U.S. News

FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) — A jury on Friday acquitted a former police officer in Virginia of involuntary manslaughter after he fatally shot a shoplifting suspect outside a busy shopping mall.

But the jury did convict the former police sergeant, Wesley Shifflett, of reckless handling of a firearm in connection with the shooting.

Prosecutors argued that Shifflett, then a sergeant with Fairfax County Police, acted recklessly when he shot and killed an unarmed man, Timothy McCree Johnson, after a short foot chase outside Tysons Corner Center in February 2023.

Shifflett testified in his own defense and claimed self defense. He said he saw Johnson, 37, reaching into his waistband after falling down during the chase, and he was worried that Johnson might be drawing a weapon.

(you see BBC? This is how you headline. )

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is back to doing what she’s best known for: spreading conspiracy theories.

The Georgia Republican, who infamously boosted a conspiracy theory about Jewish space lasers in 2021, seemingly tried to imply that Hurricane Helene was the product of someone — an ominous but otherwise unidentified “they” — who can control the weather.

Greene wrote on X[itter] late Thursday:

Yes, they can control the weather. It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done.

[...]

To state it plainly: The idea of weather-inducing technology that’s powerful enough to generate a weaponized hurricane has been debunked by experts. (Is cloud seeding a thing? Yes, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s under discussion here.)

[...]

Together, Greene’s posts certainly give the impression that she thinks Hurricane Helene was the result of some artificial technology to harm Republicans. Which is taking a claim that Donald Trump and others in the GOP have been making — suggesting that federal agencies are deliberately denying aid to Republican residents and giving it to undocumented immigrants instead — and really launching it into the stratosphere, so to speak. For the record, FEMA has denounced and corrected Trump’s claims.

The White House swiftly rebutted the claims and accused Republicans of spreading "bold-faced lies" about funding for the disaster response.

[...]

Trump and his allies expressed outrage that the agency had spent over $640m (£487m) on housing migrants.

But officials pointed out that this funding, authorised by Congress, was part of an entirely different programme run by Fema unconnected to disaster relief.

[...]

Republicans have attempted to link the disaster relief effort to immigration - an issue seen as a strength for Trump - but have spread misinformation about how government money is used.

At an event in Evans, Georgia, on Friday, Trump said, without evidence, that: "A lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already.

"It's been gone for people that came into the country illegally, and nobody has ever seen anything like that. That's a shame."

Fema did receive a budget from Congress - $640m in the last fiscal year - to provide housing to immigrants applying for US citizenship.

Speaking at an event in her home state of Tennessee on Friday, the 78-year-old said the money would come "from my own bank account".

Parton's local commercial ventures - including the Dollywood amusement park - would also donate the same amount to the Mountain Ways Foundation, which is aiding those affected by flooding in the region.

[...]

Helene is the deadliest mainland storm since Katrina in 2005.

Making landfall as a category four hurricane, Helene damaged structures, caused flash flooding and knocked out power to millions of homes. Over half a million properties remain without electricity as of Saturday.

The US government has said the clean-up effort could take years.

During pregnancy, the amount of blood in the body increases 50%. But it can dip to low – and deadly – levels within minutes.

Pregnancy complications, most often during delivery and miscarriage, can trigger critical, excessive bleeding. That bleeding, postpartum hemorrhage, is the leading cause of maternal death worldwide.

To combat it, doctors routinely reach for the medication misoprostol.

“I have it in every single delivery room,” said an obstetrician who’s practiced in New Orleans since 2017. “ I can have it in 45 seconds.”

He needs it that fast, he said, because obstetric hemorrhage can progress quickly, making it possible for a patient to lose a significant amount of blood in a short amount of time. “It’s terrifying,” said the obstetrician, who asked that his name not be used because of the divisive politics of abortion in Louisiana.

To him, misoprostol at the bedside is “tantamount to maternal health.”

Come October 1, that will change.

[...]

[A] new law limits not only people’s reproductive rights, but their very ability to survive common life events, like a miscarriage or the delivery of a child.

(archive.is link)

Some of the worst flooding from Helene was in western North Carolina. The full scope of damage in this mountainous area was still difficult to assess on Saturday, as Interstate 40 as well as countless smaller roads were either shut down or washed out, and many residents lacked power and/or cell service. The French Broad River at Asheville crested on Friday afternoon at 24.67 feet, and the Swannanoa River at nearby Biltmore crested at 26.10 feet; both crests topped the respective records of 23.1 and 20.7 feet produced by the destructive Gulf Coast Hurricane of July 1916.

The colossal storm surge and catastrophic rains produced by Helene – as well as Helene’s jaw-dropping rapid intensification prior to landfall – reveal some likely fingerprints of human-caused climate change, as discussed in a Sept. 27 post by Dr. Jeff Masters. Among the records set by Helene:

• Highest storm surge ever measured at three of the six long-term tide gauges along Florida’s west coast. Cedar Key, Clearwater Beach, and St. Petersburg all recorded high-water marks near midnight Thursday night that were roughly 2 to 2.5 feet above all prior marks in data extending back 50 to 110 years.
• Heaviest multiday rainfall on record in Asheville, with 9.89 inches for the period Sept. 26-27 (pre-Helene record 7.94” on Oct. 24-25, 1918) and 13.98” for the period Sept. 25-27 (pre-Helene record 8.49” on Oct. 24-26, 1918). Atlanta had its second wettest three-day span on record, with 11.12” on Sept. 25-27 just behind 11.75” on Dec. 7-9, 1919.

Archived version

Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts stands accused this week of killing his neighbor’s dog with a shovel circa 2004. Three people who knew Roberts during his time at New Mexico State University told The Guardian that they remember Roberts telling them that he had killed the dog because it was barking too much. Three more people reportedly recall hearing the story at the time from those colleagues [Roberts, however, denies it, calling the allegation “patently untrue and baseless.” In some ways, that denial is the most unusual part of this whole story.]

[...]

The most striking example [of a Republican killing pets and other animals] is Kristi Noem, who stunned the country this spring by bragging in her book about shooting her 14-month-old puppy and a family goat, portraying the story as an example of her grit and fortitude.

[...]

In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney participated in a so-called “canned hunt,” shooting pheasants that had been raised in captivity and then released specifically for this event.

[...]

[While] George H.W. Bush banned ivory imports to protect African elephants, the younger Bush proposed reversing the ban on importing hunting trophies of endangered species into the U.S., and later named a top lobbyist for the trophy hunting organization Safari Club International as acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

[...]

Then, of course, there were the Trump children. In 2011, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump traveled to Zimbabwe with a safari firm that Zimbabwean conservationists later said was not registered in the country. They killed an elephant and leopard, among other animals, posing with the dead bodies. “I AM A HUNTER I don’t hide from that,” Trump Jr. tweeted when the photos surfaced the following year. In late 2019, ProPublica reported that Trump Jr. had received “special treatment” during a trip to Mongolia, shooting an endangered argali sheep, for which he was retroactively given a permit after meeting with Mongolia’s president. (The hunting trip was later reported to have cost American taxpayers over $75,000.)

[...]

This isn’t a comprehensive list, because the examples are too numerous to recount. In 2022, Trump’s former secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, posted a picture of himself pressing a hot cattle brand into a strapped-down calf during his congressional campaign. As Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg memorably wrote for The New Republic last year, meat eating is now so entrenched as a masculinity marker on the American right that vegetarian men minding their own business are now mockingly referred to as “soy boys.”

[...]

Tropical Storm Helene has intensified into a hurricane and is predicted to turn into a dangerous Category 3 storm before hitting the US Gulf Coast on Thursday.

Forecasters warn the major hurricane could bring "life-threatening" storm surge, damaging winds and flooding to a large portion of Florida and the south-eastern US.

Explaining the rave scene and the appeal thereof has always been an uphill battle.

archive.is link

The area, which includes popular spots like Pismo Beach and the Gaviota Coast, is home to humpback whales, sea otters, leatherback sea turtles, kelp forests, rocky reefs and more than 200 shipwrecks. Under the proposal, it would cover 4,543 square miles — an area nearly four times the size of Yosemite National Park — and extend out to 60 miles offshore.

The Chumash sanctuary will be the first national marine sanctuary in the nation proposed by a Native American tribe. The Northern Chumash Tribe, based in Los Osos, near Morro Bay, began advocating for the idea in 2015.

A federal judge has partially sided with the family of a Black man who was fatally shot by a now-imprisoned white Kansas City, Missouri, police detective, ruling that the officer should not have entered the man’s backyard.

U.S. District Judge Beth Phillips ruled Wednesday that Eric DeValkenaere violated 26-year-old Cameron Lamb’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure by entering his property in 2019 without a warrant or other legal reason to be there.

However, Phillips declined to issue a summary judgment on the family’s claim that the ensuing shooting amounted to excessive force, and made no immediate decision on any damages in the wrongful death case filed against the Kansas City police board and DeValkenaere.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - A sight previously thought to be science fiction is very real at a southeast Kansas City shopping center. Instead of a police officer, a security robot has been patrolling sidewalks and shoppers are taking notice.

Since Marshall the robot has been on the job, shoppers say the experiences have completely changed when they come to these stores. The robot can spend 23 hours a day monitoring the parking lot from all angles which gives people a new sense of protection and ease they don’t always have when out.

Marshall took over security at Brywood Centre in April. Before that, Karen White noticed a lot of trouble outside the shopping center.

“Sometimes it’d be concerning for your car like someone could take it or something,” White said.

Knowing now that Marshall is always watching, the risk of crime does not worry her or others as much.

“It made it very better, like you can’t be in the parking lot without seeing the robot,” White continued. “So, I think it scared them off.”

DENVER -- A teenager scouting out a spot near a Colorado lake to take picturesque homecoming photos this weekend was shot in the face when the boyfriend of the property owner fired his weapon and yelled, “Oh sh__, my gun went off,” court records show.

The 17-year-old boy survived the shooting and told investigators he didn't believe the man intentionally shot him. But the man who shot him, Brent Metz, a councilman in a tiny town in the Denver metro area, was arrested on suspicion of charges that include first degree assault.

DENVER (AP) — A Colorado paramedic convicted in the death of Elijah McClain, a Black man whose name became part of the rallying cries for social justice that swept the U.S. in 2020, is being released from prison after a judge reduced his sentence to four years of probation Friday.

Judge Mark Warner said during his ruling that Peter Cichuniec had to make quick decision the night of the arrest as the highest-ranking paramedic at the scene, the Denver Post reported. He also noted a background of no previous criminal history and good character for Cichuniec, who had an 18-year-career as a firefighter and paramedic before he was convicted.

Warner held that the case had “unusual and extenuating circumstances,” in reference to a part of Colorado’s mandatory sentencing law, which allows a court to modify a sentence after a defendant has served least 119 days in prison if the judge finds such circumstances. McClain was walking down the street in a Denver suburb in 2019 when police responding to a suspicious person report forcibly restrained him and put him in a neck hold. His final words — “I can’t breathe” — foreshadowed those of George Floyd a year later in Minneapolis.

Cichuniec and a fellow paramedic were convicted in December of criminally negligent homicide for injecting McClain with ketamine, a powerful sedative blamed for killing the 23-year-old massage therapist. Cichuniec also was convicted on a more serious charge of second-degree assault for giving a drug without consent or a legitimate medical purpose. The other paramedic avoided prison time, sentenced instead to 14 months in jail with work release and probation.

Springfield, Ohio became suddenly famous nationally when Trump claimed that an influx of Haitian migrants were devouring residents' pets. I went looking to see what the town is experiencing from the perspective of local news, and it looks surprising nuanced.

It appears that the town saw a rapid influx of migrants fleeing violence in Haiti. The town has since experienced a strain in its ability to function in notable ways because of the population shock. The issues include a sudden reduction in the housing supply and an increase in traffic and inexperienced drivers. One particularly bad traffic accident killed a child during a school bus crash.

The city government has seemed to largely avoid blaming new arrivals themselves. However they've expressed a sense of betrayal towards Biden and the federal government for granting thousands of people entry into the country without appearing to recognize any responsibility for helping them resettle or aiding their destination cities in accommodating them. Additionally, they've begun investigating local businesses which they suspect used the expansion of visas for Haitians seeking asylum as an opportunity to seek out low-cost workers while concealing their role in creating a population shock for which the city was unprepared.

I must say that I think the city government makes a reasonable point: those of use who want to offer foreign visitors safety and dignity in American must also demand that our government takes responsibility for helping them relocate to a town in which is expecting their arrival and has been aided in making that arrival successful.