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Tag: crimes against persons

  • Is it safe to travel to Mexico? Here’s what you need to know | CNN

    Is it safe to travel to Mexico? Here’s what you need to know | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The kidnapping and killing of US travelers this week in the Mexican city of Matamoros, just over the border from Brownsville, Texas, has put a glaring spotlight on violence in a country that millions of international visitors flock to each year.

    And as spring break gets under way in popular beach resorts hundreds of miles away in the country’s west and south, the question of safety is likely top of mind.

    Here’s what to know about travel safety in Mexico:

    There are 32 states in Mexico, and the US State Department has “do not travel” advisories in place for six, including Tamaulipas state, where Matamoros is located.

    Zachary Rabinor, founder and CEO of travel company Journey Mexico, points out that this week’s violence happened far from some of the most sought-after tourist destinations in Mexico, in a state that has long held a US State Department “do not travel” warning.

    “To put things in perspective, Matamoros is about 1,360 miles away from Cancun; that’s about the equivalent distance from the Texas side of the border to Chicago, Illinois,” said Rabinor, whose company creates tailored luxury trips.

    Seven Mexican states are listed one tier down in the State Department’s “reconsider travel” category and 17 are listed under “exercise increased caution.”

    “Crime and kidnapping” is listed as the cause for advisories in some states in each of those three categories, including Tamaulipas. The rest of the advisories list “crime” as the reason to either not travel, reconsider or exercise caution.

    “Exercise normal precautions” is the guidance for the states of Campeche and Yucatán on the Yucatán Peninsula.

    Countries including Canada and the United Kingdom also have detailed travel warnings related to Mexico.

    What is medical tourism and what are the risks

    Playa del Carmen and Cancún, which are welcoming an influx of spring break travelers, are located in the state of Quintana Roo, where the State Department advises travelers to “exercise increased caution due to crime and kidnapping.”

    Rabinor highlighted other popular destinations carrying the “exercise increased caution” advisory, including France and the Bahamas. France receives the caution because of possible terrorism and civil unrest. Crime is listed as the reason for caution in the Bahamas.

    The State Department notes in its Quintana Roo advisory that violence and criminal activity may occur anywhere, “including in popular tourist destinations.”

    “Travelers should maintain a high level of situational awareness, avoid areas where illicit activities occur, and promptly depart from potentially dangerous situations,” the advisory warns.

    Those popular resort areas are still reasonably safe, says Jaime Lopez-Aranda, who is a senior security manager at travel risk management firm International SOS.

    “It is relatively safe for travelers to head to tourist destinations and major urban centers such as Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey,” Lopez-Aranda told CNN Travel.

    The US State Department advises travelers to

    Lopez-Aranda lives in Mexico City, where petty crime is a persistent risk and precautions should be taken, he said, “but the most popular locations are relatively safe for all kinds of travelers.”

    Journey Mexico has more than 50 employees based in the country who are always monitoring for potential risk, Rabinor said.

    “We are confident that with proper preparation and information, travel to and within Mexico continues to be a great option,” he said.

    If January’s international flight arrivals are any indication, the risks associated with travel to parts of Mexico aren’t keeping visitors away from the country as a whole.

    Passenger arrivals on international flights were up by 13% in January compared with January 2019, before the pandemic took hold around the world.

    Caution and situational awareness are key all over the country – and the world for that matter.

    For travel in Mexico, Lopez-Aranda says precautions could include:
    • Traveling with a trusted driver in a private vehicle
    • Traveling only in daylight hours outside urban centers or in higher-risk locations
    • Avoiding trouble spots in major cities
    • Avoiding traveling alone
    • Staying up-to-date through news and government alerts
    • Making sure your mobile device is charged

    All of those tips are measures to take at a destination, but much of the work that goes into ensuring the safest possible trip happens before anything is even booked.

    You’ll want to research the security and medical risks of destinations you’re considering and make sure that you have confidence in your accommodations, transport, means of communication and security arrangements, says Lopez-Aranda.

    “It is important that you share all plans with friends and family at home. While traveling, you should also keep constant communication to ensure safety and discuss any potential risks that may arise,” he says.

    And you should have copies of your documents, contact information for your country’s embassy or consulate and the location of the closest hospital with you. Insurance that covers you in your destination is also key.

    Journey Mexico links to the US State Department advisories on its website, as well as travel guidance for the citizens of other countries including the United Kingdom and Australia.

    The company also notes conflicts between rival criminal organizations in various areas of Mexico in its own “Is Mexico Safe?” safety assessment.

    “Though these conflicts can be unpredictable, they are almost always among and between organized crime groups” and are very rare in tourist areas, the posting says.

    The site also includes precautions travelers can take to avoid pickpocketing or robbery, including using ATMs only in secure locations, hiring reputable private transportation, not wearing expensive jewelry and avoiding deserted, unlit areas.

    If you’re uncomfortable, try to get away from the situation or environment immediately, says Lopez-Aranda.

    Because “intuition is often right.”

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  • Memphis officials to release more video from Tyre Nichols’ deadly beating today, after saying a 7th officer was fired | CNN

    Memphis officials to release more video from Tyre Nichols’ deadly beating today, after saying a 7th officer was fired | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Officials in Memphis are expected Wednesday to release about 20 more hours of video relating to January’s deadly police beating of Tyre Nichols – as well as some records of the city’s now-finished internal probe into 13 police officers and four fire department personnel, a Memphis official said.

    The anticipated release comes a day after the official revealed that a seventh police officer has been fired and others were suspended or left the force after the brutal encounter in the western Tennessee city. Previously, authorities said six officers were fired, five of whom have been criminally charged.

    The city’s internal investigations into the beatings have finished, so the city intends to release the additional video footage Wednesday afternoon, Memphis Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Sink told a city council committee Tuesday morning.

    The unreleased footage most notably will include audio of what was said after the beating and after an ambulance took Nichols to a hospital, and it could play an investigative role as his office contemplates additional charges, the county prosecutor previously told CNN.

    Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was repeatedly punched and kicked by Memphis police officers following a traffic stop and brief pursuit on foot on January 7. Nichols was hospitalized after the beating and died three days later.

    Five police officers, who are also Black, were fired following an internal investigation and were indicted on criminal charges January 26.

    Body camera videos and surveillance footage from the arrest were released on January 27, showing the severity of the beating to the public and drawing widespread condemnation from residents and police officials alike. The video shook a nation long accustomed to videos of police brutality – especially against people of color – and spurred protests and vigils in Memphis and other major US cities.

    The video released in January contradicted what officers said happened in the initial police report filed after Nichols’ beating, the county prosecutor said, and spurred renewed national debate on justice in policing and reform.

    In early February Shelby County prosecutor Steven Mulroy told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer the video released in January are “the relevant parts” of the initial stop and the beating after the foot chase, but the yet-to-be-released footage could play a role in investigations.

    Potential charges of “false reporting” related to the initial police report were being investigated, Erica Williams, a spokesperson for Mulroy’s office, told CNN around the same time.

    When asked whether anyone new will face criminal charges now that the city’s investigation is finished, Williams told CNN on Tuesday: “Not at this time.” Mulroy’s office previously told CNN it would wait for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to conclude an investigation before deciding on more charges.

    The city will also release Wednesday some records related to the internal probes of the 13 police officers and four fire department personnel, including documents indicating what they were being investigated for, Sink said.

    Other investigative files have information that needs to be redacted, and will be posted online when that is completed, she added without giving a timeline.

    But Sink already announced the bottom line on Tuesday: Seven police officers were fired, three were suspended, one retired and two had their investigations dropped as result of the probes, she said.

    That was the first time the city announced a seventh officer was fired. That person’s name, and details about what the officer is accused of doing, weren’t immediately released.

    Also, the officer who retired likely would have been terminated, Sink said without elaborating about what that officer was accused of doing.

    The city has previously said that three Memphis fire department personnel who responded to the scene – two emergency medical technicians and a fire lieutenant – were fired, though none was criminally charged. On Tuesday, Sink said a fourth fire department worker was suspended. Sink did not elaborate.

    The two fired EMTs did not conduct a primary examination of Nichols for the first 19 minutes they were on scene, and the lieutenant stayed in a fire truck, according to a state emergency medical services board.

    A council member asked Sink whether anyone who struck Nichols was still part of either the police department or fire department.

    “No. All of those officers … have been charged criminally,” Sink said.

    Those five former Memphis police officers indicted in January were arraigned February 17 on criminal charges.

    Five former Memphis police officers face criminal chagres in connection with the death of Tyre Nichols. Top: Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III. Bottom: Desmond Mills Jr., Justin Smith.

    Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin III and Desmond Mills Jr. each face charges of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. Second-degree murder in Tennessee is considered a Class A felony punishable by 15 to 60 years in prison.

    Their attorneys entered not guilty pleas on their behalf. They are due back in court on May 1.

    The five charged officers were part of the department’s SCORPION unit, which was launched in 2021 to take on a rise in violent crime in Memphis. Shortly after video of Nichols’ arrest was released in January, Memphis police announced the unit would be permanently deactivated as a sign the department was taking “proactive steps in the healing process for all impacted.”

    Police in February identified a sixth officer who was fired. Preston Hemphill, who is White, saying he was accused of violating departmental policies including those covering personal conduct and truthfulness.

    Sink said February 7 that seven officers – beyond the six who’d been fired at the time – were facing disciplinary action for policy violations. Tuesday’s announcement covers the discipline decisions for all 13.

    In addition, two Shelby County Sheriff’s Office deputies who were at the scene were suspended for five days each without pay for their parts in the case, according to a sheriff’s office news release obtained by CNN affiliate WHBQ.

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  • 4 Americans missing in Mexico identified by family members as a South Carolina mother and her friends who were traveling for a medical procedure | CNN

    4 Americans missing in Mexico identified by family members as a South Carolina mother and her friends who were traveling for a medical procedure | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The four Americans who authorities say were kidnapped in Mexico on Friday were a tight-knit group of friends traveling from South Carolina so one of them – a mother of six – could undergo a medical procedure across the border, two family members told CNN.

    Latavia “Tay” Washington McGee, 33, drove to Mexico with Shaeed Woodard, Zindell Brown and their friend Eric for the procedure but she never made it to her doctor’s appointment on Friday, her mother Barbara Burgess told CNN.

    On Sunday, Burgess said she was informed by the FBI that her daughter had been kidnapped and was in danger. “They said if she calls me to call them,” she said.

    Mexican authorities are still searching for the missing Americans, who drove into the border city of Matamoros on Friday, where they were fired upon by unidentified gunman and “placed in a vehicle and taken from the scene by armed men,” according to the FBI.

    An innocent Mexican bystander was also killed in the encounter, US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said.

    Investigators believe the Americans were mistakenly targeted by a Mexican cartel that likely mistook them for Haitian drug smugglers, a US official familiar with the ongoing investigation tells CNN.

    The US citizens have no concerning criminal history that has been identified by investigators, the source said.

    The group of friends, who were bonded “like glue,” grew up together in South Carolina, Brown’s sister Zalandria Brown told CNN. She added, that she and her brother are also close. “Zindell is like my shadow, he’s like my son, he’s like my hip bone. We’re just tight like that.”

    This was the second time Washington McGee, a mother of six children, had gone to Mexico for a medical procedure, her mother said. About two to three years ago, Burgess said, her daughter traveled to the country for a surgery.

    Mexico has become a popular destination for “medical tourism,” attracting travelers who may be seeking cheaper alternatives or medical treatments that are unapproved or unavailable in the US. But the CDC warns the growing trend can carry dangerous risks depending on the destination and facility, including infection and possible post-procedure complications.

    Receipts found in the group’s vehicle also indicated the Americans were in Mexico for medical procedures, a US official with knowledge of the investigation tells CNN.

    Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday that the group had crossed the border to “buy medicines” and assured the “whole government” is working to resolve the case.

    Federal and local Mexican authorities are participating in the effort to locate the missing Americans, Tamaulipas Attorney General Irving Barrios Mojica said Monday.

    The White House and US State Department are “closely following” the case, spokespeople said in briefings Monday.

    “These sorts of attacks are unacceptable. Our thoughts are with the families of these individuals and we stand ready to provide all appropriate consular assistance,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Monday, adding that the State and Homeland Security departments are coordinating with Mexican authorities.

    “We will continue to coordinate with Mexico and push them to bring those responsible to justice,” Jean-Pierre said.

    CNN has reached out to the FBI, the Tamaulipas Secretary of Public Security’s office and the Mexican Attorney General’s Office for more information.

    Washington McGee’s aunt, Mary McFadden, told CNN that when the family hadn’t heard from the group of friends by Sunday, they began searching online for any news related to their travel destination. Then, the family saw a video McFadden described as showing her niece being kidnapped.

    “We recognized her and her blonde hair,” McFadden said. She said she also recognized her niece’s clothing from a live video Washington McGee had posted to Facebook earlier Friday.

    “This happened in plain daylight. We don’t know if she is dead or alive. The last picture we saw, she was walking alive,” McFadden said.

    “She is a mother and we need her to come back here for her kids,” she said, adding that Washington McGee’s children range in age from 6 to 18 years old.

    A video obtained by CNN shows a woman and other unidentified people being roughly loaded into a white pickup truck. CNN has confirmed the video matches the incident but has not independently confirmed it is the four Americans shown in the video.

    The video shows the woman being pulled or pushed onto the bed of the truck by two unidentified people as a third visibly armed man watches. The three men then appear to drag at least two limp people onto the truck bed, the video shows.

    Additionally, photos obtained by CNN appear to show fragments of the scene where the situation occurred, including the car believed to have been driven by the Americans crashed with another vehicle before they were taken at gunpoint from the scene.

    The US citizens were driving a white minivan with North Carolina plates, according to the FBI in San Antonio.

    The FBI would not confirm the authenticity of the photos, but CNN has geolocated the images and confirmed their authenticity with a US official with knowledge of the investigation.

    Two vehicles rest in Matamoros, Mexico, at the scene which a US official said is connected to the missing Americans.

    The photos also show a woman looking at and then sitting next to three people lying on the ground outside a white minivan. All the doors of the van are open. It is unclear whether the four people in the photos are the US citizens.

    The woman then appears to have been loaded onto the bed of a white pickup truck, beside which several people can be seen lying on the street, the photos show.

    One photo shows that an ambulance arrived, but it’s unclear if medical attention was being provided.

    Investigators trying to locate the US citizens and identify those involved in the alleged kidnapping have been working to gather surveillance footage, collect ballistics and fingerprint evidence, take biological samples for genetic profiles and process the vehicles involved, Tamaulipas officials said.

    A joint task force of federal and state agencies has been created for “processing all the information related to the case” and maintaining constant communication with US officials, Barrios Mojica, the Tamaulipas Attorney General, said.

    “Given the presumption that they are American citizens, a line of direct communication was established with US authorities to exchange information and dedicated to locating them. These communications are being carried out at the highest level between the State Government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the United States Embassy in Mexico,” Barrios Mojica said.

    The FBI is also requesting the public’s help in finding the Americans and identifying anyone involved in the incident. The agency announced a $50,000 reward for the return of the victims and the arrest of those responsible.

    Ongoing violence has plagued some Mexican cities as they become the backdrop of organized crime and drug trafficking operations, which the country’s government has been battling since at least 2006.

    Matamoros, a city in the state of Tamaulipas, has a population of more than 500,000 people and is located just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. The city has recently been the site of a large encampment of asylum-seeking migrants hoping to cross into the US.

    The US State Department has issued a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory for US citizens thinking of going to Tamaulipas, citing crime and kidnapping.

    “Criminal groups target public and private passenger buses, as well as private automobiles traveling through Tamaulipas, often taking passengers and demanding ransom payments,” the State Department advisory says.

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  • After a man is fatally shot near Indianapolis stadium, police lock down convention center in search for suspect | CNN

    After a man is fatally shot near Indianapolis stadium, police lock down convention center in search for suspect | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A man was fatally shot near Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium and downtown convention center on Monday night, prompting a lockdown of the convention center as officers searched for a suspect, police said.

    Officers responding to reports of the shooting found the man injured on a sidewalk outside the stadium – home to the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts – and he was later pronounced dead, Indianapolis police said.

    Investigators had reason to believe a suspect entered the nearby Indiana Convention Center, so the center was put on lockdown and police began searching the center Monday night, Indianapolis police spokesperson William Young said.

    No suspect was in custody as of late Monday, Young said.

    “Those inside of the convention center were asked to shelter in place,” Young told reporters shortly after 11 p.m. ET.

    “Right now officers are preparing to clear the convention center to ensure that it is safe and no one else is injured,” Young added.

    All streets around the stadium were closed for an investigation, police said. Residents were asked to avoid the area.

    The name of the man who was killed and details about what led to the shooting weren’t immediately available.

    Police didn’t say precisely where the shooting happened, but Young stressed it did not happen at the stadium or the convention center.

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  • US imposes visa sanction on Syrian military official over massacre that killed at least 41 unarmed civilians | CNN Politics

    US imposes visa sanction on Syrian military official over massacre that killed at least 41 unarmed civilians | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The US State Department on Monday imposed a visa sanction on a Syrian military official whom it says killed at least 41 unarmed civilians in a neighborhood of Damascus in April 2013.

    Amjad Yousef, a military intelligence officer for the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, and his immediate family will be blocked from entering the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.

    Video evidence of the massacre in Tadamon, which Blinken described as being “carried out coldly and methodically,” publicly emerged in 2022 “after a long and comprehensive investigation by independent researchers.”

    “Today, we are taking action to promote accountability for this atrocity,” the top US diplomat said.

    The announcement of the visa restriction comes as a growing number of countries have renewed at least some level of contact directly with the Assad regime, particularly in the wake of last month’s devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria.

    “The footage of this massacre, coupled with the ongoing killing and abuse of countless Syrians, serves as a sobering reminder for why countries should not normalize relations with the Assad regime absent enduring progress towards a political resolution,” Blinken said.

    “The United States calls on the Assad regime to cease all violations and abuses of human rights, including but not limited to extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and torture,” he said.

    Blinken noted that March “marks the twelfth year of conflict in Syria during which the Assad regime has committed innumerable atrocities, some of which rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

    In an April 2022 article published in “New Lines Magazine,” the two researchers who helped expose the massacre said that the videos, which were “already shocking for their atrociousness, stand out in their brevity and callousness among the thousands of hours of footage that we have examined throughout our respective careers as researchers of mass violence and genocide in Syria and elsewhere.”

    “Particularly shocking about the Tadamon videos is the fact that the intelligence officers who committed the massacre were on duty and in uniform; they report to President Bashar al-Assad himself, and yet they chose to show their faces in the incriminating footage. At several points during the video, they looked straight into the camera seemingly relaxed and smiling. In documenting their own actions, they used HD video quality,” Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör wrote.

    Yousef, the official who was sanctioned by the State Department Tuesday, “is focused, stoic and precise, and he works efficiently toward completing the task within a matter of 25 minutes,” the researchers wrote.

    “After a few months, we confronted him with the massacre and let him know that we had seen the footage,” the researchers described.

    “First, he denied it was him in the video. Then, he said he was just arresting someone,” they wrote. “Finally, he settled on the justification that it was his job and expressed his content: ‘I am proud of my deeds.’”

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  • 1 dead, 9 injured after what appears to be the ‘result of a large crowd pushing’ at a concert in Rochester, New York | CNN

    1 dead, 9 injured after what appears to be the ‘result of a large crowd pushing’ at a concert in Rochester, New York | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A 33-year-old woman is dead and nine others are injured “as a result of a large crowd pushing” during a concert Sunday night in Rochester, New York, police said.

    Police initially responded to a report of shots fired inside the Main Street Armory event venue during a concert around 11:05 p.m.

    Officers found several people injured inside but saw no evidence of a shooting, Rochester police said.

    “Upon further investigation … none of the injuries sustained to any of the victims were consistent with a person being shot,” Rochester police Lt. Nicholas Adams said.

    “The injuries appear to be as a result of a large crowd pushing towards the exits following accounts of individuals hearing what they believed to be gunshots.”

    Atiya Holley was leaving the concert with her sister when she got caught up in the deadly stampede, she told CNN.

    She heard what sounded like muffled gunshots outside the venue, she said.

    “It sounded like they were shooting outside, so everyone started running back in. Then when everyone tried to exit again it got crazy,” Holley said.

    Several people started running toward the main and emergency exits, According to Holley.

    “I didn’t know where to go so I went through an emergency exit on the side of the venue. That’s when I was pushed down the stairs and my sister had to pick me up from the ground. We just kept running to the parking lot after that,” Holley said. There, she said, she saw injured concertgoers.

    The tragedy follows a series of deadly crowd surges at entertainment events.

    In 2021, eight people died at the Astroworld music festival in Houston.

    Last fall, 158 people were killed in a crush of people during Halloween festivities in a nightlife district of Seoul, South Korea.

    Authorities in Rochester have not publicly identified the woman who died.

    Two of the nine people hurt were in “critical, life-threatening condition,” police said. The other seven people had non-life-threatening injuries.

    It’s “too early to say what precipitated the event,” Rochester Mayor Malik Evans said Monday.

    “You do not expect to be trampled,” at a concert, the mayor said, saying the tragedy “breaks my heart” and is “totally unacceptable.”

    Police are interviewing concertgoers and security agents, Rochester Police Chief David Smith said. Investigators are also working with fire marshals to help determine the number of concertgoers in relation to the venue’s capacity.

    The venue, which has a 5,000 person maximum capacity, is “current and compliant” with all fire codes, according to a statement released by the City of Rochester Monday afternoon.

    The Main Street Armory has two city code violations, one involving an unapproved business operation at the rear of the property and an unapproved “dwelling unit” the statement said.

    Eight Rochester police officers were posted outside the building, which is why police were on the scene so quickly, according to the statement. Those officers were placed there at the request of the venue, which paid for their services.

    The investigation is in its early stages, and police are asking anyone with video of what happened to come forward, Smith said.

    Rapper GloRilla, who was performing at the venue Sunday night, offered prayers to those affected.

    “I’m just now hearing about what happened … praying everybody is ok,” she tweeted.

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  • Man arrested after allegedly trying to open emergency door on plane and stabbing flight attendant | CNN

    Man arrested after allegedly trying to open emergency door on plane and stabbing flight attendant | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A Massachusetts man was arrested for allegedly stabbing a flight attendant in the neck with a broken metal spoon three times during a flight from Los Angeles to Boston on Monday, after attempting to open an emergency exit door, according to the Justice Department.

    Francisco Severo Torres, 33, faces one charge of interference and attempted interference with flight crew members and attendants using a dangerous weapon. Torres was arrested at Boston Logan International Airport Monday and will remain detained pending a hearing set for Thursday.

    During a United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Boston, the flight crew saw an alarm that a door in the plane had been disarmed and, after inspection, a flight attendant saw the door’s locking handle had been pushed out of the fully locked position and an emergency slide arming lever had been disarmed, according to the Justice Department.

    A flight attendant who saw Torres near the door went to talk to Torres about the door, according to the department, who asked if there were cameras showing he had tampered with the door.

    “According to court documents, the flight attendant then notified the captain that they believed Torres posed a threat to the aircraft and that the captain needed to land the aircraft as soon as possible,” the Justice Department said.

    Soon after, Torres allegedly got out of his seat, mouthing something, before thrusting “towards one of the flight attendants in a stabbing motion with a broken metal spoon, hitting the flight attendant on the neck area three times,” the Justice Department said.

    Torres was then tackled by other passengers on the flight and was immediately taken into custody after the flight landed.

    United Airlines says it has banned Torres from flying on future flights following this incident.

    “Thanks to the quick action of our crew and customers, one customer was restrained after becoming a security concern on United flight 2609 from Los Angeles to Boston,” United said in a statement.

    United says the flight was able to land safely and without any reported injuries.

    “We have zero tolerance for any type of violence on our flights, and this customer will be banned from flying on United pending an investigation. We are cooperating with law enforcement in their investigation,” the statement says.

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  • London police officer who killed Sarah Everard sentenced for indecent exposure | CNN

    London police officer who killed Sarah Everard sentenced for indecent exposure | CNN

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Wayne Couzens, the former London police officer who abducted, raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021, has been sentenced to 19 further months in prison for indecent exposure incidents that took place while he was serving in the force.

    Couzens, 50, was already serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the killing of 33-year-old Everard, which sparked outrage towards the Metropolitan Police and began a national debate about violence against women.

    He was additionally sentenced on Monday for exposing himself to women on three occasions in the months prior to the murder. Two occurred at a fast-food restaurant – the latter of which was just days before he murdered Everard – and another took place while Couzens was on shift with the police.

    Couzens appeared via video link from prison during Monday’s hearing. The court heard that he stepped into the path of a female cyclist while naked and masturbating, in a woodland area of Kent in November 2020, while he was supposed to be working from home.

    Then, on two dates in February 2021, Couzens displayed his erect penis to staffers at a fast food drive-through, while picking up food in his car.

    The second incident took place on February 27; days later, on March 3, Couzens kidnapped Everard in south London.

    On Monday, Couzens also pleaded not guilty to a fourth indecent exposure charge from an alleged incident in June 2015. The UK news agency PA Media reported that he will not face trial over that charge as it was left on file.

    Confidence in the Met police force has plummeted following a series of scandals, including cases of violence against women and allegations of a misogynistic and protective culture among officers.

    The crisis began after Couzens’ murder of Everard, which stunned Britain and drew sharp scrutiny towards Scotland Yard. The 33-year-old was walking to her London home on March 3 when Couzens used his police identification and handcuffs to deceive her into getting in his car under the pretense that she had violated Covid-19 pandemic rules. He raped her and strangled her with his police belt later that evening.

    Police were subsequently criticized for their heavy-handed tactics at a vigil for Everard in Clapham, south London, near where she went missing, and for not acting upon red flags in his behavior sooner.

    Two police officers are currently facing misconduct hearings over their handling of two separate indecent exposure reports related to Couzens, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) confirmed last month.

    In January, former Met senior officer David Carrick admitted 49 offenses, including 24 counts of rape, over an 18-year period, sparking another round of anger. Critics have called for a root-and-branch inquiry into its the Met’s operations and its process in dealing with complaints.

    Met Commissioner Mark Rowley apologized for the failings that led to Carrick not being caught earlier, in an interview distributed to UK broadcasters in January.

    Announcing a review of all those employees facing red flags, he said: “I’m sorry and I know we’ve let women down. I think we failed over two decades to be as ruthless as we ought to be in guarding our own integrity.”

    A report last fall found that when a family member or a fellow officer filed a complaint, it took on average 400 days – more than an entire year – for an allegation of misconduct to be resolved.

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  • 4 US citizens missing after being assaulted and kidnapped in Matamoros, Mexico, FBI says | CNN

    4 US citizens missing after being assaulted and kidnapped in Matamoros, Mexico, FBI says | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Four US citizens were assaulted and kidnapped after crossing the border into northeastern Mexico on Friday, according to the FBI, which is working to locate the missing Americans.

    Soon after the US citizens drove into the border city of Matamoros, Mexico, on Friday they were fired upon by unidentified gunmen, a release from the FBI in San Antonio said. The agency did not identify the victims.

    “All four Americans were placed in a vehicle and taken from the scene by armed men,” the release said.

    The US citizens were driving a white minivan with North Carolina license plates, according to the FBI.

    The FBI is seeking the public’s help in locating the Americans and identifying those responsible for the kidnapping. The agency announced a reward of $50,000 for the return of the victims and the arrest of those involved.

    The FBI said it is cooperating with other federal partners and Mexican law enforcement agencies to investigate the kidnapping.

    Anyone with information related to the incident is encouraged to call the FBI San Antonio Division or submit a tip online.

    Matamoros is located in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, for which the US State Department has issued a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory for US citizens, citing crime and kidnapping.

    CNN has reached out to the FBI for further information on the victims and has also sought comment from the government of Tamaulipas, the Tamaulipas Secretary of Public Security’s office and the Mexican Attorney General’s Office.

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  • Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    As president, Donald Trump made some of his most thoroughly dishonest speeches at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

    As he embarks on another campaign for the presidency, Trump delivered another CPAC doozy Saturday night.

    Trump’s lengthy address to the right-wing gathering in Maryland was filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections and other subjects.

    Here is a fact check of 23 of the false claims Trump made. (And that’s far from the total.)

    Crime in Manhattan

    While Trump criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump’s company, he claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

    Facts First: It isn’t even close to true that Manhattan is experiencing a number of killings that nobody has ever seen. The region classified by the New York Police Department as Manhattan North had 43 reported murders in 2022; that region had 379 reported murders in 1990 and 306 murders in 1993. The Manhattan South region had 35 reported murders in 2022 versus 124 reported murders in 1990 and 86 murders in 1993. New York City as a whole is also nowhere near record homicide levels; the city had 438 reported murders in 2022 versus 2,262 in 1990 and 1,927 in 1993.

    Manhattan North had just eight reported murders this year through February 19, while Manhattan South had one. The city as a whole had 49 reported murders.

    The National Guard and Minnesota

    Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle, then added, “We saved Minneapolis. The thing is, we’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities and states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people.”

    Facts First: This is a reversal of reality. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

    Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that he was the one who sent the Guard to Minneapolis. You can read a longer fact check, from 2020, here.

    Trump’s executive order on monuments

    Trump boasted that he had taken effective action as president to stop the destruction of statues and memorials. He claimed: “I passed and signed an executive order. Anybody that does that gets 10 years in jail, with no negotiation – it’s not ’10’ but it turns into three months.” He added: “But we passed it. It was a very old law, and we found it – one of my very good legal people along with [adviser] Stephen Miller, they found it. They said, ‘Sir, I don’t know if you want to try and bring this back.’ I said. ‘I do.’”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not create a mandatory 10-year sentence for people who damage monuments. In fact, his 2020 executive order did not mandate any increase in sentences.

    Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law, including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.

    Vandalism in Portland

    Trump claimed, “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.”

    Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. Portland obviously still has hundreds of active storefronts, though it has struggled with downtown commercial vacancies for various reasons, and some businesses are sometimes vandalized by protesters. Trump has for years exaggerated the extent of property damage from protest vandalism in Portland.

    Russian expansionism

    Boasting of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed, “I was also the only president where Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.”

    Facts First: While it’s true that Russia didn’t take over a country during Trump’s term, it’s not true that he was the only US president under whom Russia didn’t take over a country. “Totally false,” Michael Khodarkovsky, a Loyola University Chicago history professor who is an expert on Russian imperialism, said in an email. “If by Russia he means the current Russian Federation that existed since 1991, then the best example is Clinton, 1992-98. During this time Russia fought a war in Chechnya, but Chechnya was not a country but one of Russia’s regions.”

    Khodarkovsky added, “If by Russia he means the USSR, as people often do, then from 1945, when the USSR occupied much of Eastern Europe until 1979, when USSR invaded Afghanistan, Moscow did not take over any new country. It only sent forces into countries it had taken over in 1945 (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968).”

    NATO funding

    Trump said while talking about NATO funding: “And I told delinquent foreign nations – they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills – that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that NATO countries weren’t paying “bills” until Trump came along or that they were “delinquent” in the sense of failing to pay bills – as numerous fact-checkers pointed out when Trump repeatedly used such language during his presidency. NATO members haven’t been failing to pay their share of the organization’s common budget to run the organization. And while it’s true that most NATO countries were not (and still are not) meeting NATO’s target of each country spending a minimum of 2% of gross domestic product on defense, that 2% figure is what NATO calls a “guideline”; it is not some sort of binding contract, and it does not create liabilities. An official NATO recommitment to the 2% guideline in 2014 merely said that members not currently at that level would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”

    NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did credit Trump for securing increases in European NATO members’ defense spending, but it’s worth noting that those countries’ spending had also increased in the last two years of the Obama administration following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the recommitment that year to the 2% guideline. NATO notes on its website that 2022 was “the eighth consecutive year of rising defence spending across European Allies and Canada.”

    NATO’s existence

    Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense.

    There was never any indication that NATO, created in 1949, would have ceased to exist in the early 2020s without additional funding from some members. The alliance was stable even with many members not meeting the alliance’s guideline of having members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

    We don’t often fact-check claims about what might have happened in an alternative scenario, but this Trump claim has no basis in reality. “The quote doesn’t make sense, obviously,” said Erwan Lagadec, research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert on NATO.

    Lagadec noted that NATO has had no trouble getting allies to cover the roughly $3 billion in annual “direct” funding for the organization, which is “peanuts” to this group of countries. And he said that the only NATO member that had given “any sign” in recent years that it was thinking about leaving the alliance “was … the US, under Trump.” Lagadec added that the US leaving the alliance is one scenario that could realistically kill it, but that clearly wasn’t what Trump was talking about in his remarks on spending levels.

    James Goldgeier, an American University professor of international relations and Brookings Institution visiting fellow, said in an email: “NATO was founded in 1949, so it seems very clear that Donald Trump had nothing to do with its existence. In fact, the worry was that he would pull the US out of NATO, as his national security adviser warned he would do if he had been reelected.”

    The cost of NATO’s headquarters

    Trump mocked NATO’s headquarters, saying, “They spent – an office building that cost $3 billion. It’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan laid on its side. It’s one of the longest buildings I’ve ever seen. And I said, ‘You should have – instead of spending $3 billion, you should have spent $500 million building the greatest bunker you’ve ever seen. Because Russia didn’t – wouldn’t even need an airplane attack. One tank one shot through that beautiful glass building and it’s gone.’”

    Facts First: NATO did spend a lot of money on its headquarters in Belgium, but Trump’s “$3 billion” figure is a major exaggeration. When Trump used the same inaccurate figure in early 2020, NATO told CNN that the headquarters was actually constructed for a sum under the approved budget of about $1.18 billion euro, which is about $1.3 billion at exchange rates as of Sunday morning.

    The Pulitzer Prize

    Trump made his usual argument that The Washington Post and The New York Times should not have won a prestigious journalism award, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize, for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to Trump’s team. He then said, “And they were exactly wrong. And now they’ve even admitted that it was a hoax. It was a total hoax, and they got the prize.”

    Facts First: The Times and Post have not made any sort of “hoax” admission. “The claim is completely false,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in an email on Sunday.

    Stadtlander continued: “When our Pulitzer Prize shared with The Washington Post was challenged by the former President, the award was upheld by the Pulitzer Prize Board after an independent review. The board stated that ‘no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.’ The Times’s reporting was also substantiated by the Mueller investigation and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the matter.”

    The Post referred CNN to that same July statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

    Awareness of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline

    Trump claimed of his opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany: “Nord Stream 2 – Nobody ever heard of it … right? Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. I started talking about Nord Stream 2. I had to go call it ‘the pipeline’ because nobody knew what I was talking about.”

    Facts First: This is standard Trump hyperbole; it’s just not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before he began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. Trump may well have generated increased US awareness to the controversial project, but “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along” isn’t true.

    Trump and Nord Stream 2

    Trump claimed, “I got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. Remember they said, ‘Trump is giving a lot to Russia.’ Really? Putin actually said to me, ‘If you’re my friend, I’d hate like hell to see you as my enemy.’ Because I ended the pipeline, right? Do you remember? Nord Stream 2.” He continued, “I ended it. It was dead.”

    Facts First: Trump did not kill Nord Stream 2. While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

    The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine early last year. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

    The Obama administration and Ukraine

    Trump claimed that while he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine, the Obama administration “didn’t want to get involved” and merely “supplied the bedsheets.” He said, “Do you remember? They supplied the bedsheets. And maybe even some pillows from [pillow businessman] Mike [Lindell], who’s sitting right over here. … But they supplied the bedsheets.”

    Facts First: This is inaccurate. While it’s true that the Obama administration declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, it provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016 that involved far more than bedsheets. The aid included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.

    Biden and a Ukrainian prosecutor

    Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

    Facts First: This is baseless. There has never been any evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been widely faulted by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and European countries for failing to investigate corruption. A former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor and a top anti-corruption activist have both said the Burisma-related investigation was dormant at the time Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

    Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told The Washington Post in 2019: “Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma. And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.” In addition, Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg in 2019: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws – at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”

    Biden, as vice president, was carrying out the policy of the US and its allies, not pursuing his own agenda, in threatening to withhold a billion-dollar US loan guarantee if the Ukrainian government did not sack Shokin. CNN fact-checked Trump’s claims on this subject at length in 2019.

    Trump and job creation

    Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.”

    Facts First: This is false. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president. The net loss was largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7 million jobs added – was far from the greatest of any president ever. The economy added more than 11.5 million jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

    Tariffs on China

    Trump repeated a trade claim he made frequently during his presidency. Speaking of China, he said he “charged them” with tariffs that had the effect of “bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury from China. Thank you very much, China.” He claimed that he did this even though “no other president had gotten even 10 cents – not one president got anything from them.”

    Facts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.” Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing most of the cost of the tariffs.

    The trade deficit with China

    Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president – that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.”

    Facts First: The US has never had a $500 billion, $600 billion or $700 billion trade deficit with China even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade in which the US runs a surplus with China. The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

    Trump and the 2020 election

    Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].”

    Facts First: This is Trump’s regular lie. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.

    Democrats and elections

    Trump said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense. There is just no basis for a broad claim that Democrats are election cheaters. Election fraud and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. (We’ll ignore Trump’s subjective claim about “disinformation.”)

    The liberation of the ISIS caliphate

    Trump repeated his familiar story about how he had supposedly liberated the “caliphate” of terror group ISIS in “three weeks.” This time, he said, “In fact, with the ISIS caliphate, a certain general said it could only be done in three years, ‘and probably it can’t be done at all, sir.’ And I did it in three weeks. I went over to Iraq, met a great general. ‘Sir, I can do it in three weeks.’ You’ve heard that story. ‘I can do it in three weeks, sir.’ ‘How are you going to do that?’ They explained it. I did it in three weeks. I was told it couldn’t be done at all, that it would take at least three years. Did it in three weeks. Knocked out 100% of the ISIS caliphate.”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim of eliminating the ISIS caliphate in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq, in late December 2018, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past, when he said “I did it”: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

    IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

    Military equipment left in Afghanistan

    Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. He said of the leader of the Taliban: “Now he’s got $85 billion worth of our equipment that I bought – $85 billion.” He added later: “The thing that nobody ever talks about, we lost 13 [soldiers], we lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

    Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

    As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

    The Afghanistan withdrawal and the F-16

    Trump claimed that the Taliban acquired F-16 fighter planes because of the US withdrawal, saying: “They feared the F-16s. And now they own them. Think of it.”

    Facts First: This is false. F-16s were not among the equipment abandoned upon the US withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan armed forces, since the Afghan armed forces did not fly F-16s.

    The border wall

    Trump claimed that he had kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that Trump “completed” the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed.

    The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280 miles left to go, about 74 miles were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

    Latin America and deportations

    Trump told his familiar story about how, until he was president, the US was unable to deport MS-13 gang members to other countries, “especially” Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because those countries “didn’t want them.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back migrants being deported from the US during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

    In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

    For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported that Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.

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  • 2 dead, 6 injured after shooting at Georgia house party that had more than 100 teenagers in attendance | CNN

    2 dead, 6 injured after shooting at Georgia house party that had more than 100 teenagers in attendance | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Two people were killed and six others were injured after a shooting at a house party in Douglas County, Georgia on Saturday that had more than 100 teenagers in attendance, police said.

    Officials said the shooting stemmed from a confrontation at the house party in Douglasville, a city about 20 miles west of Atlanta.

    The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office (DCSO) asked that anyone with information about the assailant to contact its office as information about the incident is “very limited,” the agency said in a news release.

    Wounded partygoers were seen in neighboring yards after the shooting, according to CNN affiliate WXIA. The owner of the home told WXIA they held a Sweet 16 party for their daughter and they chose to end the party at 10:00 p.m., claiming some of the attendees were smoking marijuana.

    It’s unclear whether there were any adults present at the time of the shooting, which the owner told WXIA happened in a cul-de-sac outside the home.

    DCSO said the incident remains a “very active investigation.”

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  • 5 people shot near a gun buyback event at a Los Angeles beach | CNN

    5 people shot near a gun buyback event at a Los Angeles beach | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Five people were injured in a shooting at a Los Angeles beach Saturday – a few miles from where city officials had hosted a gun buyback event earlier in the day, according to the Los Angeles Police Department and City Councilmember Tim McOsker.

    The LAPD’s Harbor Division responded to a radio call of a shooting at Royal Palms Beach around 5:45 p.m. Saturday.

    “Five male Hispanic victims were at a barbeque, at the beach, with a group of approximately 10-20 people,” Los Angeles police said in a written statement Sunday.

    Two suspect approached the group and got into a physical altercation. “The suspects then produced a handgun and fired multiple rounds, striking the victims,” police said. “The suspects then fled the location in a vehicle.”

    Five victims were struck by gunfire. “Last information we received was two victims are in critical condition, two victims are in serious condition and one victim is in stable condition,” the police statement said.

    Previously, police said one victim was in critical condition, and four were in stable condition.

    “We’re outraged and saddened by the shooting at Royal Palms Beach in San Pedro that has left 5 people injured,” said a joint statement by McOsker and Janice Hahn, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

    “It’s tragically ironic that today we hosted a gun buy-back event just a few miles away from this location. Gun violence is wreaking havoc on our community.”

    Royal Palms Beach will be closed Sunday and will close earlier on weekends as city officials work on plans “to ensure safety and peaceful community use,” the joint statement said.

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  • Alex Murdaugh’s risky testimony ultimately brought him down | CNN

    Alex Murdaugh’s risky testimony ultimately brought him down | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Convicted former attorney Alex Murdaugh’s decision to take the stand at his double murder trial was not entirely surprising given his family’s legal legacy stretching back to the early 1900s in coastal South Carolina.

    But legal experts say it was ultimately a costly maneuver for the scion of the well-connected Murdaugh clan, which prosecuted crime for three successive generations across the state’s rural low country.

    “Being a skilled attorney, I think he thought he could outsmart the jurors,” attorney and legal affairs commentator Areva Martin said.

    On Friday, one week after Murdaugh, 54, spent hours on the witness stand trying to convince a jury of his innocence, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders of his wife and son.

    “He had to testify. There were too many lies,” CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson said Saturday. “Obviously the jury felt that he was conning them.”

    Murdaugh’s biggest lie perhaps was denying for a year and half that he was anywhere near his wife, Maggie, and 22-year-old son, Paul, when they were fatally shot on the family’s Islandton property on June 7, 2021.

    On the stand, Murdaugh maintained he didn’t kill them but found their bodies after returning from a brief visit to his sick mother that night.

    A key piece of evidence came from Paul Murdaugh, who recorded a video moments before he was gunned down and killed. It showed a family dog near the kennels on the property. It also captured his father’s voice in the background, placing Alex Murdaugh at the scene of the crime.

    The video, which Murdaugh didn’t know existed before the trial, eliminated his alibi. The longtime lawyer took the stand in a courthouse where a portrait of Murdaugh’s grandfather had adorned a wall before the trial. He sought to explain why he lied about his whereabouts.

    “He had never faced accountability in his life and had always been able to escape that – and that was more important to him than anything,” lead prosecutor Creighton Waters told CNN.

    “That’s why I was always convinced that he would testify in this case. That he was assured that he could talk his way out of it one more time. Not out of all the trouble but certainly talk his way out of this. Obviously the jury saw otherwise.”

    Within moments of taking the stand, Murdaugh acknowledged his voice is heard in the video that appeared to be taken at the dog kennels where the bodies were found, saying he lied to investigators about being there earlier that evening because of “paranoid thinking” stemming from his drug addiction.

    Over the course of the trial, numerous witnesses identified Murdaugh’s voice in the background of the footage. But Murdaugh was emphatic that he “didn’t shoot my wife or my son. Anytime. Ever.”

    Craig Moyer, a juror who helped convict Murdaugh on Thursday, told ABC News it took the panel less than an hour to reach a unanimous decision.

    The video was crucial.

    “I could hear his voice clearly,” Moyer told ABC. “And everybody else could too.”

    Murdaugh was “a good liar,” Moyer said, “but not good enough.”

    Moyer told ABC he “didn’t see any true remorse or compassion” from Murdaugh. On the stand, Murdaugh “didn’t cry,” Moyer said. “All he did was blow snot.”

    Waters said he simply wanted to get Murdaugh talking during cross examination. And he did.

    “We have to remember this guy was an experienced lawyer,” Waters said. “He’s a part-time assistant solicitor and there’s 100 years of prosecution legacy in his family… I felt like he believed he could look at that jury and really convince them. But I felt if I got him talking he would eventually lie and they would get to see that in real time.”

    Defense attorney Dick Harpootlian defended the decision to let Murdaugh testify, saying his credibility was under question because of financial wrongdoings. He said the defense team plans to appeal the sentence within 10 days.

    In a separate case that has not yet gone to trial, Murdaugh faces 99 charges stemming from a slew of alleged financial crimes, including defrauding his clients, former law firm and the government of millions.

    “Once they got that character information – ‘he’s a thief, he’s a liar’ – then this jury had to think that he’s a despicable human being, and not to be believed,” Harpootlian told reporters after sentencing, referring to evidence about the financial crimes introduced at the murder trial. Murdaugh, he added, always wanted to take the stand.

    Harpootlian told CNN it was “inexplicable that he would execute his son and his wife in that fashion, in my mind.”

    Another defense lawyer, Jim Griffin, said putting Murdaugh on the stand showed the jury his client’s “emotions about Maggie and Paul, which are very raw and real.”

    Still, putting Murdaugh on the stand was a risky move, according to legal experts.

    “His testimony was very poor. In fact, I think it was borderline atrocious,” jury consultant Alan Tuerkheimer told CNN. “Jurors don’t like it when witnesses are being questioned and they don’t answer and what he kept doing continually was going beyond the scope of the questions.”

    Tuerkheimer added that Murdaugh “kept trying to interject his own narrative. He was evasive, I thought he prevaricated a lot and his testimony was self serving and jurors do not like that. He should have stuck to quick yes or no answers when he was being crossed.”

    Tuerkheimer also questioned the effectiveness of Murdaugh frequently referring to his dead wife and son as “Mags” and “Paul Paul.”

    “It’s effective if it’s genuine and it just did not come off as genuine. Look, lawyers love to testify. They use words to persuade people. And once he was on the stand, he just couldn’t contain himself,” Tuerkheimer said of Murdaugh.

    “And when he was using those terms in trying to endear himself with the jury, they just didn’t think that it was authentic. They rejected it and it was a Hail Mary that he had to testify. And, like most Hail Marys, it didn’t work.”

    On Thursday, after more than a month and dozens of witnesses, the jury convicted Murdaugh of two counts of murder in the June 2021 killings, as well as two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.

    The next day, after his sentencing, Murdaugh – wearing a brown jumpsuit and handcuffs – was escorted out of a courthouse that once symbolized his family’s history of power and privilege in the region.

    “For him the chance of convincing one or two jurors that he might be a liar, he might be a thief, but he’s not a killer, was worth taking that risk,” defense attorney Misty Marris told CNN Saturday. “But in my opinion, the testimony was what actually sunk him.”

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  • How Paul Murdaugh helped solve his own murder | CNN

    How Paul Murdaugh helped solve his own murder | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    For a year and a half, Alex Murdaugh denied he was anywhere near where his wife, Maggie, and 22-year-old son, Paul, were brutally killed.

    But it was one of his victims – his son – who would provide key proof after his death that legal experts say exposed his father’s web of lies and ultimately led to his conviction in the double homicide.

    “It is ironic, in the end, that it was the victim, Paul Murdaugh, who solved his own murder,” Dave Aronberg, state attorney for Florida’s Palm Beach County, told CNN Thursday night.

    Murdaugh, a now disgraced former South Carolina attorney, was found guilty Thursday of fatally shooting his wife and son and, a day later, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He has maintained his innocence.

    The key proof came from a video, which Paul recorded on Snapchat and sent to several of his friends moments before he was gunned down and killed. It appeared to show one of the family’s dogs at the kennels on their property. It also captured Alex Murdaugh’s voice in the background – and placed him at the scene of the crime.

    The video, which Murdaugh didn’t know existed before the trial, marked the crumbling of his alibi and left him no choice but to take the stand and explain why he lied multiple times to authorities about his whereabouts, legal experts told CNN.

    Murdaugh, while denying he killed his wife and son, testified he lied about where he was because of paranoid thoughts stemming from his yearslong drug addiction to opioid painkillers, as well as his distrust of investigators. While on the stand, he also confessed to more lies, admitting in court he had stolen millions from his law firm and clients over roughly two decades.

    He told the jury that despite his repeated past deceptions, he was honest about one thing: he did not kill his family.

    But jurors did not believe him.

    And in a case with little to no direct evidence linking Murdaugh to the scene, South Carolina’s top prosecutor credited the video clip for the quick conviction by the jury.

    “This was a circumstantial evidence case but what people have to understand is that circumstantial evidence is just as powerful as direct evidence,” South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who was part of the prosecuting team, said Friday. “I think the kennel video hung him.”

    “The jury saw how he was trying to manipulate them, saw how he was lying and they read through it, and they heard the kennel video and they made the right decision.”

    Craig Moyer, one of the jurors who helped convict Murdaugh, told ABC News in his first public interview that it took less than an hour for the group to reach a unanimous decision.

    The video is what convinced him.

    “I could hear his voice clearly,” Moyer told ABC. “And everybody else could too.”

    Moyer said he was surprised Murdaugh admitted he lied about the video, but, he added, he still did not believe the defendant was being truthful about what happened on the night of June 7, 2021.

    Murdaugh was “a good liar,” Moyer said, “but not good enough.”

    “When he took the stand – that is, Alex Murdaugh – that was his opportunity to state his claim. It was a very hard sell, however,” said criminal defense attorney and CNN Legal Analyst Joey Jackson. “As much as you deny, deny, deny being at the kennels, you took the stand because it came out that you were there. Cell phone data put you there, car data put you there, in addition to the fact that your own voice put you there, by virtue of what your son recorded.”

    “I think by virtue of what that juror said, clearly he was of the view that … (Alex Murdaugh) was continuing to lie, the evidence was clear and that he was guilty,” Jackson added.

    murdaugh juror

    ‘All he did was blow snot’: Juror on whether Murdaugh was crying on the stand

    The video was recorded by Paul at 8:44 p.m. on the night of the killings, according to testimony during the trial.

    Colleton County Coroner Richard Harvey testified he estimated Maggie and Paul’s time of death to be around 9 p.m. – though he said it’s possible the pair could have been shot any time between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.

    After admitting he lied to authorities about where he was that night, Murdaugh said he did briefly go to the kennels and left roughly around 8:47 p.m.

    He later visited his mother and found Maggie and Paul’s bodies when he returned home, Murdaugh testified.

    Murdaugh told the court that as his longtime addiction evolved, it often caused him to go into “paranoid thinking.” Those paranoid thoughts were triggered on the night of the homicides, he said, when investigators tested his hands for gunshot residue and asked him about his relationship with his wife and son. Murdaugh claimed that was why he lied.

    “All those things, coupled together after finding them, coupled with my distrust for (the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) caused me to have paranoid thoughts,” he testified. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I don’t think I was capable of reason. And I lied about being there, and I’m so sorry that I did.”

    “Once I told the lie, I told my family, I had to keep lying,” he told the court.

    Former prosecutor Sarah Ford told CNN that Murdaugh “really had no choice other than to take the stand and clarify” the video at the kennel.

    “And the jury did not buy that clarification. He was lying long before he walked into that courtroom, long before he took the stand and that jury believed that he was lying to them on that stand,” Ford said.

    After his sentence, Murdaugh was released to the South Carolina Department of Corrections.

    He was processed Friday evening at a reception and evaluation center in Columbia, the department said in a news release. As part of that process, he had his head shaved, a standard procedure for inmates processed into the system, department spokesperson Chrysti Shain said.

    Murdaugh will next undergo medical tests and a mental health and education assessment, the release added.

    Over the next month and a half, department officials will take into account the results of his tests and assessments as well as his crime and sentence in deciding which maximum-security prison he will be sent to, the department said.

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  • 2 more Michigan State shooting victims sent home from hospital while 2 remain hospitalized | CNN

    2 more Michigan State shooting victims sent home from hospital while 2 remain hospitalized | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Two Michigan State students wounded in the mass shooting on campus in February have been discharged from hospital, according to the university’s police department.

    The tweet did not identify the students who were released but said they were previously listed in serious condition.

    One student remains hospitalized in critical condition and one is in fair condition, the MSU Police and Public Safety Department said.

    One other student was discharged last week. Troy Forbush wrote in a Facebook post on February 26 he had a “brush with death” after being shot in the chest.

    He credited the “incredible doctors” who saved his life with emergency surgery. He said he spent a week in the ICU and three more days being cared for by the “superhero staff.”

    “My world has been turned upside down so suddenly but I refuse to be a number, a statistic. Alongside my family, friends, community, university, & state government officials, we will enact change,” he wrote.

    Three students – Arielle Anderson, Brian Fraser and Alexandria Verner – were killed in February 13 when a man opened fire in a classroom and then in another building.

    It’s still unclear why the gunman – a man with no known ties to MSU – targeted the university. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound the night of the killings, authorities said, and had a note threatening other shootings hundreds of miles away in New Jersey.

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  • Jury begins deliberating in Alex Murdaugh’s double murder trial | CNN

    Jury begins deliberating in Alex Murdaugh’s double murder trial | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The jury began to deliberate Thursday in the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced attorney accused of fatally shooting his wife and son at their South Carolina hunting property in 2021.

    The 12 jurors will deliberate until they come to a unanimous verdict on two counts of murder and two weapons charges. Murdaugh, 54, has pleaded not guilty in the deaths of his wife Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh and son Paul Murdaugh.

    Earlier Thursday, Murdaugh’s defense team delivered closing arguments and said law enforcement was too quick to pinpoint him as the main suspect in the killings by the dog kennels on the sprawling estate.

    “We believe that we’ve shown conclusively that (the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) failed miserably in investigating this case,” attorney Jim Griffin said. “And had they done a competent job, Alex would have been excluded from that circle (of suspects) a year ago or two years ago.”

    Over about two hours, Griffin also mocked the prosecution’s theory of motive, explained away Murdaugh’s lies, accused investigators of fabricating evidence and criticized the supposed timeline as unconvincing.

    Follow live updates

    In a rebuttal, prosecutor John Meadors took offense at the defense’s accusations of wrongdoing.

    “I find it offensive that the defense … is claiming law enforcement didn’t do their job, while he is withholding and obstructing justice by not saying ‘I was down at the kennels.’ ”

    The deliberations come after a six-week trial heavy on brutal gore, phone forensics, a mysterious blue tarp, extensive financial wrongdoing and the defendant’s own lies.

    Prosecutors called 61 witnesses over three weeks of testimony to show Murdaugh was the only person who had the motive, means and opportunity to kill his wife and son on their property known as Moselle in Islandton, South Carolina, on the night of June 7, 2021.

    With little to no direct evidence, such as bloody clothing or eyewitnesses, prosecutors have hinged their case on consequential video placing Murdaugh at the crime scene that night despite his repeated assertions otherwise.

    The defense case was highlighted by Murdaugh himself, who offered dramatic testimony over two days last week in which he flatly denied killing his wife and son. At the same time, he admitted he had lied to investigators about his whereabouts just prior to the killings due to paranoia from his drug addiction. He further admitted to stealing millions of dollars from his former clients and law firm and lying to cover his tracks.

    The stranger-than-fiction case has brought national attention – including Netflix and HBO Max documentaries – on Alex Murdaugh, the former personal injury attorney and member of a dynastic family in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather served as the local prosecutor consecutively from 1920 to 2006.

    Murdaugh was a partner at a powerful law firm with his name on it. But that prominence belied underlying issues, and the killings of his wife and son were followed by accusations of misappropriated funds, his resignation, a bizarre alleged suicide-for-hire and insurance scam plot, a stint in rehab for drug addiction, dozens of financial crimes, his disbarment and, ultimately, the murder charges.

    He separately faces 99 charges related to alleged financial crimes that will be adjudicated at a later trial.

    Defense attorney Jim Griffin, right, questions Alex Murdaugh, left, as he gives testimony during his murder trial at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, S.C., on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023. The 54-year-old attorney is standing trial on two counts of murder in the shootings of his wife and son at their Colleton County, S.C., home and hunting lodge on June 7, 2021. (Grace Beahm Alford/The Post And Courier via AP, Pool)

    See what happened when Alex Murdaugh took the stand

    Griffin’s closing arguments, taken together, sought to undercut the prosecution and raise reasonable doubt about the case.

    He said the agency failed to investigate hair found in Murdaugh’s wife’s hand, take fingerprint evidence, examine footwear and tire impressions, or test DNA on the victims’ clothes.

    “They had decided, ‘Unless we find somebody else, it’s going to be Alex,’” he said.

    The prosecution has argued Murdaugh’s motive in the killings was to distract and delay investigations into his financial wrongdoing. Griffin mocked that theory as nonsensical and noted that Murdaugh tried to kill himself in September 2021, calling that a “natural” response to being exposed.

    “It’s totally illogical, irrational and insane … for someone to kill their loved ones when their criminal conduct is exposed,” he argued.

    Griffin acknowledged Murdaugh had lied about being at the dog kennels where his wife and son were killed on the night of the murders. He said the lies were to hide his drug addiction and financial problems – not because he killed his family.

    “Because that’s what addicts do. Addicts lie,” Griffin said. “He lied because he had a closet full of skeletons, and he didn’t want any more scrutiny on him.”

    Griffin said that once Murdaugh’s years of financial fraud were exposed in September 2021, investigators began fabricating evidence about blood spatter on Murdaugh’s clothes and a blue jacket with gunshot residue.

    “I hate to say this, but the evidence is crystal clear, from that moment they started fabricating evidence against Alex. That’s an awful charge,” he said. “I don’t make that claim lightly.”

    Griffin attacked the prosecution’s assertion that the guns used in the killings were “family weapons,” saying there was no firm evidence to support that. He also criticized the prosecution’s proposed timeline of the killings, noting that it was mainly made up of information about whether Paul’s and Maggie’s phones were being used.

    “There’s no direct evidence of him doing anything,” he said.

    He further noted that the prosecution’s timeline indicated Paul and Maggie were killed at about 8:49 or 8:50 p.m. and that Murdaugh left the property for his mother’s house at 9:07 p.m., leaving only about 17 minutes to clean up the bloody scene.

    “He would have to be a magician to make all that evidence disappear,” Griffin said.

    murdaugh juror vpx

    See where jurors walked through Murdaugh crime scene

    In the prosecution’s telling, the motive was Murdaugh’s attempt to distract and delay investigations into his growing financial problems. The means were two family-owned weapons, prosecutors argued. And the opportunity was Murdaugh’s presence at the crime scene, as revealed in a pivotal video and confirmed by his own testimony, minutes before the murders.

    “This defendant … has fooled everyone, everyone, everyone who thought they were close to him,” prosecutor Creighton Waters told the jury. “Everyone who thought they knew who he was, he’s fooled them all. He fooled Maggie and Paul, too, and they paid for it with their lives. Don’t let him fool you, too.”

    Waters first laid out a decade-long timeline of Murdaugh’s financial wrongdoing to show his motive in the killings.

    For one, the chief financial officer of his law firm testified she had confronted Murdaugh about missing funds on the morning of June 7, 2021.

    Second, Murdaugh was facing a lawsuit from the family of Mallory Beach, a 19-year-old woman who was killed in February 2019 when a boat allegedly driven by Paul, and owned by Murdaugh, crashed. A hearing in that civil case was scheduled for June 10, 2021, and had the potential to reveal his financial problems, prosecutors argued.

    Next, Waters worked to show that Murdaugh had been at the kennels that night and had lied about it.

    Murdaugh had long denied that he went to the kennels that night, but a video taken on Paul’s phone at 8:44 p.m. includes audio of Murdaugh’s voice in the background. After about a dozen friends and family members identified his voice on the video, Murdaugh took the stand and admitted he was there and that he he’d lied to police.

    “Why in the world would an innocent, reasonable father and husband lie about that, and lie about it so early? He didn’t know that (video) was there.”

    Further, Waters said Murdaugh had the “means” to commit the murders, in particular the weapons in the crime. Maggie was killed by a Blackout rifle and Paul was killed by a shotgun, and Waters said both were family weapons.

    Finally, the prosecution walked through Murdaugh’s series of lies about the case, particularly about his presence at the kennels. Murdaugh, he said, “lies convincingly and easily and he can do it at a drop of a hat.”

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  • Woman in custody after hourslong standoff that followed the shooting of three officers, authorities say | CNN

    Woman in custody after hourslong standoff that followed the shooting of three officers, authorities say | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Authorities say an hourslong standoff at a Missouri home that followed the shooting of three officers is over and a woman found in the house was taken into custody.

    A deceased man was also found in the home, according to state authorities.

    The three Kansas City, Missouri, police officers were hospitalized after being shot while executing a search warrant Tuesday night, Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said.

    Authorities have not said who fired the shots that injured the officers.

    The officers’ injuries were not life-threatening and they were able to talk from their hospital beds, Graves said.

    “That’s the best situation under these circumstances that I could hope for,” the chief said. “That our officers are alert, they’re awake and they’re talking.”

    The officers were part of a tactical response team executing the warrant at a home shortly after 9:30 p.m. local time, Graves said. Graves did not provide details about the investigation or the warrant.

    Police knocked and identified themselves and were met with gunfire when they tried to breach the door, she said.

    Officers returned fire, but it is unclear how many shots they fired or if they hit the gunman or anyone else in the home, the chief said.

    What followed was a standoff around the home that lasted for hours and involved the help of at least one other Missouri police department as well as the state’s highway patrol.

    SWAT members from the Missouri State Highway Patrol arrived on scene early Wednesday morning, the agency said on Twitter.

    The highway patrol’s SWAT team, with help from FBI SWAT members, secured the house Wednesday evening, it said.

    “A male was found deceased & a female was located alive with no injuries. She is in police custody,” the highway patrol said.

    Authorities have not said how the man died and it was unclear as of Wednesday night who fired at the three Kansas City officers.

    Investigators were continuing to process the scene Wednesday night and the probe is ongoing.

    Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a tweet late Tuesday night he was praying for the officers injured.

    “We’ve been reminded too much lately in Kansas City how dangerous police work can be,” he said. “I am praying for a full recovery for our three officers injured this evening and that everyone on duty gets home to their families safely.”

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  • Prosecutors call rebuttal witnesses in Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial before jury visits scene where wife and son were killed | CNN

    Prosecutors call rebuttal witnesses in Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial before jury visits scene where wife and son were killed | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Prosecutors on Tuesday planned to call up to seven further witnesses to rebut parts of Alex Murdaugh’s defense in his murder trial, according to attorneys in court.

    The first rebuttal witness was Ronnie Crosby, an attorney who worked with Murdaugh and testified for the prosecution three weeks ago.

    “He was a theatrical-type presence in the courtroom and he could get very emotional during closing arguments in front of a jury,” Crosby testified Tuesday.

    Once the rebuttal witnesses are complete, the jury will be allowed to view Murdaugh’s property in Islandton, particularly its dog kennels near where the bodies of Murdaugh’s wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, and son Paul Murdaugh were found. Closing arguments will follow after that.

    The rebuttal comes more than a month into the murder trial and a day after the defense rested its case following testimony from 14 witnesses.

    The most important defense witness was Murdaugh himself, as he admitted he had lied about his whereabouts on the night of the murders and that he had in fact been at the kennels shortly before the murders took place. He blamed his lies on “paranoid thinking” stemming from his addiction to painkillers.

    “I don’t think I was capable of reason, and I lied about being down there, and I’m so sorry that I did,” Murdaugh said.

    Prosecutors, who called 61 witnesses in the case, have argued he killed his wife and son to gain sympathy and distract from the financial misconduct allegations, some of which the state says were about to come to light before the fatal shootings. Murdaugh indeed confessed to much of that financial misconduct – yet denied killing his family.

    “If I was under the pressure that they’re talking about here, I can promise you I would hurt myself before I would hurt one of them, without a doubt,” Murdaugh said on the stand Friday.

    He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two weapons charges in the June 7, 2021, killings. He is separately facing 99 charges related to alleged financial crimes that will be adjudicated later.

    Alex Murdaugh stands during a break in his murder trial on Friday.

    In their case, prosecutors sought to poke holes in Murdaugh’s account of the night of the killings, using cell phone data, video and other evidence to suggest he tried to manufacture an alibi.

    In the absence of direct evidence connecting Murdaugh to the killings – no murder weapon, bloody clothing or eyewitnesses – key arguments in his trial have revolved around the timeline of events and Murdaugh’s whereabouts the night of June 7, 2021.

    In particular, prosecutors used video filmed at the dog kennels shortly before authorities say the killings took place to show Murdaugh was at the scene just minutes before the fatal shootings. Multiple witnesses testified that Murdaugh’s voice can be heard in the background of the video, which was filmed on Paul’s phone starting at 8:44 p.m. In his testimony, Murdaugh admitted he was indeed there and had lied about it.

    Murdaugh testified last week that he went down to the kennels at Maggie’s request, but then returned to the house and laid down on a couch. When he got up, he said, he drove to visit his ailing mother at her home in nearby Almeda, before returning to his property later that night. Police say he called 911 at 10:07 p.m. to report finding the bodies.

    The defense has painted Murdaugh as a loving father and husband being wrongfully accused of the killings after what it says has been a mishandled investigation and crime scene.

    Among the witnesses called by Murdaugh’s attorneys were his former legal partner who testified the scene was not properly secured, and a forensics expert who said his analysis suggests two shooters carried out the killings.

    Murdaugh’s only surviving son, Buster Murdaugh, also testified last week, saying his father was “destroyed” and “heartbroken” following the killings.

    To show the killings could have taken place after Murdaugh left the kennels, the defense has tried to establish that Maggie and Paul’s time of death could have fallen in a much longer time window than prosecutors have presented.

    More than a week ago, Colleton County Coroner Richard Harvey testified that he estimated the time of death to be around 9 p.m. – just minutes after Murdaugh’s voice was captured on the video – based in part on armpit checks he conducted to feel how warm the bodies were.

    Harvey, who said he arrived on scene at 11:04 p.m., also testified that rigor mortis – the stiffening of a body’s joints and muscles following death – had not yet set in, and that it typically starts developing one to three hours following death.

    However, when asked by the defense if the pair could have been shot anytime between 8 or 10 p.m., Harvey said yes.

    A forensic pathologist, Jonathan Eisenstat, testified Monday that armpit temperature checks are “just not a valid method to try to make a determination of time of death,” calling the technique “just a guess.”

    Instead, he said, someone arriving on scene should first check the ambient temperature of the area where the body is found and then take a rectal temperature to get as close to a core body temperature as possible.

    Harvey testified earlier that he did not take rectal temperatures that night. During cross examination, prosecutors asked if the coroner had an idea of when the killings occurred since he did not take exact temperatures.

    “You really do not have a general idea as to when that incident actually occurred?” Deputy Attorney General Attorney Don Zelenka asked Harvey.

    “Yes sir, that’s true,” Harvey said.

    The defense has also tried to portray the investigation into the case as shoddy, arguing that the crime scene was not secure or handled carefully. One witness, Mark Ball, one of Murdaugh’s former law firm colleagues, testified no barricades or police tape were set up to block several visitors from entering the property the night of the killings.

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  • New Meta platform aims to prevent sextortion of teens on Facebook and Instagram | CNN Business

    New Meta platform aims to prevent sextortion of teens on Facebook and Instagram | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Meta is taking steps to crack down on the spread of intimate images of teenagers on Facebook and Instagram.

    A new tool, called Take It Down, takes aim at a practice commonly referred to as “revenge porn,” where someone posts an explicit picture of an individual without their consent to publicly embarrass or cause them distress. The practice has skyrocketed in the last few years on social media, particularly among young boys.

    Take It Down, which is operated and run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, will allow minors for the first time to anonymously attach a hash – or digital fingerprint – to intimate images or videos directly from their own devices, without having to upload them to the new platform. To create a hash of an explicit image, a teen can visit the website TakeItDown.NCMEC.org to install software onto their device. The anonymized number, not the image, will then be stored in a database linked to Meta so that if the photo is ever posted to Facebook or Instagram, it will be matched against the original, reviewed and potentially removed.

    “This issue has been incredibly important to Meta for a very, very long time because the damage done is quite severe in the context of teens or adults,” said Antigone Davis, Meta’s global safety director. “It can do damage to their reputation and familial relationships, and puts them in a very vulnerable position. It’s important that we find tools like this to help them regain control of what can be a very difficult and devastating situation.”

    The tool works for any image shared across Facebook and Instagram, including Messenger and direct messages, as long as the pictures are unencrypted.

    People under 18 years old can use Take It Down, and parents or trusted adults can also use the platform on behalf of a young person. The effort is fully funded by Meta and builds off a similar platform it launched in 2021 alongside more than 70 NGOs, called StopNCII, to prevent revenge porn among adults.

    Since 2016, NCMEC’s cyber tip line has received more than 250,000 reports of online enticement, including sextortion, and the number of those reports more than doubled between 2019 and 2019. In the last year, 79% of the offenders were seeking money to keep photos offline, according to the nonprofit. Many of these cases played out on social media.

    Meta’s efforts come nearly a year and a half after Davis was grilled by Senators about the impact its apps have on younger users, after an explosive report indicated the company was aware that Facebook-owned Instagram could have a “toxic” effect on teen girls. Although the company has rolled out a handful of new tools and protections since then, some experts say it has taken too long and more needs to be done.

    Meanwhile, President Biden demanded in his latest State of the Union address more transparency about tech companies’ algorithms and how they impact their young users’ mental health.

    In response, Davis told CNN that Meta “welcomes efforts to introduce standards for the industry on how to ensure that children can safely navigate and enjoy all that online services have to offer.”

    In the meantime, she said the company continues to double down on efforts to help protect its young users, particularly when it comes to keeping explicit photos off its site.

    “Sextortion is one of the biggest growing crimes we see at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” said Gavin Portnoy, vice president of communications and branding at NCMEC. “We’re calling it the hidden pandemic, and nobody is really talking about it.”

    Portnoy said there’s also been an uptick in youth dying by suicide as a result of sextortion. “That is the driving force behind creating Take It Down, along with our partners,” he said. “It really gives survivors an opportunity to say, look, I’m not going to let you do this to me. I have the power over my images and my videos.”

    In addition to Meta’s platforms, OnlyFans and Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek are also adding this technology into their services.

    But limitations do exist. To get around the hashing technology, people can alter the original images, such as by cropping, adding emojis or doctoring them. Some changes, such as adding a filter to make the photo sepia or black and white, will still be flagged by the system. Meta recommends teens who have multiple copies of the image or edited versions make a hash for each one.

    “There’s no one panacea for the issue of sextortion or the issue of the non-consensual sharing of intimate images,” Davis said. “It really does take a holistic approach.”

    The company has rolled out a series of updates to help teens have an age-appropriate experience on its platforms, such as adding new supervision tools for parents, an age-verification technology and defaulting teens into the most private settings on Facebook and Instagram.

    This is not the first time a major tech company has poured resources into cracking down on explicit imagery of minors. In 2022, Apple abandoned its plans to launch a controversial tool that would check iPhones, iPads and iCloud photos for child sexual abuse material following backlash from critics who decried the feature’s potential privacy implications.

    “Children can be protected without companies combing through personal data, and we will continue working with governments, child advocates, and other companies to help protect young people, preserve their right to privacy, and make the internet a safer place for children and for us all,” the company said in a statement provided to Wired at the time.

    Davis did not comment on whether it’s expecting criticism for Meta’s approach, but noted “there were significant differences between the tool that Apple launched and the tool that NCMEC is launching today.” She emphasized Meta will not be checking for images on users phones.

    “I do welcome any member of the industry trying to invest in efforts to prevent this kind of terrible crime from happening on their apps,” she added.

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  • Ex-husband and relatives charged with murder of Hong Kong model Abby Choi as body parts found | CNN

    Ex-husband and relatives charged with murder of Hong Kong model Abby Choi as body parts found | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Four members of the same family charged in connection with the gruesome killing of Hong Kong model Abby Choi appeared in court Monday, after police said they found what are believed to be parts of her dismembered body, public broadcaster RTHK reported.

    Choi’s ex-husband Alex Kwong, 28, his brother Anthony, 31, and their father, Kwong Kau, 65, are charged with her murder. Alex Kwong’s mother Jenny Li, 63, is charged with perverting the course of justice, RTHK reported.

    All four were denied bail, the Kowloon City Magistrates’ Court ruled Monday, according to RTHK. They are yet to enter a plea.

    On Sunday, investigators identified a skull, several ribs and hair in a large stainless steel soup pot believed to be Choi’s remains, police said. Other body parts, including Choi’s torso and hands, remain missing.

    It follows a police investigation that began Wednesday after Choi, 28, was reported missing. Two days later, parts of her body were found at a house in the city’s Tai Po district, police said. A meat slicer, an electric saw, and some clothing were also found at the home, police said.

    Choi’s ex-husband was arrested on Saturday at a ferry pier on one of the city’s outlying islands, police said. His brother and his parents were arrested on Friday.

    A fifth suspect, a 47-yer old woman, was arrested on Sunday in connection with the case, police said.

    Choi, a model and social media influencer with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, recently appeared as the digital cover model for luxury magazine L’Officiel Monaco and attended this year’s Paris Fashion Week.

    The court adjourned the case until May 8 to allow for further police investigation, RTHK reported.

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