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MADISON, Wis. -- A judge sentenced a former Wisconsin prosecutor to 18 months in prison Monday for secretly recording sexual encounters with two women, including one he was prosecuting in a restraining order case.
A jury found former Burnett County District Attorney Daniel Steffen guilty in April of three counts of capturing an intimate representation depicting nudity. St. Croix County Circuit Judge Scott Nordstrand handed down the sentence.
A state Department of Justice agent began investigating Steffen in early 2020, according to the criminal complaint in the case. A witness told the agent that a woman the witness knew had openly talked about having sex with Steffen in exchange for leniency on her pending criminal cases.
The woman told the agent she had only met Steffen a couple times in court and denied having a relationship with him. She said she had several cases pending and ended up paying a fine. A few months, later she acknowledged a relationship with Steffen, saying she was facing charges for violating a restraining order and he was prosecuting her.
Investigators searched Steffen's home in October 2020 and found an iPad in his dresser, according to the criminal complaint. On the iPad were videos of Steffen having sex with the woman in August and September of 2018. The woman told investigators she wasn't aware he was filming them.
Also on the iPad was another video of Steffen having sex with another woman earlier in 2018. They could be heard talking about how she could avoid charges for hitting a mailbox. She told investigators she wasn't aware he was filming them.
Nordstrand, the judge, also ordered Steffen to serve two years of extended supervision and four years on probation after he gets out of prison.
Steffen's attorney, listed in online court records as Minneapolis-based Eric Nelson, didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment late Monday afternoon. | Explicit |
Quick-thinking bystandders in southern California helped rescue an out-of-state kidnapping victim who had been holding up a sign that said "help me" inside a car, authorties said Thursday.
The victim, a 13-year-old girl, was allegedly taken from a bus stop in San Antonio, Texas, the Long Beach Police Department said in a news release. The girl had allegedly been ordered into a vehicle at gunpoint on July 6.
On July 9, officers in Long Beach responded to a 911 call, where they found the teen "visibly emotional and distressed." Investigating officers found that Good Samaritans were in a parking lot when they saw the victim in a parked vehicle holding a sheet of paper with "help me" written on it. They "immediately" called 911, police said.
Officers located and arrested the man suspected of kidnapping the teen. He was identified as 61-year-old Steven Robert Sablan. He had been inside a nearby laundromat washing clothes when the teen wrote the sign, officials said. Police said they found the firearm used to kidnap the girl was a black BB gun "which resembled a semi-automatic pistol." They also found a pair of handcuffs inside the car.
Sablan was transported to the Long Beach City Jail, where he was booked for kidnapping, lewd and lascivious acts with a child, and fugitive from justice. He was booked on a $100,000 bail and was released to the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on July 11, according to the jail's website.
Sablan was indicted by a federal grand jury earlier this week and has been charged with one count of kidnapping and one count of transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, the Central District of California U.S. Attorney's Office said in a news release. His arraignment is scheduled for July 31 in United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles.
According to the office, Sablan allegedly asked the victim how old she was. When she mentioned having a friend overseas, Sablan allegedly told the victim he could take her to a cruise ship to visit the friend, but she had to do something for him first. The girl was allegedly repeatedly sexually assaulted during the three days she was held by Sablan, according to the office.
If convicted of both charges filed by the federal grand jury, Sablan may face life in prison.
The teen, who was a reported runaway missing person, was placed in the custody of the San Antonio Department of Children and Family Services.
The Long Beach chief of police, Wally Hebeish, praised the Good Samaritans who had called 911.
"I want to commend our community members for their vigilance and willingness to get involved by calling 9-1-1. This incident highlights the critical role community members play in keeping people safe," said Hebeish. "I would also like to acknowledge our officers for their swift response and actions which led to getting this victim to safety."
A similar incident unfolded in South Carolina last month. An alleged kidnapping victim was rescued after aduring a traffic stop in North Myrtle Beach.
for more features. | Explicit |
Tulsi Gabbard pushes back against Jack White’s anti-Trump comment
Former Republican presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard blasted musician Jack White’s criticism of former President Trump on Twitter Saturday.
Gabbard, who served as U.S. representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021, called out what she sees as a double standard of normalization.
“Jack White recently expressed his disdain for anyone who ‘normalizes’ Trump,” she wrote about the White Stripes frontman. “In the meantime, what he wants us to do is normalize those in power abusing that power to go after political opponents, using the strong arm of the law as their goon squad.”
“Anybody who ‘normalizes’ or treats this disgusting fascist, racist, con man, disgusting piece of s— Trump with any level of respect is ALSO disgusting in my book,” White wrote on Instagram.
“That’s you Joe Rogan, you Mel Gibson, you Mark Walhberg, you Guy Fieri,” he added. This is a statement from me, not a discussion/debate.”
ITK previously reached out to Rogan, Gibson, Fieri and Wahlberg for comment.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | Explicit |
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, and his mother, a White House official said Saturday.
Biden will sign a proclamation on Tuesday to create the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument across three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, according to the official. The individual spoke on condition of anonymity because the White House had not formally announced the president's plans.
Tuesday is the anniversary of Emmett Till's birth in 1941.
The monument will protect places that are central to the story of Till's life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers and his mother's activism. Till's mother's insistence on an open casket to show the world how her son had been brutalized and Jet's magazine's decision to publish photos of his mutilated body helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement.
Biden's decision also comes at a fraught time in the United States over matters concerning race. Conservative leaders are pushing back against the teaching of slavery and Black history in public schools, as well as the incorporation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs from college classrooms to corporate boardrooms.
On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris criticized a revised Black history curriculum in Florida that includes teaching that enslaved people benefited from the skills they learned at the hands of the people who denied them freedom. The Florida Board of Education approved the curriculum to satisfy legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate who has accused public schools of liberal indoctrination.
"How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?" Harris asked in a speech delivered from Jacksonville, Florida.
DeSantis said he had no role in devising his state's new education standards but defended the components on how enslaved people benefited.
"All of that is rooted in whatever is factual," he said in response.
The monument to Till and his mother will include three sites in the two states.
The Illinois site is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Thousands of people gathered at the church to mourn Emmett Till in September 1955.
The Mississippi locations are Graball Landing, believed to be where Till's mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till's killers were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.
Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when Carolyn Bryant Donham said the 14-year-old Till whistled and made sexual advances at her while she worked in a store in the small community of Money.
Till was later abducted and his body eventually pulled from the Tallahatchie River, where he had been tossed after he was shot and weighted down with a cotton gin fan.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried on murder charges about a month after Till was killed, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. Months later, they confessed to killing Till in a paid interview with Look magazine. Bryant was married to Donham in 1955. She died earlier this year.
The monument will be the fourth Biden has created since taking office in 2021, and just his latest tribute to the younger Till.
For Black History Month this year, Biden hosted a screening of the movie Till, a drama about his lynching.
In March 2022, Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law. Congress had first considered such legislation more than 120 years ago.
The Justice Department announced in December 2021 that it was closing its investigation into Till's killing. | Explicit |
Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso, has declared a 60-day state of emergency throughout the country’s prisons and authorized the armed forces to retake control of jails, following violence in the country’s most notorious prison that left 18 dead and a string of protests in which inmates took nearly 100 guards hostage.
The measure – the second state of emergency that Lasso has ordered in less than 24 hours – will be in effect for 60 days and orders the immediate mobilization of the military and police in an effort to regain control of the prisons.
Clashes – including gunfire and explosions – between organized criminal gangs have raged since Saturday at the Penitenciaría del Litoral prison in the city of Guayaquil.
“So far the death of 18 prisoners has been confirmed after the clashes registered since Saturday,” the prosecutor’s office tweeted on Tuesday, adding that more than 10 people, including one police officer, were injured during the incidents.
The Penitenciaría del Litoral has a capacity for about 9,500 inmates, but in the first quarter of this year exceeded that number by almost 3,000.
It is considered one of the most dangerous prisons in Ecuador. A gang battle in 2021 killed 119 inmates. In April, 12 inmates were killed and three injured during a riot.
Meanwhile, prisoners in 13 other prisons declared a hunger strike on Monday and are holding 96 prison guards hostage to demand better sanitary conditions and food, among other issues.
Ecuador has long been plagued by prison violence, with this latest surge taking place amid campaigning for elections scheduled for 20 August, pushing some presidential candidates to pledge prison reforms, including electronic surveillance systems and more prison officers.
The SNAI prison authority has worked to regain control of the prison since early Tuesday, it said in a posting on the social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, which was accompanied by images of heavily equipped police and military entering the Penitenciaría del Litoral.
Military intervention in Ecuador’s prisons will continue until control has been retaken and there is no threat to prisoners or officials, the government said on Tuesday.
Lasso also declared a state of emergency in the provinces of Manabí and Los Ríos, as well as in the city of Durán on Monday, after the mayor of the city of Manta, Agustín Intriago, was shot dead on Sunday.
Lasso has regularly declared states of emergency in the country’s prisons as he tries to tackle violence which has surged since 2021, claiming the lives of hundreds of prisoners.
The prison system has faced structural problems for decades, prompting concern from the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. | Explicit |
MEXICO CITY, July 25 (Reuters) - Mexican security forces at local, state and federal level knew about the 2014 abduction of 43 student teachers and were complicit in their disappearances, a report prepared by an independent investigatory panel said on Tuesday.
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) - a panel appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights who were tasked with investigating the case - said in the report on one of Mexico's most notorious human rights scandals that the Army, Navy, police and intelligence agencies knew, minute by minute, where the student teachers were.
"They all collaborated to make them disappear," GIEI panel member Carlos Beristain told a press conference ahead of the presentation of the group's final fact-finding report.
The Army said it had no comment. The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mexico's armed forces have long denied having information about the disappearances.
The 43 missing youths were part of a larger group of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College that came under attack in the city of Iguala, Guerrero, the night of Sept. 26, 2014. Some of that group died at the scene or escaped.
In its initial findings, the previous government concluded the 43 had been kidnapped by corrupt police in cahoots with a local drug gang who believed the students had been infiltrated by members of a rival outfit. The gang then killed the students and burned their bodies, their report said.
The GIEI and the current government says that account was riddled with errors and that officials hid information, using torture to obtain false testimonies, and that members of the armed forces were complicit in the disappearances.
After President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a trenchant critic of the previous administration, took office in 2018, he created a "truth commission" to look into the case and renewed the mandate of the GIEI, which had been formed in 2014.
The investigation found that members of the Navy and the Army had carried out secret, unreported joint operations and manipulated information relevant to the case, according to the report published on Tuesday.
In the crucial hours after the students went missing, at least 500 calls about the incident were recorded at a government security surveillance center, the report said.
Meanwhile, soldiers who had initially testified they were in their barracks that night were linked to locations where the students are believed to have been taken, it also found.
The Army and Navy also secretly arrested five suspects in the case who were believed to have been missing until now, the report argued, using documents, photographs and testimonies.
Experts also found discrepancies over the Army's reporting of the discovery of the body of Julio Cesar Mondragon, one of the Ayotzinapa students who died that night. The institution told the GIEI the differences were an "involuntary error."
The remains of only three of the 43 have been formally identified.
The GIEI said the motive behind the disappearances remains unclear.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Explicit |
The Tomohon Extreme Market has become the first such market in Indonesia to go dog and cat meat-free.
The market's six remaining dog and cat meat traders signed an agreement to stop their sales on Friday, and the mayor of Tomohon issued a statute to ban the trade.
"We believe the way to reduce people's interest in consuming dog and cat meat in Tomohon is to stop selling it in markets." the regional secretary of the city of Tomohon, Edwin Roring, said.
He urged people to opt for clean, rabies-free animal-based foods such as pork, beef, and chicken.
'Brutally cruel' animal trade
The move followed months of campaigning and lobbying by Humane Society International (HSI) and the local Animal Friends Manado Indonesia (AFMI) groups.
The animal welfare groups called the treatment of the animals at the markets "brutally cruel" and like "walking through hell."
They hope to see the ban extended to the rest of Indonesia where an estimated one million dogs and cats are killed for human consumption every year.
Campaigners said the trade causes immense animal suffering and poses serious threats to human health by spreading diseases such as rabies, anthrax, and leptospirosis.
The footage captured by the activists at two markets in North Sulawesi province shows workers pulling howling animals out and bludgeoning their heads with wooden batons.
The animals were hanged, and their fur was blowtorched off while they were still alive.
Traditional attitudes slowly changing
Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country, and Islam considers and views dog products as haram, or forbidden, in the same way as pork.
Still, as much as 7% of Indonesians eat dog and cat meat, according to Dog Meat Free Indonesia. This is practiced mainly in North Sulawesi, North Sumatra, and East Nusa Tenggara provinces, where most of the population identify as Christian.
The decisson by dog and cat meat traders in Tomohon to stop selling means the supply would now be cut off at the source.
Elvianus Pongoh, one of the sellers at Tomohon for 25 years, said the time was right to end the trade.
"I have probably slaughtered thousands of dogs. Every now and then I would see the fear in their eyes... as I came for them, and it made me feel bad," he said. "I know this ban is best for the animals and also best to protect the public."
lo/dj (AFP, AP, dpa) | Explicit |
In this Aug. 12, 2017 file photo, white nationalist demonstrators clash with counter demonstrators at the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Va.
Steve Helber/AP
In late May, a group of young, male neo-Nazis converged outside a bookstore in Bozeman, Mt., to protest a drag queen story hour. Later that day, they hit another similar event in Livingston, Mt. The second weekend in June, the groups targeted the Lewis County Pride Festival in Centralia, Wash. A week after that, it was the Wind River Pride event in Lander, Wyo. And the following weekend, they were at Oregon City Pride, not far from Portland, Ore.
These men, dressed in tactical gear and masks, were members of so-called "active clubs" — a term that may be relatively new to American audiences. They are a strand of the white nationalist movement that has grown quickly during the last three years and that has recently taken their message of hate into more public view. These decentralized cells emphasize mixed martial arts training to ready their members for violence against their perceived enemies.
Stephen Piggott, a researcher with the Western States Center, a national civil rights organization, has closely tracked their evolution in the Pacific Northwest.
"They are really focused on a couple of things," said Piggott. "One is centering, organizing and trying to recruit people through combat sports ... but also, preparing for political and racially motivated violence."
Those that protested those LGBTQ gatherings in the Pacific Northwest states call themselves the Northwest Nationalist Network; they have been among the most emboldened to bring their activities into the streets. But groups in Arizona, California, Pennsylvania and Tennessee have also been notably active. And recently, two new networks have been announced: The Dixie Alliance, for groups in Southern states, and the Midwest Network.
"These clubs are decentralized and they're forming on their own," said Morgan Moon, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, which estimates that there are active clubs now in at least 30 states. "We're starting to see [the active club model] pop up in Europe as well as Canada now."
European 'hooliganism' for American neo-Nazis
Those who have closely tracked the active club scene in the U.S. largely attribute its establishment and growth to a single individual: Robert Rundo. Rundo, a self-professed fascist and white nationalist who frequently traffics in anti-Semitic tropes, has spent much of the last five years on the run from law enforcement. In the spring, he was arrested in Romania, and a court recently ordered that he be extradited to face charges in California for rioting and conspiring to riot at political rallies.
"What Rundo did was take a model of European far-right extremism: decentralized, [and] quite honestly, borrowing — if not stealing from — far-right football hooligan subcultures, right down to aesthetics and plopping that down into an American context as something new and innovative," said Michael Colborne, a researcher, investigator and journalist at the investigative journalism website Bellingcat. Colborne's investigations helped to uncover Rundo's whereabouts in Serbia in 2020 and 2021, and then in Bulgaria in 2022.
Rundo's alleged criminal activity in the U.S. dates back chiefly to 2017 and 2018, when he ran an active club in Southern California called the Rise Above Movement. Despite that crew's dissolution and his absence from the U.S. during the last several years, Colborne said Rundo has retained a central role in the growth of the active club scene. Rundo sells merchandising online and uses podcasts to instruct others on starting their own crews. Colborne said Rundo's advice to adherents centers on what he calls the "three F's" — fashion, fitness and fighting.
"He really saw the power of that aesthetic, that power of bringing young men together into these hyper masculine subcultures where they could train up for physical combat against their their perceived ideological foes," said Colborne.
Rundo has also spent his time deepening trans-Atlantic ties with similar-minded hate groups. Colborne said he spotted Rundo at events hosted by ultranationalists in Budapest, Hungary and Sofia, Bulgaria in early 2020. These gatherings and connections have reinforced a common goal, said Colborne.
"It's not explicitly politically focused," he said. "It's about building ... what they perceive as a far-right countercultural movement to try to mainstream their ideas, their ideologies, their symbols, to make them more ... acceptable in society over time."
The neo-Nazi question
Active clubs are not the first instance where a decentralized model of crews for young men committed to becoming "white warriors" has been exported from Europe to the U.S. Almost four decades ago, the same happened with the neo-Nazi skinhead scene. In fact, Colborne said in some places, like Canada, active clubs have been established by former Hammerskin members.
"They are trying to cloak the very same neo-Nazi ideas that their [neo-Nazi skinhead] forbearers had with their jackboots and swastika t-shirts, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago."
Colborne said Rundo's obsession with the aesthetics of active clubs has steered away from that imagery because ultimately, it didn't play well with American audiences. Plus, it could immediately attract law enforcement scrutiny — particularly in Europe.
"In countries where there are some pretty open far-right scenes, like Serbia, you cannot display swastikas. You cannot be that obvious. You literally cannot do it in Germany or Austria because it's a crime," said Colborne. "[Rundo] was very familiar with how far-right extremists across Europe had to be more clever and coy with the way that they were try to communicate their ideas, and the way that they would try to spread their ideology."
Despite that, groups that have formed in the U.S. have taken their own approach on whether or not to openly embrace neo-Nazism.
"Their praise of National Socialist tenets and of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime is very apparent," said Piggott. "If you if you look at their social media, it's full of pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler rhetoric and and iconography."
Jim Urquhart for NPR
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Law enforcement detains and arrest 31 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front on suspicion of conspiracy to riot after they were removed from a U-Haul truck near the LGBTQ community's Pride in the Park event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, last June.
Jim Urquhart for NPR
At anti-LGBTQ gatherings during the last two months, active clubs in the U.S. have allied with other white nationalist organizations. Among those are Patriot Front, which saw 31 members arrested and charged with conspiring to riot at a Pride event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, last summer. Also, White Lives Matter groups have reportedly attended "fight nights" hosted by active clubs in San Diego and in Washington state.
But not all far-right groups have welcomed the increased public activity of these crews. A viral video taken near the Oregon City Pride event last month showed Proud Boys, a violent neo-fascist group, beating members of an active club on a sidewalk. In the video, Proud Boys are heard calling the active club members "racists" and Nazis. The fight, which has been attributed to an interpersonal conflict between the groups, has opened up hostilities between the two extremist factions, mostly online.
Extremism experts caution that there is little comfort to take from seeing two far-right groups in conflict with each other. In this case, both had shown up in furtherance of the same cause: to intimidate members of the LGBTQ community at a Pride event. And the fact that both were there may signal a common perception that this moment in America, when anti-LGBTQ hostility is heightened, maybe be an opportunity to spread their extreme ideologies. | Explicit |
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
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Olha Kornych, 58, stands in front of her newly rebuilt home on Vokzalna Street in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. Her home was among the many that were badly damaged or destroyed in Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
Olha Kornych, 58, stands in front of her newly rebuilt home on Vokzalna Street in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. Her home was among the many that were badly damaged or destroyed in Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
BUCHA, Ukraine — To understand how much the Kyiv suburb of Bucha has recovered in the past year, take a look at the photos above and below.
Above is Olha Kornych, 58, who was cleaning up at her newly rebuilt, tan, two-story stucco home.
"The rebuilding started in March this year, and they finished it recently. They're still planting trees," said Kornych. The inside is still a bit messy, but she hopes to move back in soon.
Below is the photo of her street, Vokzalna Street, from early April of last year, just after the Russian forces had been driven out of Bucha, which is a few miles northwest of Kyiv.
Felipe Dana/AP
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A Ukrainian serviceman stands amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on April 6, 2022, just days after the Russian forces were driven out.
Felipe Dana/AP
A Ukrainian serviceman stands amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on April 6, 2022, just days after the Russian forces were driven out.
Felipe Dana/AP
Kornych recalled the terrifying day in February last year when Russian tanks came rumbling down her narrow street.
"Around 7:30 in the morning, the convoy of tanks passed by. We drank tea and coffee and watched TV. We didn't panic at first," she said. "Then we heard the machine guns. We barely managed to make it to the basement."
She was one of nine family members and neighbors who took refuge in her basement as a Russian tank took up a position in her yard, and many others filled the street.
"We were stuck in the cellar until the end of the battle. It was horrible," said Kornych. She said they were able to escape at the end of the day, but the tanks remained for weeks.
New homes, a concert and a memorial
The rebuilt homes in Bucha are just one example of how the town is coming back to life.
On a recent Saturday evening, residents packed into an open-air theater in Bucha's main park for an energetic concert.
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
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Bucha recently staged a packed concert at an open-air theater in the city's main park.
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
Bucha recently staged a packed concert at an open-air theater in the city's main park.
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
Families strolled the lush, manicured grounds on a gentle summer night that looked like it could be almost any small town in Europe.
"Rebuilding at the fastest pace possible is very important. This provides the psychological support our citizens need, so they can see the city being renewed," Bucha's mayor, Anatolii Fedoruk, told NPR.
He said more than 3,000 homes and structures were damaged or destroyed during the Russian occupation that lasted for nearly the entire month of March 2022. About half are now in some stage of reconstruction, and the mayor hoped that figure will reach 70% by the end of the year.
Yet even this day was filled with somber moments.
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
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Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk spoke with residents at the unveiling of a Wall of Honor that featured the names of 501 civilians killed when Russia invaded last year. Some of the plaques are blank because around 80 bodies have still not been positively identified.
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk spoke with residents at the unveiling of a Wall of Honor that featured the names of 501 civilians killed when Russia invaded last year. Some of the plaques are blank because around 80 bodies have still not been positively identified.
Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR
The mayor dedicated a newly built Wall of Honor, with silver plaques featuring the names of 501 civilians killed during Russia's occupation in March of last year.
Dozens of additional plaques are blank, reflecting the 80 bodies still not positively identified.
"We demand justice. We demand that even after we achieve victory, the Russians must be punished for what they did here," Fedoruk said.
Reminders of destruction left by the Russians
A short distance away, the scars of the Russian invasion remain. Mangled, rusting vehicles. Homes and shops pierced by bullets and shrapnel.
Much of the money to rebuild homes in Bucha came from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, based in Decatur, Ill. The foundation operates mostly in poor countries in Africa and Latin America. Buffett said he came to Ukraine because the need is so great.
"These people did nothing wrong. They did not deserve this. They did not ask for this. It should not have happened to them. And they've lost everything," he said.
Buffett has made eight trips to Ukraine since last year and his foundation has committed $450 million to multiple projects around the country.
He spoke to NPR via Zoom from the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson. He was wearing a flak jacket because Kherson was yet again under a shelling attack.
"It's a war on civilians. It's a war on global food security. It's a war on freedom. It's a war on democracy. And it's a war on sovereignty," he said. "This is a war that everybody should care about."
A roundabout in Bucha has been renamed Buffett Square, marked with a large sign. This is a place he's more famous than his father, billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
Greg Myre/NPR
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One of the main traffic roundabouts in Bucha has been renamed Buffett Square in honor of American philanthropist Howard Buffett, whose foundation has committed $450 million to reconstruction projects throughout Ukraine.
Greg Myre/NPR
One of the main traffic roundabouts in Bucha has been renamed Buffett Square in honor of American philanthropist Howard Buffett, whose foundation has committed $450 million to reconstruction projects throughout Ukraine.
Greg Myre/NPR
Howard Buffett gives credit to the local groups that have done so much to rebuild Bucha, and recalled a recent visit to the rapidly renovating town.
"It's just amazing to see it. I mean, it's just it's an incredible change. It has to give people hope," Buffett said.
Bucha's revival is happening more rapidly than in other ravaged places. The war still rages in the south and east. Even in relatively stable areas, Ukraine lacks the resources to rebuild.
The cost will be astronomical. Estimates put the nationwide reconstruction figure at somewhere between $400 billion to more than $1 trillion.
There's talk of seizing frozen Russian assets abroad — around $350 billion — and giving that money to Ukraine, though so far it's just one idea under discussion.
Meanwhile, back at the concert, as the music comes to a close, the audience rises to a standing ovation to express its appreciation — and to imagine better days ahead.
Greg Myre is an NPR national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1. | Explicit |
Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey left the four men who made allegations against him in a sexual assault trial feeling small, diminished and worthless, prosecutors have said.
Summing up, Christine Agnew KC told Southwark Crown Court the case involved an "enormous imbalance of power".
Kevin Spacey denies nine counts of sexual assault between 2001 and 2013.
Earlier, the jury was told four counts against him had been removed because of legal technicalities.
The four indecent assault charges, which were alternative, lesser counts, were struck off by the judge due to a "legal technicality" - not because the prosecution had abandoned any allegation.
In her closing speech, prosecutor Ms Agnew told jurors the case was "about power and taking advantage of that power".
She questioned Mr Spacey's claim that his accusers were motivated by money and suggested the trial was a result of his "aggressive, oppressive and intimidatory behaviour".
There was no doubt he was "a very famous and lauded actor" who was "used to getting his own way", she said - and his behaviour made his accusers "feel small, it made them feel diminished, it made them feel worthless".
"He is undoubtedly someone who is kind to those he chooses to be kind to," she said, referring to character witnesses for Mr Spacey.
But she added: "History is littered with those who are benevolent to some and cruel to others."
She went on to say it was "not simply a strength-in-numbers case" against Mr Spacey but that of four separate men who told friends and family, the police and then the court their stories in search of justice.
These men were entitled to the same protection in law as a woman, she told the jury at Southwark Crown Court.
"Why on earth should these men put up with what they say has happened to them?" she asked.
She added they were not motivated by "money, money, money" but instead had come forward because they no longer wanted to be the "secret keeper" for someone who had abused them.
Mr Spacey, 63, denies using his celebrity to get people into bed, and has rejected claims he is a sexual bully.
He previously called the case against him "weak".
His defence lawyers are expected to sum up their case on Thursday. | Explicit |
An Ohio K9 officer has been put on administrative leave, and his dog placed in a kennel after a confrontation captured on bodycam earlier this month shows the animal attacking Jadarrius Rose, a Black truck driver who was surrendering to authorities at the time.
Circleville K9 Officer Ryan Speakman was placed on leave as the city’s five-member Use of Force Review Board continues an investigation, Mayor Donald McIlroy confirmed.
“It’s an unfortunate situation and we look to get it resolved very, very soon,” he told ABC News on Monday.
The confrontation unfolded on July 4 along state highway 35, when officers tried to stop a commercial semitruck that was missing a mudflap and failed to halt for an inspection, according to a Ohio State Highway Patrol incident report.
“Right now I’m being chased by like 20 police officers and they all got their guns pointed directly to my truck,” a man police believed to be Rose told a Pickaway County dispatcher during a 2-minute call obtained by NBC News. “So now I’m trying to figure out why they got their guns all pointed to me and they’re all white people.”
In separate 911 call released by Ross County, Rose says he doesn’t feel safe stopping and speculates the officers are “trying to kill” him.
Following a lengthy pursuit, Rose finally exited his vehicle with his hands raised as Speakman ordered his dog to attack.
In bodycam footage of the incident, one officer can be heard yelling: “Do not release the dog with his hands up!” His order is almost immediately followed by screams from Rose, who is already trying to fend off the police K9.
“Get the dog off of him!” the trooper shouts “Get it off! Please! Please!”
Rose was later charged with failure to comply.
With News Wire Services | Explicit |
Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into the Placebo frontman Brian Molko for publicly calling the Italian prime minister “racist” and “fascist”, according to local media reports.
The band were performing last week at the Sonic Park festival in Stupinigi outside Turin when Molko hurled insults from the stage about Giorgia Meloni.
“Giorgia Meloni, piece of shit, fascist, racist,” Molko shouted in Italian, as seen in fan videos from the concert posted on social media.
Prosecutors in Turin did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation.
Meloni, 46, heads Italy’s most rightwing government since the second world war. Italy’s criminal code punishes with a fine ranging from €1,000 to €5,000 (£858 to £4,290) anyone who “publicly defames the republic”, which includes the government, parliament, the courts and the army. | Explicit |
PHILADELPHIA -- A retired minister in Georgia has been charged with murder in the slaying of an 8-year-old girl whose remains were found in southeastern Pennsylvania almost a half-century ago.
David Zandstra, 83, of the Atlanta suburb of Marietta is charged with criminal homicide, first--, second- and third-degree murder, kidnapping of a minor and a related count in the 1975 death of Gretchen Harrington in Delaware County.
District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer told reporters Monday in the Delaware County seat of Media that the defendant was “a monster" and "every parent's worst nightmare."
“This is a man who is a remorseless child predator who acted as if he was a friend, a neighbor and a man of God, and he killed this poor little girl,” Stollsteimer said.
Having killed a child who knew and trusted him, he then “acted as if he was their family friend, not only during her burial and the period after that but for years,” the district attorney said.
Harrington, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and his wife, disappeared in mid-August 1975 while walking from her Marple Township home to Bible camp at Trinity Church Chapel, where Zandstra was pastor. Her body was found two months later by a jogger in Ridley Creek State Park in Media.
Harrington, usually accompanied by her sisters but alone this day because of a recent birth in her family, was offered a ride by Zandstra, who was also the father of one of her best friends, Stollsteimer alleged.
“So when he offered her a ride in his car, of course she got in the car,” he said.
Zandstra took her to a wooded location and eventually struck her in the head, and believing her to be dead tried to cover her body, authorities said. Returning to his church, he “tried to act like nothing had happened,” and when her father, pastor of the nearby Reformed Presbyterian Church, called seeking to find her, Zandstra was the one to call police, Stollsteimer alleged.
Over ensuing days, hundreds of people searched nearby wooded areas, and authorities distributed more than 2,000 leaflets and set up a 24-hour hotline that took hundreds of calls, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. When the girl’s body was found in mid-October 1975, her clothing was “folded and in a neat pile” near her body with her underwear hanging from a tree branch “like a flag ... as if to call attention to the place,” the Inquirer reported at the time.
Stollsteimer said new information from an unnamed friend of the victim led state police to travel to Georgia and interview Zandstra, who authorities allege then confessed to the crime.
Trooper Eugene Tray said the defendant's demeanor was “relieved" as if it was “a weight off his shoulders.” Stollsteimer said Zandstra, however, was fighting extradition from Georgia though the prosecutor vowed that he would be returned to face justice in Pennsylvania.
DNA from the defendant will be compared to material from open cases in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, authorities said. Zandstra lived in Texas and Georgia after leaving the commonwealth, they said. The Christian Reformed Church lists him as having ministered in New Jersey, California and Texas before retiring in 2005. Authorities said they were concerned that there may have been more victims and urged anyone with information to contact investigators.
Zandstra remained in custody in Georgia; a message was left Monday for a Pennsylvania attorney listed as representing him.
Gretchen Harrington's family asked for privacy but said in a statement that they were “extremely hopeful” that the person responsible would be held accountable for taking her away from them, which they said “forever altered our family and we miss her every single day.”
“If you met Gretchen, you were instantly her friend. She exuded kindness to all and was sweet and gentle,” the family said. “Even now, when people share their memories of her, the first thing they talk about is how amazing she was and still is ... at just 8 years old, she had a lifelong impact on those around her.” | Explicit |
TOKYO -- Renowned Japanese mystery writer Seiichi Morimura, whose nonfiction trilogy “The Devil’s Gluttony” exposed human medical experiments conducted by a secret Japanese army unit during World War II, died Monday. He was 90.
His official website and publisher, Kadokawa, said Morimura died of pneumonia at a Tokyo hospital.
“Akuma no Hoshoku,” or “The Devil’s Gluttony,” which began as a newspaper series in 1981, became a bestseller and created a sensation across the country over atrocities committed by Japanese Imperial Army Unit 731 in China.
From its base in Japanese-controlled Harbin in China, Unit 731 and related units injected war prisoners with typhus, cholera and other diseases as research into germ warfare, according to historians and former unit members. Unit 731 is also believed to have performed vivisections and frozen prisoners to death in tests of endurance.
Morimura began contributing articles to magazines while working in hotels. He won the prestigious Edogawa Rampo Prize for his mystery fiction in 1969 and the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1973.
Born in 1933 in Saitama, just north of Tokyo, Morimura survived harsh U.S. bombings of the Tokyo region toward the end of World War II and developed pacifist principles. He wrote a book about his commitment to defending Japan's postwar pacifist Constitution and opposing nuclear weapons. He joined protests against a 2015 reinterpretation of the constitution by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe allowing greater military activity.
His 1976 novel “Ningen no Shomei” ("Proof of the Man"), a mystery about a young Black man who is murdered, revealed the dark side of postwar Japan and was made into a movie.
Another popular novel, “Yasei no Shomei” ("Proof of the Wild"), published a year later depicts a conspiracy over genocide in a remote village. | Explicit |
JERUSALEM, July 25 (Reuters) - Israeli troops killed three Palestinian militants who opened fire on them from a car near the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday, Israel's defence minister and army said.
The Islamist militant group Hamas claimed the three as its members and said in a statement they had died in a clash.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Twitter the incident took place at Mount Gerizim, a Samaritan community overlooking Nablus.
Violence in the West Bank has surged for over a year, with increased Israeli raids, Palestinian street attacks and settler rampages in Palestinian villages. Nablus and the nearby northern West Bank city of Jenin have seen especially intense clashes.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Explicit |
Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams offered a bizarre response after a woman appeared to curse him out over his treatment of homeless people on Monday.
After a woman, who appeared to be protesting, screamed obscenities at Adams, the New York City mayor responded that "one should be happy" if another person wants to "make love to them." The eyebrow-raising exchange came during a press conference Adams hosted to unveil his efforts to remove scaffolding from city streets and kickstart a recovery of the city's business district.
"F--- you, a--hole!" the protester appeared to say during the press conference Monday.
"She said I'm messing with homeless people," Adams responded, chuckling. "One should be happy if someone wants to make love to them. You know?"
Adams didn't explain what he meant, instead taking a question from a reporter on an unrelated topic. His office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
New York City continues to experience rising homelessness that is at its highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. As of December 2022, there were 68,884 homeless people, including 21,805 children, housed in New York City’s main shelter system.
The press conference Monday comes less than a month after Adams was criticized over his similarly-bizarre response to a woman concerned about high rent prices. That woman interrupted Adams during a town hall event in June to accuse the mayor of raising New York City rent and supporting increases
"If you are going to ask a question, don't point at me and don't be disrespectful to me," Adams told the woman. "I'm the mayor of the city. Treat me with the respect I deserve to be treated. I'm speaking to you as an adult. Don't stand in front like you treating someone that's on the plantation that you own. Give me the respect I deserve and engage in the conversation up here in Washington Heights."
"Treat me with the same level of respect I treat you," Adams continued. "So, don't be pointing at me, don't be disrespectful to me. Speak with me as an adult because I'm a grown man. I walked into this room as a grown man, and I'll walk out of this room as a grown man. I answered your question."
On June 21, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board announced recommendations paving the way for landlords to increase rents by 3% this year. Adams endorsed the board's decision, saying it found the "right balance."
It was later revealed the woman Adams compared to a plantation owner was housing activist Jeanie Dubnau whose family fled to New York City from Nazi Germany in the mid-1900s. | Explicit |
Ernie Els did not hold back on Thursday afternoon at Royal Liverpool.
Els, after his opening-round 75 at the British Open on Thursday, ripped PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan for striking a deal with LIV Golf and Saudi Arabia.
“Talk to us, tell us what you’re going to do, plan on negotiating. Don’t just go rogue as a member of the board and come back with a deal and think we’re all going to say yes. You’re affecting people’s lives. You’re affecting the professional game. It’s just so bad.”
regarding their “framework agreement” with the Tour, the DP World Tour and LIV Golf. Since then, into the proposed partnership — which still has a long way to go before anything is finalized. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invested more than $2 billion trying to get LIV Golf running, reportedly plans to invest more than $1 billion into the new entity.
Monahan received plenty of criticism for striking a deal with LIV Golf and Saudi Arabia, who have been . Monahan even once invoked the 9/11 terrorist attacks when advocating for the Tour over LIV Golf.
The announcement caught just about everyone in the golf world by surprise, too. PGA Tour board members Ed Herlihy and Jimmy Dunne helped Monahan negotiate the deal in near-total secrecy.
Plenty of details still need to be figured out before the new entity can launch. Under the current framework agreement, Monahan would become CEO of the new entity and PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan would be chairman of the board.
Els said he knows Al-Rumayyan and other top Saudi Arabian officials from his time playing in the country and throughout the Middle East in his career. While he’s not doubting their sincerity when it comes to golf, but Els isn’t here for LIV Golf and its team system — which he described as “circus golf.”
“That’s not where I stand,” Els said. "Team golf doesn’t work. It works maybe in a two-month, three-month happy season. Get these guys together, get teams together and play around the world. But [then] play real golf.
"That’s what this thing is all about. That’s what I prided myself on. Like Tiger [Woods] and some of these guys. Playing that type of golf. Getting yourself into majors. And grinding.
"And for [the PGA Tour leadership] to go out there and do what they did, just off the cuff, as a board member, do a deal, nobody knows. The commissioner is supposed to be the guy running our Tour. These board members make a deal or a so-called deal and with no input from the players. It's absolute shambles. I’m worried."
Els won 19 times on Tour in his career, including twice at the British Open. The 53-year-old has 42 international wins to his name, too, and he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2011. He's 4-over after Thursday at Royal Liverpool, nine shots back from the leaders.
“I spent almost 30 years on Tour, playing against Tiger … People don’t mention me, but I was there,” Els said. “He needed somebody to beat. There’s a lot of guys who did a lot for the Tour. They helped the Tour and helped build the game. Are you kidding me? And then this bulls**t.”
Els isn’t opposed to Saudi Arabia being involved in golf. He’s seen what the country has done elsewhere in the sports world, and he knows there’s not much to be done to stop it. The to work with, if not more.
But in his eyes, Al-Rumayyan is coming for full control golf. Monahan and the board are “going to be answering to him” no matter how the new venture is structured, and that’s a problem.
"Do we play ball with him? Does he come in at a different rate, maybe a smaller investment, see if they are the right partner? Not just come in and take over world golf. That's just ridiculous,” Els said.
“[We] need to slow things down … I think they need to cut a deal. And Saudi comes in and invests in the Tour. They can bring a lot of money to the Tour. Hopefully all of that money flows down to people who got burned by this." | Explicit |
The man accused of attacking former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband last year will stand trial in San Francisco, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
David DePape’s federal public defenders, Jodi Linker and Angela Chuang, had requested that the federal trial be moved to the city of Eureka in neighboring Oregon. They argued that their client wouldn’t get a fair trial because the media attention has tainted the pool of jurors and because Pelosi, who has represented the City since 1987, remains a popular figure in the Bay Area.
DePape’s lawyers said a survey they commissioned shows many potential jurors already believe he is guilty of the crimes and would be unable to change their minds.
Per the San Francisco Standard, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said DePape’s lawyers had failed to show evidence that media coverage in the Bay Area was more negative than anywhere else.
Prosecutors say DePape broke into the Pelosis' San Francisco home on Oct. 28 seeking to kidnap the former speaker — who was out of town — and instead beat her 83-year-old husband with a hammer. Footage of the attack was released to the public in January after a California judge denied prosecutors' request to keep it secret.
DePape, 43, pleaded not guilty to federal charges of attempting to kidnap a federal official and assaulting a federal official's family member. He also pleaded not guilty to state charges, including attempted murder, burglary and elder abuse. He remains jailed without bail.
DePape’s federal trial is set to start November 13. His state trial hasn't been scheduled.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. | Explicit |
Texas Governor Greg Abbott's escalating measures to stop migrants along the U.S. border with Mexico came under a burst of new criticism Tuesday after a state trooper said migrants were left bloodied from razor-wire barriers and that orders were given to deny people water in sweltering heat.
In one account, Texas Trooper Nicholas Wingate told a supervisor that upon encountering a group of 120 migrants on June 25 — including young children and mothers nursing babies — in Maverick County, a rural Texas border county, he and another trooper were ordered to "push the people back into the water to go to Mexico."
The trooper described the actions in an email dated July 3 as inhumane.
Travis Considine, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Safety, said the accounts provided by the trooper were under internal investigation. He said the department has no directive or policy that instructs troopers to withhold water from migrants or push them back into the river.
The emails, first obtained by Hearst Newspapers, thrust Texas' sprawling border security mission back under scrutiny at a time when Abbott is expanding the mission by putting a new floating barrier on the Rio Grande. The Republican has authorized more than $4 billion in spending on the mission, known as Operation Lone Star, which has also included busing thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities and arresting migrants on trespassing charges.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday that the trooper's account, if true, was "abhorrent" and "dangerous." Democrats in the Texas Capitol said they planned to investigate.
"We are talking about the bedrock values of who we are as a country and the human indecency that we are seeing," Jean-Pierre said. "If this is true, it is just completely, completely wrong."
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security condemned the reported actions in a statement but did not say whether the agency was planning to investigate the allegations.
Republican Representative Tony Gonzales, whose sprawling south Texas congressional district includes the border, tweeted, "Border security should not equal a lack of humanity."
In one instance, according to Wingate, a 4-year-old girl attempting to cross through razor wire was "pressed back" by Texas National Guard soldiers in accordance with orders and that the child later fainted from the heat. Temperatures in Maverick County this summer have soared into the triple-digits.
Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, who has supported the state deploying workers to the border, said he was taken aback by the trooper's account.
"I don't agree with whatever they were told to do," Schmerber said. "That's not something that's part of our mission. You know, I know that we're here to protect and serve no matter who it is, you know, either immigrants or U.S. citizens. But we're not going to do any harm to anybody."
Wingate did not immediately return an email message seeking comment Tuesday. The Texas Military Department also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As concern and outrage over the trooper's account mounted Tuesday, Abbott's office issued a statement that said no orders have been given "that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally." The statement did not address Wingate's specific accounts and defended the border mission overall.
The statement said the razor wire "snags clothing" but did not address the accounts of migrants being cut and bloodied by the barrier.
"The absence of these tools and strategies — including concertina wire that snags clothing — encourages migrants to make potentially life-threatening and illegal crossings. Through Operation Lone Star, Texas continues stepping up to respond to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis at our southern border," the statement read.
The email chain with the trooper included a log showing 38 encounters between June 25 and July 1 with migrants in need of medical assistance, ranging from weakness to lacerations, broken limbs and drownings in which life-saving measures were required. A dozen were under a year old.
Other accounts included a 19-year-old woman who was found cut by the wire and having a miscarriage. The others had cuts or broken bones as a result of where the wires were placed, according to the email.
"We need to operate it correctly in the eyes of God," Wingate wrote.
In response to Wingate's accounts, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw sent an email saying "the priority of life requires that we rescue migrants from harm and we will continue to do so."
A separate email exchange obtained by The Associated Press dated July 14 shows McCraw receiving pictures, originally sent by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, of injuries caused by the sharp wire placed by Texas officials.
The pictures showed some injuries that required stitches as well as bloodied hands and legs. | Explicit |
Donald Trump on Thursday reposted a video on his Truth Social platform in which he is heard saying: “If you f**k around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
The former president’s threatening words play over a black-and-white image of his face and his 2024 campaign logo.
The clip was initially shared by the user @AmericanAF, which in its bio says is the “OFFICIAL MAGA headquarters” that is “run by veterans.”
The audio is actually from a 2020 conversation the Republican 2024 frontrunner had about Iran.
Trump shared the video, without the Iran context, as he reportedly faces another indictment, this time in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the U.S. Capitol riot.
The twice-impeached Trump has frequently raged at the legal scrutiny he has faced since leaving office, earlier this week claiming Smith had sent him a target letter in the probe. He called it “HORRIFYING NEWS.” | Explicit |
A man who was kicked out of a bar in Mexico returned and set it ablaze, killing 11 people and injuring six others over the weekend, police said.
Authorities arrested a suspect Saturday afternoon in the attack at Beer House in San Luis Rio Colorado, less than 300 feet from the U.S. border. He has not been publicly identified.
The attacker visited the bar early Saturday morning and within an hour became very drunk, according to the local prosecutor’s office in the state of Sonora. He was removed from the establishment for harassing women, investigators said.
The suspect got in his pickup truck, backed up to the front of the bar and began pouring gasoline on the door, state attorney general Gustavo Romulo Salas Chavez told reporters.
“He then used some instrument, perhaps a blowtorch, he used it as an igniting agent,” Salas Chavez said in Spanish. “That’s when the fire began.”
Seven men and four women were killed in the fire. Ten of the 11 victims were adults, and the 11th was 17 years old, according to police. At least one of the victims was a U.S. citizen.
The six injured people were taken to hospitals on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, the Washington Post reported.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security told the paper it was “looking into” the arson attack. Mexican authorities did not suggest the suspected killer had any ties to drug cartels.
San Luis Rio Colorado is a border city of about 200,000 people. It shares a metropolitan area with San Luis, Ariz., which sits in the far southwestern corner of the state, about 15 miles south of Yuma. | Explicit |
VERDEGRIS, Okla. -- A woman and her three children were found dead in an Oklahoma home on Thursday evening in what may be a murder-suicide following an hours-long standoff, authorities said.
The names of the victims weren't immediately released.
The standoff began in the small town of Verdigris, a suburb east of Tulsa, after a woman told a patrolling police officer at around 4 p.m. that another woman with a gun held her hostage in a garage, Police Chief Jack Shackleford said, KOKI-TV reported.
The woman also said there were children in the home and the officer called for reinforcements, Shackleford said.
Several agencies surrounded the house, including a SWAT team from the Cherokee Nation.
Authorities entered the home around 7:30 p.m. and found the bodies of the woman and three children, believed to range in age from several months to around 11 years old.
A handgun was found at the scene and the killings are being investigated as a murder-suicide, authorities said.
Shackleford said officers went to the home several times in the past on domestic and mental health calls, KOKI-TV reported. | Explicit |
As the chair of Alliance for a Pro-Life Alabama in 2018, Cole Wagner helped muscle into the Alabama Constitution a new amendment declaring the state recognized “the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.” On Friday, the Alabama Political Reporter broke the news that Wagner had been arrested for the sexual abuse of a child under the age of 12.
A copy of the indictment was not immediately available, and the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to inquiries about Wagner’s arrest.
Wagner told the Montgomery Advertiser in 2018 that passing Amendment 2 would send the “powerful message” that Alabama voters “are willing to stand in defense of our citizens who can’t yet defend themselves.” Amendment 2 did pass — in a big win for the anti-abortion movement — setting the stage for Alabama’s total ban on abortion, which went into effect when Roe v. Wade was overturned last year.
After that victory, Wagner snagged a plum job in Lieutenant Governor Will Ainsworth’s office. For three and half years, according to Wagner’s LinkedIn, he was employed as Ainsworth’s Senate liaison working to advance Ainsworth’s agenda and support his role as president of the Senate. During his time with Ainsworth’s office, Wagner attended events with the lieutenant governor, who called Wagner “a whiz-kid” and a “bright, young guy.”
On Twitter, Ainsworth — who was also a prominent supporter of Amendment 2 and opponent of abortion rights — has shared photos of himself with Wagner. He’s also used Twitter to wish Wagner happy birthday: “Happy 30 birthday @MDeColeW . For those of you that don’t know this is his face when he loses in sports. Fortunately he is better at policy and solving problems than winning at sports.” (Ainsworth’s tweet was deleted shortly after this story published, but an archived copy remains available online.)
On his own since-deactivated Twitter account, Cole has joked about Joe Biden’s “inappropriate hugs.”
Ainsworth’s office did not respond to multiple inquiries about Wanger’s tenure working with the lieutenant governor, including a question about whether his office was taking steps to investigate whether Wagner may have engaged in criminal behavior while working for the lieutenant governor.
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Wagner left the lieutenant governor’s office in February for the Alabama Department of Education, where according to his LinkedIn profile, he worked in government relations. The ALSDE called the allegations against Wagner “serious, tragic and shocking” in a statement, and said last week that he had been terminated from his job “effective immediately.”
According to the Alabama Political Reporter, Wagner was released last week after posting $60,000 bail. He faces up to 20 years in prison. | Explicit |
A man who attacked worshippers at a mosque in Canada with bear spray and an axe last year was sentenced to eight years in prison on Tuesday.
Mohammad Moiz Omar, 24 at the time, stormed into the Dar Al-Tawheed Islamic Centre in Mississauga, Ontario, during morning prayers on March 19, 2022 and started spraying. Worshippers took him down and held him until police arrived.
Police investigated the incident as a possible hate crime. Omar pleaded guilty last Wednesday to three charges: administering a noxious substance with intent to endanger life or cause bodily harm, assault with a weapon, and mischief to religious property with motivation of bias, prejudice or hate based on religion, CBC News reported.
Omar’s act, according to a statement of facts agreed to by all parties involved, was “intended to perpetrate a mass casualty event,” and his plea included an admission that his offenses met the Criminal Code definition of terrorism.
The hatchet man also admitted being motivated by intense hatred for Muslims and said he wanted to intimidate them because he believed that Islam is “an intolerant and violent religion,” CBC News reported.
Muslim advocates had not commented late Tuesday afternoon about the sentence, but Dar Al-Tawheed Islamic Centre Imam Ibrahim Hindy told CBC News before the sentencing that eight years would not be enough given that Omar, a former Muslim who referred to himself as an atheist, had admitted planning a much broader attack and wanted to see people die.
“This was not someone having a bad day or having a mental health episode,” Hindy said. “This was someone who planned out clearly what he wanted to do and how he wanted to kill Muslims.
“I’m only grateful that our congregation was able to stop him before he was able to ultimately harm someone.” | Explicit |
26-year-old man who posed as Lincoln high school student accused of sex crimes
LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – A man who posed as a student at two different Lincoln high schools has been arrested, police say.
Assistant Police Chief Brian Jackson said 26-year-old Zachary Scheich attended 54 days of class at Northwest and Southeast high schools last semester.
He used the pseudonym Zak Hess.
During an investigation that began on June 1, police discovered his true identity.
Scheich, who is 5-foot-4 and 120 pounds, graduated from Lincoln Public Schools in 2015. Jackson said he “blended in with other students.”
Scheich was arrested earlier Thursday at a library. He has been charged with two counts of sexual assault using an electronic device and sex trafficking a minor.
Jackson said the parents at both schools have been notified.
An investigation is ongoing, and anyone with information is asked to call Lincoln Police at 402-441-6000 or Crime Stoppers at 402-475-3600.
Lincoln Public Schools provided a timeline of the events in a letter to parents:
- Late in the afternoon on May 31, LPS received a report that an adult male may be attending one of our high schools pretending to be a junior. LPS Student Services and Security immediately contacted Lincoln Police to investigate.
- LPS Student Services and Security continued to assist the investigation, turning over information as it was discovered.
- In mid-July, LPD confirmed that 26-year-old Zachary Scheich did enroll and attend two LPS high schools during the 2022-23 school year under the name Zak Hess.
- Scheich began attending Northwest High School on October 20, 2022.
- Scheich then transferred to Southeast High School on January 12, 2023.
- Scheich was registered to attend summer school, but did not attend.
- On July 20, Lincoln Police arrested Zachary Scheich.
“In light of this incident, LPS is reviewing our enrollment procedures,” the district said. | Explicit |
Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh on Wednesday reacted to the May 4 video of two women being “paraded naked" on a road allegedly by a group of men and assured capital punishment for those involved.
Speaking to CNN-News18, he said, “It is a crime against humanity and if found true, the state government will leave no stone unturned to nab the culprits and give them capital punishment. It is a heinous crime and I condemn it strongly."
According to the Indigenous Tribal Leaders’ Forum (ITLF), the incident took place on May 4 in Kangpokpi district, a day after ethnic clashes broke out in the state between the Meitei and Kuki Communities.
Union Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani also condemned the incident and termed it “downright inhuman". “The horrific video of the sexual assault of 2 women emanating from Manipur is condemnable and downright inhuman. Spoke to CM N BirenSingh ji who has informed me that investigation is currently underway and assured that no effort will be spared to bring perpetrators to justice," she tweeted.
Biren Singh and Irani’s reactions came after tension mounted in the hills of Manipur over a May 4 video that surfaced on Wednesday purportedly showing two women from one of the warring communities being “paraded naked" by a few men from the other side.
Officials said in Imphal that the video was doing the rounds on the eve of a planned protest march announced by ITLF on Thursday to highlight their plight.
News agency PTI quoted police as saying that a case of abduction, gang rape, and murder has been registered at Nongpok Sekmai police station in Thoubal district against unknown armed miscreants.
In a statement, they said an all-out effort is on to arrest the culprits at the earliest.
Manipur state has been witnessing ethnic clashes since May 3 between the majority the Meiteis, concentrated in Imphal valley, and the Kukis, occupying the hills. Over 160 people have been killed in the violence so far.
(with inputs from PTI) | Explicit |
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., caused a stir when she held up several graphic photos from Hunter Biden’s laptop during a committee hearing Wednesday with IRS whistleblowers alleging misconduct in investigations into the Biden family.
The House Oversight Committee interviewed two IRS whistleblowers alleging political misconduct throughout the Hunter Biden investigation — Special Agent Joseph Ziegler, whose identity was revealed during the hearing, and his IRS supervisor Gary Shapley.
Shapley previously blew the whistle on alleged political influence surrounding prosecutorial decisions throughout the years-long federal probe into the president's son.
Ziegler testified Wednesday that Hunter Biden itemized a $10,000 deduction on his 2018 tax return for a supposed golf club membership that was really a sex club membership and that he wrote off payments to prostitutes as business expenses.
"So, I can tell you that there were deductions for what we believe to be escorts. And then that $10,000 golf club membership. Yes, that was not a golf club membership, that was for a sex club payment," Ziegler told Greene.
Greene held up censored nude photos taken from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and addressed Ziegler.
"So, when Hunter Biden paid for this woman to do this with him, to travel across state lines from California to Washington, D.C., on June 15, this is a violation of the Mann Act. This was prostitution," Greene said.
"This is evidence of Hunter Biden making sex — excuse me, this is my time – making pornography," she said holding up another photo, as Democrats objected.
One member interjected that showing the pictures was "unbecoming of this hearing," and another asked, "Should we be displaying this … in the committee?"
Greene’s time ran out after she was interrupted.
Ziegler, who identified himself as a gay Democrat with more than a dozen years serving within the IRS' criminal investigative division, appeared for the first time publicly Wednesday, while Shapley testified to the House Ways and Means Committee last month.
The whistleblowers allege that officials at the Justice Department, FBI and IRS interfered in the investigation into Hunter Biden and that decisions in the case were influenced by politics. | Explicit |
ATMORE, Ala. -- Alabama plans to execute an inmate Friday morning for the 2001 beating death of a woman, in what would be the first lethal injection since the state paused executions following a string of problems with inserting the IVs.
James Barber, 64, is scheduled to be put to death at a south Alabama prison. The U.S. Supreme Court denied Barber's request for a stay shortly after midnight and cleared the way for the execution to begin.
It is the first execution scheduled in the state since Gov. Kay Ivey paused executions in November to conduct an internal review after two lethal injections were called off because of difficulties inserting IVs into the condemned men’s veins.
Barber was convicted in the 2001 beating death of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps in Harvest, Alabama. Prosecutors said Barber, a handyman who knew Epps’ daughter, confessed to killing Epps with a claw hammer and fleeing with her purse. Jurors voted 11-1 to recommend a death sentence, which a judge imposed.
Barber’s scheduled execution comes hours after Oklahoma executed Jemaine Cannon for stabbing a Tulsa woman to death with a butcher knife in 1995 after his escape from a prison work center.
Barber's attorney's asked the Supreme Court to halt the execution, citing Alabama's recent problems.
Attorneys for inmate Alan Miller said prison staff poked him with needles for over an hour as they unsuccessfully tried to connect an IV line to him and at one point left him hanging vertically on a gurney during his aborted execution in September. State officials called off the November execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith after they were unsuccessful in connecting the second of two required lines.
Advocacy groups claimed a third execution, carried out in July after a delay because of IV problems, was botched because of multiple attempts to connect the line, a claim the state has disputed.
Ivey announced in February that the state was resuming executions. Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said prison system had added to its pool of medical professionals, ordered new equipment and conducted additional rehearsals.
Attorneys for Barber argued his execution “will likely be botched in the same manner as the prior three."
The Supreme Court denied Barber's request for a stay without comment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the decision in a writing joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“The Eighth Amendment demands more than the State’s word that this time will be different. The Court should not allow Alabama to test the efficacy of its internal review by using Barber as its ‘guinea pig,’" Sotomayor wrote.
The Alabama attorney general's office had urged the Supreme Court to let the execution proceed.
The state wrote that the previous executions were called off because of a “confluence of events—including health issues specific to the individual inmates and last-minute litigation brought by the inmates that dramatically shortened the window for ADOC officials to conduct the executions."
“Dorothy Epps, Smith’s victim, has survivors who have already waited overlong to see justice done,” the office added.
In the hours leading up to the scheduled execution, Barber had 22 visitors and two phone calls, a prison spokesperson said. Barber ate a final meal of loaded hashbrowns, western omelet, spicy sausage and toast.
One of the changes Alabama made following the internal review was to give the state more time to carry out executions. The Alabama Supreme Court did away with its customary midnight deadline to get an execution underway in order to give the state more time to establish an IV line and battle last-minute legal appeals. The state will have until 6 a.m. Friday to start Barber’s execution. | Explicit |
Former Detroit police commissioner admitted to paying $10 for sexual favors, officers said
Former Detroit Police Commissioner Bryan Ferguson admitted to officers that he had paid a prostitute $10 in exchange for sexual favors in Detroit on July 12, according to a citation obtained by the Detroit Free Press.
"Yes, I gave her $10 dollars for it," the citation says Ferguson told undercover narcotics officers from the Wayne County Sheriff's Office that caught him parked in his car in Detroit that morning engaging in a sex act with the prostitute.
"I'm sorry, I know I was wrong."
That's not what Ferguson said to the public. He previously denied the allegations, characterized them as a "big misunderstanding," and said the woman was unknown to him and that she had attempted to enter his vehicle.
"Can you help me out? Can I throw something out there please?" Ferguson continued, according to the citation. "I'm a Detroit Police Commissioner."
Ferguson was issued a misdemeanor citation for indecent or obscene conduct involving a sex act with a prostitute. He resigned from his position as a Detroit Police Commissioner for District 1.
Prior to his resignation, Ferguson sent out a news release denying the allegations and informed the public he was stepping away from the police oversight board's weekly meetings. The news release was signed "in the spirit of transparency and accountability."
Ferguson could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.
An officer wrote in the citation that he and other undercover officers had been conducting surveillance in Detroit when they saw a woman known to them as a sex worker standing on the corner of Cheyenne and Schoolcraft, making eye contact and waving at men as they drove by, according to the citation.
Then officers observed Ferguson's vehicle drive past the sex worker and circle around the block several times before stopping in the middle of the street next to the woman, according to the citation. She entered the vehicle, and Ferguson drove to a side street and parked in front of a vacant house on Sorrento, the officer wrote.
When officers approached Ferguson, his pants were unzipped and unbuckled.
"This is going to really mess things up for me," Ferguson told officers, according to the citation.
'How many more?'Southfield teen shot, killed weeks before heading off to college
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan will appoint a new commissioner to represent District 1. His office has begun the process of identifying potential candidates who might be eligible, qualified, and interested, according to John Roach, city spokesperson. The appointment will then go to city council for a vote. | Explicit |
ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- Maryland prosecutors have filed hate crime charges against a man accused of killing three people and wounding three more in a dispute over parking.
The three people shot to death were Latino; the man accused of shooting them is white. Their families have lived on the same street for years and have had a history of disputes, including allegations of racial slurs against one of the victims.
Charles Robert Smith, 43, had been charged with second-degree murder. Now he faces first-degree murder and hate-crime charges in the killings of Mario Mireles, his father Nicholas Mireles, and Christian Segovia, under an indictment returned by an Anne Arundel County grand jury on Friday, according to online court records.
The 42-count indictment also includes six charges of attempted first-degree murder. Smith's initial court appearance was scheduled for next Monday. His initial lawyer is no longer representing him, and another attorney did not immediately respond Monday to a request for comment.
Maryland's hate crime law applies to crimes that are motivated either in whole or in substantial part to another person's race, color, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, disability or national origin. It enables prosecutors to add years to a sentence, and financial penalties. Smith faces up to life in prison without possibility of parole if convicted of first-degree murder.
According to the police charging documents, the six people who were shot were attending a large party when a dispute broke out over a parking issue. Mireles went to Smith's home to talk about it and was arguing with Shirley Smith when her son Charles Smith returned home and confronted him. The verbal argument became physical.
Smith pulled out a gun and Mireles tried to grab it before Smith shot Mireles and Segovia. Smith “then stood over Mario Mireles and shot him several more times,” the document says. Smith then went into his house, got a rifle and began firing through a window at people who had come trying to help the mortally wounded men. Smith fatally shot Nicolas Mireles, and wounded Rosalina Segovia, Paul Johnnson and Enner Canales-Hernandez, police said.
Smith surrendered when the police arrived, telling officers he shot the victims because they shot at his house. However, none of the witnesses interviewed saw any of the victims with a firearm, according to the charging documents.
The Smith and Mireles families have had disputes for years, even going to court for help at one point. Mario Mireles sought a peace order petition in September 2016, accusing Shirley Smith of harassing him and their neighbors since he was a child. He accused her of directing racial slurs at him and his family, as well as other neighbors who are Black.
He wrote that he was washing his car in front of his house when Shirley Smith drove fast by him about an “arm length away,” saying he believed she was “targeting” him with her car.
Shirley Smith also sought a peace order at the same time, accusing Mireles of hitting her car with a large wet towel or blanket. She also accused him of throwing rocks at street signs and hitting vehicles.
Peace orders are civil orders asking a person to refrain from committing certain acts. The judge denied both their petitions. | Explicit |
The front doors of a Plano church were damaged in a firebomb attack early Sunday, according to police and church officials.
Sometime between midnight and 12:30 a.m., an incendiary device with a chemical accelerant was either thrown or placed at the doors of the Community Unitarian Universalist Church of Plano’s main building, a post on the church’s Facebook page said.
Plano firefighters extinguished the blaze and the damage was limited to the front doors and objects directly outside of it as well as the entrance foyer, the post said. No one was injured.
“Plano police and fire department personnel did a thorough collection of evidence of the crime scene,” the post said. “They also interviewed multiple church personnel who arrived on-site to assess the incident.”
Plano police confirmed arson investigators are handling the case. A department spokesperson said they are investigating who threw an accelerant at the church and whether more than one suspect was involved.
The church continued to have Sunday morning services with extra security provided by Plano officers.
“The church community asks for your support and prayers at this time as we deal with the impact of this incident,” the post said.
According to the church, a hate group has been targeting it since at least June 25. The post said church officials have been reviewing building security and working with law enforcement “since the intrusion of a hate group” in the church building during a service that day. | Explicit |
Police arrested an 85-year-old man on Tuesday, decades after he allegedly stabbed a woman to death in Texas, according to police.
Barbara Villarreal was found dead on Nov. 7, 1986 in Garland, about 20 miles from Dallas. She had been repeatedly stabbed and a large kitchen knife was found nearby.
At the time, police interviewed and cleared her husband, officials said. Police also recovered DNA evidence at the scene and entered it into CODIS, the United States' national DNA database.
Officers worked with the FBI on the investigation over the years and tracked leads in both Mexico and the U.S. They identified Liborio Canales, now 85, as a suspect, and determined that he sometimes stayed at a home in Lovington, New Mexico.
Canales was in Mexico for most of the year, but he crossed the border to enter New Mexico on Monday so he could celebrate his birthday with family, authorities said. He was arrested by officers from Lovingfton and Garland on Tuesday and was booked into the Lea County Detention Center on a federal warrant for the charge of murder.
Bond was set at $1 million. Canales is expected to be extradited to Texas in the coming days.
Officials have not released any other details connecting Canales with Villarreal or with the city of Garland. Police in Lovington referred CBS News to the Garland Police Department for additional information. Officials in Garland have not yet responded to a request for additional information.
for more features. | Explicit |
A shooting has left two people dead in the centre of Auckland, New Zealand, hours before the city is due to open the Fifa Women's World Cup.
Six other people, including police officers, were injured and the gunman is also dead after the incident at 07:22 (19:22 GMT) on a construction site in the central business district.
PM Chris Hipkins said the attack was not being seen as an act of terrorism.
The tournament would go ahead as planned, he said.
The public, he added, could be assured police had neutralised the threat and there was no ongoing risk after the incident on Queen Street.
No political or ideological motive for the attack had been identified, the prime minister said.
The gunman, he said, had been armed with a pump-action shotgun.
Mr Hipkins thanked "the brave men and women of the New Zealand police who ran into the gunfire, straight into harm's way, in order to save the lives of others".
"These kinds of situations move fast and the actions of those who risk their lives to save others are nothing short of heroic," he added.
According to Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, all Fifa personnel and football teams are safe and have been accounted for.
"I can't remember anything like this ever happening in our beautiful city. This morning's events have been tragic and distressing for all Aucklanders, as this is not something that we are used to," Mr Brown said on Twitter.
Fifa expressed its "deepest condolences" to the victims' families and said it was in communication with New Zealand authorities.
"The participating teams in close proximity to this incident are being supported in relation to any impact that may have taken place," it said.
The opening match is to be held between New Zealand and Norway in the city's Eden Park.
Sport Minister Grant Robertson said there would be extra police in the area to provide reassurance.
The ninth Women's World Cup is being co-hosted by New Zealand and Australia.
Earlier, the mayor warned people should stay home and avoid travelling into the city. Mr Brown said it was a "dreadful thing to happen" in his city.
Police say they heard reports of a person discharging a firearm inside the construction site, and the gunman moved through the building and continued to fire.
The man then went into a lift shaft and police attempted to engage with him.
Further shots were fired by the man and he was found dead a short time later, police say.
Following the shooting there was a large armed police presence in the central business district not far from the waterfront and the fan park.
Tatjana Haenni, chief sporting director for National Women's Soccer league USA, is staying close to where the shooting happened.
She told BBC News she had woken up to sounds of police cars arriving and was told to stay inside. "So far we feel safe," she said. | Explicit |
Addis Abeba – An armed militia attack on Nuer village in the city of Gambella, the capital of Gambella regional state has resulted in at least 31 fatalities and 20 injuries, according to a source who spoke with Addis Standard. The informant, wishing to remain unidentified for their safety, indicated that the attack began on 18 July around 4:50 pm.
The source, who is close to the matter, said 19 people from the village and 12 from the attackers, who are alleged to be ethnic Angwa militias from Abol district, were killed during the attack, adding that among the dead is Kwang Nial Poh, a respected member of the psychology department at Gambella University.
Another anonymous source provided further details about the assailants, stating that they donned the city’s police uniforms to carry out their assault surreptitiously, thereby evading identification. This informant went on to suggest that these attackers were also responsible for a previous assault on a bus traveling from Wentawo to Gambella city.
On 13 July, Addis Standard reported that three people were killed, and 23 others were injured during a violent assault on two public buses on the outskirts of Gambella city, at a location known as Ochom.
According to the sources, following the latest attack, the city is currently under the control of the national defense forces, with public services and offices remain closed for the time being.
In response to this escalating crisis, the Gambella regional cabinet, in an emergency meeting on 19 July, has enacted an indefinite curfew, prohibiting all movement between 1:00AM and 12:00PM, except for designated security personnel. Furthermore, it has been mandated that carrying weapons, with the exception of the aforementioned security forces, is strictly forbidden, according to the regional government’s communication bureau.
In an attempt to restore some normalcy, the cabinet has decreed that all government employees and service providers will recommence regular work schedules from the following day.
Ugato Ading, head of the regional communication bureau, said in a presser, human lives were lost and properties have been damaged in the wake of recent violence in the region. He added, the efforts are underway to ensure security in the region with the help of federal government forces. He said “ethno-nationalism and tribalism are threatening the region”, admitting that the violence is ethnic based. He vowed any individuals or parties including government officials contributing to the disruption of peace in the region will be held accountable.
In May, the Gambella region president, Umod Ujulu, dismissed the violence which killed nine people and injured 23 in Itang special woreda and the capital Gambella city as a dispute between individuals which later escalated into communal violence.
He also said back then that the violence has been brought under control by the coordinated efforts of the regional and federal security forces, and that the plot by what he called “elements” existing in the public who try to separate the people who have lived in solidarity and brotherhood for centuries was foiled. AS | Explicit |
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NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s Parliament was disrupted for a third day Monday by opposition protests over ethnic clashes in a remote northeastern state in which more than 130 people have been killed since May.
Opposition lawmakers carried placards and chanted slogans outside the Parliament building as they demanded a statement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the violence in Manipur state before a debate on the issue.
Last week, Modi broke more than two months of public silence over the ethnic clashes, telling reporters that mob assaults on two women who were paraded naked were unforgivable, but he did not refer directly to the larger violence.
His comments came after a video showing the assaults sparked widespread outrage on social media despite the internet being largely blocked and journalists being locked out in the state. It shows two naked women surrounded by scores of young men who grope their genitals and drag them to a field.
The video was emblematic of the near-civil war in Manipur, where mobs have rampaged through villages and torched houses. The conflict was sparked by an affirmative action controversy in which Christian Kukis protested a demand by mostly Hindu Meiteis for a special status that would let them buy land in the hills populated by Kukis and other tribal groups and get a share of government jobs.
READ MORE: Yellen visits India again to deepen ties and tackle global economic issues
Indian Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday said the government is ready to discuss the situation in Manipur. “I request the opposition to let a discussion take place on this issue. It is important that the country gets to know the truth on this sensitive matter,” he said in the lower house of Parliament.
Both houses of Parliament were adjourned various times as the opposition stopped proceedings with their demand for a statement from Modi. Sessions were also disrupted on Thursday and Friday.
The main opposition Congress party’s president, Mallikarjun Kharge, tweeted it was Modi’s “duty to make a comprehensive statement inside the Parliament on Manipur violence.”
Violence in Manipur and the harrowing video have triggered protests across the country. On Monday, scores of people gathered in Indian-controlled Kashmir and protesters carrying placards took to the streets of the eastern city of Kolkata.
Over the weekend, nearly 15,000 people held a sit-in protest in Manipur to press for the immediate arrest of anyone involved in the assault, which occurred in May. They also called for the firing of Biren Singh, the top elected official in the state who also belongs to Modi’s party.
The state government said last week that four suspects had been arrested and that police were carrying out raids to arrest other suspects.
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July 22, 2023 - 9:00 pm
The Biden first family seems determined to confirm every stereotype of their antisocial behavior — to the point of dysfunctionality.
During the 2020 campaign at least eight women alleged that Joe Biden in the past had serially and improperly touched, kissed or grabbed them. One, Tara Reade, alleged she was sexually assaulted by Biden, who denied the charge.
Yet Biden himself finally was forced to apologize for some of his behavior. Or as he said at the time, “I get it.” He claimed that he would no longer improperly invade the “private space” of women and had meant no harm.
But Biden’s obnoxious conduct extended well beyond the eight accusers.
Women as diverse as former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Biden’s own daughter-in-law Kathleen Buhle have both alleged in their memoirs that Biden made them feel uncomfortable through his intrusive touching and embraces.
On several occasions, Biden developed a strange tic of becoming too physical with young girls. He habitually attempted to hug them while blowing in their hair.
His daughter Ashley wrote in her diary that she feared her past adolescent showers with her father had been inappropriate. Even as president, Biden has weirdly called out young girls in his audiences to note their attractiveness.
On one occasion, the president interrupted his speech to address a female acquaintance — enlightening the crowd that, “We go back a long way. She was 12 and I was 30, but anyway …”
As a result, Biden has likely been warned repeatedly to forgo intimate references to young women. He has no doubt also been advised by his handlers to stop all close, supposedly innocent contact with young girls and children — if for no other reason than to prevent his political opponents from charging that Joe is “creepy,” “perverse” or “sick.”
And yet like some addict, Biden cannot stop — regardless of the eerie image he projects around the world. This month, the president jumped the proverbial shark by embracing a young child in a crowd while on the tarmac of the Helsinki airport.
In his strangest act yet, Biden kept moving his mouth near the face of the young girl. He was apparently trying to nibble the youngster, almost in turkey-gobbling fashion. She recoiled.
No matter — Biden continued at her shoulder. Again, she flinched.
Biden then reverted to form and sought with a second try to smell her hair and nestle closer.
Had any other major politician in the age of #MeToo committed such an unnerving stunt, he would probably have been ostracized by colleagues and mercilessly hammered by the media. Not in Biden’s case.
The apparent media subtext was that it was either just “Old Joe” trying to be too friendly, or a symptom of his cognitive decline and thus not attributable to any sinister urge.
Senescence now provides paradoxical cover for Biden’s creepiness — newfound exemption for his old boorish behavior.
Also, during the president’s latest antics, cocaine was found in the West Wing of the White House. All the White House spokespeople had to do was to reassure the public that the drugs most certainly did not belong to first son Hunter Biden — despite being a frequent guest resident of the White House and a former crack-cocaine addict.
Instead, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed reporters for requesting such clarification.
Then the official narrative went through several contortions, as to where and how the bag of cocaine was found.
The disinformation only added suspicion that the White House either would not or could not be transparent about the discovery of illicit drugs abandoned at the very nexus of American governance.
Requests for clarity were understandable not just because Hunter has had a long history of drug addiction. He also has a troubling habit of leaving a public trail of evidence of his drug use.
Hunter forgot his crack pipe in a rental car. He abandoned his laptop that contained evidence of his own felonious behavior. And his unlawfully registered handgun turned up in a dumpster near a school.
In sum, the president and his son both have quite disturbing and all-too public bad habits.
Americans in response assume both would be careful not to offer the tiniest shred of evidence that their pathologies continue.
White House handlers should keep the president from even getting near small children and young women. And they should be just as unambiguous that Hunter Biden has never, and would never, even get too close to illicit drugs while inside the White House.
Sadly they can do neither.
These suspicions are force multipliers of the mounting evidence of Biden family corruption. They feed narratives of heartlessness about disowning a granddaughter born out of wedlock. And they add to worries of presidential senility.
The result is the caricature of a first family: one that is utterly dysfunctional — and increasingly detrimental to the country at large.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com. | Explicit |
There’s a lot to digest in the three-hour runtime of Oppenheimer, which blew up the weekend box office alongside Barbie, grossing about $80.5 million domestic and $93.7 million internationally. The film includes a poison apple, the recurring presence of Albert Einstein, and the first sex scene ever lensed by filmmaker Christopher Nolan.
While the intimate encounter between Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and his real life love Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh ,has generated plenty of buzz, it’s causing outrage among some in India—not so much for the sex scene itself, but due to the memorable quote uttered during the act: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
During Oppenheimer and Tatlock’s tryst in the film, Jean stops their romp to pick up a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, which she makes Oppenheimer read aloud during sex. While there’s no evidence to support that this actually happened, the physicist did have an affinity for Sanskrit. Murphy even read the sacred text to prepare for his role.
But despite its rooting in (semi) reality, a character reading a sacred text during sexual activity has sparked controversy among India’s Hindu nationalists and politicians within its right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Over the weekend, India’s Information Commissioner, Uday Mahurkar, shared a statement on Twitter that called the sex scene “a scathing attack on Hinduism.” Mahurkar took offense that Pugh’s character “is holding Bhagwad Geeta in one hand, and the other hand seems to be adjusting the position of their reproductive organs” in the scene, which he also labeled “ a direct assault on religious beliefs” and a way of “waging a war on the Hindu community.”
As noted by CNN, Oppenheimer currently holds a U/A rating in India, which deems it appropriate to be watched by children under 12 with parental guidance. Not only has the film not been banned, but it grossed more than $3 million in its opening weekend in the country—beating out Barbie, which has also sparked controversy overseas.
Mahurkar concluded his message with a call for the filmmakers to erase the sex scene from Oppenheimer. “We believe that if you remove this scene and do the needful to win hearts of Hindus, it will go a long way to establish your credentials as a sensitized human being and gift you friendship of billions of nice people,” he wrote, adding, “Should you choose to ignore this appeal it would be deemed as a deliberate assault on Indian civilisation.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to Universal for comment.) | Explicit |
Two people were killed after a gunman opened fire at a construction site in Auckland, New Zealand, police said.
The suspected shooter was also found dead, New Zealand Police said.
Shots were initially reported inside the building around 7:22 a.m. local time Thursday, and the male suspect continued to shoot as he moved throughout the site, police said.
"Upon reaching the upper levels of the building, the male has contained himself within the elevator shaft and our staff have attempted to engage with him," New Zealand Police said in a statement. "Further shots were fired from the male and he was located deceased a short time later."
Police added that details on what happened "are still emerging."
Multiple injuries were reported in the shooting, police said. No details were immediately provided on the victims killed in the incident.
There is no national security risk, police said.
"This is a scary situation for Aucklanders on their Thursday morning commute to work," Mayor Wayne Brown tweeted. "Please stay at home, avoid travel into the city centre."
The incident occurred as the FIFA Women's World Cup is set to kick off in New Zealand and Australia.
Following the shooting, the United States Soccer Federation said that all U.S. women's national soccer team players and staff "are accounted for and safe."
ABC News' Will Gretsky contributed to this report. | Explicit |
British pop singer Matty Healy's protest stunt at a concert in Malaysia has sparked fury from LGBT activists and allies in the country.
Many have described the 1975 singer's sweary rant at the Malaysian government - and kiss with a male bandmate - as an act of "performative activism" that would make their lives even harder.
Homosexuality remains a crime in Malaysia, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Conservative Islam remains the dominant political and cultural force in the country, restricting sexuality, alcohol and other perceived threats to traditional values and "public decency" standards.
In a statement after Friday's show, a source close to the band said Healy had wanted to stand up for the LGBT community.
But while many locals appreciated the intent, they say he crashed a precarious political environment for LGBT Malaysians and caused greater damage.
"Unfortunately, local activists are now having to deal with the fall-out and the potential policies and restrictions that might come from it," said Dhia Rezki, an activist with Kuala Lumpur-based support group JEKAKA.
What did Healy do?
Last Friday, indie-pop band The 1975 was headlining a music festival in the capital Kuala Lumpur when Healy - who has a history of derogatory comments about women and minorities - launched into a tirade against Malaysia's anti-LGBT laws and kissed his bandmate in protest.
He had already been drinking on stage and destroyed a drone belonging to concert organisers. Attendees reported him spitting on fans.
Swaggering around the stage, the 34-year-old insulted the Malaysian government and said he was "furious" he'd made "a mistake when we were booking shows".
"I don't see the [expletive] point, right, I do not see the point of inviting the 1975 to a country and then telling us who we can have sex with," he said.
"I'll take your money, you can ban me, but I've done this before and it doesn't feel good," he said. He then grabbed his bandmate's face and kissed him.
The band's set was shut down soon after. "Alright, we just got banned from Kuala Lumpur, see you later," he yelled to the audience.
The next day authorities ordered the closure of the entire Good Vibes festival which still had two days to go and other international acts due to perform like The Kid Laroi, The Strokes and Ty Dolla $ign. Festival goers had paid hundreds of dollars to attend, many travelling from other parts of Southeast Asia.
Healy and his band flew out a few hours later. They cancelled the rest of their Asia tour dates - they'd also been due to play in devoutly Muslim Indonesia and Taiwan.
What's the response?
While Healy was ranting to the crowd in Kuala Lumpur, he said: "I'm sure a lot of you are gay and progressive and cool" - comments which drew scattered cheers.
But videos from the night also show the audience's silence and fans' growing unease. TikToks show people's faces falling and locals grimacing.
"Just sing the damn song," mutters one girl in a pink headscarf and glittery eye make-up. "I mean you come here and then insult our country..." she says, swapping glances with her friend in the clip viewed millions of times. She captioned the video "Iykyk".
That was reflective of the broader reaction across Malaysian social media on the weekend.
The TikTok commentary was overwhelmingly critical, and in many of the most popular videos, young LGBT Malaysians are furious.
"I'm seeing a lot of like 'Oh Matt Healy stood up for the rights of the Malaysian queer community' - No, Matt Healy, you're an idiot. Do you have any idea of repercussions⦠do you have any idea how hard it is for queer people to just exist now?" one user said in another TikTok that's been viewed more than 2m times since Saturday.
"I hate this white saviour complex of people coming to regions like Southeast Asia - with no prior research whatsoever to what the culture is, or the repercussions of doing acts like this - and ruining it not for them but for the people who actually live here."
Young Malaysians told the BBC they felt the act reflected a patronising Western attitude to Asia.
"It is very reminiscent of the whole white saviour complex, this narrative again and again of how 'uncivilised or un-progressive' the people in the East are and how the white person has to come into a country to save or better the people," said Dee May Tan, an arts creative in Kuala Lumpur.
"The way he went about it was just purely culturally insensitive. Like it's very self-righteous, entitled, ignorant and doesn't gel with what he's trying to promote."
The criticism is in part also fuelled by Healy's reputation. There's a long-running internet joke that his bandmates cut him off on stage before he says something problematic. British-Japanese singer Rina Sawayama at Glastonbury last month called him out for his racist comments about Asian people.
Earlier this year in a podcast, he mocked American rapper Ice Spice, mimicked Asian and Hawaiian accents and asked the show's hosts to do impressions of Japanese people labouring in concentration camps. He has apologised for some of the comments, saying people misinterpreted his sense of humour.
LGBT community fears reprisals
Healy had tried to do the right thing, but in the wrong way, suggested artist Jerome Kugan, who recently organised an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur allowing local LGBT artists to showcase their works.
"I understand and commend him for wanting to express his opinions about the regressive laws against LGBTQ+ folks in Malaysia and other parts of the world," he said. "But I think he could've chosen a more conducive platform to do it."
Malaysian activist Dhia Rezki also felt Healy's protest message was genuine but feared his high profile stunt could reinforce LGBT repression.
Conservative groups have described the incident as a violation of "family values" and could point to it as evidence of the LGBT community "taking things too far, crossing the line", he said.
"They'll use it to target anything done by LGBT people, be it holding hands, kissing or even posting about relationships online."
Malaysia has seen a noticeable shift to more conservative parties advocating harsher laws. There is outright state hostility.
Former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, in office 2020-2021, described LGBT people as a threat to Islam, backed by "foreign influences". He said they had a "disorder" that requires counselling.
Malaysia is ranked the second-worst place for transgender people in the world, and one study by local advocates Pelangi Campaign found nearly half of those who identify as LGBT have faced harassment and threats.
And while there are more open-minded views in cities like Kuala Lumpur, it's different in other parts of the country.
"We're still seeing people fired due to their sexual orientation, young people are outed, bullied or evicted," said Mr Rezki.
"We agree that visibility is important, and at some point, we would like to have more public displays of our activism, but we have always planned carefully around how we intend to do it so that members of our community are not jeopardised." | Explicit |
He said on Sunday, July 23, that his government will "protect the Christian roots" of Hungary from sexual minorities, Ukrinform reports with reference to Euractiv.
“The EU rejects Christian heritage, carries out a replacement of its population via migration … and conducts an LGBTQ offensive,” he said on Saturday.
According to the politician, Hungarians "even at home, we must fight" to defend what he and his supporters regard as "traditional Christian values".
At the same time, the publication notes that Orban upped his anti-LGBT rhetoric as Hungary’s economic troubles have escalated.
Annual inflation topped 25% in the first quarter, the report stresses. | Explicit |
Unilever has said it will let Russian employees be conscripted to be sent to Ukraine if they are called up.
The consumer goods giant, which has about 3,000 employees in Russia, has policies that cover the well-being and safety of its workers.
However, in a letter to campaign group B4Ukraine, it said it would comply with Russian conscription law.
Unilever has been under pressure to pull out of Russia, but says the situation is "not straightforward".
In a letter to B4Ukraine, which campaigns for companies to cease operating in Russia to hurt its economy, Unilever said it "absolutely condemns the war in Ukraine as a brutal, senseless act by the Russian state".
It also said it had responsibility for its 3,000 workers, adding that it had "global principles including the safety and well-being of our employees".
Nevertheless, the British firm, which makes products including Marmite and Cornetto ice creams, said it was "aware of the law requiring any company operating in Russia to permit the conscription of employees should they be called".
"We always comply with all the laws of the countries we operate in," wrote Reginaldo Ecclissato, Unilever's chief business operations and supply chain officer.
A spokesperson for the firm declined to say whether any Russian employees had been called up.
Any who are will not continue to be paid by the firm, the spokesperson added.
In its letter, it said it had paid 3.8bn roubles (£33m; $36m) in tax to the Russian state in 2022, which was a similar amount to the previous year.
The majority of its business in Russia is personal care and hygiene products, but it continues to supply ice cream.
At least 25,000 Russians have been killed in the war, according to research by the BBC's Russian service and Russian website Mediazona, but other sources put the figure much higher.
In February, UK intelligence services estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 Russian troops had died.
Russian soldiers have also been accused by the UN of war crimes, including rapes, "widespread" torture and killings.
Unilever and other Western firms have been under pressure to pull out of Russia since its invasion of Ukraine.
However, Unilever has said this is "not straightforward". If it abandoned operations, they would be "appropriated and then operated" by the Russian state.
It has not managed to find a way to sell the business that "avoids the Russian state potentially gaining further benefit, and which safeguards our people".
It said there were no "desirable" ways forward, but continuing to run the business with "strict constraints" was the best option at present.
However, the Ukraine Solidarity Project, which is part of B4Ukraine, said Unilever's response was "jaw-dropping".
"One day you're manufacturing ice cream, the next you're gearing up for the front line. You can't say Unilever isn't offering its employees varied work experience," said campaigner Valeriia Voshchevska.
"If this is protecting your workers, I'd hate to see what putting them in harm's way looks like." | Explicit |
Russian missiles, drones strike Odessa port just as grain export deal set to expire
Russian missile and drone strikes destroyed grain facilities and critical port infrastructure in Odessa overnight Wednesday morning, injuring at least 6 people.
Odessa, a major city in Ukraine’s south on the Black Sea, is the country’s largest and most important port. The attack threatens Ukrainian grain exports, which bolster the country’s economy and supply the global market.
The strikes on Odessa follow Russia’s announcement that it will suspend the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a United Nations-negotiated deal to allow grain exports from Odessa that is set to expire Sunday. The strikes suggest a connection to that deal’s failure, and an effort by Moscow to hurt Ukraine’s major export even if doing so contributes to global grain shortages.
“Russian terrorists have absolutely consciously kissed the infrastructure of the grain deal, and every Russian missile is a strike not only on Ukraine, but also for everyone in the world who seeks a normal and safe life,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday.
Zelensky pledged to increase the defenses at port facilities around the country.
Wheat prices have risen about 3 percent since Monday amid market pressures and the Russian moves.
“Putin hasn’t just blown up the Black Sea Grain Initiative; now he has hit the port city of Odessa with a hail of bombs for the second consecutive night,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said.
“In doing that, he is robbing the world of any hope of Ukrainian grain. Every one of his bombs also hits the world’s poorest,” she added.
Odessa Gov. Oleh Kiper said that 14 regions were targeted by Russian missile strikes overnight Wednesday, injuring at least 19 people. Kyiv was a target of explosive drones, but all were shot down, the city’s defense minister said.
The flurry of strikes came after explosives damaged the Kerch Bridge, which connects Crimea to Russia from the east. That bridge is considered critical infrastructure for both military and civilian supplies.
Ukrainian authorities did not directly claim responsibility for the attack, which was similar to another attack on the bridge in October 2022.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | Explicit |
The facade of gender identity is failing our students
According to the National Education Association, each American school child has “a multitude of identities that shape how they feel entering school each day.” The organization goes on to ask, “How can we, as educators, ensure our schools support each of those identities so that each of our students can learn and flourish?”
This focus on students’ “identities” is both misplaced and misleading — misplaced because the only relevant identity of any school-age child as far as a public educational institution is concerned should be “young person learning to read, write, reason, and do arithmetic,” and misleading because it’s really the multitudinous identities of adults, not those of children, that are the driving force behind today’s troubling educational trends.
Public schools are failing in their basic mission to educate young Americans; as a result, we are in the midst of a full-blown disaster of illiteracy and innumeracy. Eighth graders’ average math test scores have dropped to their lowest levels in 35 years and their reading scores to the lowest levels in two decades. Meanwhile, two-thirds of American fourth graders are functionally illiterate, yet many parents are ignorant of just how dire our educational crisis has become.
The notion that public schools are understood as support centers for students’ identities is nothing more than a semantic papering over of their increasing failure as public schools — that is, institutions that impart skills and knowledge to American children without regard to race, class or creed.
Despite what are likely the best of intentions on the part of many who favor the neo-identitarian rhetoric, socio-economically disadvantaged students of color are disproportionately harmed by this dereliction of duty. These are the students who most need cost-free, institutionalized opportunities to attain literacy and numeracy. But such opportunities are effectively stymied — often, patronizingly, in the name of those same students — by a system in which educated elites counterproductively prioritize partisan virtue-signaling over academic achievement.
At bottom, many leaders in public education today prioritize neither children’s alleged “multitude of identities” nor children more generally. Instead, they replace what is good for all kids with what feels good to some adults.
Why, for example, was phonics instruction mostly abandoned in public schools over the past 30 years, so that it now has to make a “comeback?” Did we think there was a better way to actually teach children to read? Nope. But we decided that we cared more to posture about a “love of reading” than to inculcate literacy in children. After all, the former is warm and fuzzy, if ineffective; the latter is boring and tedious, so we abandoned it despite its efficacy.
How about the sexualized content, particularly as relates to transgender rhetoric, being foisted upon America’s kindergarteners at the behest of the National Education Association and its allies? Teaching kindergartners about gender identities and choices of pronouns has zero to do with children’s needs. Honest people, progressives included, know this deep down — even if they are afraid to so much as entertain the thought. On the contrary, “choose your pronouns” inflected sexual content in schools simply creates a captive class of potential victims so that a cadre of so-called “gender-nonconforming” adults and their “allies” can perpetuate a notion of “gender identity” that is patently false.
But, alas, public schools mostly defer to the desire of a small minority of disproportionately influential teacher-activists to share their “holistic” selves — sexuality included — with minor children. This activist fringe has been able to shape the conversation about LGBTQ issues in public schools to seem as though their focus is on the developmental needs of children when in fact it is on the solipsistic self-promotion of adults.
Ironically enough, we are delimiting students’ capacity to form exactly the sort of multifaceted identity to which our public schools pretend to be responsive. Because we waste so much time peddling a false and oversimplified notion of identity for the benefit of adults, we deprive children of the knowledge and skills to understand themselves, their society and the broader world.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a Young Voices Contributor. She writes about culture, education, and politics; her work has appeared in various outlets, including USA Today, Deseret News, America Magazine, Law and Liberty, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | Explicit |
JAKARTA: Indonesian authorities have arrested 12 people including a policeman and an immigration officer accused of trafficking 122 people to Cambodia to sell their kidneys, officials said on Thursday (Jul 19).
The suspects were charged with violating Indonesia's human trafficking law and face a maximum 15 years in prison and a fine of up to 600 million rupiah (US$40,040) if convicted.
They were accused of recruiting people from across Indonesia through social media and sending them to Cambodia for kidney transplant surgery, said Hengki Haryadi, director of the criminal investigation unit at Jakarta Police.
The victims were promised 135 million rupiah (US$9,009) each.
"The victims agreed to sell their organs because they needed money. Most of them lost their jobs during the pandemic," Hengki told reporters.
Indonesia is no stranger to human trafficking, mainly for labour and often through debt-based coercion.
In 2019, authorities arrested eight people over what was the country's biggest-ever human trafficking bust, with about 1,200 victims taken abroad as domestic workers. | Explicit |
- Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump, has settled his lawsuit against the Trump Organization seeking $1.3 million in legal fees, NBC News reported Friday.
- The amount of the settlement was not disclosed.
- Cohen is a leading antagonist of Trump and is expected to testify next year at Trump's criminal trial for allegedly falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The amount of the settlement was not disclosed.
"This matter has been resolved in a manner satisfactory to all parties," Cohen told NBC News.
The Trump Organization had no comment. But a source at the company confirmed the settlement to NBC.
A trial in the case was expected to begin Monday in New York state court in Manhattan.
Cohen sued Trump's company in 2019 for failing to pay agreed-upon legal bills related to his testimony to various congressional committees in 2017 and 2018, when Trump was president.
In one appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017, Cohen lied about a proposed Trump building in Moscow, Russia.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal crimes related to that lie, and to various financial crimes and campaign finance violations. Among other things, Cohen admitted to facilitating hush money payments to two women to keep them quiet about alleged sexual encounters with Trump.
Trump denies having sex with either woman, porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Trump was indicted earlier this year by a Manhattan state court grand jury on criminal charges of falsifying business records related to Cohen's payment to Daniels. He has pleaded not guilty in that case, in which
Cohen is expected to testify at trial next year. | Explicit |
A 12-day scouring of Gilgo Beach murder suspect Rex Heuermann’s cluttered Long Island home found a “massive amount” of potential evidence, with investigators still probing whether the killings were committed inside, the chief Suffolk County prosecutor said Tuesday.
“We’ve haven’t ruled out anything in regard to that,” said Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney outside the defendant’s Massapequa Park home, adding the areas searched included a creepy walk-in basement vault at the suspect’s suburban residence.
“It’s not like TV,” he added of the ongoing probe. “It’s going to be a while for the analysts to do their job ... And if appropriate, the DNA section. That’s a process.”
Tierney acknowledged a number of items of potential evidence were found while declining to offer any sort of details.
“I’m not going to say specifically,” he said. “I think everyone wanted that singular piece of evidence. But we’re going to wait until we see all the evidence.”
Heuermann, 59, was busted July 13 on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan as the real estate executive left his Manhattan offices, with the suspect pleading innocent one day later to murder charges in the cold-case killings of three sex workers on Long Island in 2009 and 2010.
“What we’ve done is acquired a lot of information,” said Tierney. “So what we’re going to do now is what we’re doing all along, which is work with our partners ... and we’re going to see what if in any way fits into the case.”
The Daily News Flash
The hulking defendant was also identified as the prime suspect in the suburban murder of a fourth victim last seen alive on July 9, 2007. The lifelong Long Islander was the father of two, with his wife filing for divorce after Heuermann’s arrest.
The prosecutor, without offering details, confirmed investigators had also searched a number of other locations during the investigation.
Authorities said Heuermann remains a suspect in the slayings of six other victims found in Gilgo Beach: Four women, an Asian man dressed as a woman and a child, even as investigators dug up the defendant’s suburban backyard looking for evidence.
A tip from a Long Island pimp last year, along with DNA lifted from a pizza crust recovered from the suspect’s trash and Heuermann’s chilling web searches, steered investigators to the defendant and his green Chevrolet Avalanche, authorities said.
The arrest of the 6-foot-6, 270-pound suburban dad followed Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison’s decision last year to ramp up the investigation into the killings where the victims were found about 15 miles from the suspect’s Massapequa Park home.
The victims were identified as Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, with the open investigation probing the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes — identified as the first victim in the killing spree.
Authorities in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and South Carolina were also reviewing cold case files where the defendant has emerged as a possible suspect. | Explicit |
AP
toggle caption
Emmett Till, from Chicago, had traveled to Mississippi to visit his relatives when he was killed.
AP
Emmett Till, from Chicago, had traveled to Mississippi to visit his relatives when he was killed.
AP
President Biden will designate a national monument at three sites in honor of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley — both of whom served as catalysts for the civil rights movement.
Biden is expected to sign a proclamation on Tuesday, which will be the 82nd anniversary of Till's birth.
The new monument will be established across three locations in Illinois and Mississippi in an effort to protect places that tell Till's story, as well as reflect the activism of his mother, who was instrumental in keeping the story of Till's murder alive.
In August 1955, two white men abducted, tortured and killed Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, after he whistled at a white shopkeeper's wife in a grocery store in Mississippi. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted but later confessed to the killing in a magazine. Fifty years after the crime, the shopkeeper's wife, Carolyn Bryant Donham, also admitted to lying about Till touching her.
Among the sites that will be honored is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till's funeral service was held in September 1955.
About 1,700 people filled the church to its capacity, while 10,000 more stood outside and listened to the service over loudspeakers. The ceremony was also remembered for Till-Mobley's brave decision to keep the casket open, showing Till's mutilated body.
In Mississippi, Graball Landing will become a monument. Locals believe it is the spot where Till's body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. In 2008, a memorial sign dedicated to Till was installed near the site.
But over the years, the sign was routinely stolen, vandalized or shot at and forced to be replaced. A fourth edition now stands at the site — this time bulletproof and details the history of vandalism.
The third monument location will be the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, also in Mississippi, where Till's killers were acquitted by an all-white jury. In October 2007, Till's family visited the courthouse to receive an apology from the town's leaders.
At the time, Till's cousin, Simeon Wright, who was there the night Till was kidnapped, said he appreciated the efforts — though it came decades after his cousin's death.
"You are doing what you could. If you could do more, you would," Wright said. | Explicit |
The full horrors of the only Nazi concentration camps to exist on British soil will finally be investigated in an official government inquiry, the Observer can reveal.
Eighty years on from one of the darkest episodes in British history, the government is to carry out a review into the numbers of prisoners murdered by the Nazis on Alderney, the tiny Channel Island and British crown dependency.
It has now been established that the SS ran two of the camps on Alderney during the second world war, and new evidence of the scale of Nazi barbarity on the island has emerged over recent years. The number of victims has been contested, with some claiming thousands were killed with many buried in mass graves on the island.
Dame Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP whose father fled Nazi persecution in Germany, welcomed the review: “It is time for the British government and Alderney authorities to finally face up to the horror of what happened on British soil. There can be no more lies and no more cover-up.”
The expert review will be announced later this summer by the UK’s Holocaust envoy, Lord Pickles, and the government hopes the investigation will finally end the controversy over the scale of the Holocaust on Alderney. Lord Pickles told the Observer: “The difference between the estimates is so large, I thought it sensible for everyone to put the facts on the table, for it all to be transparent and for the deliberations to be in the open. It seemed pointless people shouting across at each other. It would be better to have a proper discussion and to bring together a panel of international experts.”
The announcement comes as the UK prepares to take over the chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a network of experts and government officials from 35 countries around the world. Dr Kathrin Meyer, secretary general of the IHRA, said: “This inquiry is a significant step toward telling this important history. Dealing openly and accurately with the Holocaust and the history of the Nazi persecution of other groups in all its dimensions is crucial and we expect the results to go a long way in protecting the facts, no matter how uncomfortable they may be.”
The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the German army after Winston Churchill’s war cabinet decided in the summer of 1940 they could not be defended. The British population of Alderney, 10 miles from the French coast, was evacuated, which allowed Nazi high command to turn the island into a giant prison for slave labour.
Though the majority of prisoners were Russians and Ukrainians, brought from the occupied parts of the Soviet Union to build the giant defences of Hitler’s so-called Atlantic Wall, it is known that many Jews, north Africans and Spanish republicans were also taken to Alderney.
According to testimony from the time, many prisoners were killed through a policy of systematic murder known as “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” – extermination through labour. Others were tortured, shot, given fatal injections and those sick, or unable to work, were sent to extermination camps in Occupied Europe.
It has been established that at least one transit of hundreds of French Jews was housed in one camp on the island having been transported there from the Drancy transit camp in Paris, where Jews were rounded up and sent on to Auschwitz during the German occupation of France.
The numbers who died on Alderney has long been disputed but even the most cautious academics put the figure at between 700 and 1,000 people. Professor Anthony Glees, security and intelligence expert and formerly adviser to the war crimes inquiry in the Home Office, told the Observer that the Pickles investigation is vital. “I would be surprised if the numbers killed by the Nazis either in Alderney or transported from Alderney on to extermination camps in Europe did not run into thousands,” he said.
Only eight Jews are officially recorded as dying on the island, but the new inquiry will examine claims from researchers that as many as 1,000 could be buried in mass graves. Some campaigners believe thousands could have perished on the island.
Jewish researcher Marcus Roberts, who has campaigned for many years for the full scale of the horrors on Alderney to be revealed, said: “There are still many questions about what really went on in Alderney and who knew what. For too long, some have been too willing to look the other way in the hope it all goes away. I hope this review will finally provide answers and some justice for the victims.”
Dr Caroline Sturdy Colls, professor of conflict archaeology at Staffordshire University, has used imaging technology to identify the sites of two mass graves on the island. She is cautious about the numbers of victims but told free-expression magazine Index on Censorship: “It is evident from the wide range of testimonies available and from the surveys we did of the camps in which Jews were housed that they were treated appallingly, and more Jews likely died than we know of.”
She added: “The conditions in which Jews were housed were an extension of those that they were kept in elsewhere in Europe. The camps on Alderney were part of a network of sites that housed Jews and harsh punishments, terrible working and living conditions, and torture characterised their lives on Alderney.”
After the war, an investigation by the Judge Advocate General’s office concluded: “The position here is somewhat similar to Belsen, stronger perhaps because the offences were committed on British soil.” However, none of those responsible for the war crimes committed on Alderney were ever brought to justice.
The inquiry is likely to vindicate the journalist who first sought to reveal these atrocities in the Observer four decades ago. Solomon Steckoll’s groundbreaking research was serialised in 1982 and made the sensational claim that Carl Hoffman, the commandant of Alderney, was not handed over to the Soviet authorities and executed in Kyiv as the UK government claimed. He had, in fact, been in British custody until 1948, when he was allowed to return to Germany. He died peacefully in his bed in West Germany in 1974. At first, the British government dismissed Steckoll’s claims but, in 1983, were forced to admit he was right. | Explicit |
SILVER SPRING, Md. -- A police officer in a Washington, D.C., suburb shot and killed a man after reports he had, without provocation, stabbed four people at random on Saturday, officials said.
The victims included three women — two were stabbed in the neck — and a man, all of whom are expected to survive, Montgomery County Police Assistant Chief Darren Francke told reporters during a Saturday afternoon news conference at the scene. Three were hospitalized with injuries.
The suspect’s identity has not been released.
Francke said the man used a 12-inch butcher knife in the stabbings, which started at a popular thrift store in Silver Spring, Maryland, and then continued in the surrounding neighborhood. While the investigation is ongoing, Francke said, detectives don’t believe the suspect knew any of the victims. He said the attacks appear “completely random.”
“We have witnesses. We are continuing our interviews, but at this point it was an unprovoked attack,” he said.
Police received reports around 10:35 a.m. of a stabbing at the thrift store. Almost simultaneously, another caller reported a second stabbing on a nearby street, according to police.
The suspect ran into a wooded area while police started setting up a perimeter. Francke said the man then came out of the woods and “confronted a police cruiser.” He said another officer soon arrived on scene, saw the man armed with a knife, gave commands and ultimately opened fire, killing the suspect.
“The officer fired multiple rounds and the subject was stopped from attacking further people,” Francke said.
The suspect died at the scene.
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office is investigating the police shooting, which is standard procedure under state law. That office will turn over the results of its investigation to local prosecutors, who will decide whether the officer could face criminal charges.
Officials said the shooting was captured on body camera and the footage will likely be released in the coming weeks, as well as the names of the officer and suspect.
Francke said the incident was out of character for the otherwise quiet suburban area.
“Montgomery County is a very safe community,” he said. “On a Saturday afternoon where folks are having a yard sale and just shopping at a very popular thrift store, we don’t expect this. We certainly don’t accept it.” | Explicit |
BBC presenter Evan Davis has revealed how he learned on the day of his wedding that his seriously-ill father had taken his own life.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, he said 92-year-old Quintin had left a note saying his "system is closing down" and he had "no alternative".
Davis's brother had texted to break the news while the Radio 4 host was at his wedding reception in July 2022.
The presenter made an impromptu speech telling the guests his father had died.
He said the occasion turned into "a very warm-hearted, supportive, reflective day" - he did not tell the guests it was suicide until later.
Davis, known for hosting TV's Dragon's Den and BBC Radio 4's PM programme, married Guillaume Baltz in a follow-up event to their civil partnership ceremony in 2012.
Quintin was very supportive of his son's relationship, making a "proud and loving" speech on that occasion.
But his wedding in London only included a small number of guests not invited to the first event, including two dozen friends and neighbours.
During the ceremony, Davis said he received a message from his brother Roland telling him to "call ASAP".
When he told him their father had died, Davis hung up and gave his husband the news. Davis called back five minutes later, and learned Quintin had taken his own life.
But messages from Roland and his other brother, Beric, encouraged Davis to continue the day.
Davis told his guests: "We've just had some news. My father died. But I don't want you to be alarmed. He was very elderly and it was definitely time.
"There's actually nothing we can do. So I'm going to propose that we carry on."
It was at work the next day when his colleagues asked how his wedding was, Davis said he "burst into tears".
Davis said Quintin had emailed his three sons the previous year informing them of his intention to kill himself.
But speaking to Sunday Times journalist Decca Aitkenhead with his family's consent, he said he would never know why his father chose his wedding day to do it.
He said: "We've all speculated on what the hell was going on in his head... there's no good day, is there? And I know he didn't do it to spoil our day."
Several notes were discovered alongside Quintin's body.
He wrote a note for his wife, Davis's mother Hazel, who was in a care home, telling her how much he loved her, and three identical notes for his sons.
Another handwritten note read: "To all my family, I am so sorry - so, so sorry - to spring this on you. But it is the best outcome.
"My system is closing down and I am on the verge of a mental breakdown - ie, I am going mad and physically falling apart. I really have no alternative. Thank you all for being such a wonderful family."
Quintin separately left a note pointing out he had "at no time been helped in any way in deciding to take my own life", and that he "perform(ed) this action because I wish to maintain my autonomy".
He left a bag of fresh clothes for his wife, "so she could be topped up at the care home", and cash for the gardener's weekly wages.
Davis's father and his mother, originally from South Africa, came to the UK after meeting at university, and had been together for 65 years.
When his mother was admitted to a care home during the Covid-19 pandemic after she started to show signs of dementia, Davis said he noticed his dad had also started to deteriorate.
Quintin was diagnosed with bowel cancer, and his heart was failing.
Davis said his dad had "felt very bad" that he could not look after his wife.
He said: "Having being together for 65 years, suddenly being on his own at home was a big deal... I think he felt guilt at not being able to look after her."
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, you can visit the BBC Action Line for help. | Explicit |
A 23-year-old Black man who was mauled by a police dog in Ohio after surrendering with his hands up appeared to tell 911 dispatchers in at least two calls that he didn't know why he was being pulled over or why troopers had their guns drawn.
“Right now I’m being chased by like 20 police officers and they all got their guns pointed directly to my truck,” a man police believed to be Jadarrius Rose told a Pickaway County dispatcher during a 2-minute call released Monday. “So now I’m trying to figure out why they got their guns all pointed to me and they’re all white people.”
Rose was pulled over July 4 in Circleville, Ohio, because the semi-truck he was driving “was missing a left rear mud flap,” according to an incident report from the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
Following a pursuit, Rose stood outside his vehicle with his hands raised when a Circleville police officer instructed his dog to attack. A trooper with the Ohio State Highway Patrol could be heard in a body camera video advising against releasing the dog because Rose had surrendered.
The 911 caller, who didn't identify himself but is believed to be Rose, also says that the troopers "exploded" the tires on his truck, which he was driving to a delivery point. (He was referring to tire-deflating devices called "stop sticks" that troopers deployed in an attempt to stop Rose's truck.)
"And it's not even my truck, I'm just driving to my delivery point," he said. "All of them got their guns pointed directly to me."
When asked for a second 911 call Rose made to Ross County, a spokesperson provided audio in which the caller says: "I don’t know why they’re trying to kill me."
"I do not feel safe with stopping, I don’t know why they’re throwing stuff on the ground trying to get me in an accident," the caller said.
On the 911 call with Pickaway County, the dispatcher advised: "Listen to what the officers are telling you."
"They ain't told me nothing, they ain't told me nothing," the caller said. "I don't know why they're pulling me over."
The dispatcher tells the caller to roll down his window.
"I did that the last time and all of them had their guns pointed at me. You think I feel safe?" the caller said.
The caller is then instructed to put both hands out the window, then open his door with his left hand showing. The call ends shortly after.
A 'lengthy pursuit' ends in a mauling
Rose was traveling westbound on U.S. Route 35 when a Motor Carrier Enforcement inspector and troopers with the Ohio State Highway Patrol tried to pull him over. When Rose failed to stop, troopers deployed the stop sticks on his vehicle twice before it came to a stop on U.S. Route 23.
After he was ordered several times to get out of the vehicle, Rose can be seen on the body camera video standing in front of troopers with his hands in the air.
That's when a Circleville police officer, identified as “R. Speakman,” deploys his K9 and instructs the dog to attack Rose.
“Do not release the dog with his hands up!” a trooper can be heard yelling multiple times before Speakman releases the dog.
The bodycam video then appears to show the dog biting and pulling Rose by his arm as he screams loudly.
Although Circleville police vehicles have dashboard cameras and officers are meant to wear body cameras, Circleville Mayor McIlroy said he does not know if Speakman had one on during the incident.
Speakman was placed on paid administrative leave around five days ago, McIlroy told NBC News.
When asked why Speakman wasn’t immediately placed on leave following the incident, McIlroy said, “I cannot answer that question.”
“Nothing like this should ever happen to anybody. ... It’s just a very unfortunate situation,” he said.
This isn't the first time Speakman's conduct has been under review, according to McIlroy. The officer was investigated in connection with another incident approximately within the past two years.
A use of force review board is reviewing the incident, according to the Circleville Police Department. The board’s findings will be released next week.
McIlroy said he understood how people could be concerned about race factoring into the officer’s actions but adds “… we do not have any racial problems here in the city of Circleville.”
He called the community “all inclusive" and "a great place to live, a great place to raise your family, a great place to send your kids to school.” | Explicit |
AUSTIN, Texas — Former El Paso Rep. Beto O'Rourke is calling on President Joe Biden to take aggressive action against Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) following a trooper’s alarming report that state-driven border security efforts have harmed immigrants.
O'Rourke, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and governor in 2022, urged the White House to unleash the full power of the federal government against Abbott. Abbott has sent more than 10,000 soldiers and police to the border since 2021 to respond to a record-high number of illegal crossings from Mexico, which he said Biden has not done enough to stop.
"If @potus does not stop Abbott now, he will find new ways to hurt and kill people at the border," O'Rourke tweeted.
Earlier this week, the Washington Examiner obtained a July 3 email that a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper-medic deployed to Eagle Pass, Texas, had sent to his superior. The DPS employee raised human rights concerns about how the state's Operation Lone Star.
The complaint alleged that immigrants had been hurt and even killed as a direct result of the state's barbed wire and water buoy barriers at the border. The trooper's name is being withheld for privacy reasons.
“I truly believe in the mission of Operation Lone Star; I believe we ... have stepped over a line into the in humane [sic]. We need to operate it correctly in the eyes of God,” the trooper wrote. “We need to recognize that these are people who are made in the image of God and need to be treated as such.”
O'Rourke's plea Wednesday was a follow-up to his initial call on Monday for Washington to take action.
"There is one person who has the power to stop Abbott. Stop him from deploying razor wire & medieval drowning devices designed to ensnare & mutilate," O'Rourke wrote in a tweet Monday. "Stop every illegal thing he’s doing on the border that ends up killing human beings. Mr. President, we need you to act."
Internal communications from DPS showed that the trooper's email was forwarded throughout the department for two weeks as officials debated how to handle the concerns.
DPS spokesman Travis Considine on Tuesday defended the state's actions.
“There is not a directive or policy that instructs Troopers to withhold water from migrants or push them back into the river," Considine wrote in an email.
DPS Director Steve McCraw responded multiple times, including calling for an audit of the department's policies. The DPS inspector general has formally launched an investigation into a trooper’s claims.
The trooper's email stated that he had been working on June 25 when he encountered “120 people camped out along the fence line,” including small children and nursing babies. The trooper said he was twice given orders to "push people back into the water to go to Mexico."
On June 30, a 4-year-old girl who tried to cross the wire was “pressed back” by Texas National Guard soldiers “due to the orders given to them.” The girl fainted shortly after and was then extricated and transferred to the trooper for emergency care, according to the account.
That same day, the trooper treated an adult man who had a large laceration on his leg from trying to free a child on top of a “trap” in the river and, in doing so, cut his leg open. DHS provided various pictures of the wounded immigrants.
The trooper's email listed a boy who broke his leg and a 19-year-old pregnant woman "doubled over" in the wire and in “obvious pain” as she had a miscarriage.
The following day, Border Patrol informed the trooper of a separate incident in which a mother and two children drowned trying to cross the river, which the trooper stated was because the casualty wire “forces people to cross in other areas that are deeper.”
The injuries have not stopped since then. In the first two weeks of July, Border Patrol’s Del Rio, Texas, regional office listed six incidents in which immigrants who crossed the border illegally were injured and received elevated medical care as a result of trying to pass through circular concertina wire along the U.S. shoreline.
House Democrats have also called this week on the Department of Homeland Security and State Department to intervene and stop Abbott's border security operation.
Abbott issued a statement Tuesday afternoon, doubling down on the mission.
"Operation Lone Star agency partners use verbal warnings and signage to direct migrants attempting to illegally cross from Mexico into Texas to use ports of entry to protect the lives of migrants, DPS troopers, and Texas National Guard soldiers," Abbott said in a statement. "Until President Biden reverses his open border policies and does his job to secure the border, Texas will continue protecting Texans and Americans from the chaos along the border."
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. | Explicit |
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A lawsuit accuses West Virginia State Police troopers of using excessive force in tackling and handcuffing a man who was walking along an interstate highway.
Edmond Exline, 45, of Hagerstown, Maryland, died at a hospital after the Feb. 12 incident along I-81 near Martinsburg.
A State Police statement cited by news outlets at the time said Exline was walking along the interstate when he got into a “struggle” with troopers and became unresponsive. State Police Capt. Eric Burnett in Charles Town said a Taser was used on him.
“He ran into traffic and wouldn’t listen to any commands from the trooper,” Burnett told The Associated Press in March.
The lawsuit says Exline was unarmed and was doing nothing wrong when three troopers tackled and handcuffed him. The troopers' actions “were not taken in good faith and were in violation of clearly established law,” it says, adding that “no objectively reasonable police officer could have perceived the force as necessary.”
The cause of death and the reason why Exline was on the interstate haven’t been disclosed. It’s unclear whether he was having a medical or other type of episode. The lawsuit says troopers administered the overdose-reversing drug Narcan several times even though Exline had not overdosed on any narcotics.
The lawsuit also names the State Police and was filed in Kanawha County Circuit Court last week on behalf of Edmond Exline II, the executor of his father's estate. The suit, which was first reported by the Charleston Gazette-Mail, does not list the troopers by name and seeks unspecified damages and to force the defendants to undergo additional training.
Capt. Robert Maddy, a state police spokesman, said the I-81 incident is the subject of federal and state criminal investigations as well an an internal investigation. He declined to comment on the lawsuit Tuesday.
During a briefing in March, Gov. Jim Justice said he had watched police video involving Exline and called it “very very concerning.” State Police previously denied a request by the AP to review the video.
Justice announced at the time that Exline's death would be part of a sweeping investigation of the State Police due to several alarming incidents, including allegations that a now-dead employee hid a video camera in the women’s locker room at a facility in Kanawha County. The governor also appointed a new State Police superintendent. | Explicit |
President Joe Biden is set to designate a new national monument on Tuesday memorializing the brutal 1950s lynching of Emmett Till, with the White House framing the symbolic act as part of a fight against resurgent racism.
The monument, sited in several locations, will remember the 14-year-old Black boy tortured and murdered by white men in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white shopkeeper's wife in Mississippi.
His mother Mamie Till-Mobley, also honored in the memorial, became an activist, and is widely viewed as having helped to spark the U.S. civil rights movement.
"The new monument will protect places that tell the story of Emmett Till's too-short life and racially-motivated murder, the unjust acquittal of his murderers, and the activism of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who courageously brought the world's attention to the brutal injustices and racism of the time, catalyzing the civil rights movement," the White House said.
The memorial signing by Biden — on the 82nd anniversary of Till's birth — will designate three historic sites in Illinois and Mississippi.
One of them will be the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till's mother insisted at her son's funeral that the casket remain open, allowing a huge crowd to see the boy's disfigured body.
Another will be the Tallahatchie, Mississippi courthouse where an all-white jury found the men accused of murdering Till not guilty. They would later admit to the crime.
The third location will be the spot on the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi where Till's battered body was eventually discovered. Signs commemorating the brutal event there and in other locations around Tallahatchie County have repeatedly been defaced and vandalized over the years.
Biden's high-profile treatment for a painful piece of 20th century U.S. history is playing out against a backdrop of accusations that a leading Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race is openly stirring racist sentiment.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has led a charge to minimize the history of past racism in his state's school curriculum, making this part of a broader campaign against what he describes as the "virus" of "woke" left-wing values.
Responding to an outcry over what has been described as an attempt to rewrite history, DeSantis last week doubled down, saying that slavery even had benefits.
"They're probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life," DeSantis said Friday.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described DeSantis's comment as "inaccurate" and "insulting."
"It's hurtful and prevents an honest account, an honest account of our nation's history," she said.
Jean-Pierre, who is Black, said the Emmett Till monument was part of "the broader story of American Black oppression, their survival."
"It's an important moment. You're going to hear directly from the president tomorrow," she said. | Explicit |
- Summary
- Two people and armed shooter killed, at least 6 injured
- World Cup to proceed as planned, says PM Hipkins
- Hipkins says no political or ideological motivation identified
AUCKLAND, July 20 (Reuters) - At least two people and an armed attacker were killed and six others wounded in a shooting in New Zealand's largest city of Auckland on Thursday, hours ahead of the opening match of the Women's soccer World Cup in the city.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said the soccer tournament would proceed as planned, adding the shooting appeared to be the actions of an individual and that police were not seeking anyone else in relation to the incident.
"There was no identified political or ideological motivation for the shooting and therefore no national security risk," Hipkins said during a televised media briefing.
There would be no change to New Zealand's security threat level although there would be an increased police presence in the city, he said.
Police said the shooter in Auckland was armed with a pump-action shot gun, moved through the building site and, after reaching the upper levels, "contained himself within the elevator shaft."
"Further shots were fired from the male and he was located deceased a short time later," police said.
Auckland welcomed thousands of international players and tourists for the ninth Women's World Cup which is being co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand.
In the two opening matches on Thursday, Norway plays New Zealand in Auckland while Australia faces Ireland in Sydney.
The shooting took place near the Norwegian team hotel in downtown Auckland, and several players took to social media to report they were safe.
"All seems calm, and we are preparing as normal for the match tonight," Norway captain Maren Mjelde told Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang during the police operation.
Italy team's training has been delayed as players cannot get out of their hotel, while the U.S. team said all its players and staff were accounted for and safe.
Douglas Emhoff, the husband of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris who is leading the presidential delegation to New Zealand for the opening ceremony of the World Cup, is safe, the U.S. embassy said.
Several streets in Auckland were cordoned off, all ferry services into the city were cancelled, and buses were asked to detour some areas of the city.
A FIFA Fan Festival event just a few blocks from the shooting was also delayed.
"This appears to be the act of one individual. This was not a threat to national security, nor was it in any way related to the FIFA Women’s World Cup Event," Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown said in a statement.
Gun violence is rare in New Zealand, which tightened its gun laws after a gunman killed 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch in 2019 in the country's worst peace-time mass shooting.
The government has banned all military style semi-automatics and other deadly guns.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Explicit |
Delaware County District Attorney's Office
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Gretchen Harrington (left) disappeared on Aug. 15, 1975, as she was walking to summer bible camp in a Philadelphia suburb. Former pastor David Zandstra (right), 83, has been charged with her murder.
Delaware County District Attorney's Office
Gretchen Harrington (left) disappeared on Aug. 15, 1975, as she was walking to summer bible camp in a Philadelphia suburb. Former pastor David Zandstra (right), 83, has been charged with her murder.
Delaware County District Attorney's Office
On the morning of Aug. 15, 1975, Gretchen Harrington, 8, left her home in Marple Township, Penn., to walk to summer bible camp and disappeared.
About two months later, her skeletal remains were found in nearby Ridley Creek State Park, but her killer was never apprehended — until this month.
The Delaware County District Attorney's Office announced on Monday that it had arrested former pastor David Zandstra, 83, for Harrington's murder.
Zandstra admitted to killing Harrington and is currently being held in jail in Cobb County, Ga., according to authorities.
"We are gonna bring him here to Delaware County. We're gonna try him. We're gonna convict him. And he's gonna die in jail," District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said at a press conference on Monday.
"Then he's gonna have to find out what the God he professes to believe in holds for those who are this evil to our children," Stollsteimer added.
Zandstra has been charged with criminal homicide, first-degree murder, second-degree murder, third-degree murder, kidnapping of a minor and possession of an instrument of crime.
Delaware County District Attorney's Office
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A newspaper clipping from 1975 describes the search for Gretchen Harrington.
Delaware County District Attorney's Office
The killing nearly 48 years ago stumped investigators for decades and cast a pall over the small-town community in suburban Philadelphia.
In a statement, the Harrington family thanked law enforcement officials for their continued work on the case and said they were hopeful that the person responsible for Gretchen's murder would be held accountable.
"If you met Gretchen, you were instantly her friend. She exuded kindness to all and was sweet and gentle. Even now, when people share their memories of her, the first thing they talk about is how amazing she was and still is...at just 8 years old, she had a lifelong impact on those around her," the family said.
"The abduction and murder of Gretchen has forever altered our family and we miss her every single day."
A breakthrough in the case came from a witness
In January of this year, investigators said they interviewed a source who was best friends with Zandstra's daughter and who would often sleep over at the family's home.
She told investigators that, during a sleepover when she was 10, she woke up to Zandstra groping her groin area. The source said she told Zandstra's daughter, who replied that her father sometimes did that.
The source also said she remembered that a girl in her class was nearly kidnapped twice and wrote in her diary in 1975 that she suspected Zandstra was the likely kidnapper.
The summer bible camp Harrington was attending took place on the grounds of two nearby churches. Harrington's father was the pastor of one church, and Zandstra was the pastor of the other.
Delaware County District Attorney's Office
toggle caption
Investigators say Zandstra was the pastor of Trinity Church Chapel Christian Reform Church, where some of the summer bible camp took place.
Delaware County District Attorney's Office
In July of this year, investigators traveled to Marietta, Ga. — where Zandstra now lives with his wife — to interview him.
At first Zandstra denied knowing what happened to Harrington, but investigators say he later admitted to offering her a ride and taking her to a nearby wooded area.
Zandstra said he asked Harrington to take off her clothes and she refused, and then he punched her in the head, causing her to bleed. He left her body in the woods and fled the scene.
Police also interviewed Zandstra in 1975, but the then-pastor denied seeing Harrington on the day she was abducted.
"Justice does not have an expiration date," Pennsylvania State Police Lt. Jonathan Sunderlin said in a statement. "Whether a crime happened fifty years ago or five minutes ago, the residents of the Commonwealth can have confidence that law enforcement will not rest until justice is served."
The investigation enters a new phase
Zandstra apparently refused to waive extradition to Pennsylvania, so prosecutors must send a petition for requisition to Gov. Josh Shapiro, who will then forward it to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.
If approved, authorities can transport Zandstra from Georgia to Pennsylvania, where he is expected to stand trial.
Stollsteimer also said authorities are concerned Zandstra may have sexually assaulted other victims. After Harrington's death, Zandstra moved to Plano, Texas, and later to Marietta, Ga.
Investigators took a DNA sample from Zandstra and will compare it to open cases in Pennsylvania and across the country, and they are asking anyone with additional information about Zandstra's activities to contact the Pennsylvania State Police. | Explicit |
More say violence could be necessary to restore Trump to White House: survey
A recent survey shows increasing support for the use of violence to restore former President Trump to the White House.
The report, titled “Dangers to Democracy” and released by the Chicago Project on Security Threats (CPST) earlier this month, found that 7 percent of Americans from April 6 to June 26 agree that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”
That number is an increase from 4.5 percent, or “the equivalent of an estimated shift from 12 million to 18 million American adults,” according to the survey, which was conducted by CPST and NORC.
It’s the first bump in the number of Americans who agree with that statement since April of last year.
The rise “likely reflects the response of more intense commitment to Trump following the announcement of the federal indictment against him for mishandling classified documents on June 9, 2023 — about two and a half weeks before our June 26, 2023 survey,” the poll said.
Trump was charged by the Justice Department with 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of making false statements and four additional offenses pertaining to different forms of concealment. The obstruction charge alone carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. The former president pleaded not guilty on June 13.
It was Trump’s second indictment, and his first federal one, following his decision to run for president in 2024. He had previously been hit with charges in April by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over alleged hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels; he has also pleaded not guilty in that case.
The former president predicted earlier this month that he would be hit with his second federal indictment, this one over his involvement in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in which a violent mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturns the results of the election.
Trump has frequently been accused of being responsible for the attack, having rallied his supporters that day and urged them to march to the Capitol following his loss to President Biden. The events of Jan. 6 and Trump’s continued refusal to acknowledge that the 2020 election was free and fair have fueled concerns that the 2024 one will also be marked by violence.
Other findings in the survey included “about 40 percent of Americans” sharing “at least one attitude reflecting deep distrust of American democratic institutions” and “20 percent of Americans” believing in “anti-democratic political conspiracy theories about how the country is run.”
The survey used a random sample of 3,543 people with a margin of error of 2.30 percent and was conducted between June 22-26.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | Explicit |
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, and his mother, a White House official said Saturday.
Biden will sign a proclamation on Tuesday to create the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument across three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, according to the official. The individual spoke on condition of anonymity because the White House had not formally announced the president's plans.
Tuesday is the anniversary of Emmett Till's birth in 1941.
The monument will protect places that are central to the story of Till's life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers and his mother's activism. Till's mother's insistence on an open casket to show the world how her son had been brutalized and Jet's magazine's decision to publish photos of his mutilated body helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement.
Biden's decision also comes at a fraught time in the United States over matters concerning race. Conservative leaders are pushing back against the teaching of slavery and Black history in public schools, as well as the incorporation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs from college classrooms to corporate boardrooms.
On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris criticized a revised Black history curriculum in Florida that includes teaching that enslaved people benefited from the skills they learned at the hands of the people who denied them freedom. The Florida Board of Education approved the curriculum to satisfy legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate who has accused public schools of liberal indoctrination.
“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Harris asked in a speech delivered from Jacksonville, Florida.
DeSantis said he had no role in devising his state’s new education standards but defended the components on how enslaved people benefited.
“All of that is rooted in whatever is factual,” he said in response.
The monument to Till and his mother will include three sites in the two states.
The Illinois site is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Thousands of people gathered at the church to mourn Emmett Till in September 1955.
The Mississippi locations are Graball Landing, believed to be where Till’s mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till’s killers were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.
Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when Carolyn Bryant Donham said the 14-year-old Till whistled and made sexual advances at her while she worked in a store in the small community of Money.
Till was later abducted and his body eventually pulled from the Tallahatchie River, where he had been tossed after he was shot and weighted down with a cotton gin fan.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried on murder charges about a month after Till was killed, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. Months later, they confessed to killing Till in a paid interview with Look magazine. Bryant was married to Donham in 1955. She died earlier this year.
The monument will be the fourth Biden has created since taking office in 2021, and just his latest tribute to the younger Till.
For Black History Month this year, Biden hosted a screening of the movie “Till,” a drama about his lynching.
In March 2022, Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law. Congress had first considered such legislation more than 120 years ago.
The Justice Department announced in December 2021 that it was closing its investigation into Till’s killing. | Explicit |
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Malaysia's government Saturday cut short a music festival after the lead singer of British band The 1975 slammed the country's anti-gay laws and kissed a male bandmate during their performance.
Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil slammed Matty Healy's conduct late Friday at the start of the Good Vibes Festival as “very rude.”
Healey used profanity in his speech criticizing the government's stance against homosexuality, before kissing bass player Ross MacDonald. Footage of the fiasco was posted on social media and sparked a backlash in the predominantly Muslim nation.
After meeting the festival organizers Saturday, Fahmi said the festival, which was scheduled to go on this weekend, will be canceled.
“There will be no compromise with any party that challenges, belittles or violates Malaysian laws," he said in a statement on Facebook. Homosexuality is a crime in the country that is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and caning.
The agency in charge of approving performances by foreign artists said it was disappointed with the band's conduct, calling it “an insult and disrespecting the laws of the country.” It said the group will be blacklisted from performing in Malaysia.
It wasn't the first time that Healy used the stage to defend lesbian and gay rights. In 2019, he kissed a male fan during a concert in the United Arab Emirates, which also outlaws homosexual acts, according to media reports. | Explicit |
WASHINGTON, July 23 (Reuters) - The United States said on Sunday it was deeply concerned by reports of viral videos showing two women paraded naked in India's northeastern state of Manipur, a sexual assault case that enraged the country.
The assault, in which a mob allegedly raped and paraded the naked women, took place over two months ago, but it captured national and global attention as the video went viral on social media in the past week. Police have made some arrests.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson called the incident "brutal" and "terrible" and said the United States conveyed its sympathies to the victims.
The assault was reported by the victims aged 21 and 19 in May during intense ethnic clashes between the tribal Kuki people and majority ethnic Meitei over potential changes to economic benefits given to the Kuki.
The trouble was quelled after New Delhi rushed thousands of paramilitary and army troops to the state of 3.2 million people. But sporadic violence and killings resumed soon afterwards and the state has remained tense since.
At least 125 people have been killed and more than 40,000 have fled their homes since the violence erupted in Manipur.
The United States encouraged a peaceful and inclusive resolution to the Manipur violence and urged authorities to respond to humanitarian needs while protecting all groups, homes and places of worship, the State Department spokesperson said.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday condemned the assault as "shameful" and promised tough action.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Explicit |
A distressing video of two Manipur women being paraded naked has gone viral, drawing condemnation from the Indigenous Tribal Leaders' Forum as evidence of heinous atrocities. The incident occurred in Kangpokpi district amidst mob violence following the burning of a village. A relative filed a zero FIR, leading to the case being registered at Nongpok Sekmai police station. The mob killed two men, forcibly stripped and gang-raped three women, with the victim's brother also losing his life while trying to protect her. Fortunately, the three women managed to escape with the help of locals. Authorities are currently investigating to bring the perpetrators to justice. | Explicit |
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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Juveniles held in a former death row building at a Louisiana prison for adults are suffering through dangerous heat and psychologically damaging isolation in their cells with little or no mental health care, inadequate schooling and foul water, advocates say in a federal court filing asking a judge to order that the youths be moved.
The document, filed in Baton Rouge and dated Monday, says state officials have broken promises to provide constitutionally acceptable facilities for young people housed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola — a remote prison farm with a notorious history of violence. With a spring target date for moving the youths to other facilities having passed, advocates for the juveniles are asking for an order ending the housing of juveniles at the Angola facility.
The state Office of Juvenile Justice did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and other inmate advocates accompanied the filing with affidavits from three youths who are or have been housed at the facility. All talked of foul water from unsanitary faucets in their cells and inedible food. One said he was slammed against a wall by a guard and, another time, was overcome by a chemical irritant that had drifted from another cell when it was used on another detainee.
WATCH: Prison inmates struggle to survive unrelenting heat without air conditioning
The document cited weather data indicating outside heat-index values at the prison in a remote part of southeast Louisiana regularly surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) and sometimes 130 degrees F (54 degrees C).
There was also an affidavit from a medical expert who said the prolonged solitary confinement the youths are exposed to causes “significant risk of serious psychological harm.” Another expert discussed the physical and psychological dangers of keeping the youths in un-airconditioned cells, with fans that are unreliable.
“The youth at OJJ Angola Unit are at substantial risk of serious physical and psychological harm due to their extensive and continued exposure to high temperatures and heat index during the summer months in Louisiana,” Dr. Susi Vassallo wrote.
Gov. John Bel Edwards announced last July that juveniles would be housed at the temporary facility at Angola, with an aim of ending the practice the following spring, once renovations were complete at a northeast Louisiana juvenile facility. As many as 70 or more have moved through the facility, the ACLU said in a news release. The population earlier this month was put at 15. The target date for ending youth incarceration at Angola was recently pushed to late November of this year.
When Edwards announced the plan, state officials were under growing pressure to do something after a series of escapes from the violence-plagued Bridge City Center for Youth in suburban New Orleans. One inmate is suspected in a carjacking and shooting that happened before he was recaptured. Establishing a detention center at Angola was described as a last-ditch but necessary measure amid capacity and safety concerns at juvenile detention facilities.
READ MORE: ‘I thought I was going to die there.’ What it’s like to live with rising temperatures in prison
At Angola, state officials say, the youths are segregated from the adult prison population, held at a building that once held convicts awaiting execution.
From the start, juvenile justice advocates assailed the plan to house the youths at Angola — an adult prison farm with a notorious history of violence.
A lawsuit was filed in August, questioning the state’s ability to protect the juveniles and provide them with needed services at the prison. “Given the fact that 83% of youth in OJJ’s secure care system are Black, it is statistically likely that Black youth will disproportionately suffer the brunt of the Governor’s transfer plan,” attorneys wrote then.
U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick declined last September to remove the youths. Acknowledging the possible harm, Dick said state officials had shown they could provide shelter and treatment that would comply with the constitution.
“While locking children in cells at night at Angola is untenable, the threat of harm these youngsters present to themselves, and others, is intolerable,” Dick wrote at the time. “The untenable must yield to the intolerable.”
In their latest filing, advocates again asked Dick to end the practice, saying the state failed to keep its promises.
“Defendants promised safe and sanitary conditions. Defendants broke that promise, locking children in barred cells with only a metal bed and metal toilet/sink, unclean faucets and no drinkable water source, and allowing excessive heat in the housing areas to go unremediated during this hot summer in Louisiana,” the juvenile advocates say.
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Jul 15 | Explicit |
A Michigan man accused of assaulting his ex-girlfriend and then kidnapping and killing her 2-year-old daughter was hit with nearly two dozen charges in connection with the “horrific and brutal crime spree,” officials announced.
Rashad Trice was taken into custody on July 3 in the St. Clair Shores area of Michigan. He’s now facing charges including one count of first-degree premeditated murder and one count of felony murder, the Michigan Attorney General’s office announced on Friday.
Both felonies carry a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole if convicted.
On July 2, Trice allegedly had a violent altercation over money with his ex-girlfriend inside her apartment, according to an affidavit obtained by ABC News. Police said he sexually assaulted and stabbed the victim, who then raced to a neighboring apartment to call the police. She left her daughter, Wynter Cole-Smith, and her 1-year-old son behind. When she returned, only the little boy remained.
Trice allegedly fled the scene in a stolen car with Wynter, but the child was not with him when he was arrested the following day, prompting police to issue an Amber Alert.
Wynter’s body was found in a Detroit alley following a three-day search. Police said Trice strangled the child with a pink cellphone charging cord. Part of the cord was found with the child’s body, while the rest was in the vehicle that Trice was in when he was arrested, according to the complaint.
“We have alleged today, and our many charges reflect, a horrific and brutal crime spree from Lansing to Detroit to St. Clair Shores,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement.
She also praised the county prosecutors “for their commitment to a singular, victim-centered prosecution that prioritizes and respects the tragic experiences of the surviving victims and the family of Wynter Cole-Smith.”
Trice initially faced charges across three different counties in connection with the deadly attack, though the Michigan Department of Attorney General said it will prosecute all state charges in one trial, consolidating the case.
The previously announced local charges brought against Trice have since been dropped.
Trice is being held at the Newaygo County Jail. | Explicit |
PM accuses Labour of backing ‘deceptive’ asylum claim lawyers
Rishi Sunak has accused the Labour party of siding with lawyers found to have falsely submitted asylum claims in exchange for thousands of pounds.
An investigation by the Daily Mail revealed that multiple solicitors had agreed to help an undercover reporter posing as an economic migrant submit a fake application in exchange for £10,000.
One of the firms the newspaper targeted was Duncan Ellis Solicitors in Colliers Wood, south London, where a legal adviser named VP Lingajothy agreed to invent a back story to use in an asylum application. The story included claims of sexual torture, beatings, slave labour, false imprisonment and death threats that had led to suicidal thoughts and had compelled the applicant to flee to the UK.
Lawyers are forbidden from misleading | Explicit |
Rapist David Goodwillie's new team have said they will not walk away from the player despite council criticism.
Goodwillie, who was ruled to be a rapist in a civil case, recently played for Glasgow United FC in a friendly.
Glasgow City Council threatened to bar the club from its training facility, however the club said there had been a "witch hunt" against the player.
Rape Crisis Scotland said the club had sent a "clear message of disregard" to survivors of rape and sexual violence.
Glasgow United FC has not confirmed if Goodwillie has been signed.
Council leader Susan Aitken said the ex-Dundee United, Aberdeen and Blackburn player had not shown "any kind of contrition or remorse" for his actions and warned any club that signed him would send "a very clear statement about its attitude to the safety of women and girls".
However a spokesperson for Glasgow United FC, which is based in Shettleston, told BBC Scotland the club would not walk away from him "like every other club".
They said: "David Goodwillie has never been charged for this offence. He has no criminal record and has never appeared on any offenders register.
"How can he show contrite or remorse for something he staunchly claims he did not do?"
They added: "We do a lot of work in our community helping those in need and this is only an extension of that work.
"We are supporting David with his mental health and will continue to do so. This witch hunt has gone on for far to long and the use of any person's life as a political football is unacceptable."
Ninth-tier Glasgow United train twice a week at council-owned Greenfield Football Centre but play their home games at the nearby Greenfield Park stadium.
In a statement released on Sunday, Ms Aitken she had asked city official to "look at" the local authority's agreement with the club over Greenfield Football Centre.
Rape Crisis Scotland said it was "deeply disappointed" by the club's decision to play Goodwillie.
A spokeswoman said: "David Goodwillie has been found by a senior judge to be a rapist. Footballers are role models - particularly for young people - and it's not okay to have someone in this position who has been found to be a rapist."
Glasgow United, who play in the West of Scotland third division, selected Goodwillie to play in a match against West of Scotland Premier Division side Pollok on July 12 but lost 7-0.
A few days later, Goodwillie spoke out for the first time since the 2017 ruling on the Anything Goes podcast by Scottish actor James English.
The footballer said he did not feel like he has had justice and that both parties had been left in limbo.
Civil court case
In 2017, Goodwillie and former Dundee United teammate David Robertson were ordered to pay £100,000 in damages after a judge ruled they raped a woman at a flat in Armadale, West Lothian, in 2011.
Neither faced a criminal trial over the rape accusation after prosecutors said there was not enough evidence.
Robertson retired from football aged 30 in the days after the ruling, while Goodwillie left English side Plymouth Argyle by "mutual agreement".
However, the forward soon signed with Scottish League One side Clyde, who he played for more than 100 times and captained before leaving in 2022.
Raith Rovers sparked outrage by signing Goodwillie in January 2022 and a loan move back to Clyde also collapsed.
Rape Crisis Scotland described the Raith Rovers move as another "clear message of disregard" to survivors of rape and sexual violence.
The forward was released without playing a game in September 2022, with Raith Rovers admitting it "got it wrong" by signing him.
In February this year, Northern Premier League side Radcliffe FC, based in Bury, Greater Manchester, released the striker after one game following a public outcry.
Four months later, Goodwillie's contract with Australian semi-professional club Sorrento FC was rescinded. The club apologised to anyone "that may have been caused offence by his signing". | Explicit |
Legally speaking, it’s been a rough few months for Donald Trump. In April, he was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in connection to a hush money payment made prior to the 2016 election. In May, a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, ordering him to pay the writer $5 million. In June, he was charged with a cornucopia of crimes related to his handling of classified documents. On Monday, he lost his bid to have Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis removed from the investigation into his attempt to overturn the election in Georgia, clearing the way for her to potentially charge him in a matter of weeks. On Tuesday, we learned that he was officially a target of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into his attempt to overturn the election—the scope of which reportedly took his lawyers by surprise—and would likely be indicted in that case. One day after that, a judge denied his request for a new trial against Carroll, as well as his request to reduce the damages owed from $5 million to less than $1 million. And if he thought he might get a brief reprieve from this cosmic assault from the legal gods, he unfortunately thought very wrong.
NBC News reports that William Russell, a former Trump administration aide who currently works for Trump’s presidential campaign, is expected to testify Thursday to the grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. That’s significant because Russell was reportedly “with Trump for much of the day on January 6, 2021,” meaning he could theoretically speak to the fact that Trump:
- Demanded supporters with guns be let through for his speech on the Ellipse, allegedly saying: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.... They can march to the Capitol from here.”
- Flew into a rage when he was told he couldn’t go to the Capitol, allegedly tried to grab the steering wheel of the vehicle driving him back to the White House, and lunged for the neck of the Secret Service agent who told him he couldn’t join his supporters
- “Gleefully” watched the insurrection unfold on TV and allegedly said, “Look at all of the people fighting for me”
- Refused to act to stop the violence “until after it was clear that the riot had failed to disrupt Congress’s session to confirm his election defeat”
- Declined to concede the election or suggest that the attack on the Capitol was a crime, even while finally recording a video in which he directed his supporters to “go home” (and told them “you’re very special” and “we love you”)
In his letter to Trump, Smith reportedly laid out three possible statutes Trump could be charged with violating in his attempt to overturn the election: conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States; tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant; and deprivation of rights under color of law. Should a jury decide to convict, all of these charges could result in prison time.
Meanwhile, in other Trump legal news:
Trump’s legal team had wanted to move the trial to federal court in order to claim additional defenses, and had argued that Trump would not have hired Michael Cohen, whom he reimbursed for the Stormy Daniels hush money payment while in office, had he not become president. Because of that, Trump’s attorney’s claimed, his actions concerning Cohen were “connected or associated” with his official duties as POTUS. And if that sounds like a completely ridiculous argument to you, you’re not alone. “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was purely a personal item of the President — a cover-up of an embarrassing event. Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts,” Hellerstein wrote in his ruling. “Falsifying business records to hide such reimbursement, and to transform the reimbursement into a business expense for Trump and income to Cohen, likewise does not relate to a presidential duty.” Trump is scheduled to go to trial in March. | Explicit |
A 63-year-old moviegoer was brutally beaten by a man who was sitting in the victim’s reserved VIP seat, according to southeast Florida police.
Security video from inside the AMC Pompano Beach 18 cinema last week shows an older man and his wife approach a younger man and his female companion inside a largely empty theater shortly before 10 p.m.
“According to the preliminary investigation, the victim politely asked the subject to move from their seats,” which the victim had reserved, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. “Witnesses said that’s when the subject became hostile, standing up and aggressively getting in the victim’s face.”
The victim moved backwards as the suspect seemingly became more aggressive, causing the older man to fall into an aisle stairway. The man accused of planting himself in the victim’s reserved seats then let loose on the fallen man, pounding him with a barrage of blows that prompted witnesses to rush toward the violence and break up the drubbing.
“The victim suffered several injuries to his head and face,” police said. “He was transported to a local hospital to receive treatment.”
Law enforcement is now hoping someone who sees video of the alleged assailant and his associate leaving the theaters on July 10 will recognize the suspect and phone in a tip. | Explicit |
Atmore, Alabama — Alabama executed a man on Friday for the 2001 beating death of a woman as the state resumed lethal injections following a pause to review procedures., 64, was pronounced dead at 1:56 a.m. after receiving a lethal injection at a south Alabama prison.
Barber was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2001 beating death of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps. Prosecutors said Barber, a handyman, confessed to killing Epps with a claw hammer and fleeing with her purse. Jurors voted 11-1 to recommend a death sentence, which a judge imposed.
It was the first execution carried out in Alabama this year after the state halted executions last fall. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced a pause on executions in November to conduct an internal review of procedures.
The move came after the state halted two lethal injections because of difficulties inserting IVs into the condemned men's veins. Advocacy groups claimed a third execution, carried out after a delay because of IV problems, was botched, a claim the state has disputed.
Barber's attorneys unsuccessfully asked the courts to block the execution, saying the state has a pattern of failing "to carry out a lethal injection execution in a constitutional manner."
The state asked the courts to let the execution proceed.
"Mrs. Epps and her family have waited for justice for twenty-two years," the Alabama attorney general's office wrote in a court filing.
Attorneys for inmate Alan Miller said prison staff poked him with needles for over an hour as they unsuccessfully tried to connect an IV line to him and at one point left him hanging vertically on a gurney during his. State officials called off the November after they were unsuccessful in connecting the second of two required lines.
Ivey announced in February that the state was resuming executions. Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said prison system had added to its pool of medical professionals, ordered new equipment and conducted additional rehearsals.
Attorneys for Barber had argued that his execution "will likely be botched in the same manner as the prior three."
The Supreme Court denied Barber's request for a stay without comment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the decision in a writing joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
"The Eighth Amendment demands more than the State's word that this time will be different. The Court should not allow Alabama to test the efficacy of its internal review by using Barber as its 'guinea pig,'" Sotomayor wrote.
State officials wrote that the previous executions were called off because of a "confluence of events-including health issues specific to the individual inmates and last-minute litigation brought by the inmates that dramatically shortened the window for ADOC officials to conduct the executions."
In the hours leading up to the scheduled execution, Barber had 22 visitors and two phone calls, a prison spokesperson said. Barber ate a final meal of loaded hashbrowns, western omelet, spicy sausage and toast.
One of the changes Alabama made following the internal review was to give the state more time to carry out executions. The Alabama Supreme Court did away with its customary midnight deadline to get an execution underway in order to give the state more time to establish an IV line and battle last-minute legal appeals.
for more features. | Explicit |
WASHINGTON – An Arkansas truck driver who beat a police officer with a flagpole attached to an American flag during the U.S. Capitol riot was sentenced Monday to more than four years in prison.
Peter Francis Stager struck the Metropolitan Police Department officer with his flagpole at least three times as other rioters pulled the officer, head first, into the crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The bruised officer was among more than 100 police officers injured during the riot.
Stager also stood over and screamed profanities at another officer, who was seriously injured when several other rioters dragged him into the mob and beat him, according to federal prosecutors.
After the beatings, Stager was captured on video saying, “Every single one of those Capitol law enforcement officers, death is the remedy. That is the only remedy they get.”
U.S. Judge Rudolph Contreras sentenced Stager to four years and four months in prison, according to a spokesperson for the prosecutors' office.
Stager, 44, of Conway, Arkansas, pleaded guilty in February to a felony charge of assaulting police with a dangerous weapon.
Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of six years and six months.
Stager assaulted the officer during one of the most violent episodes of Jan. 6 — a battle between rioters and police guarding an entrance to the Capitol building in a tunnel on the Lower West Terrace.
Stager's actions at the Capitol “were the epitome of disrespect for the law,” prosecutors said in a court filing.
“Stager joined a prolonged, multi-assailant attack on police officers, which resulted in injuries to the officers," they wrote. "Stager himself wielded a flagpole and used it to strike at a vulnerable officer, who, lying face down in a mob of rioters had no means of defending himself.”
Stager's truck driving job took him to Washington, D.C., on the day before then-President Donald Trump's “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6. Stager stayed overnight to attend Trump's rally after delivering a load of produce, a decision that he will regret for the rest of his life, his lawyers said in a court filing.
Stager's attorneys say he tried to help others in the crowd who were injured after the riot erupted. Shocked by what he saw, Stager had “reached his breaking point” and was “seeing red” when he picked up a flag on the ground, they said.
“Once the adrenaline wore off, Mr. Stager immediately called his wife to tell her he was horrified by his actions and that he was going to turn himself in upon returning to Arkansas,” his lawyers wrote.
More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol riot. Over 620 of them have pleaded guilty. Approximately 100 others have been convicted by juries or judges after trials. Nearly 600 have been sentenced, with over half receiving terms of imprisonment ranging from three days to 18 years.
Stager was indicted with eight other defendants on charges related to the tunnel battle. Four of his co-defendants also have pleaded guilty to assault charges.
Florida resident Mason Courson was sentenced in June to four years and nine months in prison. Michigan resident Justin Jersey was sentenced in February to four years and three months in prison. Michigan construction worker Logan Barnhart was sentenced in April to three years in prison. Georgia business owner Jack Wade Whitton is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 16. | Explicit |
Body camera footage shows a police officer in Ohio releasing a K-9 dog on a truck driver despite commands to stop the dog from at least one state trooper. The dog was released as the man, who is Black, appeared to be surrendering after a chase earlier this month.
The incident, captured on the morning of July 4, is now being investigated by U.S., state and local police in Ohio.
State troopers say they were attempting to inspect a semi-truck on I-35 in Ohio, noticing a missing rear mud flap. The truck's driver, 23-year-old Jadarrius Rose, didn't pull over, leading to a pursuit with multiple police cruisers.
Eventually, Rose did stop, but when officers exited their vehicles with guns drawn, he pulled away, tearing his left tire by speeding through a spike strip, effectively ending the chase.
Body cam footage shows Rose then exiting the vehicle and seemingly complying with officers' instructions, with his hands up. A state trooper can be heard telling the local Circleville police not to release their K-9 onto Rose, saying, "Do not release the dog with his hands up! Do not release the dog with his hands up!"
Despite at least one warning, an officer released the dog and it bit Rose, holding its grip for over 30 seconds while Rose screamed for officers to intervene.
An officer can be heard yelling, "Get the dog off of him!" The dog was eventually pulled away from Rose, who was then handcuffed before officers called for first aid. He was bleeding heavily and taken to a local hospital.
Rose was later jailed for three days before being released.
Brian Higgins, a professor at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, said part of the problem appeared to be miscommunication between state and local police.
"When you have other agencies ... that then descend on the incident, they have to be in some sort of agreement as to what the use of force practices will be," said Higgins.
Both the Ohio State Highway Patrol and the Circleville Police Department say an investigation is underway into what happened.
The Circleville police would not respond to questions about whether the officer who released the dog onto Rose has been placed on leave.
for more features. | Explicit |
A video showing two women being paraded naked by a mob in the violence-hit northeastern state of Manipur has sparked outrage in India.
The police say they have opened a case of gang rape and have arrested a man, adding that others will be held soon.
This is also likely to dominate discussions in the parliament's monsoon session, which begins on Thursday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi also said the incident had "shamed India" and that "no guilty will be spared".
"I assure the nation, the law will take its course with all its might. What happened with the daughters of Manipur can never be forgiven," he said, finally breaking his silence on Manipur more than two months after violence began.
The Supreme Court also expressed its concern over the assault. Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud said the court was "really disturbed over the video" and asked the government to take action.
Police say the assault on the women took place on 4 May but it made national headlines on Thursday after the video started going viral on social media. The federal government has asked all social media companies to delete the video from their platforms.
At least 130 have died and tens of thousands have been displaced since ethnic clashes started in May in Manipur.
Clashes broke out between the Meitei and Kuki communities after the Meiteis - the state's main ethnic group - demanded tribal status which gives access to benefits such as forest land and government job and education quotas.
Some 60,000 have become refugees in their own land. Opposition politicians have criticised PM Modi for not visiting the state or speaking about the violence in Manipur so far.
The horrific video of the two women was widely shared on social media on Wednesday. It shows them being dragged and groped by a mob of men who then push them into a field.
The Indigenous Tribal Leaders' Forum (ITLF) said in a statement that the atrocities had been committed in a village in Kangpokpi district against women from the Kuki-Zo tribal community. It also alleged that the women had been gang raped.
'This shouldn't be happening in modern India': By Geeta Pandey, BBC News, Delhi
It's well known that women's bodies often become a battleground during riots and conflicts, and rape and sexual assault are used as instruments of violence to punish them.
The sexual assault of a Kuki mother and daughter duo, who were stripped naked and paraded while being groped and molested by a mob of men in Manipur, is the latest example of that.
The video footage showing the women weeping, wincing in pain and begging their attackers to show some mercy is disturbing to watch.
The fact that the first arrest has been made only after the outrage in the case that happened 78 days ago and was reported to the police more than two months back doesn't inspire much confidence in the administration - more so since many of the men are clearly identifiable in the footage.
But the massive outrage that has followed the video's emergence in India has put the spotlight on the horrific crime. It has also raised questions about the failure of the state in comforting the survivors - and finally forced Mr Modi to make a statement on the ethnic violence.
To restore some sort of confidence in the people of violence-torn Manipur, especially the minority Kuki community, the authorities must now act swiftly against the perpetrators of the horrific assault and bring justice to the women. This should not be happening in modern India.
"The gang rape of the women happened after the village was burnt down and two men - one middle-aged and another a teenager - were beaten to death by the mob," the ITLF said.
Police said that the incident took place on 4 May and that a case of abduction and gang rape and murder had been registered against "unknown armed miscreants" at Thoubal district.
The police added that they were making an "all out effort to arrest the culprits at the earliest".
The incident has sparked strong reactions from politicians across the spectrum.
Federal minister Smriti Irani, called the incident "condemnable and downright inhuman". She also said that she had spoken to Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh, who informed her that investigations were underway and that "no effort will be spared to bring perpetrators to justice".
Several opposition leaders also criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party government for not doing enough to quell the violence in the state.
Congress party leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadhra said that the "images of sexual violence against women from Manipur are heart wrenching", adding that women and children face the maximum brunt of violence in society.
She asked why the federal government and the prime minister "were sitting blindly on the violent actions in Manipur".
"Do such images and violent incidents not disturb them?" she tweeted.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also condemned the incident. "This kind of heinous act cannot be tolerated in the Indian society," he said.
"The situation in Manipur is becoming very worrying. I appeal to the prime minister to pay attention to the situation in Manipur. Please take strict action against the culprits seen in the video of this incident. There should be no place for people of such criminal nature in India," he tweeted.
BBC News India is now on YouTube. Click here to subscribe and watch our documentaries, explainers and features. | Explicit |
AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Security will be heightened ahead of Thursday night's opening Women's World Cup game after a gunman killed two people at a downtown construction site in Auckland, roughly 12 hours ahead of co-host New Zealand's match against Norway.
Norway's team hotel was located within a short distance of the shooting, which occurred in the tourist area of the city near the harbor ferry terminal. Norway captain Maren Mjelde said teammates were awakened by a helicopter hovering outside the hotel.
“We felt safe the whole time,” Mjelde said in a statement. “FIFA has a good security system at the hotel, and we have our own security officer in the squad. Everyone seems calm and we are preparing as normal for the game tonight.”
Officials from Eden Park, where the game was scheduled to be played following an opening ceremony for the tournament, encouraged ticket holders to arrive to the stadium early.
“There will be an increased security presence within the precinct and across the venue. Additional traffic management measures are in place,” Eden Park said.
The shooting happened early Thursday morning at the start of rush hour in New Zealand's largest city. The gunman was armed with a pump-action shotgun, said New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. He added police arrived 1 minute after the first emergency call and had run straight into harm’s way to save the lives of others.
The gunman was found dead in an elevator, said Acting Police Superintendent Sunny Patel.
In addition to the three dead, at least six others were injured, officials said.
“New Zealand Football are shocked by the incident in Auckland CBD this morning,” the team said in a statement. “We can confirm that all of the Football Ferns team and staff are safe.”
Although Hipkins said his attendance of the opening match was now “under review” he said the tournament would go on as planned.
“Clearly with the FIFA World Cup kicking off this evening, there are a lot of eyes on Auckland,” Hipkins said. “The government has spoken to FIFA organizers this morning and the tournament will proceed as planned. I want to reiterate that there is no wider national security threat. This appears to be the action of one individual.”
Tourism New Zealand canceled a welcome party, which was scheduled to be held Thursday afternoon at a location within the cordoned off area that included many hotels in which participating teams are being housed.
The United States women's team hotel is also located in the vicinity of the shooting and the team said in a statement it was "saddened by the inexcusable loss of life to gun violence, and our thoughts are with the people of Auckland/Tamaki Makaurau and Aotearoa New Zealand.”
The month-long, 32-team tournament is being co-hosted by New Zealand and Australia, where the final will be staged on Aug. 20. There are strict gun laws in both countries, and fatal shootings are rare.
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families in these difficult times. As a peace-loving nation, we stand with New Zealand in solidarity," Football Australia's head of marketing and communications Peter Filopoulos said. "The situation seems to be contained now, thanks to NZ authorities. This incident is unrelated to the Women’s World Cup. Stay safe everyone.”
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AP Sports Writer Steve McMorran contributed from Wellington, New Zealand.
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AP World Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/world-cup and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports | Explicit |
More than two months after three women were stripped and paraded by a mob in violence-hit Manipur, police said they have registered a case of gang-rape and abduction, and would soon make arrests. It is among the first cases of sexual violence to be reported and which is being followed up with police action after the clashes in the State started on May 3.
A video clip of the incident surfaced on social media on Wednesday. The Indigenous Tribal Leaders’ Forum (ITLF) said in a statement that the ordeal suffered by the women is amplified by the perpetrators’ decision to share the video on social media revealing the identity of the victims. Two of the women are seen in the clip.
The incident is alleged to have taken place on May 4 at Nongpok Sekmai in Thoubal district when the three women were trying to escape a violent mob that had attacked their village in Kangpokpi district. A police source said that on May 18, a zero First Information Report (FIR) was registered at Kangpokpi police station, which has now been transferred to Thoubal, the place of incident. A zero FIR is registered irrespective of the jurisdiction or area power of the police.
One of the women was raped, the FIR said. The father and brother of the rape survivor were killed by the mob, according to a complaint filed by the village head. The complaint said the brother, aged 19, was killed while trying to protect his sister from the mob. Charges of murder have also been added.
The FIR stated that five villagers, including the three women, fearing for their lives had fled towards a forest and had been rescued by the police. However, the mob of around 900-1,000 men, some of them carrying sophisticated weapons, blocked the police team and snatched the five from the custody of the police, the FIR said.
The zero FIR was transferred to Thoubal police on June 21. It has been more than a month that a regular FIR was registered, but no arrests have been made.
A statement by the Manipur police said, “In regard to the viral videos of two women paraded naked by unknown armed miscreants on May 4, a case of abduction, gang-rape and murder etc. was registered against unknown armed miscreants and the investigation has been started. The State Police is making all-out effort to arrest the culprits at the earliest.”
The State government imposed an indefinite curfew in the five valley districts of Imphal East, Imphal West, Bishnupur, Kakching, and Thoubal districts on Wednesday after a protest march was planned by women’s group.
Hoihnu Hauzel, a Manipuri journalist, said on Twitter, “The women were paraded naked, fondled and beaten in full public glare. A disturbing video taken by a perpetrator leaked and got viral today. This breaks all level of humanity.”
Two more tactical headquarters
Meanwhile the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has deployed two senior officers from Nagaland and Assam to oversee the existing and additional companies deployed in Manipur in “view of present security situation.” It created two tactical headquarters in Kangpokpi and Jiribam districts, other than the one in Imphal.
The order said, “In view of the present security scenario in the State of Manipur and increased level of CRPF deployment, supervision of senior officers of the level of Deputy Inspector General across strategic places of the State has been felt essential and crucial. Accordingly, to have effective control and supervision over the existing and additional companies deployed in Manipur, DIG Ops (Operations) Kohima and DIG Silchar are temporarily placed in Manipur with immediate effect.”
Other than the State police, 124 companies of Central Armed Police Force (CAPF) and 184 columns of the Army has been deployed in the State.
Internet has been suspended in Manipur since May 3, when ethnic violence between the Kuki and Meitei communities erupted in the State. More than 140 people have been killed and over 54,000 people displaced in the ongoing violence. | Explicit |
The Women’s World Cup soccer tournament kicked off in New Zealand Thursday evening with amped-up security after a deadly shooting about 12 hours earlier.
Two people plus the suspect died in the shooting at a construction site in downtown Auckland, near a touristed area, the harbor ferry terminal, and close to team Norway’s hotel.
All players were safe and accounted for, and the shooting was an isolated incident, New Zealand authorities said.
Nonetheless, spectators for the first match, between Norway and New Zealand, were encouraged to arrive early. Officials closed most of the roads around the stadium in Eden Park hours ahead of the game.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Secretary-General Fatma Samoura were coordinating closely with local authorities and participating teams in the vicinity, the soccer organization said in a statement.
A welcome party that was to be hosted by Tourism New Zealand on Thursday afternoon was canceled, since the venue fell within the area that was cordoned off after the tragic incident, near the hotels housing several teams.
The Pinstripe Express
The gunman had began blasting away with a shotgun just before 7:30 a.m. local time, according to emergency calls that flooded in. Police arrived minutes later, running toward the gunfire, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said in a statement.
Six people were wounded, including a police officer, before the suspect barricaded himself in an elevator, where he was later found dead after a shootout with police, Acting Police Superintendent Sunny Patel said. It was not clear whether the gunman died by his own hand or by a police bullet.
Anofficer was hospitalized in critical condition and had since been upgraded to stable, New Zealand police said on Twitter.
Before match, which saw New Zealand win over Norway 1-0, the players held a moment of silence.
U.S. women’s national team players were among the many expressing condolences, saying the incident had brought them together in mutual focus on life.
“There wasn’t really a conversation had. Unfortunately, I feel like in the U.S. we’ve dealt with this far too many times,” USWNT forward Lynn Williams said at a news conference, according to ESPN. “But there was definitely a sense of, like, ‘let’s come together, we still have a job to do,’ but also recognizing that there were lives lost, and that is very real and very devastating.”
With News Wire Services | Explicit |
Biden to establish national monument honoring Emmett Till
President Biden will reportedly sign a proclamation on Tuesday to establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black teenager whose lynching in 1955 galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.
The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will span three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, marking locations that are central to Till’s story, according to The Associated Press.
“The new monument will protect places that tell the story of Emmett Till’s too-short life and racially-motivated murder, the unjust acquittal of his murderers, and the activism of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who courageously brought the world’s attention to the brutal injustices and racism of the time, catalyzing the civil rights movement,” a White House official told CNN.
It will include the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till’s mother held an open-casket funeral to display her son’s brutalized body.
Graball Landing in Tallahatchie County, Miss., where Till’s body is believed to have been pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., where Till’s murderers were acquitted, will also be part of the monument.
Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1955, when he was kidnapped, beaten and shot for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were found not guilty of Till’s murder by an all-white jury in September 1955. However, they later admitted to the killing in an interview with Look Magazine, notes the AP.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | Explicit |
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BRUSSELS (AP) — A jury on Tuesday found six people guilty of terrorist murder for extremist attacks in Brussels in 2016 that killed 32 people and were claimed by the Islamic State group, in Belgium’s deadliest peacetime violence, according to Belgian media.
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Among those convicted for their role in the suicide bombings at Brussels’ airport and a subway station was Salah Abdeslam, who already is serving a life sentence without parole in France over his role in attacks that hit Paris cafes, the Bataclan theatre and France’s national stadium in 2015.
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The verdict was reported by public broadcaster RTBF, newspaper Le Soir and news websites HLN and Nieuwsblad.
The chief judge read out the verdict and explanations by the 12-person jury, who made a clear connection to IS and its extremist ideology. The reading of the verdict was expected to take a few hours. Sentencing will be decided in a separate process, not before September.
In addition to the six people convicted of terrorist murder, four others on trial were acquitted or facing other charges.
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The biggest trial in Belgium’s judicial history unfolded over seven months in a special court to address the exceptional case. Survivors and families of victims hoped the trial and verdict would help them work through what happened and find closure.
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The morning rush hour attacks on March 22, 2016, at Zavantem Airport and on the Brussels subway’s central commuter line deeply shook the city, which is home to the headquarters of the European Union and NATO, and put the country on edge. In addition to the 32 people killed, nearly 900 others were wounded or suffered serious mental trauma.
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Jamila Adda, president of the Life4Bruxelles victims’ association, gathered a group of survivors at the special courthouse to hear Tuesday’s verdict. Among them was a man named Frederic, who said the ”atrocious crimes” of March 22 still haunt him.
“We have been waiting for this for seven years, seven years that weighed heavily on the victims. … We are waiting with impatience, and with some anguish” for the verdict, he told The Associated Press. Frederic, among the commuters who survived the attack at the Maelbeek metro station, spoke on condition that his last name not be published to protect his identity as a victim of trauma.
Survivors have supported each other through the proceedings, some coming every day. “It is important to be together, to hear the decision of justice,” Frederic said. And then, they hope “to be able to turn the page.”
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The 12 jurors had been deliberating since early July over some 300 questions the court asked them to consider before reaching a verdict. Tuesday’s expected decision will address whether or not each of the suspects is guilty of various charges. and may take several hours to be read out.
Eventual sentencing will be decided in a separate process. If convicted, some could face up to 30 years in prison.
Abdeslam was the only survivor among the Islamic State extremists who struck Paris in November 2015 and were part of a Franco-Belgian network that went on to target Brussels four months later. After months on the run following the Paris attacks, Abdeslam was captured in Brussels on March 18, 2016, and his arrest may have prompted other members of the IS cell to rush ahead with attack plans on the Belgian capital.
Also convicted of terrorist murder at the trial in Brussels was Mohamed Abrini, childhood friend of Abdeslam and a Brussels native who walked away from Zaventem airport after his explosives failed to detonate.
Oussama Atar, who has been identified as a possible organizer of the deadly attacks on both Paris and Brussels, was convicted of terrorist murder in absentia. He is believed to have died in the Islamic State group’s final months of fighting in Iraq and Syria. | Explicit |
By Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.EURACTIV.es Est. 5min 21-07-2023 Content-Type: News News Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. “We cannot call everything a marriage (because if we do so) tomorrow we could also call marriage a union of a person with a cat”, Latorre told the local website Enciende Cuenca in an interview, quoted by EURACTIV’s partner EFE. [Shutterstock/Alexandre Rotenberg] EURACTIV is part of the Trust Project >>> Print Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram One cannot call marriage a union of two people of the same sex, it would be more appropriate to define it as a union between a person and an animal, Mariano Latorre, candidate of the far-right VOX – party in the province of Cuenca (centre-south) said on Thursday, two days ahead of Spain’s general elections. The issue of LGBTQ+ rights has been at the centre of the political parties’ attention during the campaign for the general elections and has also been one of the most controversial issues in the three election debates that have been held on the Iberian country’s television, the last of them on Wednesday evening. “We cannot call everything a marriage (because if we do so) tomorrow we could also call marriage a union of a person with a cat”, Latorre told the local website Enciende Cuenca in an interview, quoted by EURACTIV’s partner EFE. Following the offensive comments by VOX’s candidate for the province of Cuenca, the president of the socialist party (PSOE/S&D) in the region, Sergio Gutiérrez, has called for the urgent resignation of the “ultra” politician. Without your ‘own’ children there can be no ‘marriage’ “Marriage, as its own name indicates, is a union of a man and a woman that is supposed to bring with it an offspring”, explained the VOX politician in the interview, in which he also touched upon other controversial issues like immigration – echoing other ideologically related parties, like Meloni’s Fratelli D’Italia. “When in Spain, in the 1940s, there was very strong immigration to other European countries, like Germany, France. The Spaniards who entered did not arrive, throwing acid in the face of the policemen to enter through the border. They didn’t arrive stealing, raping women, occupying houses”, Latorre stated. These Spanish immigrants adapted to the customs of the countries where they settled to live, “they worked, paid their taxes and were welcome,” he added. “We do the same, anyone who comes here legally, who knocks on our door and who adapts to our way of life or, at least, who is compatible with it, is welcome, particularly if they work and contribute” to Spanish society, Latorre added. According to the local branch of PSOE, the VOX candidate should not be allowed to participate in Sunday’s elections. His insulting and degrading words disqualify him from taking part in democratic elections, the socialist party claims. Meanwhile, Gutiérrez pointed out that responsibility does not only lie with VOX but “also with the PP (centre-right Partido Popular)” as it is (PP/EPP) “an ally of the far-right-wing party”. In Gutiérrez’s words, this is a clear example “of what the next four years could mean for the Spanish people” if Partido Popular, currently the main opposition force, and Vox forge a coalition to govern at the national level. A VOX deputy PM? In addition, he called it “intolerable” that a person who thinks this way and makes these statements should be allowed to be a candidate for a political party in Spain. If both the PP and Vox have “a minimum of democratic conscience or ethical convictions”, they should request the immediate resignation of VOX’s head of the list in Cuenca. “It is humiliating that there are candidates (…) aspiring to (become) deputies (at the national level) who think that there are homosexuals who can be dogs”, the socialist politician added. Spain’s general elections on Sunday could radically change the country’s political map. The polls point to a victory for the PP, which, if it does not obtain an absolute hierarchy of 176 seat majority (176 seats out of 350), would have to make a pact with VOX, as it has already done at the regional and municipal levels after the local elections held on 28 May. If the PP, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo and VOX, led by Abascal, manage to govern, it would be an unprecedented and historic event as it would be the first time in more than 40 years that far-right ministers – or even an “ultra” deputy prime minister- would enter a national government in Spain. The question remains whether the progressive bloc forged by Sánchez and Diaz’s Sumar platform will win more seats than the right-wing and far-right bloc combined. If they succeed, they could re-edit a new left-wing alliance to govern the country for another four years. (Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.EURACTIV.es) Read more with EURACTIV Estonia blocks EU Parliament seat allocation deal Print Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Topics Politics The Capitals | Explicit |
A fight between two groups inside a Walmart in a Miami suburb erupted in gunfire Wednesday afternoon, leaving one man dead, Miami-Dade police said. A suspect has been taken into custody.
The shooting, which sent panicked shoppers running for safety, occurred at a Walmart in Florida City shortly before 3 p.m. local time. A police spokesperson said a fight broke out between two groups of about three people, during which someone took out a gun and opened fire.
Investigators said one man, who had been involved in the altercation, died from his gunshot wounds after being flown to a local hospital. He was not immediately identified.
"As soon as you hear those four bangs, screaming, it was like a stampede of people running," one woman told CBS Miami.
Another man who sustained a gunshot wound to the foot during the ordeal was believed to be an innocent bystander and a woman suffered a head injury while trying to run from the scene, police said.
Officials said five other people were treated at the scene and released.
It's unclear what initially prompted the altercation. Police did not immediately identify the suspect who was taken in custody.
Police said they were also searching for four other people who were involved in the fight but had fled the area. Miami-Dade police and Florida City police are investigating.
In a written statement provided to CBS News Miami, Walmart said that it was "deeply saddened by what took place in our Florida City store, and our thoughts are with the victim's loved ones. The store is closed at this time. We will work closely with local law enforcement through the course of their investigation and will refer further questions to police."
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As the threat of a third indictment looms, Donald Trump reposted a threatening video message on Truth Social from a verified MAGA account on Thursday—the same day a federal grand jury convened to determine whether to charge the ex-president over Jan. 6. “If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before,” Trump is heard saying in the 9-second-long clip. Dramatic music plays in the background as a black-and-white photo of Trump zooms out and his 2024 campaign logo appears. While the audio itself is from a 2020 conversation about Iran, the message seems to target special counsel Jack Smith, one of Trump’s current biggest foes. Earlier this week, Trump lost his mind after prosecutors warned him that he is the target of another criminal investigation. On Truth Social, Trump declared it was “HORRIFYING NEWS for our Country” and labeled Smith as “deranged.
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Rapist David Goodwillie's new team have said they will not walk away from the player despite council criticism.
Goodwillie, who was ruled to be a rapist in a civil case, recently played for Glasgow United FC in a friendly.
Glasgow City Council threatened to bar the club from its training facility, however the club said there had been a "witch hunt" against the player.
Rape Crisis Scotland said the club had sent a "clear message of disregard" to survivors of rape and sexual violence.
Glasgow United FC has not confirmed if Goodwillie has been signed.
Council leader Susan Aitken said the ex-Dundee United, Aberdeen and Blackburn player had not shown "any kind of contrition or remorse" for his actions and warned any club that signed him would send "a very clear statement about its attitude to the safety of women and girls".
However a spokesperson for Glasgow United FC, which is based in Shettleston, told BBC Scotland the club would not walk away from him "like every other club".
They said: "David Goodwillie has never been charged for this offence. He has no criminal record and has never appeared on any offenders register.
"How can he show contrite or remorse for something he staunchly claims he did not do?"
They added: "We do a lot of work in our community helping those in need and this is only an extension of that work.
"We are supporting David with his mental health and will continue to do so. This witch hunt has gone on for far to long and the use of any person's life as a political football is unacceptable."
Ninth-tier Glasgow United train twice a week at council-owned Greenfield Football Centre but play their home games at the nearby Greenfield Park stadium.
In a statement released on Sunday, Ms Aitken she had asked city official to "look at" the local authority's agreement over access to Greenfield Football Centre.
Glasgow United is part of Shettleston Community Sports Trust, which runs the centre on a rolling licence from Glasgow Life - a charity that runs libraries, museums and sports facilities for the council.
Rape Crisis Scotland said it was "deeply disappointed" by the club's decision to play Goodwillie.
A spokeswoman said: "David Goodwillie has been found by a senior judge to be a rapist. Footballers are role models - particularly for young people - and it's not okay to have someone in this position who has been found to be a rapist."
Glasgow United, who play in the West of Scotland third division, selected Goodwillie to play in a match against West of Scotland Premier Division side Pollok on July 12 but lost 7-0.
A few days later, Goodwillie spoke out for the first time since the 2017 ruling on the Anything Goes podcast by Scottish actor James English.
The footballer said he did not feel like he has had justice and that both parties had been left in limbo.
In 2017, Goodwillie and former Dundee United teammate David Robertson were ordered to pay £100,000 in damages after a judge ruled they raped a woman at a flat in Armadale, West Lothian, in 2011.
Neither faced a criminal trial over the rape accusation after prosecutors said there was not enough evidence.
Robertson retired from football aged 30 in the days after the ruling, while Goodwillie left English side Plymouth Argyle by "mutual agreement".
However, the forward soon signed with Scottish League One side Clyde, who he played for more than 100 times and captained before leaving in 2022.
Raith Rovers sparked outrage by signing Goodwillie in January 2022 and a loan move back to Clyde also collapsed.
Rape Crisis Scotland described the Raith Rovers move as another "clear message of disregard" to survivors of rape and sexual violence.
The forward was released without playing a game in September 2022, with Raith Rovers admitting it "got it wrong" by signing him.
In February this year, Northern Premier League side Radcliffe FC, based in Bury, Greater Manchester, released the striker after one game following a public outcry.
Four months later, Goodwillie's contract with Australian semi-professional club Sorrento FC was rescinded. The club apologised to anyone "that may have been caused offence by his signing". | Explicit |
SHREVEPORT, La. -- State prosecutors have added a second felony charge against a former Louisiana police officer accused of fatally shooting an unarmed Black man earlier this year.
The second criminal charge of felony malfeasance was added Monday as former Shreveport officer Alexander Tyler, who is white, was arraigned on charges of shooting Alonzo Bagley at an apartment complex in February. Tyler and another officer were responding to a report by Bagley's wife of a domestic disturbance.
Tyler pleaded not guilty to first-degree negligent homicide and felony malfeasance.
Body camera footage shows officers knocking on Bagley’s door, Bagley retreating into his apartment, and then jumping off a second-floor balcony. The video shows Tyler catching Bagley and shooting him once in the chest, and then officers begging him to stay alive while trying to administer first aid.
Tyler was charged with negligent homicide on Feb. 16 by the Louisiana State Police, about two weeks after the shooting. State police typically investigate shootings involving police officers in Louisiana.
“These charges are extremely disappointing," Dhu Thompson, Tyler's defense lawyer, said Monday. "However, we have been prepared since day one to bring the case and facts therein to an impartial jury. We look forward to our day in court.”
Both negligent homicide and malfeasance in office carry sentences of up to 5 years in prison.
Relatives of Bagley have filed a $10 million lawsuit against Tyler, who had been an officer for about two years before he resigned in March.
Family members hired Louisiana attorney Ronald Haley, who has represented other high-profile clients, including the family of Ronald Greene, a Black motorist whose 2019 death in state police custody in north Louisiana prompted lawsuits and criminal charges against law enforcement officers. | Explicit |
Country music star Jason Aldean 's latest music video for “Try That In A Small Town," lasted just one weekend on Country Music Television before the network pulled it in response to an outcry over historically charged references.
In the video, Aldean — who has been awarded county music artist of the decade by the Academy of Country Music — performs in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. This is the site of the 1946 Columbia race riot and the 1927 mob lynching of an 18-year-old Black teenager named Henry Choate.
Aldean's video, which was released Friday, July 14, has received fervent criticism online, with some claiming the visual is a “dog whistle” and others labeling it “pro-lynching.”
Interspersed between performance footage of Aldean are news clips of violent riots and flag burning. A Fox News chyron reads: “State of emergency declared in Georgia."
“Cuss out a cop, spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, ya think you’re tough,” Aldean, who is from the city of Macon, Georgia, sings. "Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up / Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck / Try that in a small town."
Aldean has long identified as conservative, and has been a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump.
The video and its subsequent removal from CMT quickly blew up into one of the periodic culture war clashes, with several conservative figures speaking out in favor of Aldean — including Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Colorado Republican firebrand, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert.
This isn't the first time Aldean has been at the center of controversy. In 2015, he made headlines for dressing as rapper Lil Wayne as a Halloween costume, wearing blackface makeup and a wig with dreadlocks.
And in 2017, the country singer was on stage at the Route 91 Festival in Las Vegas during the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Over the years, Aldean has given conflicting statements about his stance on U.S. gun laws, though his music celebrates gun ownership.
“It’s too easy to get guns, first and foremost,” he told The Associated Press after the Las Vegas shooting. “When you can walk in somewhere and you can get one in 5 minutes, do a background check that takes 5 minutes, like how in-depth is that background check? Those are the issues I have. It’s not necessarily the guns themselves or that I don’t think people should have guns. I have a lot of them.”
“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests," Aldean said on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon. "These references are not only meritless, but dangerous."
“My political views have never been something I’ve hidden from” and that the song is about a desire to “get back to a sense of normalcy,” he wrote on Twitter.
A CMT spokesperson did not immediately respond to AP's request for comment. | Explicit |
Kevin Spacey has been cleared of sexual assault in one of the UK’s most high-profile #MeToo trials.
The 64-year-old Oscar-winning actor wept as he was found not guilty on Wednesday of sexually assaulting four men after a four-week trial at Southwark crown court.
Wearing a dark suit, pink shirt and burgundy pocket square and tie, Spacey looked to his legal team as jurors cleared him of all nine sex offences against four men over nine years.
The Hollywood star had denied the charges – claiming the allegations against him were “madness”, “absolute bollocks” and a “stab in the back”. He claimed the men were financially motivated and that one victim was after “money, money, and then money”.
The judge, Mr Justice Mark Wall, praised the lawyers in the case and said: “The defendant may be discharged.”
Spacey appeared emotional and hugged his legal team after he was discharged on his birthday.
The actor, who stood trial under his full name, Kevin Spacey Fowler, was found not guilty of nine sexual offences against four men in their 20s and 30s, between 2004 and 2013.
The prosecutor, Christine Agnew KC, accused Spacey of being a “sexual bully” who exploited his fame and power to abuse the complainants.
Jurors rejected the prosecution’s claims that Spacey had “aggressively” grabbed three men by the crotch and had performed a sex act on an aspiring actor while he was asleep in his flat.
Spacey told the court that he had consensual sexual encounters with a driver and the aspiring actor, and that he may have made “a clumsy pass” at a man at a party in the Cotswolds. But he rejected claims that he had grabbed a man’s crotch “like a cobra” at a West End theatre in the mid-2000s, telling jurors: “It never happened.”
In his evidence, Spacey gave jurors an insight into his relationship with famous faces and name-dropped fellow actors including Jack Lemmon, Val Kilmer, Richard Harris and Joan Collins.
He also recounted showbiz anecdotes including buying Dame Judi Dench a ping-pong table and purchasing “the most expensive Mini Cooper ever” at a charity auction hosted by Elton John. John and his husband David Furnish were called as defence witnesses in the trial.
Spacey had previously denied 12 charges – seven sexual assaults, three indecent assaults, one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.
A further charge of indecent assault was added mid-trial, taking to 13 the total number of alleged offences listed on the indictment.
Last Wednesday, the four indecent assault charges were struck off by the judge due to a “legal technicality”.
The court heard that two of the complainants in the case were pursuing Spacey in the civil courts. | Explicit |
SILVER SPRING, Md. (AP) — A police officer in a Washington, D.C., suburb shot and killed a man after reports he had, without provocation, stabbed four people at random on Saturday, officials said.
The victims included three women — two were stabbed in the neck — and a man, all of whom are expected to survive, Montgomery County Police Assistant Chief Darren Francke told reporters during a Saturday afternoon news conference at the scene. Three were hospitalized with injuries.
The suspect’s identity has not been released.
Francke said the man used a 12-inch butcher knife in the stabbings, which started at a popular thrift store in Silver Spring, Maryland, and then continued in the surrounding neighborhood. While the investigation is ongoing, Francke said, detectives don’t believe the suspect knew any of the victims. He said the attacks appear “completely random.”
“We have witnesses. We are continuing our interviews, but at this point it was an unprovoked attack,” he said.
Police received reports around 10:35 a.m. of a stabbing at the thrift store. Almost simultaneously, another caller reported a second stabbing on a nearby street, according to police.
The suspect ran into a wooded area while police started setting up a perimeter. Francke said the man then came out of the woods and “confronted a police cruiser.” He said another officer soon arrived on scene, saw the man armed with a knife, gave commands and ultimately opened fire, killing the suspect.
“The officer fired multiple rounds and the subject was stopped from attacking further people,” Francke said.
The suspect died at the scene.
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office is investigating the police shooting, which is standard procedure under state law. That office will turn over the results of its investigation to local prosecutors, who will decide whether the officer could face criminal charges.
Officials said the shooting was captured on body camera and the footage will likely be released in the coming weeks, as well as the names of the officer and suspect.
Francke said the incident was out of character for the otherwise quiet suburban area.
“Montgomery County is a very safe community,” he said. “On a Saturday afternoon where folks are having a yard sale and just shopping at a very popular thrift store, we don’t expect this. We certainly don’t accept it.” | Explicit |
British indie band The 1975 have cut short a gig in Malaysia, claiming officials ordered them off stage for breaching the country's anti-LGBT laws.
The band were headlining the Good Vibes Festival in the capital Kuala Lumpur on Friday.
During the set, singer Matty Healy attacked the country's anti-LGBT laws before kissing bass player Ross MacDonald.
Homosexuality is illegal in Malaysia and punishable by 20 years in prison.
In footage shared online, Healy could be seen telling the crowd, in a profanity laden speech, that the band's decision to appear in Malaysia had been a "mistake".
"When we were booking shows, I wasn't looking into it," Healy said. "I don't see the [expletive] point, right, I do not see the point of inviting the 1975 to a country and then telling us who we can have sex with.
"Unfortunately you don't get a set of loads of uplifting songs because I'm [expletive] furious," the frontman continued. "And that's not fair on you, because you're not representative of your government. Because you're young people, and I'm sure a lot of you are gay and progressive and cool."
Healy and MacDonald then kissed as the band played the song I Like America & America Likes Me.
Soon after - just 30 minutes into the set - Healy and the band walked off stage, with the singer telling the audience: "Alright, we just got banned from Kuala Lumpur, see you later."
A source close to the 1975 confirmed the incident to the BBC.
"Matty has a long-time record of advocating for the LGBTQ+ community and the band wanted to stand up for their LGBTQ+ fans and community," the source said on Friday night.
In a short statement to local media, festival organisers said the band's set was stopped due to "non-compliance with local performance guidelines".
"Good Vibes Festival has always been dedicated to providing enjoyable music experiences, and we sincerely appreciate your continued support," the statement added. "Good Vibes Festival 2023 will proceed as scheduled, and we eagerly anticipate your presence on Saturday and Sunday."
Malaysia's Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil hit out at the band's performance on Twitter, calling it "very disrespectful". He added that he had contacted festival organisers and asked them to provide a full report.
Healy has previously used appearances on stage to highlight anti-LGBT laws.
In 2019 he invited a male fan on stage during a gig in Dubai to hug him, before sharing a quick kiss. The incident attracted criticism in the country, where homosexuality is punishable by 10 years imprisonment.
Posting on Twitter after the show, Healy said: "Thank you Dubai you were so amazing. I don't think we'll be allowed back due to my 'behaviour' but know that I love you and I wouldn't have done anything differently given the chance again."
Other performers at the Good Vibes Festival include the Strokes, Dermot Kennedy and Ty Dollar $ign. | Explicit |
A rare multiple shooting in the center of Auckland just hours before the opening of the Women’s World Cup rattled the city as tens of thousands gathered to watch New Zealand play Norway in the first game of the tournament.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins outlined details of the attack in a hastily called news conference, confirming that three people had died – including the gunman – and several others were injured.
Emergency services rushed to the city’s central business district just after 7 a.m. local time Thursday, after reports that a man armed with a pump action shotgun had opened fire on a construction site, he said.
“He moved through the building site discharging the firearm as he went,” Hipkins said. “Upon reaching the upper levels of the building, the man contained himself in an elevator. Shots were fired, and he was located a short time later.”
News footage showed heavily armed police dressed in body armour and carrying rifles flocking to the scene and cordoning off swathes of the business district.
Hipkins said the actions of the police officers who “ran into the gunfire, straight into harm’s way in order to save the lives of others” were “nothing short of heroic.”
New Zealand Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said one officer was shot as he attempted to engage the gunman, and four civilians had “moderate to critical injuries.”
Coster said the suspect was under home detention orders but had an exemption to work at the construction site where the shooting took place, and the incident was believed to be related to his work there.
The man had a “family violence history” but there was “nothing to suggest that he has presented a high level risk,” Coster said. He did not have a firearms license, Coster added.
New Zealand Police said the shooting did not pose a national security risk, as officials confirmed the Women’s World Cup opening ceremony and first game would go ahead as planned.
In a statement, FIFA said it extended “its deepest condolences to the families and friends of the victims”.
“FIFA has been informed that this was an isolated incident that was not related to football operations and the opening match tonight at Eden Park will proceed as planned,” the statement added.
However plans to show the match on a big screen at a fanzone in downtown Auckland were scrapped “out of deep respect to those who lost their lives,” the mayor’s office and Auckland Council said in a statement. The fan festival will open from midday Friday, the statement added.
Tourism New Zealand also canceled a welcome event scheduled for the opening match because the location is within the area cordoned off by police as they investigate the shooting.
The central business district in Auckland is the commercial heart of the city, a base for blue chip international firms and the gateway to the famous harborside, which is lined with restaurants and bars and home to the main ferry terminal.
Shootings are relatively rare in New Zealand, especially following the introduction of strict gun laws in 2019 after a mass shooting in Christchurch left 50 people dead and led to strict new laws curbing firearms being passed in a matter of days.
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown told New Zealand public radio RNZ the shooting was a “dreadful thing to happen in our city at a time when the rest of the world’s watching us over the football.”
New Zealand will face Norway at Eden Park in the opening match on Thursday in one of the world’s biggest sporting events, co-hosted by New Zealand and neighbor Australia.
Players from the United States women’s national soccer team (USWNT) also addressed the shooting at their inaugural press conference.
“Unfortunately in the US I feel like we’ve dealt with this far too many times,” forward Lynn Williams told reporters.
Looking over the cordon, Nisha, an American tourist who had traveled to Auckland to watch the World Cup, described the shooting to CNN as “incredibly tragic… especially at the start of the World Cup, there’s so many people coming in, there’s so much excitement.”
Nisha, who declined having her surname published, said news of the shooting surprised her.
“In places like New Zealand, you just assume a level of sort of safety, right?” she said.
Standing at the edge of the cordon on Quay Street a block away from the ferry pier, 21 year-old Seth Kruger, who is originally from South Africa, expressed shock at the shooting.
“I reckon it’s a pretty rare occurrence for New Zealand, he said. “Moving here, you move here for safety reasons. So pretty weird for this to be happening just down the road from home as well.”
Kruger and his friend David Aguillon were scheduled to work at The Cloud, a multipurpose event space at the Queen’s Wharf along the Auckland waterfront, which is hosting the FIFA Fan Festival throughout the World Cup.
However, with the police continuing to cordon off several key streets, Aguillon said they hadn’t been able to get on site, and it was unclear whether the Fan Festival would be open in time for Monday’s first game.
In a statement, US Soccer said that it “extends its deepest condolences to the families of the victims who were killed in downtown Auckland today.”
In a statement, New Zealand Football said it was “shocked” by the incident. “We can confirm that all of the Football Ferns team and staff are safe but we will not be able to comment further while details are still emerging,” a statement said. “Preparations for the game tonight at Eden Park will continue as planned.”
CNN’s Tara John, Mohammed Tawfeeq and Hira Humayun contributed reporting. | Explicit |
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ODESA, Ukraine (AP) — Russia struck the Ukrainian Black Sea city of Odesa on Sunday, keeping up a barrage of attacks that has damaged critical port infrastructure in southern Ukraine in the past week. At least one person was killed and 22 others wounded in the early morning attack, officials said.
Four children were among those wounded in the blasts, which severely damaged 25 landmarks across the city, including the historic Transfiguration Cathedral.
Russia has been launching repeated attacks on Odesa, a key hub for exporting grain, since Moscow canceled a landmark grain deal on Monday amid Kyiv’s grinding efforts to retake its occupied territories.
After the fires were put out at the Orthodox cathedral, volunteers donned hard hats, shovels and brooms to begin removing rubble and try to salvage any artifacts — under the watchful gaze of the saints whose paintings remained intact. Local officials said the icon of the patroness of the city was retrieved from under the rubble.
“The destruction is enormous, half of the cathedral is now roofless,” said Archdeacon Andrii Palchuk, as workers brought documents and valuables out of the building, its floor inundated with water used by firefighters to extinguish the blaze.
Palchuk said the damage was caused by a direct hit from a Russian missile that penetrated the building down to the basement. Two people inside were wounded.
“But with God’s help, we will restore it,” he said, bursting into tears.
A woman who came to help with the cleanup said she loved the cathedral “for its tranquility and grace.”
“When you enter this church, you feel like you’re beyond the world,” said Liudmyla, who gave only her first name. “I have a feeling that God, to protect apartments, took this pain, this explosion upon himself.”
Anna Fetchenko, who came to Odesa for a volunteer meeting, also pitched in to clear the debris. “I wanted to go to the seaside, but last night was so frightening that I cried for the first time in 2023,” she said.
“This is our Ukrainian heritage, and now it’s taken away from us.”
Later Sunday, Palchuk urged people to gather in front of the destroyed part of the cathedral for an outdoor service and to pray in front of a sacred icon that “miraculously survived.”
“We will pray that it protects us from the Russians,” he said.
The cathedral belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has been accused of links to Russia. The church has insisted that it is loyal to Ukraine, has denounced the Russian invasion from the start and even declared its independence from Moscow.
WATCH: Russia’s war in Ukraine leads to historic split in the Orthodox Church
But Ukrainian security agencies have claimed that some in the Ukrainian church maintain close ties with Moscow. They’ve raided numerous church holy sites and posted photos of rubles, Russian passports and leaflets with messages from the Moscow patriarch as proof some church officials are loyal to Russia.
UNESCO strongly condemned the attack on the cathedral and other heritage sites and said it will send a mission in coming days to assess damage. Odesa’s historic center was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site earlier this year, and the agency said the Russian attacks contradict Moscow’s pledge to take precautious to spare World Heritage sites in Ukraine.
“This outrageous destruction marks an escalation of violence against the cultural heritage of Ukraine. I strongly condemn this attack against culture, and I urge the Russian Federation to take meaningful action to comply with its obligations under international law,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.
Regional Gov. Oleh Kiper said that six residential buildings were destroyed by the strikes.
Some people were trapped in their apartments following the attack, which left rubble strewn in the street and partly blocking the road.
Svitlana Molcharova, 85, was rescued by emergency workers. But after she received first aid, she refused to leave her destroyed apartment. “I will stay here,” she said.
“I woke up when the ceiling started to fall on me. I rushed into the corridor,” said Ivan Kovalenko, a 19-year-old resident of the building. “That’s how I lost my home in Mykolaiv, and here, I lost my rented apartment.”
His unit revealed a partially collapsed ceiling and a balcony that came off the side of the building. All the windows were blown out.
Ukraine’s air force reported on the Telegram messaging app that Russia had launched 19 missiles in the Odesa region, including five high-precision winged Onyx missiles and four sea-to-shore Kalibr cruise missiles. It said that Ukrainian air defenses shot down nine.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Sunday its forces attacked sites in Odesa “where terrorist acts against the Russian Federation were being prepared.”
In a later statement, the ministry denied that its attacks struck the Transfiguration Cathedral, claiming the destruction of the cathedral was likely due to “the fall of a Ukrainian anti-aircraft guided missile.”
The attacks come days after President Vladimir Putin pulled Russia out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a wartime deal that enabled Ukraine’s exports to reach many countries facing the threat of hunger.
WATCH: Russia ends grain export deal with Ukraine, raising fears about global food security
Earlier Russian attacks have crippled significant parts of export facilities in Odesa and nearby Chornomorsk, and destroyed 60,000 tons of grain, according to Ukraine’s Agriculture Ministry.
Putin vowed to retaliate against Kyiv for an attack Monday on the crucial Kerch Bridge linking Russia with the Crimean Peninsula, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014.
— Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko were meeting Sunday in St. Petersburg, two days after Moscow warned Poland that any aggression against its neighbor and ally would be considered an attack on Russia. Putin said talks would also take place Monday, and declared that Kyiv’s counteroffensive had failed.
Lukashenko said Wagner troops, who launched joint drills with the Belarusian military on Thursday, almost a month after their short-lived rebellion against Moscow, wanted to go west “on an excursion to Warsaw, to Rzeszow” in Poland, but that Belarus would not allow the mercenary force to relocate.
“I am keeping them in central Belarus, like we agreed. … We are controlling what is happening” with Wagner, he said.
— Kharkiv regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov reported Sunday that two people were killed in Russian strikes on the northeastern province Saturday, when Russia attacked populated areas of the Kharkiv, Chuhuiv, Kupiansk and Izium districts.
Donetsk regional Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said four residents were also killed and 11 wounded in attacks Saturday.
Morton reported from London.
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‘Oppenheimer’ sees pushback in India over sex scene that quotes Bhagavad Gita
A sex scene from Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster “Oppenheimer” has come under fierce criticism in India after a clip from the movie went viral and sparked the ire of Hindu nationalists.
In the scene, Cillian Murphy’s character reads from a sacred Hindu text — the Bhagavad Gita — alongside Florence Pugh, who plays psychiatrist and physician Jean Tatlock.
According to Variety, Pugh stops during intercourse, gets up and goes over to the bookshelf, picks out a copy of the “Bhagavad Gita” and asks Murphy to read from it.
Murphy then reads out the quote “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” — a now famous phrase that Oppenheimer later said popped into his consciousness after the first atom bomb was detonated.
India’s Information Minister Uday Mahurkar took to Twitter to express his outrage about the creative license Nolan took with the scene.
In an open letter to Nolan, Mahurkar called the scene “a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus,” referring to the sacred text using the spelling Bhagwad Geeta.
“It has come to our notice that the movie ‘Oppenheimer’ contains a scene [which makes] a scathing attack on Hinduism. As per social media reports, a scene in the movie shows a woman making a man read Bhagwad Geeta aloud while getting over him and doing sexual intercourse. She is holding Bhagwad Geeta in one hand, and the other hand seems to be adjusting the position of their reproductive organs,” the letter added.
“We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene [in the life] of a scientist. But this is a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus, rather it amounts to waging a war on the Hindu community and almost appears to be part of a larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces.”
Oppenheimer was drawn to the Hindu text in real life.
In a 1965 NBC News documentary called “The Decision to Drop the Bomb,” he said that “a few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) has also come under fire for allowing the scene past its censor board.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | Explicit |
A three-day music festival in Kuala Lumpur was cancelled on Saturday after British band The 1975 failed to comply with local performance guidelines.
The band’s performance was cut short on Friday, the first day of the three-day Good Vibes Festival, after frontman Matty Healy gave a speech criticising the Malaysian government for criminalising same-sex relationships.
“I made a mistake when we were booking shows, I wasn’t looking into it. I don’t see the ****ing point, right? I do not see the point of inviting The 1975 to a country and telling us who we can have sex with,” Healy told the crowd.
“And I’m sorry if that offends you and you’re religious... If you push, I’m gonna push back.”
Homosexuality is forbidden in Malaysia, and laws criminalising sodomy can result in imprisonment or corporal punishment.
Healy, who was holding a bottle of wine, told the crowd that the group would not be performing “uplifting songs” as he was furious.
“And that’s not fair on you, because you’re not representative of your government. You are young people, and I’m sure a lot of you are gay and progressive,” he said.
After Healy’s speech, the band’s bassist Ross MacDonald walked over to him, and the two men kissed during their rendition of I Like America & America Likes Me.
After performing at least one more song, Healy said: “All right, we gotta go. We just got banned from Kuala Lumpur, I’ll see you later.”
The band performed seven songs in its headlining set. Other songs on the set list that it did not perform on Friday included Robbers, Somebody Else and I’m In Love With You.
Malaysia’s Communications and Digital Ministry announced through one of its committees that The 1975 had been blacklisted from performing in Malaysia.
The ministry’s central committee for the application for filming and performance by foreign artistes (Puspal) said the decision was made after the group was found to have “challenged, belittled and disparaged local laws and violated the morals of Malaysians” during its show.
“The Communications and Digital Ministry will not tolerate any party that provokes and engages in disrespectful behaviour while performing in Malaysia,” Puspal said in a statement on Saturday.
The ministry has also filed a police report against the band and the festival’s organisers for failing to comply with Puspal’s conditions for performing in the country, adding that the organisers had previously made assurances that they would be responsible for the band’s performance.
Selangor police chief, Datuk Hussein Omar Khan, said the police would be contacting the organisers as part of their investigations.
As the concert took place at the Sepang International Circuit, Commissioner Hussein said the inquiries will be conducted by Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) police. Sepang International Circuit is a 10-minute drive from KLIA.
The organisers issued a statement late on Friday night saying: “We regret that The 1975 performance had to be cut short due to non-compliance with local performance guidelines.”
On Saturday afternoon, the organisers said in an Instagram post that the festival, which was supposed to end on Sunday, had been cancelled following the incident.
In a series of tweets on Saturday afternoon, Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil said he had ordered the immediate cancellation of the rest of the festival, with organisers asked to compensate those who had bought tickets.
“I want to stress, the position of the Unity Government is very clear. There is no compromise against any party that challenges, disparages and violates Malaysian laws,” he tweeted.
The festival had been expected to feature other international and local music acts, including American band The Strokes and Australian rapper The Kid Laroi.
Malaysians have left disparaging comments on The 1975’s social media pages, voicing their disappointment at the band and lead vocalist Healy for being disrespectful towards the country’s customs, and their “surface-level activism”.
One fan, Ms Yasmin Devan, blamed the band for being “the reason the festival got cancelled after just one day” and possibly for the wider repercussions.
“You don’t know how to navigate this country and its issues. Countless people lost their jobs and the (organising) company might even go bankrupt because of this, can’t even recoup their cost,” she said.
Another Malaysian fan wrote on Instagram: “What you did may cost us to miss out on a lot of concerts in future.”
Puspal had earlier in 2023 tightened guidelines for concerts in the country, including blackout dates close to religious holidays such as Hari Raya Puasa, and banning performers from actions such as cross-dressing or removing articles of clothing during shows.
Popular American YouTube musician David Choi also weighed in, saying it was a shame that The 1975’s “extremely selfish, unprofessional, and most of all, privileged actions... probably made things worse for the progressives in a mostly Islamic country”.
While the band has yet to comment since walking off the stage on Friday, those close to the members have shown support for their antics in Malaysia.
A source close to the band told American magazine Variety: “Matty has a long-time record of advocating for the LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) community, and the band wanted to stand up for their LGBTQ+ fans.”
Healy’s mother, actress Denise Welch, shared a tweet of a video of the onstage kiss, writing: “He’s my son.”
In 2019, Healy kissed a male fan while performing in Dubai, which criminalises same-sex couples and sexual acts.
After the incident in Dubai, Healy tweeted: “I don’t think we’ll be allowed back due to my ‘behaviour’ but know that I love you and I wouldn’t have done anything differently given the chance again.”
The band will perform in Jakarta on Sunday. Same-sex marriage is not officially recognised in Indonesia.
The band performed in Singapore at two sold-out concerts earlier this week. | Explicit |
FARGO, N.D. -- The man who shot Fargo police officers — one fatally — last week had 1,800 rounds, multiple guns and a homemade hand grenade in his vehicle, officials said Wednesday.
Mohamad Barakat, 37, opened fire on officers responding to a traffic wreck Friday before being fatally shot by Officer Zach Robinson. Officer Jake Wallin was killed, and Officers Andrew Dotas and Tyler Hawes were hospitalized with critical injuries.
“When you look at the amount of ammunition this shooter had in his car, he was planning on more mayhem in our community,” Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney said at a news conference Wednesday.
North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley described Barakat's attack as “completely unprovoked.”
Police and fire officials were responding to a routine traffic accident on a busy street that afternoon when the gunman began firing multiple rounds at them, according to Zibolski.
“It’s clear to us that our police officers were ambushed in this attack,” the mayor said.
Firefighters on the scene and a nearby ambulance were essential in preventing additional fatalities, he said. As soon as the firing stopped, “firefighters bounced out and they were applying first aid immediately to our officers,” Fargo police Chief David Zibolski said, which “probably had a very significant impact on their survival.”
A 25-year-old Fargo woman was also shot, but authorities have not said who shot her.
Wrigley said Robinson’s use of deadly force “was reasonable. It was justified and lawful in every possible way.”
Shortly after the shooting, authorities, including the FBI, converged on a residential area about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away and evacuated residents of an apartment building to gather what they said was related evidence.
Zibolski said he believed police previously had some sort of contact with Barakat “but not anything significant.”
Zibolski said it does not appear that Barakat was involved in the car crash that brought officers to the scene. But he indicated investigators are determining whether this was a planned ambush of officers.
The state Bureau of Criminal Investigation and FBI are investigating the attack. Robinson was placed on paid administrative leave while state authorities completed an investigation into his use of force, per Fargo police procedure.
The funeral service for Wallin, 23, is set for Saturday morning in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, according to an obituary. A private service will follow graveside at a cemetery in Nisswa, Minnesota. Dotus was a six-year veteran responsible for training officers.
Wallin served in the Minnesota Army National Guard and was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq from November 2020 to July 2021. He and Hawes were sworn in less than three months ago and were still in training when they responded to the scene Friday.
Governors of Minnesota and North Dakota have directed U.S. and state flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of Wallin through sunset on Saturday, and encouraged residents and businesses to do the same. | Explicit |
A federal judge has dismissed Donald Trump's request for a new trial in a civil case in which a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming columnist E Jean Carroll.
Mr Trump was ordered to pay $5m (£3.9m) in damages, which he argued was excessive based on the jury's verdict.
The judge ruled that the jury's 9 May verdict was not a "miscarriage of justice".
The former president has called the case "part of a political witch hunt".
Ms Carroll, 79, had accused Trump of raping her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, and then branding the incident a hoax in an October 2022 post on his Truth Social platform. The jury found Mr Trump guilty of battering the columnist, but stopped short of finding the former president guilty of rape.
Mr Trump's attorneys had argued in their bid for a new trial that "the Court should order a new trial on damages or grant remittitur because contrary to Plaintiff's claim of rape, the Jury found that she was not raped but was sexually abused by defendant during the 1995/1996 Bergdorf Goodman incident."
In a 59-page decision on Wednesday, US District judge Lewis Kaplan ruled the jury did not reach "a seriously erroneous result", in calculating the amount of damages, as argued by Mr Trump's lawyers, and dismissed his request for a new trial.
Judge Kaplan, who presided over the original trial, wrote that the trial evidence demonstrated Mr Trump "raped" Ms Carroll in the plain sense of the word.
"The finding that Ms Carroll failed to prove that she was 'raped' within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr Trump 'raped' her as many people commonly understand the word 'rape'," Judge Kaplan wrote. "Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr Trump in fact did exactly that."
Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer representing E Jean Carroll, celebrated Judge Kaplan's ruling in a statement shared with the BBC.
"E Jean Carroll looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages that the jury awarded her," Ms Kaplan said.
She added her client also looks forward to "continuing to hold Trump accountable" in a further defamation trial scheduled to begin early next year.
Ms Carroll has sued Mr Trump for $10m (£7.7m) for statements he made in 2019 that she claims are defamatory.
The US Justice Department initially ruled Mr Trump was legally immune from the lawsuit because he was president when he made the remarks.
But earlier this month, government attorneys said they no longer had "sufficient basis" to conclude Mr Trump was acting within the scope of his duties as president.
The BBC has contacted Mr Trump's lawyers for comment.
Judge Kaplan's decision comes as former president Trump is facing a series of legal challenges, including a potential indictment over his alleged role in January 6 insurrection as well as criminal charges in New York related to a hush-money payment to a porn actress.
In the hush-money case, a New York judge delivered another loss for Mr Trump's legal team on Wednesday rejecting the former president's request to move an upcoming trial to federal court.
Mr Trump is facing felony charges in New York for falsifying business records over a reimbursement he made to his lawyer for paying porn star Stormy Daniels.
He has pleaded not guilty to those charges and a trial is scheduled for March 2024.
Mr Trump had argued the trial should be moved to federal court because the alleged crimes took place while he was president. But District Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote in a filing that Mr Trump had failed to show his conduct was related to "any act performed by or for the President". | Explicit |
Salvatore Mancuso is one of the most notorious figures in Colombia’s six decades of conflict, responsible for some of the most heinous of crimes during the darkest chapters in the country’s history.
As a senior commander of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) – the country’s largest rightwing death squad – he ordered forced disappearances, sexual violence and massacres of civilians.
“There was not a single campesino who did not live in fear of that man,” said Angelica Salsero, representative of the Association of Victims in Cordoba, the northern Colombian region where the AUC sprang up. Like many others there, Salsero lost a family member to the paramilitaries.
So when president Gustavo Petro recently appointed Mancuso as a “peace manager” for negotiations with armed groups, Salsero – like many others – reacted with outrage, saying the decision makes a mockery of all those who lost loved ones or were forced from their homes.
“How can someone be named a Peace Manager when they committed so much war and death? It’s an insult to all of his victims,” she said.
Mancuso demobilised during a much-criticized peace process in 2003 and was extradited to the USA in 2008 for drug trafficking. He finished his sentence in prison in 2020 but remains in detention in Atlanta, Georgia, as he is yet to pay for his war crimes in Colombia.
Mancuso has accepted responsibility for more than 300 killings and is accused of committing about 75,000 crimes.
In the hopes of receiving lenient punishment the former paramilitary leader has testified virtually to Colombia’s special peace tribunal (JEP), giving details of how the country’s military, as well as its business and political elites, worked hand-in-glove with the paramilitaries to stamp out leftwing guerrillas.
Mancuso’s testimony is helping the JEP to untangle the truth of Colombia’s conflict and that knowledge could eventually help the government negotiate with other rightwing groups who remain active today, experts say.
His appointment as a peace envoy by Colombia’s first ever leftwing president, came as a shock to many.
But his inclusion in negotiations is part of Petro’s bold strategy to include figures across the political spectrum – even where their ideological ties or criminal past would usually exclude them from any official role.
In November Petro appointed José Félix Lafaurie, head of Fedegan – a traditionally conservative association of cattle ranchers – to lead talks with leftist ELN rebels.
Mancuso could be a useful bridge between the government and the Gulf Clan (ACG) – an armed drug faction which has become the largest criminal organisation in Colombia, say analysts. Negotiations with the ACG stalled and Petro broke off a ceasefire in March.
“Appointing Mancuso can only be positive in attempts to establish a channel with the ACG. He has managed to create some confidence with that group and his appointment has the potential to reinvigorate the channel between the government and the organisation,” said Elizabth Dickinson, senior analyst for Colombia at Crisis Group.
Mancuso’s testimonies helped authorities discover mass graves near the Venezuelan border in June, and the former AUC commander is encouraging other paramilitary leaders to join him in the peace process.
But victims argue that Mancuso’s dire human rights record means he should have no role in the country’s future.
Eliécer Arias, who belongs to the Indigenous Kankuamo people, lost his elder brother to Mancuso’s death squads who tortured their victims before burning them or throwing them into rivers.
“For 22 years as victims, we have waited for an act of reparation and to be recognised by the Colombian state. Then on Sunday I heard this news. It’s a huge blow to us families who have lost people to the paramilitaries. It’s not just sad and enraging. It’s humiliating.
“We’re always told that the victims are at the centre of these peace processes but in reality nobody is listening to us. This guy walks free and we, the victims, are left adrift once again,” Arias said.
It remains unclear when and if Mancuso will return to Colombia. He remains subject to an arrest warrant, and the country’s courts have confirmed that his appointment as peace manager would not exempt him from trial.
“The question is how this decision can be anything more than symbolic. What kind of peace processes can Mancuso promote from a detention site in the US? With whom?,” said Juan Pappier, deputy director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch.
Mancuso’s victims argue that wherever he ends up he should be given no honours.
“The appointment of Mancuso is an affront to all of us,” says Luz Marina Hache Contreras who was displaced by the Colombian military and paramilitary forces. “Recognition must be given to those who have suffered Mancuso’s crimes, not to the criminal himself. It is his responsibility to contribute to the truth without anything in return.” | Explicit |
Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey was "tried by social media" after he was accused of sexual assaults, a court has heard.
He is charged with nine sexual offences relating to four men allegedly committed between 2001 and 2013.
The 63-year-old American sat in the dock on Thursday at Southwark Crown Court in London as defence barrister Patrick Gibbs KC gave a closing speech.
Mr Spacey, a two-time Oscar winner, denies all of the charges against him.
"What the defence suggests is that three people have lied and they have lied in ways and for reasons which, ultimately, will only ever be known to themselves," said Mr Gibbs, who suggested the fourth complainant was intoxicated.
He told jurors: "It's not a crime to like sex, even if you're famous and it's not a crime to have sex, even if you're famous, and it's not a crime to have casual sex.
"And it's not a crime to have sex with someone of the same sex because it's 2023 not 1823."
He challenged the Crown's claim that there was a "pattern of similarity" between the accusers because three claim Mr Spacey "grabbed" them by the crotch, a term Mr Spacey previously told the court he "objected" to.
He told the jury it was "easy" to lie convincingly, especially when it is about someone such as Kevin Spacey who he described as a man "who is promiscuous, not publicly out, although everyone in the businesses knows he's gay who wants to be just a normal guy to drink beer and laugh and smoke weed and sit in the front and spend time with younger people who he's attracted to".
He said perhaps Mr Spacey had led "a bit of an odd life", but that it was "a life that makes you an easy target when the internet turns against you and you're tried by social media".
"That's when these claims were taken to the police, when it was, I suggest, only too easy to do and the prospects of a pay-off from the bandwagon were at their most irresistible."
Mr Gibbs praised Sir Elton John and his husband David Furnish for risking the "wrath of the internet" to be called as defence witnesses after they gave evidence via video link from Monaco on Monday.
Mr Spacey pleaded not guilty in January to three counts of indecent assault, three counts of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent.
He also previously denied four further charges of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.
A further charge of indecent assault, an alternative count, was added mid-trial - taking the total number of alleged offences listed on the indictment to 13.
On Wednesday, the four indecent assault charges, which were all alternative counts, were struck off by the judge, due to a "legal technicality" and not as a result of the prosecution abandoning any allegation.
The trial continues. | Explicit |
NEW DELHI, July 21 (Reuters) - Women in India's northeastern state of Manipur attacked the house of the main suspect in a sexual assault case that has enraged the nation, police said on Friday.
The person allegedly dragged two tribal women onto the streets in May and later incited a mob to rape and parade them naked, police said on Friday, as ethnic clashes engulfed the state.
The sexual assault took place over two months ago but it captured national attention after a short video went viral on social media earlier this week.
The main suspect, a resident of violence-hit Manipur state, was arrested on Thursday hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned the alleged sexual assault as "shameful" and promised tough action.
Three others also were arrested and a police official said were tracing at least 30 others involved in the crime.
"Local women pelted stones and burnt some parts of the house belonging to the prime accused in a village," said Hemant Pandey, a senior police official in capital city Imphal.
"We request women to protest peacefully as there is intense unease. We understand their rage," he said.
Protests were planned in several parts of India by rights groups demanding justice and swift investigations into the latest incident to raise questions about the safety of women in the country.
The sexual assault was reported by the victims in May after ethnic clashes began in Manipur. The fighting was triggered by a court order that the government should consider extending special benefits enjoyed by the tribal Kuki people to the majority Meitei population as well.
At least 125 people have been killed and more than 40,000 have fled their homes since the violence erupted.
"We want to know why police failed to take swift action when they knew that women were raped and paraded naked in Manipur," said Radhika Burman, a student in eastern city of Kolkata who is set to lead a public demonstration on Thursday.
Modi, who had not made any public remarks about the trouble in a state ruled by his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), spoke a day after the videos showing women being molested went viral.
Opposition MPs who have submitted notices in both houses of the parliament to discuss the violence in Manipur stalled the proceedings on Friday.
"Manipur needs complete attention and we demand the prime minister make an elaborate statement in the parliament," said Mallikarjun Kharge, the president of opposition Congress party.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Explicit |
NEW DELHI, July 21 (Reuters) - Women in India's northeastern state of Manipur attacked the house of the main suspect in a sexual assault case that has enraged the nation, police said on Friday.
The person allegedly dragged two tribal women onto the streets in May and later incited a mob to rape and parade them naked, police said on Friday, as ethnic clashes engulfed the state.
The sexual assault took place over two months ago but it captured national attention after a short video went viral on social media earlier this week.
The main suspect, a resident of violence-hit Manipur state, was arrested on Thursday hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned the alleged sexual assault as "shameful" and promised tough action.
Three others also were arrested and a police official said were tracing at least 30 others involved in the crime.
"Local women pelted stones and burnt some parts of the house belonging to the prime accused in a village," said Hemant Pandey, a senior police official in capital city Imphal.
"We request women to protest peacefully as there is intense unease. We understand their rage," he said.
Protests were planned in several parts of India by rights groups demanding justice and swift investigations into the latest incident to raise questions about the safety of women in the country.
The sexual assault was reported by the victims in May after ethnic clashes began in Manipur. The fighting was triggered by a court order that the government should consider extending special benefits enjoyed by the tribal Kuki people to the majority Meitei population as well.
At least 125 people have been killed and more than 40,000 have fled their homes since the violence erupted.
"We want to know why police failed to take swift action when they knew that women were raped and paraded naked in Manipur," said Radhika Burman, a student in eastern city of Kolkata who is set to lead a public demonstration on Thursday.
Modi, who had not made any public remarks about the trouble in a state ruled by his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), spoke a day after the videos showing women being molested went viral.
Opposition MPs who have submitted notices in both houses of the parliament to discuss the violence in Manipur stalled the proceedings on Friday.
"Manipur needs complete attention and we demand the prime minister make an elaborate statement in the parliament," said Mallikarjun Kharge, the president of opposition Congress party.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Explicit |
Reactor block at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant transitioned to 'hot shutdown', IAEA Responds
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reported that Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has initiated the planned transition of its fourth reactor block from "cold shutdown" to "hot shutdown".
According to the IAEA, the plant has begun the scheduled process of moving the fourth reactor block from "cold shutdown" to "hot shutdown," with corresponding tests completed, and the block currently being heated up.
The agency expects the reactor block to achieve "hot shutdown" on July 25. Following this, the fifth block, currently in "hot shutdown" mode, will be reverted to "cold shutdown" for maintenance work, while the other blocks will remain in "cold shutdown."
Statement by Energoatom
Energoatom has reported that on July 24, Russian occupiers transitioned the fourth reactor block of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to "hot shutdown." The department emphasized that such actions represent a gross violation of the license requirements for operating the nuclear facility, since the reactor block should be in a "cold shutdown" state.
Threat of sabotage at Zaporizhzhia NPP
President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warned about the possibility of a Russian sabotage operation at the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which could lead to severe consequences such as a radiation release.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported that the invaders might have placed explosive devices on the roofs of several reactors, intensifying the risk of potential sabotage. The IAEA announced the discovery of anti-personnel mines on the territory of Zaporizhzhia NPP. | Explicit |
Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images
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Country music singer Jason Aldean, pictured here performing at the Academy of Country Music Awards in Frisco, Texas in May, is facing a mixed bag of backlash and praise for a new music video that openly alludes to vigilante justice.
Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images
Country music singer Jason Aldean, pictured here performing at the Academy of Country Music Awards in Frisco, Texas in May, is facing a mixed bag of backlash and praise for a new music video that openly alludes to vigilante justice.
Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images
Country Music Television (CMT) says it will no longer air the music video "Try That In a Small Town" by Jason Aldean after critics of the video said it contained lyrics that glorified gun violence and conveyed traditionally racist ideas.
A CMT spokesperson confirmed the move to NPR on Thursday, but offered no comment on the reasoning.
Since the video's release on Friday, it's emerged as a familiar kind of political litmus test, with interpretations of its message often falling along voting divides.
Here's an overview of the situation:
What is "Try That in a Small Town" about?
Aldean, a 46-year-old country singer from Macon, Ga., first released the song in May, but it wasn't until the release of the video on July 14 — as promotion for his 11th upcoming album — that the discourse ratcheted up.
In a statement released alongside the video, Aldean said the song represents an "unspoken rule" for those raised in small towns: "We all have each other's backs and we look out for each other." The singer is not credited as a writer for the song, as has been the case for most of his 27 hit singles.
Threats to outsiders (and the implication those outsiders are from cities) are present throughout the song's lyrics, which begin with a list of crimes that might happen in urban settings ("Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk / carjack an old lady at a red light") then crescendo into the titular chorus:
"Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road / Around here we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won't take long / For you to find out, I recommend you don't."
Aldean ups the vigilante ante by bridging the second chorus with a reference to gun rights, singing:
"I've got a gun that my granddad gave me / they say one day they're gonna round up. / Well that shit might fly in the city / good luck / Try that in a small town".
Why is the video so divisive?
Interspersed between shots of Aldean singing are clips of vandalizing, riots and police encounters, much of which is evocative of racial injustice protests.
Some of the scenes bear a Fox News chyron, but others, as some TikTok sleuths have pointed out, appear to be stock footage, in some cases of gatherings from other countries.
But much of the criticism around the video has less to do with these clips then its setting: The Maury County Courthouse building in Columbia, Tenn., which serves as an American-flag-draped backdrop for Aldean and his band.
The landmark was the site of race riots in 1946 as well as a 1927 lynching in which a white mob pulled an 18-year-old black man, Henry Choate, from jail and drug him through the city by car, according to several media reports, including one detailed account from The Washington Post.
Choate had confessed to attacking a 16-year-old white girl "to protect his life," even though the girl "could not positively identify him as the assailant," the Post reported.
What is Aldean saying?
On Tuesday, Aldean pushed back hard against accusations he was "pro-lynching," saying such an interpretation "goes too far" and is "dangerous."
"There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it," he wrote on Twitter. "Try That In A Small Town, for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief."
"NO ONE, including me, wants to continue to see senseless headlines or families ripped apart," he wrote.
The production company behind the videos, TackleBox, also defended the video's location as a popular filming spot, telling Entertainment Tonight that any "alternative narrative" about the reasons it was chosen were false.
Aldean has received five Grammy Award nominations (including two for Best Country Album) for his two decades of music depicting rural, blue-collar life. And throughout that success, he's rarely shied away from sharing his right-leaning political views.
His wife, Brittany Aldean, and his sister, Kasi Rosa Wicks, launched a conservative clothing line dedicated to trolling liberals. Aldean defended dressing his children in anti-Joe-Biden attire and himself for wearing blackface as part of a 2015 Halloween costume. He was spotted golfing alongside Donald Trump and delivered an impromptu performance at the former president's Mar-a-Lago resort.
But, at other times, the singer has tried to walk a more nuanced line toward politics, perhaps most memorably after surviving the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival.
Aldean was performing on stage as the night's closing act when the shooting began. Six months later, he tiptoed through the refreshed gun control debate, saying in an interview that tragedies shouldn't be used as fodder for political arguments, but ultimately agreed that it was "too easy to get guns" in the U.S..
How are other people reacting?
Gun control advocates are among the song's loudest critics, saying "Try That in a Small Town" glorifies a dangerous eye-for-an eye ethos.
Shannon Watts, founder of the group Moms Demand Action, called it an "ode to a sundown town" that suggested "people be beaten or shot for expressing free speech."
Others said the song's hints at violence were clearly racial dog whistles, zeroing in on the song's portrayal of protests like flag-burning. Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones, a Democrat, summed it as a "heinous song calling for racist violence."
Sheryl Crow and Margo Price are among the musicians who've spoke out against the song. But others, like Travis Tritt and Blanco Brown described the reaction as unfair social commentary.
Political commentators on the right have have held up the country music cannon, and Aldean in particular, as a loudspeaker for under-appreciated conservative values.
2024 GOP primary contenders like Trump, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis all defended the artist, with DeSantis saying: "When the media attacks you, you're doing something right."
If attention was his goal, then Aldean might agree: As of midday Thursday, "Try That in a Small Town" was ranked No. 1 in the U.S. on iTunes and was holding the No. 2 spot on YouTube's trending music videos. | Explicit |
A motorist got out of her car naked and started fired a gun into the air Tuesday at a major Bay Area span, the California Highway Patrol said.
According to the CHP, there was a report of a reckless driver on eastbound Interstate 80 around at 4:40 p.m. The caller told 911 dispatchers the driver appeared to have a gun.
The CHP said the driver stopped on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, known locally as the Bay Bridge and part of I-80, got out of her car while wielding a knife and yelled at other drivers. She got back into the car but soon stopped near the toll plaza.
This time, she allegedly exited the car naked and carrying a gun and began firing shots into the air and at other vehicles, according to the CHP.
Law enforcement arrested her. She was taken from the bridge in an ambulance.
Several lanes of traffic were temporarily shut down so officers could look for shell casings. That caused major delays.
No injuries were reported.
Her identity wasn't released.
There was no word on what prompted her to do what she was seen on video doing.
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PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad - Authorities are on high alert in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, following a shooting incident that left five people dead.
Around 8 p.m. Wednesday, local time, officers responded to "a report of a mass shooting" in Kingstown, the capital of the Caribbean nation, according to a statement from the Royal St. Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force.
Police told ABC News a group of people were in the Harbour Club area, when a vehicle pulled up and occupants of the vehicle began shooting.
Five people were fatally shot in the incident, including a 13-year-old boy, investigators said.
"Based on the crime scene, an assault weapon appears to have been used," Police Commissioner Colin John said at a news conference on Thursday. "We also received intel about possible reprisals and that is something that we are taking very seriously."
Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who is abroad on an official visit to Morocco, offered condolences to the families of the victims in a video statement.
"We will get to the bottom of this, and we will bring the perpetrators to justice, those who carried out the killings and those who are the authors," Dr. Gonsalves said.
The United States has been working with Caribbean countries to battle crime and violence in the region.
On July 5, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Caribbean heads of government in Trinidad. The leaders addressed the issue of guns being trafficked from the U.S. to the Caribbean.
Blinken announced that U.S. prosecutor Michael BenAry has been appointed as the first U.S. coordinator for Caribbean firearms prosecutions.
U.S. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who led a bipartisan Congressional delegation to Trinidad and Tobago on July 5 for talks with regional leaders, said BenAry's appointment shows "that the United States of America, that Congress, that the Biden administration, has heard the concerns related to gun trafficking and gun violence here in Trinidad and Tobago, and throughout the Caribbean, and we are prepared to respond decisively to address it." | Explicit |
KYIV, July 20 (Reuters) - A building at the Chinese consulate in Odesa was damaged in a Russian missile and drone attack on the southern Ukrainian port city, regional governor Oleh Kiper said on Thursday.
The damage appeared to be minor. Kiper posted a photograph online showing the building with broken windows.
Russia, which is an ally of China, attacked the port cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv overnight for the third successive night.
"The aggressor is deliberately hitting the port infrastructure - administrative and residential buildings nearby were damaged, also the consulate of the People's Republic of China. It shows the enemy does not pay attention to anything," Kiper said on the Telegram messaging app.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his daily late-night video address on Wednesday that 60,000 tons of agricultural products destroyed in a Russian air strike on Odesa port had been intended for shipment to China.
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