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Anonymous ID: a1ac2e April 11, 2023, 1:03 p.m. No.18679193   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>9258 >>9274 >>9300 >>9412 >>9445 >>9499 >>9519 >>9603

Joel Koskan, who ran for SD Senate, pleads guilty to 2 counts of felony incest

 

PIERRE — Joel Koskan, who ran unsuccessfully for state Senate in 2022 and days before the election was arrested on charges relating to child abuse, pleaded guilty to two counts of felony incest Tuesday morning.

 

He was sentenced in a Hughes County court room to 10 years in the South Dakota State Penitentiary.

 

"This is the first part of the healing process," Judge Margo Northrup said during the hearing.

 

Koskan, 44, originally faced felony child abuse charges for acts that allegedly took place between October 2014 and October 2016, according to court documents filed in November. He exposed his victim, a now 20-year-old woman, to "sexual grooming behaviors."

 

In a probable caused statement reviewed by the Argus Leader prior to its sealing in November, the victim was Koskan's family member and had been allegedly sexually abused by Koskan since the time she was a child. Koskan also allegedly made references to GPS tracking and video monitoring the victim's activities.

 

A special agent with the South Dakota Department of Criminal Investigation recommended charges of rape, sexual contact with a child younger than 16 and aggravated incest.

 

As part of Tuesday's hearing, as part of a new plea agreement, Koskan would plea guilty to the two counts of felony incest, pay a $10,000 fine for each count, court fees and provide restitution for the victim included in the original plea agreement, rejected by Northrup in March.

 

The new charges alleged Koskan had raped the victim and performed oral sex between April 2 and April 16, 2022 at his home in Wood.

 

Out of safety and privacy concerns, the Argus Leader does not name victims of sexual assault without their permission.

 

Brent Kempema, the Assistant South Dakota Attorney General, said the victim had been pressured by Koskan and his family not to report the sexual abuse. She had first tried to report the years of abuse in 2016, but was unable to because of the trauma it caused her.

 

In May 2022, the victim "summon(ed) the courage to reach out to a friend," whose father was a retired agent with Department of Criminal Investigation to report further abuse.

 

"From then on, the pressure was on," Kempema said, describing Koskan in an act of retaliation had allegedly reported the car she drove stolen.

 

She had been pressured to "put the family above herself" and to not cooperate with law enforcement during the investigation, Kempema said. She had realized the people she was trying to protect did not have her best interest at heart.

 

moar

https://www.yahoo.com/news/joel-koskan-ran-sd-senate-180125752.html

Anonymous ID: a1ac2e April 11, 2023, 1:06 p.m. No.18679200   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>9204 >>9214 >>9227 >>9241

Watch the Water…

 

A Leak at the Bottom of the Sea May Be a Harbinger of Doom

 

The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) is a massive fault line stretching from Vancouver Island to Northern California—and it’s the source of the vast majority of earthquakes and tsunamis in the region. In fact, scientists believe that the fault line will likely be the source of the next Big One, an anticipated megathrust earthquake so powerful it’ll wreak death and destruction the likes of which we’ve never seen before from a geological event.

 

So, it goes without saying that researchers have a special interest in studying the CSZ—and they may have uncovered something that could clue us in on what’s going on with the incredibly powerful ticking time bomb.

 

Researchers at the University of Washington found a warm liquid seeping out of the ocean floor near the zone roughly 50 miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon. The team suspects that the underwater spring, called Pythia’s Oasis, might be connected to the CSZ—and causing the fault line to take on more stress as it leaks. They published their findings on Jan. 25 in the journal Science Advances.

 

“Pythias Oasis provides a rare window into processes acting deep in the seafloor, and its chemistry suggests this fluid comes from near the plate boundary,” Deborah Kelley, a professor of oceanography at UW and a co-author of the new paper, said in a statement. “This suggests that the nearby faults regulate fluid pressure and megathrust slip behavior along the central Cascadia Subduction Zone.”

 

The team discovered the leak after spotting plumes of methane bubbles nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean. After sending an underwater drone to investigate, they discovered that water with a different chemical composition from the surrounding seawater was seeping into the ocean from a hole in the ground “like a firehose,” Evan Soloman, a fellow UW oceanographer and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “That’s something that I’ve never seen and to my knowledge has not been observed before.”

 

Further analysis found that the water was 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the seawater around it. The authors suspect that the fluid’s source is roughly 2 miles below the ocean floor at the CSZ fault line where temperatures sit around 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

Why is that a big deal? The researchers say that the fluid might be acting as a kind of pressure regulator between the continental plate and the ocean plate. The more fluid that is in the cracks of the faults, the less pressure there is between the two plates as they smash into each other.

 

So less fluid means there’s more pressure building between the two plates. This can create a lot of stress on the region and a whole lot more potential energy that could unleash itself as a devastating earthquake.

 

“The megathrust fault zone is like an air hockey table,” Solomon explained. “If the fluid pressure is high, it’s like the air is turned on, meaning there’s less friction and the two plates can slip. If the fluid pressure is lower, the two plates will lock. That’s when stress can build up.”

 

The authors wrote that they don’t know whether or not Pythia’s Oasis is the “only seep of its kind,” and suggest that there could be similar seeps in that region of the CSZ. As such, seismologists should consider these seeps in future models of the CSZ.

 

So while there’s no telling when the next Big One is going to happen, it’s at least somewhat comforting to know that we’re still learning all we can about the CSZ to make sure we’re prepared for it when it does come.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/leak-bottom-sea-may-harbinger-180932935.html