an Alevi family of eight brothers and sisters, Ms. Cansiz became politically active in her early 20s, her brother said. What she saw as the impoverishment and repression of the Kurdish community led her and a small group of revolutionaries to found the P.K.K. at a teahouse near Diyarbakir, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.

In 1980, after a coup in Turkey, she was arrested and imprisoned until 1991, enduring torture, according to Rusen Werdi, a Kurdish lawyer in Paris.

Her brother, who was imprisoned with her, recalled that she was one of the only prisoners to stand up to the authorities. Activists recalled that she spit in the face of the notorious prison director.

In interviews on Friday, activists said  Ms. Cansiz continued to organize demonstrations from behind bars. They said she had initially been attracted by the Marxist ideology of the Kurdish rights movement, which allowed women to escape from the tribal structures of Kurdish society and to take up arms alongside men.

Vahap Coskun, an expert on Kurdish movements at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, said that from its inception, the P.K.K. saw that Kurdish women could provide a powerful base for political organization and on the battlefield. Of the group’s 5,500 members, he said, about a quarter are women. In the mid-1990s, some joined suicide bombing attacks aimed at military and civilian targets, sometimes deflecting suspicion by dressing as though pregnant.

After Ms. Cansiz was released from prison, her brother said, she received military training, organized clandestine meetings, traveled to P.K.K. mountain outposts in southeastern Turkey and went underground to Germany to raise funds.

Ms. Cansiz spent time in Syria, where Mr. Ocalan was based, at the group’s training camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa region and in northern Iraq, Mr. Coskun said. She was eventually sent to Western Europe to work in logistics and fund-raising after the P.K.K. incurred losses in fighting with Turkish security forces, he said.

The German authorities questioned her in 2007 but turned down a Turkish request for her extradition, her friends and colleagues said. She then moved to Paris, and believed that she was under frequent surveillance, they said.

Her brother said that the two had recently celebrated the new year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and that Ms. Cansiz had betrayed no concerns about her safety. “She was never afraid,” he said. “She was happy.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the background of Sakine Cansiz. She was an Alevi, not an Alawite. Among their differences, the Alevis are spread throughout Turkey, while most Alawites in Turkey are concentrated along the country’s border with Syria.

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Woman murders girl, 2, feeding her chili power, police say

An Apple Valley woman accused of fatally poisoning her boyfriend’s 2-year-old toddler with chili powder pleaded not guilty Thursday to murder, a prosecutor said.

Amanda Sorensen, 21, pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and child abuse causing death. She appeared in court Thursday, said Kathleen DiDonato, a deputy district attorney. DiDonato declined to talk about the specifics of the case.

Sorensen was arrested early Monday morning. She is being held at the West Valley Detention Center.

Authorities were called to the 20000 block of Cayuga Road in Apple Valley on a report of a child suffering from a seizure after ingesting chili powder. The toddler died at a hospital, deputies said.

Relatives of the toddler told the Victor Valley Press they were in “shock,” after the incident.

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Flu season puts businesses and employees in a bind

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly half the 70 employees at a Ford dealership in Clarksville, Ind., have been out sick at some point in the past month. It didn't have to be that way, the boss says.

"If people had stayed home in the first place, a lot of times that spread wouldn't have happened," says Marty Book, a vice president at Carriage Ford. "But people really want to get out and do their jobs, and sometimes that's a detriment."

The flu season that has struck early and hard across the U.S. is putting businesses and employees alike in a bind. In this shaky economy, many Americans are reluctant to call in sick, something that can backfire for their employers.

Flu was widespread in 47 states last week, up from 41 the week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. The only states without widespread flu were California, Mississippi and Hawaii. And the main strain of the virus circulating tends to make people sicker than usual.

Blake Fleetwood, president of Cook Travel in New York, says his agency is operating with less than 40 percent of its full-time staff because of the flu and other ailments.

"The people here are working longer hours and it puts a lot of strain on everyone," Fleetwood says. "You don't know whether to ask people with the flu to come in or not." He says the flu is also taking its toll on business as customers cancel their travel plans: "People are getting the flu and they're reduced to a shriveling little mess and don't feel like going anywhere."

Many workers go to the office even when they're sick because they are worried about losing their jobs, says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employer consulting firm. Other employees report for work out of financial necessity, since roughly 40 percent of U.S. workers don't get paid if they are out sick. Some simply have a strong work ethic and feel obligated to show up.

Flu season typically costs employers $10.4 billion for hospitalization and doctor's office visits, according to the CDC. That does not include the costs of lost productivity from absences.

At Carriage Ford, Book says the company plans to make flu shots mandatory for all employees.

Linda Doyle, CEO of the Northcrest Community retirement home in Ames, Iowa, says the company took that step this year for its 120 employees, providing the shots at no cost. It is also supplying face masks for all staff.

And no one is expected to come into work if sick, she says.

So far, the company hasn't seen an outbreak of flu cases.

"You keep your fingers crossed and hope it continues this way," Doyle says. "You see the news and it's frightening. We just want to make sure that we're doing everything possible to keep everyone healthy. Cleanliness is really the key to it. Washing your hands. Wash, wash, wash."

Among other steps employers can take to reduce the spread of the flu on the job: holding meetings via conference calls, staggering shifts so that fewer people are on the job at the same time, and avoiding handshaking.

Newspaper editor Rob Blackwell says he had taken only two sick days in the last two years before coming down with the flu and then pneumonia in the past two weeks. He missed several days the first week of January and has been working from home the past week.

"I kept trying to push myself to get back to work because, generally speaking, when I'm sick I just push through it," says Blackwell, the Washington bureau chief for the daily trade paper American Banker.

Connecticut is the only state that requires some businesses to pay employees when they are out sick. Cities such as San Francisco and Washington have similar laws.

Challenger and others say attitudes are changing, and many companies are rethinking their sick policies to avoid officewide outbreaks of the flu and other infectious diseases.

"I think companies are waking up to the fact right now that you might get a little bit of gain from a person coming into work sick, but especially when you have an epidemic, if 10 or 20 people then get sick, in fact you've lost productivity," Challenger says.

___

Associated Press writers Mike Stobbe in Atlanta, Eileen A.J. Connelly in New York, Paul Wiseman in Washington, Barbara Rodriguez in Des Moines, Iowa, and Jim Salter in St. Louis contributed to this report.

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Man Arrested for Murder in Teen's Facebook-Revealed Death

By Jeff Truesdell

01/11/2013 at 05:15 PM EST

Police have arrested a sometime boyfriend in the murder of Jasmine Benjamin, a 17-year-old Georgia college student whose parents first learned about her death last November on Facebook.

Benjamin, a freshman at Valdosta State University, was found Nov. 18 on a dormitory study room couch. On Thursday, fellow Valdosta State student Darien Meheux, 18, turned himself in after learning there was a warrant for his arrest, says Steven Turner, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

"Right now he's the sole suspect," Turner tells PEOPLE. "They had dated at one time. The status of their relationship back in November is not necessarily clear whether they were dating or not."

Frustrated by the lack of answers and the way they'd learned about Benjamin's death, her family hired a private investigator, Robin Martinelli, but believed all along that Meheux might be involved, says Martinelli.

Benjamin and Meheux both were from Lawrenceville, about 30 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Authorities earlier had said the cause of death was asphyxiation, and that Benjamin may have been dead for several hours before her body was discovered in the shared common area of Georgia Hall on the 10,000-student campus in Valdosta, Ga.

Benjamin's mother Judith Brogdon and stepfather James Jackson were notified of her death when a friend forwarded a Facebook post about the discovery.

Officials then told them their daughter died from natural causes, until the medical examiner changed the investigation within 24 hours to homicide.

"To find out it was a homicide and that somebody actually murdered our daughter changed everything," Jackson tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "It was like hearing the news all over again."

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.

A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.

"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.

The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.

The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.

The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.

"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."

The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.

But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.

Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.

"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."

The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.

At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."

During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.

And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.

"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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Flu season strikes early and, in some places, hard

NEW YORK (AP) — From the Rocky Mountains to New England, hospitals are swamped with people with flu symptoms. Some medical centers are turning away visitors or making them wear face masks, and one Pennsylvania hospital set up a tent outside its ER to deal with the feverish patients.

Flu season in the U.S. has struck early and, in many places, hard.

While flu normally doesn't blanket the country until late January or February, it is already widespread in more than 40 states, with about 30 of them reporting some major hot spots. On Thursday, health officials blamed the flu for the deaths of 20 children so far.

Whether this will be considered a bad season by the time it has run its course in the spring remains to be seen.

"Those of us with gray hair have seen worse," said Dr. William Schaffner, a flu expert at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

The evidence so far points to a moderate season, Schaffner and others say. It looks bad in part because last year was unusually mild and because the main strain of influenza circulating this year tends to make people sicker and really lay them low.

David Smythe of New York City saw it happen to his 50-year-old girlfriend, who has been knocked out for about two weeks. "She's been in bed. She can't even get up," he said.

Also, the flu's early arrival coincided with spikes in a variety of other viruses, including a childhood malady that mimics flu and a new norovirus that causes vomiting and diarrhea, or what is commonly known as "stomach flu." So what people are calling the flu may, in fact, be something else.

"There may be more of an overlap than we normally see," said Dr. Joseph Bresee, who tracks the flu for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most people don't undergo lab tests to confirm flu, and the symptoms are so similar that it can be hard to distinguish flu from other viruses, or even a cold. Over the holidays, 250 people were sickened at a Mormon missionary training center in Utah, but the culprit turned out to be a norovirus, not the flu.

Flu is a major contributor, though, to what's going on.

"I'd say 75 percent," said Dr. Dan Surdam, head of the emergency department at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, Wyoming's largest hospital. The 17-bed emergency room saw its busiest day ever last week, with 166 visitors.

The early onslaught has resulted in a spike in hospitalizations. To deal with the influx and protect other patients from getting sick, hospitals are restricting visits from children, requiring family members to wear masks and banning anyone with flu symptoms from maternity wards.

One hospital in Allentown, Pa., set up a tent this week for a steady stream of patients with flu symptoms. But so far "what we're seeing is a typical flu season," said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital, Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest.

On Wednesday, Boston declared a public health emergency, with the city's hospitals counting about 1,500 emergency room visits since December by people with flu-like symptoms.

All the flu activity has led some to question whether this year's flu shot is working. While health officials are still analyzing the vaccine, early indications are that it's about 60 percent effective, which is in line with what's been seen in other years.

The vaccine is reformulated each year, based on experts' best guess of which strains of the virus will predominate. This year's vaccine is well-matched to what's going around. The government estimates that between a third and half of Americans have gotten the vaccine.

In New York City, 57-year-old Judith Quinones skipped getting a flu shot this season and suffered her worst case of flu-like illness in years. She was laid up for nearly a month with fever and body aches. "I just couldn't function," she said.

But her daughter got the vaccine. "And she got sick twice," Quinones said.

Europe is also suffering an early flu season, though a milder strain predominates there. Flu reports are up, too, in China, Japan, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Algeria and the Republic of Congo. Britain has seen a surge in cases of norovirus.

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC. That's an estimate — the agency does not keep a running tally of adult flu deaths each year, only for children. Some state health departments do keep count, and they've reported dozens of flu deaths so far.

Flu usually peaks in midwinter. Symptoms can include fever, cough, runny nose, head and body aches and fatigue. Some people also suffer vomiting and diarrhea, and some develop pneumonia or other severe complications.

Most people with flu have a mild illness and can help themselves and protect others by staying home and resting. But people with severe symptoms should see a doctor. They may be given antiviral drugs or other medications to ease symptoms.

Flu vaccinations are recommended for everyone 6 months or older. Of the 20 children killed by the flu this season, only two were fully vaccinated.

___

AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

___

Online:

CDC flu: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/index.htm

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Dumb Criminal: Juan Ramirez Tijerina Packed for Jail Break

01/10/2013 at 05:30 PM EST

Give him an "A" for ingenuity.

Four years into a 20-year sentence for illegal weapons possession, Juan Ramirez Tijerina had had enough of life in the pokey. After a conjugal visit in July 2011 with his partner, Maria del Carmen Arjona Rivero, he was packed and ready to go – literally.

Ramirez was apprehended after officers, noticing that Arjona seemed nervous as she headed for the prison exit in Chetumal, Mexico, with a bulging suitcase, unzipped the bag and found the convict inside.

He's back behind bars, and Arjona was detained.

"This is rare," says a prison spokesman. "Most of the inmates here dig tunnels, try to jump fences or take advantage of a riot to escape."

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Jimmy Dushku: The 25-year-old who is North Korea’s one true Twitter friend

Mother Jones takes a look at a globetrotting young investor who’s the only American — and the only human being — Pyongyang follows

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt capped a controversial four-day visit to North Korea on Thursday with a call for the country’s censorship-happy communist government to give its people access to the internet, or face further economic decline due to the country’s global isolation. It was a strong message from one of the web’s most powerful figures, although North Korea watchers seem pretty confident the country’s young leader, Kim Jong Un, will ignore it. There’s one American, however, Pyongyang does appear to listen to. That would be Jimmy Dushku, a young investor who is one of exactly three Twitter users Kim’s government follows on Twitter. What’s the story behind this unlikely online bromance? Here, a guide:

Who is Jimmy Dushku?
He’s a 25-year-old financial whiz kid from Austin, Texas. Dushku, who also goes by the nicknames “Jimmer” and “Jammy,” started a website development business when he was 14, according to Mother Jones, and he parlayed his early earnings into investments that now include everything from construction projects in Europe to real estate in Texas to mines in South America. He’s also a rabid Coldplay fan, and when he isn’t jetting around the world, he says he likes to play Rachmaninoff on his piano and zoom around on his Ducati Monster motorcycle.

SEE MORE: North Korea’s rocket launch: 3 consequences

So how did he become buddies with North Korea?
Dushku tells Asawin Suebsaeng at Mother Jones he’s not really sure. “People always ask me how it happened, and I honestly can’t remember,” he says. “It started sometime back in 2010. I was initially surprised.” North Korea followed him, he followed North Korea “out of courtesy.” He tweeted back, “Hello my friend,” and a relationship was born. Then, the North Korean government, which has piled up some 11,000 followers in two-and-a-half years on Twitter, abruptly whittled down the number of accounts it follows, leaving just three. Dushku made the cut (along with a Vietnam account and another official North Korean handle).

What has Dushku gotten from the relationship?
Death threats, for one thing. Not long after he linked up with North Korea’s account, which goes by @uriminzok (or “our nation”), Dushku says he started getting angry messages from exiles and South Koreans. Since then, he has mostly kept a low profile, just to be safe, although he does occasionally grant interviews to foreign publications. For its part, North Korea gets a rare glimpse at the outside world through Dushku, as his is the only account North Korea follows that is regularly updated — the other two haven’t tweeted in months. He’s also the only human being in the bunch.

Will @JimmyDushku and @uriminzok ever meet in real life?
That’s always the question for acquaintances who meet online, isn’t it? Dushku says his friendly relationship has won him a standing offer to visit North Korea. Casual observers, however, advise him to proceed with caution. “Am I the only one thinking they picked some random guy so they can lure him into North Korea and use him as a political prisoner/bargaining chip?” one commenter at Gizmodo said. Another suggests that Dushku play it cool, without making Pyongyang angry, saying, “Never unfollow anybody with nuclear weapons.”

Sources: Austinist, CNN, Gizmodo, Mother Jones

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