Josiah Garcia reportedly told undercover agent he was an excellent shot and willing to torture people and cut off fingers or earsFake website RentAHitman.com has snagged another would-be killer-for-hire after a US soldier applied to be an assassin and accepted his first (fake) mission apparently believing it to be real.Josiah Garcia, a Tennessee air national guardsman, was arrested after federal agents said he responded to an online ad through the parody website. Continue reading...
Thirteen-year-old was rescued and banned from North Carolina amusement park for one year for attempted theftA 13-year-old boy had to be freed from a claw machine after he climbed inside hoping to score a prize, according to an official at a North Carolina amusement park.Carowinds officials were alerted just before 2pm on Sunday that the boy was inside the Cosmic XL Bonus Game, which contained plush prizes, according to Courtney C McGarry Weber, a spokesperson for the park south of Charlotte. Continue reading...
London Stock Exchange should try to create stepping stone between private ownership and quoted statusHere it is then: private equity’s long-predicted raid on the UK’s ranks of mid-sized quoted companies. Last week, Dechra Pharmaceuticals, a veterinary medicine group, said it had received a potential cash bid of £4.6bn from EQT, the Swedish private equity firm. Then Network International, a payments processor in the Middle East and Africa, said it was in talks with the European private equity titan CVC plus Francisco Partners from the US.On Monday, the Aberdeen-based oilfield services group John Wood, after putting up stout resistance for weeks, said it was open to talks with Apollo of the US. And Apollo popped up again mid-morning with a tentative approach to THG, the headline-hogging e-commerce retailer formerly called The Hut Group. Continue reading...
After being humiliated by its outgoing board, the Florida governor has hit upon another idea to punish the companyRon DeSantis has unveiled the latest act of retaliation against Disney for speaking out against his “don’t say gay” law: he’s threatening to build a new state prison next to the company’s central Florida theme parks.The Republican governor dropped the suggestion at a hastily convened Monday lunchtime press conference, at which he laid out steps the state legislature would take to try to regain control over Florida’s largest private employer. Continue reading...
by Richard Luscombe , Sam Levin and agencies on (#6AW6F)
Ralph Yarl, 16, is in stable condition as outrage spread over the police’s initial decision to release the homeowner without chargesA white homeowner in Kansas City, Missouri, has been charged with armed assault after he shot a Black teenager who rang his doorbell by mistake, authorities announced on Monday.Andrew Lester, 85, is also facing a charge of armed criminal action after shooting Ralph Yarl, 16, twice on Thursday. The teenager, a high school junior, was going to pick up his younger twin brothers from a play date when he went to the wrong address. Zachary Thompson, the prosecuting attorney, announced the charges late on Monday after intense local protests and widespread outrage over the police’s decision to briefly detain Lester before releasing him without charges. Continue reading...
A homeowner shot a Black teenager twice when the youth knocked at his door by mistake to pick up his siblings from a play date in Kansas City, Missouri. Ralph Yarl, a high school junior, was seriously injured but in stable condition on Monday, his family said. The homeowner, who Yarl’s family say is white, was detained but released within 24 hours by Kansas City police. Demonstrators took to the streets in protest against the decision by city authorities, who insisted they could not take further action until they had spoken to the seriously injured boy. The homeowner has since been charged with armed assault.
Vote is seen as an opportunity to reverse the trend of poorly compensating writers as studios report blockbuster profitsWriters in Hollywood represented by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if union leadership decides to call for one amid contract negotiations with major studios.The strike vote was approved, with 97.85% of members voting in favor and 2.15% voting against. More than 9,200 ballots were cast in the vote, with nearly 80% of all members participating in the vote. The results surpass the union’s strike vote results in 2017, when 6,310 ballots were cast with 96.3% voting in favor. Continue reading...
Grand jury declines to indict eight officers who fatally shot Walker last June in Akron, Ohio, during an attempted traffic stopEight police officers who fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, following a car and foot chase will not face criminal charges in his death because a grand jury declined to indict them, Ohio’s attorney general announced Monday.Walker’s death last June sparked protests in Akron after police released body camera footage showing him dying in a hail of gunfire. Police said he had refused to stop when they tried to pull him over for minor equipment and traffic violations, though they haven’t specified further. Police say Walker fired a shot from his car 40 seconds into the pursuit. Continue reading...
The disgraced Republican congressman, who is the subject of a House ethics panel inquiry, is expected to face many challengersDisgraced Republican congressman George Santos, who has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé in his successful bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, has announced he will stand for a second term representing his New York district.Santos, whose district is focused on New York City’s suburbs, is the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics committee, as well as complaints alleging sexual harassment and campaign finance violations. Continue reading...
Attack at teenager’s birthday party in Dadeville left 28 people injured on weekend of more shootings in AmericaStudents at a small-town Alabama school, its flag flying at half-mast Monday, returned to class as investigators worked to piece together what happened at a Saturday night shooting that killed four people, including two Dadeville high school students.The 485-student school is a center of civic life in Dadeville, population 3,200, where “Home of the Tigers” is painted on the water tower. The attack at the teenager’s birthday party also injured 28 at the Mahogany Masterpiece dance studio, where the teenage sister of one of the victims was celebrating her Sweet 16 birthday party. Continue reading...
Investor advisory firm highlights bank’s support for Jes Staley in 2020-21 despite investigation over his connections with disgraced financierThe Barclays board should face questions about its decision to back former boss Jes Staley despite his connections with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a leading corporate governance service has said.Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) told investors in Barclays that questions “can be posed now” about the board’s judgment in continuing to support Staley between 2019 and 2021 when he was subject of regulatory investigations into the nature of his relationship with the disgraced financier. Continue reading...
The court said that Trump himself ‘provoked’ some of the publicity and cannot claim prejudice to delay next week’s trial startDonald Trump’s rape trial will begin next week as scheduled after a federal judge rejected a request for a one-month delay, saying the former president cannot make public statements to promote pre-trial publicity and then claim it is prejudicial to him and reason to delay.Lewis A Kaplan, a federal judge in Manhattan, said the civil trial on claims against Trump by the columnist E Jean Carroll will begin as scheduled on 25 April. Trump denies the rape or knowing Carroll. Continue reading...
This latest cache of secret documents is yet another own goal by a pathologically confused security serviceSo far this century, there have been three major public “compromises” of US intelligence material. The first – the WikiLeaks series initiated by Chelsea Manning – revealed the mayhem at the heart of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Edward Snowden’s vast cache uncovered the US state’s campaign of unlawful surveillance against its own people. Over the past week, we have seen yet another collection of secret documents ruffle the feathers of US intelligence.Of the three sets of leaks, the most recent is, in itself, the least politically damaging. But what they demonstrate again is the dangerous self-created and continuing rot at the heart of the US intelligence system: the combination of over-classification and the widespread availability of access to secret material. Continue reading...
Ex-police officer is serving 22-and-a-half-year sentence for the murder of George Floyd in May 2020The Minnesota court of appeals on Monday upheld the most serious murder conviction against the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, for the killing of George Floyd.Chauvin is serving a 22-and-a-half-year sentence on the second-degree murder count, arising from the death of Floyd on 25 May 2020. Continue reading...
Juan Williams calls supreme court justice ‘my old friend’ but says ‘smell of financial corruption’ has damaged institutionThe supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must be investigated over allegations of corruption, his friend, the Fox News analyst Juan Williams, wrote on Monday.Williams, who said he enjoyed a close multi-decade friendship with the controversial conservative justice, wrote that Thomas “always represented the best ideals of what Black men … could achieve in modern America” but that growing scandal over his relationship with the rightwing mega-donor Harlan Crow was worthy of investigation. Continue reading...
Substitute teacher at Kimbrough middle school in Mesquite helped coordinate fights during class, officials sayA substitute teacher at a Texas middle school was fired for encouraging students to fight in class.The unnamed teacher at Kimbrough middle school in Mesquite was fired last Thursday, after district officials obtained video of in-class fights from the previous day. Continue reading...
Rupert Murdoch’s channel sued for knowingly or recklessly broadcasting outlandish lies about voting equipment after Trump lost electionThe trial in the closely watched $1.6bn defamation lawsuit between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox will begin a day later than scheduled, the judge overseeing the case announced on Sunday evening, hours before opening arguments were set to begin on Monday and amid reports of settlement talks.The trial was rescheduled to begin on Tuesday. Eric Davis, the Delaware superior court judge overseeing the case, did not say why the trial was being delayed. “The court has decided to continue the start of the trial, including jury selection, until Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 9am. I will make such an announcement tomorrow [Monday] at 9am in Courtroom 7E,” he said in a statement released through a court spokesperson. Continue reading...
High-profile trial over Fox’s airing of false claims of election fraud begins, and could see Rupert Murdoch testifyOne of the most-watched media trials in decades gets under way on Tuesday, after a delay, as Fox News, and potentially Rupert Murdoch, find themselves forced to reckon with the channel’s airing of false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race.Dominion Voting Systems, which provided election machines to 28 states in the 2020 presidential election, claims Fox News damaged its business when it aired conspiracy theories that those machines were used to rig the election in favor of Joe Biden. Continue reading...
Latest disclosure includes claims that social media platforms detect false accounts only 1% of the timeRussia has increased the effectiveness of its disinformation campaigning on social media and boasts that vast amounts of fake accounts are escaping detection, according to a report on leaked US intelligence documents.The latest material disclosed on the Discord chat platform contains claims by Russian operators of false social media accounts that they are detected by social media platforms only 1% of the time. The Russian disinformation network is known as Fabrika, according to the leak. Continue reading...
Thomas Peterffy says Florida governor ‘seems to have lost some momentum’ in undeclared bid for 2024 presidential nominationA top Republican donor said he had paused plans to fund Ron DeSantis’s expected presidential run because of the Florida governor’s “stance on abortion and book banning”.Thomas Peterffy, founder of Interactive Brokers, a digital trading platform, told the Financial Times: “I have put myself on hold. Because of his stance on abortion and book banning … myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.” Continue reading...
I thought the party couldn’t sink lower than Boris Johnson, but the awful rhetoric now must make it intolerable for people of colourI have been a politics junkie since 1960. Accordingly, I remember the Labour party introducing the Race Relations Act 1965, while Conservatives regularly made and defended racist remarks, the worst being Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in 1968. My future wife’s Pakistani origin family in Romford experienced racist attacks for the first time after that speech.Despite this, in 1983, as a new convert to free-market capitalism, I joined the Conservative party because I considered that Margaret Thatcher was transforming Britain for the better. I still do.Mohammed Amin is a former chair of the Conservative Muslim ForumDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
Mexican authorities have filed charges against the head of the country’s National Immigration Institute over conditions at the centerWhen Isidro’s phone rang past his bedtime, he knew it could only mean a fire had started somewhere in Ciudad Juárez. The man on the other end of the line told him to head to the immigration detention center near the bridge that connects the Mexican border city with El Paso, Texas.At around 10.20pm on 27 March, Isidro didn’t know he was on his way to an epic tragedy. Continue reading...
Brazen judicial overreach to curb abortion access proves the right wing will abandon their principles to get their wayBefore the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last June, the conservative line on the American judiciary was fairly consistent: judges should be careful interpreters of the rules, not activists; legislatures should decide policy, while courts should simply enforce the law.That was, of course, never true – conservatives have always been thrilled with judicial activists, as long as those activists moved the law to the right. But our post-Roe era has showed just how bankrupt conservative claims to judicial continence are. And perhaps no case – other than Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe – has revealed this rank hypocrisy as much as the decision by a rogue Texas judge to ban mifepristone nationwide.Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness Continue reading...
In the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you shouldn’t have to live in povertyCongress can no longer ignore the needs of the working class of this country. At a time of massive and growing income and wealth inequality and record-breaking corporate profits, we must stand up for working families – many of whom are struggling every day to provide a minimal standard of living for their families.One important way to do that is to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage. In the year 2023, nobody in the US should be forced to work for starvation wages. It should be a basic truism that in the US, the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you do not live in poverty. Raising the minimum wage is not only the right thing to do morally. It is also good economics. Putting money into the hands of people who will spend it on basic needs is a strong economic stimulant. Continue reading...
Thenmozhi Soundararajan has spent her life battling for equity. Now California could pass a landmark law protecting itThenmozhi Soundararajan had one of her earliest encounters with India’s ancient caste ladder when she was 10, during a playdate at a friend’s house not long after immigrating to the US.When Soundararajan revealed that she belongs to a caste once known as “untouchables” – also known by the Sanskrit term “Dalit” – her friend’s mother, with a disgusted look, asked her to eat communal snacks on a separate plate so she could not taint the rest of the family. Continue reading...
Conspiracy theorist and election denier Marjorie Taylor Greene says national guardsman Jack Teixeira has been treated unfairly. Plus, New Jersey to celebrate Bruce Springsteen DayGood morning.Senator Lindsey Graham condemned his fellow Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene as “terribly irresponsible” yesterday after the far-right congresswoman defended the air national guardsman charged with leaking Pentagon intelligence documents.What did Greene say? “Teixeira is white, male, Christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, said on Twitter. “Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low-level national guardsman? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-Nato nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”Does anyone else agree with her? Yes. Other rightwing figures have also defended Teixeira, with Tucker Carlson, the influential Fox News host, praising him as someone who “told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine”.What is Dominion hoping to get from the case? Dominion is asking a Delaware jury to award $1.6bn in damages because it says Fox knowingly or recklessly disregarded the truth when it broadcast outlandish lies about its voting equipment. US law sets a very high bar to win a defamation lawsuit and cases rarely go to trial. Dominion’s case, experts say, is unusually strong. Continue reading...
Sources say he wanted to impress a bunch of teenage boys and young men who were his acolytes in a Discord chatroomMassachusetts air national guardsman Jack Teixeira, 21, has been charged in a Boston court on two counts under the Espionage Act, and the question on everyone’s minds is why. Unlike with whistleblowers in the past such as Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers) and Chelsea Manning (Wikileaks), neither ethics or politics seem to have been the motivation for Teixeira’s alleged leak of hundreds of pages of classified documents related to the war in Ukraine. He doesn’t appear to have been acting as an agent for a foreign government, according to his criminal complaint. So why is he allegedly behind one of the worst leaks of US intelligence in a decade, for which he now faces up to 15 years in prison?Based on what we know so far, the answer may be that Teixeira did it, as they used to say, for the Vine – for social media clout. Sources say he wanted to impress a bunch of teenage boys and young men who were his acolytes in a Discord chat room of 20 to 30 gamers who referred to themselves as Thug Shaker Central – the most wannabe gangster name imaginable for a bunch of gamers whose leader (Teixeira) lived with his mother.Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno Continue reading...
The Bruins broke the long-standing NHL records for wins and points during a stunning regular-season campaign. But history shows that a Stanley Cup is hardly a given from hereOn 11 April, the Bruins notched their 64th win of the season and pushed their regular season point total to 133, the highest since the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens earned 132. Continue reading...
by Edward Helmore in Falmouth, Massachusetts on (#6AW0D)
A post-9/11 switch from ‘need-to-know’ to ‘need-to-share’ explains why a low-level guardsman had access to such sensitive materialLocals living close to the sprawling military base in Cape Cod where 21-year-old Jack Teixeira worked for a US air force intelligence unit have been asking the same questions as everyone else.Was his alleged leak of national security documents some kind of principled stand or an immature attempt to impress two dozen members of a closed chat group called Thug Shaker Central on Discord, a video game chat platform, that he lost control of? Continue reading...
A groundbreaking analysis reveals how Portland, Oregon, was blanketed with toxic chemicals, raising concerns about global teargas use: ‘This was a disaster’ Continue reading...
More than 40m birds have disappeared from UK’s skies since 1970: a trend that imperils the network that gives us lifeMost mornings in spring I listen for a sequence of birdsongs to know that my local area is in good heart, but also to reassure myself that the world is working largely as it should. The default soloist of my dawn in Buxton, Derbyshire, is a mistle thrush that delivers from the ash tree above our house.As I listen to my soloist there is an added delight in knowing that, from Cape Wrath in northernmost Scotland to Kingsdown in Kent, his voice unites with tens of millions of other dawn birds. The blue and great tits of the inner cities, blackbirds and robins among the English villages, chaffinches and wrens through the remotest Scottish glens: it is a collective performance, free of charge, unfolding across all Britain to all people. Continue reading...
by Adam Gabbatt in New York and agencies on (#6AVF9)
Most of the victims teenagers from shooting at dance studio during 16th birthday party in DadevilleAt least four people were killed, including a high school football player, in a shooting that erupted during a birthday party held inside a dance studio in the small town of Dadeville, Alabama, state police and local news media said.More than 28 people were injured, some critically, during the shooting about 60 miles (100km) north-east of the state capital of Montgomery, authorities said. The shooting started shortly after 10.30pm on Saturday. Continue reading...
Seven have died in the incidents since 2021, with much of the violence taking place around LGBTQ+ spacesLast April, Julio Ramirez, a 25-year-old social worker, met a group of men at the Ritz Bar & Lounge, a nautical-themed gay dance club in Hell’s Kitchen, two blocks from Times Square. Less than two hours after leaving with them, Ramirez was dead from a drug overdose after his new acquaintances abandoned him in the backseat of a cab. Investigators believe they used payment apps like Zelle to steal about $20,000 from his bank accounts before leaving him.A month later, John Umberger, a 33-year-old political consultant, was found dead in a Manhattan townhouse after meeting the same group of men at the Q, a multi-story queer nightclub around the corner from the Ritz. According to his mother, Linda Clary, Umberger had been with a group of friends until he decided to head to the Q alone to catch a late-night DJ show. Continue reading...
Four people were killed in a shooting in east Alabama on Saturday night and a number of people were injured, police said. A local TV station reported that the shooting happened at about 10.30pm at a 16th birthday party in Dadeville, about 50 miles north-east of Montgomery. It was not immediately known if a suspect was in custody. Investigators believe an altercation led to the shooting, WRBL reported.
Lawmakers from New York, Minnesota and Wisconsin decry the ruling, now on hold by supreme court until at least 19 AprilTop Democratic senators across the US are pushing back after a federal judge in Texas decided to block the FDA-approved abortion drug mifepristone.On Sunday, the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand criticized as an “outrage” Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision, which is currently halted until at least Wednesday 19 April by the supreme court. Continue reading...
Conspiracy theorist and election denier Marjorie Taylor Greene says national guardsman Jack Teixeira has been treated unfairlySenator Lindsey Graham condemned his fellow Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene as “terribly irresponsible” on Sunday, after the far-right congresswoman defended the air national guardsman charged with leaking Pentagon intelligence documents.Speaking on ABC’s This Week show, Graham said the leaks had “done a lot of damage to our standing” and criticized “those who are trying to sugarcoat this on the right”. Continue reading...
For Muslims, being able to attend congregational Friday prayers stress-free would be a great boon and help counter stereotypes and prejudiceIt was a Friday, the last day of a five-day workshop for young mid-career professionals from refugee backgrounds with skills in engineering, medicine, economics and other areas. Around midday, many of the Muslim participants began to appear anxious.They had been performing the usual prayers and meditations individually in quick lunch breaks the previous four days, but on Friday there was a clear desire to head to a mosque for congregational prayers with other community members. Continue reading...
Police searching for ‘10 or more males’ in black clothing and gray hoodies, as well as white Chrysler 300 and dark pickup truckApproximately 2m dimes, or the equivalent of $200,000, were taken from a tractor trailer in a parking lot of the Philadelphia Mills shopping mall complex in north-east Philadelphia on Thursday morning.According to police, the truck driver had picked up $750,000 worth of dimes from the US Mint in Philadelphia and then parked the truck in the mall parking lot on Wednesday evening. The driver had planned on transporting the dimes, which were organized into 15 pallets that contained $50,000 each, to Florida, CBS reports. Continue reading...
Historic bill aims to ban prejudice based on caste system, practiced for centuries in the Indian subcontinent, in the stateLast month state senator Aisha Wahab introduced SB 403, a historic bill that, if enacted, would make California the first state to ban caste-based discrimination in the US.Practiced for centuries in the Indian subcontinent, caste is an exclusionary system within the Hindu religion that divides people and determines their access to resources. Unlike class, caste is an ascribed status; there’s no mobility to move upwards. Generally, Brahmin communities are in the highest social order, whereas the Dalit community is at the bottom. Continue reading...
The snowpack contains enough water to fill downstream reservoirs ‘multiple times over’, which could mean a rapid runoffSpring has offered California a welcome reprieve from the record rains and historic snowfall that hammered the state in recent weeks, but a new danger wrought by the warming weather looms large. The state’s enormous snowpack will soon begin to melt – and communities are bracing for waters to rise yet again. Trillions of gallons of water packed within the record level of snow blanketing the Sierra Nevada range are expected to rush into rivers and reservoirs as the weather heats up, heightening flood risks in areas already saturated by the state’s extremely wet winter.The snowpack, which stands at 233% of the 1 April average, contains enough water to fill downstream reservoirs “multiple times over”, said climate scientist Daniel Swain in an online briefing this week. “That’s a big deal,” he added. Continue reading...
The picture that Matthew Goodwin paints of modern Britain’s ‘ruling class’ shows a weak understanding of how and where influence worksIn 1956, the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills wrote about what he called, in the title of a book, The Power Elite. America’s elite, he observed, forms a “compact social and psychological entity” that “towers over the underlying population of clerks and wage earners” and whose “values” are “differentiated” from those of the “lower classes”. “All their sons and daughters,” he added, “go to college, often after private schools; then they marry one another… After they are well married, they come to possess, to occupy, to decide.”Seven decades later, the British political scientist Matthew Goodwin similarly paints, in his new book Values, Voice and Virtue, a picture of “the new elite” in Britain. The brushstrokes are familiar, drawing on the work of communitarian and “post-liberal” thinkers of recent years. Britain has “a new dominant class” that has captured its institutions and imposes its “radically progressive cultural values” on the rest of the nation, adrift as it is from the conservative instincts of the majority.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...
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