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700 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell could be back in New York in days: report
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Ghislaine Maxwell could be back in New York as soon as Sunday, but not necessarily in the Manhattan jail where her pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein died, The Post has confirmed.
Instead, Maxwell, nabbed Thursday at a secluded New Hampshire estate after months on the run from child-sex-abuse charges, may be held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center before a possible court appearance early next week, according to law-enforcement sources.
Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in August 2019 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
US Attorney General William Barr “personally called” Manhattan prosecutors to warn that “no harm must come” to Maxwell, a source told the Daily Mail.
“After the debacle with Epstein, nothing can happen to her,” said the source, who added a plea deal is possible if Maxwell “has proof which will lead to the conviction of bigger fish.”
The feds pursued Maxwell from Colorado to Wyoming to New Hampshire during a “high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse” that cost millions, but didn’t kick into high gear until the feds secured an indictment against her 10 days before her arrest, the Mail’s source said.
The socialite was stunned when dozens of officers broke down the door to her hideaway, the source added.
“Maxwell was up and dressed, in the living room, wearing sweatpants . . . Strangely she didn’t seem to have much reaction . . . “She was turned around quickly and cuffed.” | 0 | non |
701 | Title: Swiss zookeeper killed by Siberian tiger inside enclosure
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A Swiss zookeeper was killed Saturday after she was attacked by a Siberian tiger in front of horrified visitors at the Zurich zoo.
The onlookers raised an alarm after watching the tiger, named Irina, attack the 55-year-old keeper, according to The Associated Press.
Other zoo workers rushed to the woman’s aid and lured the tiger out of her enclosure as first responders tried to revive the zookeeper.
“Sadly all help came too late. The woman died at the scene,” Zurich police spokeswoman Judith Hoedl said according to the AP.
Hoedl said an investigation has been launched into the incident, including why the keeper was in the enclosure at the same time as the tiger.
The was tiger born in 2015 at a zoo in the Danish city of Odense and transferred to Zurich a year ago, according to Severin Dressen, the zoo’s director.
“Our full sympathy is with the relatives of the victim,” Dressen said, adding that the keeper had been a long-term member of the staff.
He said visitors and workers who saw the attack were receiving psychological counseling.
The zoo had recently reopened after a coronavirus-related shutdown. | 0 | non |
702 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell, Kevin Spacey once sat on Buckingham Palace thrones
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Her majesty would not be amused.
In this newly surfaced photo from 2002, Ghislaine Maxwell, the just-captured accused madam of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, sits on Queen Elizabeth II’s throne during a private tour of Buckingham Palace.
At her side in the matching, plushly upholstered throne of Prince Philip, is actor Kevin Spacey.
Then the artistic director of London’s Old Vic Theatre, Spacey would face sex assault allegations of his own in the UK and US, though all would eventually be dropped.
The two visited the palace with former President Bill Clinton, a Spacey pal who has also weathered his share of sex scandals.
And they were all there at the palace at the invitation of Prince Andrew, the Telegraph reported Saturday, in releasing the startling snap, obtained by The Post.
Andrew, of course, has been accused by Epstein’s alleged “sex slave” Virginia Giuffre of bedding her at Maxwell’s behest when she was only 17.
The thrones sat upon by Maxwell and Spacey were used by the Queen and Prince Philip, Andrew’s mum and dad, for her 1953 coronation — and it is considered a breach of royal protocol for anyone else to sit in them, the Telegraph notes.
The Throne Room is only accessible through public tours of the palace or during state visits and official royal functions, the paper says.
“Going anywhere near the thrones is a total no-no,” a source told the Sunday Times of London.
Clinton– in London at the time for an address before Britain’s Labour Party –flew to the UK with Maxwell aboard Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express” for the underage girls often found on board. | 0 | non |
703 | Title: Questions that still need answering about Epstein's death
Even before prosecutors announced they were likely shipping Ghislaine Maxwell to the the scandal-plagued New York lock up where her pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein died in custody last summer, alarm bells were pealing over her safety.
“I’m absolutely worried for Ghislaine’s safety,” said Christopher Mason, a journalist and TV presenter who is appearing in “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein,” a Lifetime documentary series beginning next month. “I kind of don’t believe he [Epstein] committed suicide… His death seemed exceedingly convenient for many.”
Those concerns are likely gripping Maxwell herself, according to a lawyer for some of Epstein’s victims, who predicted that the perv financier would die in jail last year.
“It may be that she can’t handle the fear of what’s going to happen to her and takes matters into her own hands or there will be people who are very afraid of what she has to say,” said Spencer Kuvin in an interview last week with the Daily Mail. “She knows too much.”
Epstein’s apparent hanging in his cell on August 10 sparked a storm of controversy.
Scandalous bungling at the Metropolitan Correction Center in lower Manhattan included guards failing to watch him despite a previous failed suicide try just two weeks beforehand.
There were also competing autopsy reports, with one suggesting that Epstein did not die by hanging but was the victim of a homicide.
Almost a year after Epstein’s death, it’s still not clear what exactly happened to him in his cell in the hours before he died.
***
The events that preceded the death of Jeffrey Epstein were “a perfect storm of screwups,” said US Attorney General William Barr. They actually began weeks before he was found unresponsive in his cell on the morning of August 10, and date to July 23 at 1:27 a.m. when Epstein was found on the floor of his cell in a fetal position and with bruises around his neck in what authorities said was an attempted suicide.
His cell mate at the time — a former cop charged in a quadruple homicide — claimed to have saved his life when he alerted prison guards. Nicholas Tartaglione, 51, said through his lawyer that he had become “good friends” with Epstein and denied previous news reports that he had beaten him in their cell.
Epstein was immediately placed on suicide watch on July 23, and by July 30 that watch was moved to “heightened psychological observation” which required that he have a cell mate, and guards monitoring him every 30 minutes.
But on August 9, an unidentified cell mate was removed from Epstein’s cell and transferred to another facility. At 7:49 p.m., Tova Noel, a 31-year-old federal prison guard returned Epstein to his cell after a meeting with one of his attorneys.
Noel had started work at 4 p.m. and was doing a double shift. She had already worked several overtime shifts at the prison that week, and by 10 p.m. she reported that the prisoners in 9-South, a special wing of the facility which housed inmates in protective custody, were locked in their cells for the night.
Noel was supposed to conduct an inmate count, but surveillance video showed that she and another unidentified guard failed to do so.
By midnight, Noel was joined by Michael Thomas, 41, another prison guard. During the night, Noel and Thomas surfed the internet and shopped for motorcycles and furniture, court documents say. At one point, both dozed off for two hours, according to surveillance video. They did not check in on Epstein as required, and later reported their negligence to a supervisor.
At 6:30 on the morning of August 10, the guards discovered Epstein unresponsive in his cell when they went to take him a tray of breakfast. In the minutes before a call was placed to emergency responders, MCC staff tried to revive Epstein, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Epstein was taken by ambulance to New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan Hospital by members of the FDNY and other emergency responders at about 7:30 am. As he lay on a gurney in his orange prison jumpsuit, seemingly lifeless, his pale, ashen face nearly matching the color of his white hair, and surrounded by FDNY, police and EMTs, New York Post photographer William Farrington snapped Epstein from a distance as an EMT used a purple breathing apparatus in an attempt to revive him. The image shocked the world — showing the most notorious pedophile in modern history in the moments before his death.
The photo immediately sparked conspiracy theories that Epstein had been felled by the powerful forces that wanted him silenced. An internet meme — “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself” — exploded on social media and many observers noted that he had died less than a day after a tranche of more than 2,000 documents containing lurid testimony from his sex-abuse victims was unsealed in a case involving Maxwell.
As soon as the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed his death, the Justice Department announced an investigation by both the FBI and the Inspector General. Barr said he was “appalled” by the turn of events.
“Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered,” he said. “In addition to the FBI’s investigation, I have consulted with the Inspector General who is opening an investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Epstein’s death.”
Within a day of those comments, the MCC prison warden Lamine N’Diaye was reassigned to a regional office pending the two investigations, and the two federal guards tasked with watching over Epstein were immediately placed on administrative leave.
In addition to the government probes into his death, Epstein’s brother Mark hired former medical examiner Michael Baden to accompany the autopsy at the city’s Office of the Medical Examiner. Baden had briefly worked as New York’s medical examiner in the late 1970s and led a panel that examined the assassination of President John F. Kennedy years earlier, and was often contracted by the families of victims who suspected foul play in their deaths.
On August 16, Barbara Sampson, the city’s chief medical officer, said in a brief statement that following “a careful review of all investigative information, including complete autopsy findings,” that Epstein had committed suicide by hanging.
Months later, on October 30, Baden made his own explosive analysis public. He found that Epstein had suffered a number of injuries, including a broken bone in his neck, that “are extremely unusual in suicidal hangings and could occur much more commonly in homicidal strangulation,” he said.
“I think the evidence points to homicide rather than suicide,” said Baden, whose findings added fuel to the conspiracy theories that had been circulating for months.
At a federal prison oversight hearing in November, shortly after Baden’s findings were made public, Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, said drywall, Christmas ornaments and Epstein were “three things that don’t hang themselves.”
“That’s what the American people think, and they deserve some answers,” he said.
Barbara Sampson, the city’s chief medical officer, disagreed.
“I stand firmly behind our determination of the cause and manner of death in this case,” she told the New York Times. “In general, fractures of the hyoid bone and the cartilage can be seen in suicides and homicides.“ The bone is near the Adam’s apple, where Baden said that Epstein suffered three fractures.
Baden had found that the hyoid bone had been fractured in multiple places, and he insisted that the injuries were consistent with strangulation.
On November 19, the US Attorney’s Office announced the unsealing of an indictment charging Noel and Thomas with “conspiring to make false records and to defraud the United States by impairing the lawful functions of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.”
“The defendants had a duty to ensure the safety and security of federal inmates in their care,” said then US Attorney Geoffrey Berman. “Instead, they repeatedly failed to conduct mandated checks on inmates, and lied on official forms to hide their dereliction.”
Both Noel and Thomas pleaded not guilty and their lawyers said that their clients were being made into scapegoats for the mismanagement of the federal prison system that resulted in Epstein’s death.
Months after Epstein’s death, new questions arose. In January, the FBI found that surveillance video taken from outside Epstein’s cell during his first suicide attempt on July 23 had been erased.
The MCC “inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists,” court papers say.
What happened to the video, and what is the explanation for the broken bones that Baden found in Epstein’s neck?
***
Like Epstein before her, Maxwell, 58, is widely expected to name names and expose powerful captains of industry, world leaders and even royalty in her defense. “She of all of those people knew who slept with whom, and who was assigned to whom,” said Mason.
Maxwell, the youngest daughter of disgraced British press baron Robert Maxwell, faces six felony counts of child sex-abuse in the indictment against her which alleged that she schemed with Epstein and lied about trafficking women, some as young as 14, between 1994 and 1997.
The charges include alleged sex crimes in her London townhouse where Prince Andrew has separately been accused by an Epstein “sex slave” of sleeping with her multiple times, beginning when she was 17.
Although some are worried about Maxwell’s detention at the same decrepit facility where Epstein died, at least one of her old friends isn’t overly worried.
“Whatever happens to Ghislaine Maxwell I hope there is justice for the victims,” said Christina Oxenberg, a writer and Serbian royal who has known Maxwell for years. “I think the greater risk is that her connections work for her and she walks.”
— Additional Reporting by Paula Froelich | 0 | non |
704 | Title: Shark kills scuba diver off Australia's Great Barrier Reef
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A shark attacked a 20-year-old scuba diver off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef early Saturday afternoon, injuring his leg so badly that he bled to death.
Rescuers tried to desperately to save the unidentified man, but he died at the scene, the Daily Mirror reported.
The attack comes just three months after a shark killed Zachary Robba, 23, in nearby waters.
Australia is attributing four deaths so far this year to shark attacks. | 0 | non |
705 | Title: Air Force officer says harassment is 'price of admission' in military
A female US Air Force lieutenant colonel is being dressed down by women and veterans alike for being unsympathetic to the sexual harassment that Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen endured before she was murdered.
“You guys are kidding, right? Sexual harassment is the price of admission for women into the good ole boy club,” Lt. Col. Betsy Schoeller, who serves in the Wisconsin Air Guard, posted on Facebook.
Schoeller’s comment, which has been deleted, was in response to a story about Guillen shared by another user, the Daily Mail reported.
Guillen went missing in late April and her remains were found two weeks ago in a Texas field. A male soldier suspected of bludgeoning her to death killed himself.
Before her disappearance, Guillen had told family and friends that she was being sexually harassed by a superior.
Women and veterans immediately pushed back on Schoeller, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. A petition on Change.org called on the school to fire her.
Many criticized Schoeller for blaming the victims instead of the harassers, the news outlet reported.
“This is like the whole ‘girls can’t wear revealing clothing because men can’t control their urges’ on a whole other level,” one woman wrote. “Gahhhh so many swear words are flying around my head.”
A veteran agreed.
“I spent literally half my career handling sexual assault/harassment charges for sailors,” the user wrote.
“Leaders like her not only encourage harassment, they protect predators. This is not a mentality she left with her uniform. She brought it with her.” | 0 | non |
706 | Title: Inside the Mob ties that plague RHONJ star Dina Manzo's family
It’s enough to make you want to gulp a “Real Housewives”-size glass of pinot grigio.
Because of the twisted love story between former “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Dina Manzo, 47, and ex-husband Tommy Manzo, history is repeating itself for one of northern New Jersey’s more infamous families. The Manzos have been forced to deny mob ties once again.
On Tuesday, Tommy, 55, pleaded not guilty to federal charges of hiring a Lucchese crime family soldier to beat up Dina’s new husband, David Cantin, whom she wed in 2017, a year after divorcing Tommy.
Although Dina and Tommy, who have no children together, split up in 2012, they didn’t officially divorce until 2016. During the years in between, she began dating entrepreneur Cantin.
But Tommy wasn’t out of her life.
According to federal charges revealed Monday, Tommy allegedly planned and carried out “an assault” on Cantin in 2015. At the time, Cantin and Dina were dating and Tommy, according to the indictment, was “upset” about it.
Tommy and Dina married in 2005, in an over-the-top event that played out on the VH1 reality series “My Big Fabulous Wedding.” This was four years before Dina joined “Real Housewives of New Jersey.” It was a family affair, as her castmates included Dina’s older sister Caroline Manzo and Jacqueline Laurita, who is wed to the sisters’ brother Chris.
Caroline, 58 and a former “RHONJ” cast member herself, is notorious for saying, “Let me tell you about my family, we’re thick as thieves.”
She’s not kidding. Tommy’s brother Albert Manzo is married to Caroline, making sisters Dina and Caroline also sisters-in-law at one point.
“I grew up with Dina, I knew her since she was 7,” Albert told The Post, “We don’t want a hair on her head harmed. She is still my sister-in-law. She always will be.”
It’s unclear why the indictment is happening now, five years after the event. But Caroline told “Extra” TV her family was “heartbroken” over the charges.
“This is family on both sides,” she said. “I want to know the truth and my allegiance will lie with the truth. We don’t run from things like this, we address them, and I feel comfortable with that because we are being painted with a brush that does not reflect who we are as people.”
As Tommy’s lawyer, Michael Critchley, put it: “The allegations are right out of a fictional plot of a reality-TV show.”
Accusations that the Manzos were mobbed up date back to 1983 when the paterfamilias, 400-pound Albert “Tiny” Manzo Sr., was executed gangland-style in August 1983. Tiny, the father of Albert and Tommy, was found in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental outside a supermarket in Hillside, NJ: naked, his arms and legs tied with plastic, with four bullet holes in his torso.
He and Gambino family soldier Peter A. Campisi had reportedly skimmed money from a Mafia-connected casino on Staten Island. In a book called “Undercover Cop” by Mike Russell, Tiny Manzo was described as “the biggest enforcer in Jersey.”
Tiny Manzo was so heavy, it took police several hours to extract his body from the Lincoln.
A longtime criminal-defense attorney who represented some of the Mafia figures Albert Sr. was said to be involved with told The Post that the lines between “made guys and the goombas they hung out with” can be blurry.
“That’s kind of how they do business in Paterson,” the attorney said. “These people are not exactly Boston Brahmins.”
But Albert Sr.’s son says it was all a misunderstanding.
“My father was no gangster,” Albert said. “He was a wonderful, hardworking man. He was never accused of anything else pertaining to being a gangster. The shame of it is that our family were the victims of a murder which was never solved, and it was spun as a mob hit.”
Albert said his brother Tommy isn’t guilty of anything but hard work as well.
“I believe my brother is innocent. My father was, too,” Albert said. “It’s awful what happened to Dina’s husband. We just have to hope that whoever really did this is found and goes to jail.” Albert added that Tommy is out on bail and back at his side running The Brownstone — the restaurant and catering hall in Paterson that the brothers run.
The Manzos’ current troubles stem from the volatile marriage of Dina and Tommy, a union doomed from the start — on “My Big Fabulous Wedding,” she admitted she married him knowing he had already cheated on her.
Family and friends say it was a case of a woman who loved too much and a man who didn’t appreciate her.
“It was Dina who decided she wanted them to split,” Albert said. “It was never Tommy. Tommy wanted her. He wanted them to stay together.”
According to the indictment, Tommy enlisted the help of John Perna, 45, an alleged member of the Lucchese crime family, to assault Cantin in July 2015. Perna and another alleged Lucchese crew member followed Cantin to a strip mall in Passaic County where they attacked him with a slapjack, a small club that’s swung at someone to inflict injury, the indictment said. Perna pled not guilty.
Cantin suffered “serious bodily injury” and a “permanent facial scar.”
“She leaves him and goes off with a new, younger guy? His ego couldn’t take it.”
Perna did this in exchange for a “deeply discounted” wedding reception at The Brownstone, which happened about a month later and was attended by about 330 people, including members of the Lucchese family, according to the feds.
“RHONJ” star Kim DePaola says there is a reason Dina decided to leave her husband. “[The divorce] is not on Dina, it’s all on Tommy,” DePaola told The Post. “Dina was madly in love with him and she sat home every night waiting for him. She was a good wife. He was off at The Brownstone doing his thing, if you catch what I’m saying.”
Tommy Manzo allegedly “did his thing” with so many women that Dina once confronted one of them, who told her to “take it up with your husband,” DePaola said.
So what happened to make Tommy go after Dina’s new guy, as the feds believe?
“Here’s the thing, Tommy is actually not a bad guy,” DePaola said. “He’s mild-mannered, very lovely to people at The Brownstone. I think it was a man thing. They want what they can’t have. He didn’t want Dina when she was starving for attention and was dying for his love but when she leaves him and goes off with a new, younger guy? His ego couldn’t take it. He got too wrapped up, that’s my take.
“It’s hard not to notice that her new guy looks like a younger version of Tommy. I’ll leave it at that.”
As for mob ties, DePaola added that neither Albert nor Tommy are “in the life.” She also said their dad was not a “full-on gangster” but was killed after he “did something the full-ons didn’t like.”
“When you’re a full-on you have to abide by some rules and regulations of the life,” DePaola said. “From what I know, [Tiny] maybe did something that was not following the rules the full-ons had to follow and they wanted to send a message.”
Now people are wondering if a 2017 home invasion on Dina and Cantin’s Holmdel, NJ, residence may have been connected to the 2015 attack on Cantin.
Manzo and Cantin, now 39, told Holmdel police at the time that, when they walked into their house, they were confronted by two men already inside. One man struck Cantin several times with a baseball bat while Manzo was punched multiple times by the other man. They were then bound together while the thieves made off with cash and jewelry. Cantin, a father of two, eventually was able to free himself and call 911. They were taken to a local hospital and received treatment for facial injuries.
At the time, Manzo and Cantin were living in California, where they currently reside, but were visiting their home state for the First Communion party for Dina’s goddaughter Audriana Giudice — the daughter of “RHONJ” castmate Teresa Giudice.
The bizarre attack featured, according to the affidavit, “an Italian guy with a North Jersey accent” telling the pair: “This is what happens when you f–k with people from Paterson.”
James “Jimmy Balls” Mainello, 52, of Bayonne, was indicted on charges related to the home invasion last summer. His lawyer Marco Laracca told The Post his client is innocent and is looking to be “fully exonerated.”
DePaola figures it had to have been ordered by someone who knows Dina. “They were only home from California for two days for the christening. Isn’t it kind of a coincidence that the home invasion happened then? Who else but people in Dina’s circle knew they would even be home?” said DePaola. “That type of burglar does a little homework. That house had been empty.”
Dina and Cantin got on a plane right after the 2017 attack and as far as DePaola knows, haven’t been back to Jersey since.
“Dina’s been through a lot and I think she’s been scared s–tless by everything that’s happened,” DePaola said. “You know what? She was a girl looking for love and she finally found it.
“Tommy didn’t want her until she was gone. It’s his loss. She came out ahead.” | 0 | non |
707 | Title: Mark Zuckerberg accused of 'colonizing' Hawaiian island
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg isn’t a very popular guy on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
Mia Brier, a native Hawaiian, has launched a campaign to stop Zuckerberg from “colonizing” Kauai. In only one week, a petition on change.org has garnered nearly 500,000 signatures.
Brier calls Zuckerberg “greedy’ for suing Native Hawaiians who own property close to his massive $100 million estate.
“Mark Zuckerberg is the sixth richest man in the world… and he is suing Native Hawaiians in Kauai for their land so he can build a mansion. They have built lives there. They have built families there. Hawaiians are already mistreated enough as is. We need to let them have this.”
A spokesperson for Zuckerberg told Newsweek that “the premise of this petition is false.”
In 2017, Zuckerberg filed lawsuits against native Hawaiians who owned nearly a dozen tiny parcels to force them to sell their land at auction so he could “enhance” his privacy.
The social media genius dropped the lawsuits but was accused in 2019 of continuing his quest by using a local resident, Carlos Andrade, to scoop up the parcels – and having Andrade sue on his behalf.
“Mark is not suing native Hawaiians and no one has been forced off of the land. At the beginning of 2017, Mark withdrew as a plaintiff from the process to clear title on the land he purchased in Kauai,” Zuckerberg’s spokesperson told Newsweek.
”Beyond the ranch, Mark and (wife) Priscilla have made commitments to Kauai charitable organizations that help to improve the island’s education and health care systems, promote conservation and help to promote efforts to recover from flooding and COVID-19,” the spokesperson said. | 0 | non |
708 | Title: Italy denies entry to private plane with Americans on holiday
A planeload of rich Americans were denied entry to Italy after trying to sneak into the country for a holiday via private plane.
Travelers from the US are banned from entering the European Union for at least another two weeks following a spike in coronavirus cases in some reopened states, European officials announced last week.
There were 10 people on board, five of whom were American, when the plane which had flown in from Colorado stopped by customs officers at the Elmas Airport on Cagliari, Italy, according to reports. While the Americans were told they were to be “repatriated” immediately, the other passengers, hailing from Italy, New Zealand and England, were given the offer to stay — following a mandatory two-week quarantine. All of the passengers left “out of solidarity,” according to the site Wanted in Rome.
“The region of Sardinia has no responsibility for what happened,” Sardinia Gov. Christian Solinas told the news site. “Immediately, with the collaboration of the airport management company, we set to work — initiating urgent talks with the government, the Ministry and the Prefect — to find a solution that would allow American passengers to stay in Sardinia, even by submitting to quarantine. … The singular restrictive interpretation of the rules by the government, contrary to our ability to guarantee health security, in this case has again inflicted serious damage on the international tourism credibility of our island, and our sense of hospitality.”
This is not the first time wealthy people have tried to flout the rules. In April, a private planeload of international jet setters was sent home after flouting quarantine rules and secretly flying to the South of France for a holiday. | 0 | non |
709 | Title: Sen. Menendez blocks compensation to US victims' families
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The daughter of a diplomat who lost her dad and younger brother to the terrorist bombing of the US Embassy in Kenya in 1998 is furious with New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez for preventing her and others from receiving millions in victim compensation money.
Edith Bartley called Menendez’s actions a “travesty” in the wake of the killing of her Queens-born father, Julian Bartley, the first African-American consul general to Nairobi and the most senior US diplomat slain in the attack.
It also claimed her brother, Jay, 20, who was doing a summer internship at the embassy.
Menendez has so far blocked a $300 million deal in which Sudan, which acted as a staging ground for the blast and another bomb in Tanzania, would pay the families of the 12 Americans killed $10 million each, while foreigners who worked at the embassy would get just $800,000.
“It would be a travesty for any member to block the passage of this agreement over compensation levels,” Bartley wrote in a June 4 letter to the powerful Democrat.
Menendez, the ranking member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The Post he was concerned that the deal “simply does not do justice for the many victims who worked at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in some cases for decades, and who are now American citizens.”
He added: “We must be sure that the United States reaches the best settlement possible for every American family impacted by these horrid terrorist attacks.”
A total of 224 people were killed in the coordinated bombings on Aug. 7, 1998 in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and more than 4,000 people were hurt.
The US Sudan Agreement has bipartisan support in Congress, and is being reviewed by the Senate which is expected to vote on the issue in the coming days.
For Bartley, the fight is deeply personal.
“My entire world stopped and was never the same from that moment forward,” said Bartley, who was at the time a law student at the University of Missouri. “I felt so helpless when I heard about what happened…because I couldn’t protect my little brother. I had to do something.”
She decided to use her law studies to help her family and others obtain justice.
Bartley now acts as the spokeswoman for the Families of the Americans Killed in Nairobi and has worked on legislation that would add impact statements to federal lawsuits against terrorists and their sponsors.
If the deal is approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sudan, which ousted its military dictator last year, will be removed from the US list of terrorist sponsors and no longer subject to sanctions. | 0 | non |
710 | Title: Insiders: Ailing and wheelchair-bound Yoko Ono is 'slowing down'
Three years ago, when the National Music Publishers’ Association presented Yoko Ono with their Centennial Song Award, Sean Lennon pushed his mother onto the stage at Cipriani 42nd Street in a wheelchair — shocking some who didn’t realize the formidable avant-garde artist was incapacitated.
But in her signature shades, black leather jacket and white Panama hat, the widow of John Lennon didn’t seem to miss a beat when she began a short acceptance speech by addressing the elephant in the room.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, clutching the award in one hand and a microphone in the other as Sean whispered to her about what was going on. “I’ve learned so much from having this illness. I’m thankful I went through that.”
While it’s not clear what “illness” she was referring to, Ono, now 87, is still ailing, requires round-the-clock care and rarely leaves her sprawling apartment in The Dakota, a source close to her staff told The Post. In photos taken at rare public appearances — including a women’s march in Columbus Circle last year and at a commemoration of John in Liverpool in May 2018 — Ono is confined to a wheelchair, or walks with great difficulty using a cane, often leaning on a caregiver or Sean for support.
She has also been selling off some real-estate assets in recent years.
“She has definitely slowed down, like anyone at that age,” said Elliot Mintz, a close family friend who has known Ono for nearly 50 years, and has acted as a family spokesman, representing the John Lennon estate since the former Beatle’s murder in December 1980. “But she is as sharp as she once was.”
Mintz told The Post he last saw Ono at her 87th birthday party in February. He was one of more than 30 guests, including Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner, singer Cyndi Lauper and Ono’s daughter, Kyoko, 56, from her pre-John marriage to film producer Anthony Cox.
Two years after their divorce in 1971, Cox fled with Kyoko and raised her in Christian fundamentalist communes. Ono fought for years for Kyoko, who began reaching out to her mother after John’s murder. According to Mintz, Ono is now very close to Kyoko as well as Sean, her 44-year-old son with Lennon.
“Sean is her best friend,” said Mintz. “They have dinner two or three times a week, and he occasionally brings his mom out as a guest star in his band.”
Sean organizes Ono’s birthday party every year, painstakingly obsessing over the decorations and flower arrangements, Mintz said. In February, he took over Bar Wayo at the South Street Seaport for the party, where guests celebrated over champagne. In previous years, Sean and Ono have taken to the stage to perform.
But this year, the celebration was more low-key. “She blew out the candles with Sean and she was among the last to leave,” Mintz told The Post. “She was in good spirits. I helped her into her wheelchair and gently helped her into her car.”
Mintz would not comment on Ono’s personal medical history. “She is a particularly special being,” he said. “In these 87 years, she’s lived 400.”
Yoko Ono was born in 1933 into a Tokyo banking family whose fortunes suffered during World War II. The family faced starvation and was often forced to barter household items for food while they sought refuge from Allied bombing raids.
Despite the wartime deprivations, Ono inherited her family’s business acumen. In addition to becoming an avant-garde artist who once opened her show at MoMA by screaming into a microphone, she is also a hard-nosed businesswoman — a prodigious investor in real estate who, after her marriage to John in 1969, began to amass a mini-empire of properties that spanned New York City, the Hudson Valley, the Hamptons, Palm Beach, Ireland and England. She has also collected a sizable art collection that includes works by her old friend Andy Warhol.
Today, Ono has reported assets of $700 million. She still owns multimillion-dollar properties in Manhattan as well as hundreds of rolling acres in upstate Delaware County, public records show. She lives in the same sprawling nine-room apartment, on the seventh floor of The Dakota, that she once shared with John. She also keeps an adjacent unit at the West 72nd Street building for visitors, and two small one-room spaces without kitchens that she uses for staff, a source told The Post. And she has an office on the first floor that was once used by John as a recording studio.
“She would wake up early every morning, go downstairs to the studio and handle the family business, allowing John to be a househusband,” said Mintz, adding that John had no real business sense, and often needed her help to figure out the most mundane financial matters, such as how much to tip a waiter when he paid for a meal at a restaurant.
But Ono has been shedding assets. In 2017, she sold a building at 110 W. 79th St. that she had owned since 1988. She bought the property, housing two residential units, for just under $500,000 and unloaded it for $6,450,000, public records show. In 2013, she sold a 5,700-square-foot penthouse at 49-51 Downing St. in the West Village, which Sean occupied for years, for $8.3 million.
Although Ono still owns more than 600 acres near the town of Franklin, NY, locals say it’s been ages since they saw her in the area where she used to vacation with Sean and groups of friends. John and Ono bought the property and 100 Holstein cattle to set up a breeding operation before he was gunned down by Mark David Chapman in front of The Dakota on Dec. 8, 1980.
“We haven’t seen her for a very long time,” said Roland Greefkes, an iron artisan who made a wrought-iron gate for Ono’s property. “I never met anyone quite like her. She is really something special.”
That sentiment is echoed by the directors of charities she has long supported. Although the charity she began with John, the Spirit Foundations, had contributions of only just under $25,000 from her in 2018, Ono does most of her charitable giving directly. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in New York, she donated $250,000 to Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, to support frontline health-care workers.
“In these 87 years, she’s lived 400.”
“Montefiore was specifically chosen because Yoko wanted to assist a hospital in a community hit hard by COVID that didn’t have the ability to turn to wealthy donors and board members the way Cornell, NYU, Mount Sinai and others in Manhattan can,” said Mintz.
She has also recently supported musicians she has worked with in the past who have fallen on hard times. She helped Stanley Bronstein, who played in her Plastic Ono Band, when he needed emergency medical care, Mintz said.
But hunger remains her pet cause. “I remember being hungry and I know it’s so difficult to just be hungry,” Ono said in a 2013 interview. “One day I didn’t bring a lunchbox. The other kids asked, don’t you want to eat? I just said, no, I’m not hungry.”
Ono recently donated $50,000 to the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, which during the pandemic has provided thousands of meals to out-of-work and needy residents in her Upper West Side neighborhood. And she has a 30-year relationship with WhyHunger, a New York-based nonprofit fighting food deprivation around the world.
“She has been a true philanthropic partner,” Noreen Springstead, the group’s executive director, told The Post. “She is the most energetic, the most vivacious person and is very hands-on. She has been incredibly invested for more than three decades.”
A few years ago, Ono allowed WhyHunger to license John’s “Imagine” song lyrics and drawings for a global anti-hunger campaign, helping the charity raise nearly
$7 million for its projects in New York and around the world, Springstead said.
And it was for “Imagine,” the 1971 utopian anthem, that Ono collected the Centennial Song Award for her late husband in 2017. While she sat in her wheelchair onstage, the hosts of the National Music Publishers’ Association surprised her with a second prize of her own — after playing an old audio clip from John saying that Ono should be credited as a co-writer on “Imagine.”
“That should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song because a lot of it — the lyric and the concept — came from Yoko,” said the former Beatle in a voice-over. “But those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution.”
Ono beamed as Sean whispered the news to his mother.
“This is the best time of my life,” she told the audience. | 0 | non |
711 | Title: Controversial monument and KKK gathering spot reopens for Fourth of July
Despite public outrage and calls for its removal, the largest Confederate memorial in the world has reopened just in time for Fourth of July celebrations.
Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial — which features a nine-story high bas relief of Confederate “heroes” and slave owners, Gen. Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson — is welcoming visitors this weekend, although the laser light show (which illuminates the carvings and tells the story of the Confederacy) is still on hold.
The mountain is a notorious meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan, which was “reborn” atop it.
In 1915, the KKK was brought back on that mountain with a burning cross and advocates of the carvings were card carrying members of the hate group. After the mountain was complete, “a ‘neo-Confederate theme park’ emerged around the site, including a plantation house, a “Gone With the Wind” museum, according to a report from the Atlanta History Center, The New York Times reported. Since then, KKK members have gathered at Stone Mountain annually to hold rallies, according to the Times.
The opening has incensed Black Lives Matters protestors and civil rights groups, which have long called for the destruction of the monument.
“Here we are in Atlanta, the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement and still we have the largest Confederate monument in the world,” Gerald Griggs, a vice president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP civil rights group, told the Daily Mail. “It’s time for our state to get on the right side of history.”
In 2017, during her failed run for governor, Stacey Abrams wrote a series of tweets detailing the history of the mountain and calling for the removal of the relief.
“The removal of the bas relief of Confederates from Stone Mountain has been a constant debate since the state bought the property in 1958,” Abrams wrote. “Paid for by founders of the 2nd KKK, the monument had no purpose other than celebration of racism, terror & division when carved in 1915.
“We must never celebrate those who defended slavery and tried to destroy the Union,” she continued. “Confederate monuments belong in museums where we can study and reflect on that terrible history, not in places of honor across our state.”
Adding insult to injury, the population of Stone Mountain is over 78% African-American, according to the US census — with whites making up just 18% — and African Americans also make up the majority of workers in and around the monument. | 0 | non |
712 | Title: Fyre Fest fraudster Billy McFarland contracts COVID-19 in prison
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Hopefully, he’s getting better treatment than dry cheese sandwiches.
Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland, now imprisoned in Ohio, told The Post he has tested positive for the coronavirus.
“Tested positive for COVID today,” McFarland told a Post reporter on Thursday night. “Being put in isolation in a big room with 160 other people who have it at this jail.”
McFarland, 28, who’s serving a six-year sentence for fraud, was denied compassionate release in April from the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Lisbon, Ohio.
In an exclusive Post interview in early April, the Short Hills, NJ, native said he wasn’t scared of catching the deadly coronavirus.
“I’m feeling fine, but it’s scary. There are a lot of older guys here and not so healthy,” he said. “Elderly people who are at the greatest medical risk should definitely be considered for release.”
But later that month, McFarland’s lawyers cited a pre-existing health condition and petitioned for his release from Elkton, where some 25 percent of inmates tested positive for COVID-19, and the National Guard was sent to help control the outbreak.
On Thursday, an Elkton inmate named Jebriel, whom McFarland’s referred to as his “right hand man,” called The Post as McFarland was being taken to quarantine.
“He’s not dying, I don’t think,” said Jebriel, who asked to withhold his last name for privacy reasons. “It feels like we’re sitting ducks in here. They wait until they’re unresponsive to take people to the hospital.”
In June, the Marshall Project, which covers criminal justice, reported that “the coronavirus had arrived at the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution, where, as one prisoner put it, there were suddenly ‘people walking around looking like the living dead.'”
According to his Federal Bureau of Prisons record, McFarland’s scheduled release date is Aug. 30, 2023. | 0 | non |
713 | Title: Rachel Dolezal 'vindicated' by Black Lives Matter movement
She still sees herself as black — and yearns to play a role in the push for racial equality.
But Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who claimed to be African-American in 2015, sparking a national scandal, shrugs off the years of shaming that followed, insisting she can help inspire fairer treatment of minorities.
“Racially I identify as human, but culturally I identify as black,” Dolezal said in a phone interview from her home in Spokane, Washington, where she makes a living braiding hair and selling her artwork.
“I do hope that we can rework the vocabulary. That’s part of challenging the race world view.”
Dolezal, a single mom who changed her legal name to Nkechi Amare Diallo in 2017 but goes by Rachel socially, says she’s been energized by the drive for justice in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
But she concedes that the Black Lives Matter movement in her area has declined her offer to get involved, though she says she has good relationships with individual protesters and members of the black community.
“Overwhelmingly, most people I hear from are black or mixed or non-white in some way and a lot of people have said this is your moment, you’re vindicated,” Dolezal said. “I have received hundreds of messages. Most of it’s been overwhelmingly positive.”
She credited a sympathetic 2018 documentary, “The Rachel Divide,” for helping change people’s minds about her.
“The Netflix documentary did help some of the people understand some of the context and backstory. I have received a lot of apologies from people who jumped on the bandwagon on social media,” she said.
In June 2015, Dolezal was claiming to be biracial while serving as president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane when a local news reporter revealed that her parents, Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal of Montana, were both white.
The news broke the same month Caitlyn Jenner was celebrated for her transition, but Dolezal lost her NAACP position and teaching job at Eastern Washington University. She struggled financially, she says, relying on friends for money.
Sales from her 2018 memoir, “In Full Color,” helped, but she was later accused of welfare fraud for not reporting $84,000 in earnings to the state’s Department of Social and Health Services.
These days, Dolezal mixes political advocacy — she’s for defunding the police, reparations and defacing “racist” monuments — with promoting her works of art, including a piece she calls “Truth be Told,” which features white busts of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, splattered with red paint.
Slaver, Rapist, Murderer, Racist, are their respective captions.
“It’s in a four-inch deep shadow box frame,” said Dolezal, who’s hawking the effort for $1,000.
“All my art is for sale. It’s a hell of deal compared to the banana that was duct-taped to a wall and sold for [$120,000]” she said with a laugh.
Her family includes her son Franklin, 17, and Izaiah, 26, an adoptive brother over whom she obtained legal guardianship. She also has a four-year-old with autism. She says she’s planning to move soon to Tucson to be with Franklin, a student at the University of Arizona.
There, she hopes for a fresh start.
“I have been waiting to move for 15 years,” she said. “It’s been a long time coming.” | 0 | non |
714 | Title: Five die when packed SUV hits two 18-wheelers
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A packed SUV crossed an interstate median in South Carolina and smashed into two 18-wheelers, killing five.
The driver lost control of the 2001 Chevrolet on Interstate 26 near Orangeburg around 12:30 p.m. Thursday, state troopers told The Associated Press.
All of the dead were in the SUV, the AP reported. Two others survived inside, although state troopers didn’t know their conditions. The truck drivers weren’t injured.
Officials did not identify the victims.
The South Carolina Highway Patrol is investigating the crash. | 0 | non |
715 | Title: Mexico adds anti-COVID checkpoints at the US border for July 4 weekend
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Mexico added new health checkpoints along its US border this weekend as coronavirus cases surge on both sides of the dividing line.
Officials fear crossings during the July 4 holiday weekend could intensify the spread of COVID-19 — despite a three-month ban on nonessential travel that has been increasingly ignored.
“Whichever side of the border you live on, this is NOT the time to cross to shop, eat, or visit family on the other side,” US Ambassador Christopher Landau tweeted Thursday.
“If US citizens continue to make casual cross-border trips, the restrictions will increase, not decrease,” Landau added.
Health screenings in the Mexican state of Sonora, which shares a border with Arizona, will encompass beaches and towns that are popular with both Mexican and American visitors and shoppers, Gov. Claudia Pavlovich said.
The states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas — all border Texas — have each registered thousands of confirmed coronavirus cases, as has Baja, California, just south of San Diego.
On Tuesday, a confirmed case of COVID-19 in a sprawling refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, raised alarms that asylum seekers seeking hearings in the US could become infected while they wait. | 0 | non |
716 | Title: Rhode Island fights ODs with ad: 'Do you know your dealer is a vegan?'
Rhode Island is fighting a sharp uptick in accidental ODs with a provocative online ad campaign — “Do you know your drug dealer is a vegan?” — and a fistful of cash to get the message out.
The $500,000 campaign, paid for by the state’s behavioral healthcare department, targets users who may not know that their dealer could be selling fentanyl — and calling it heroin or some other drug.
The ads ask: “How well do you know the person who sells you cocaine? Do you trust there’s no illegal fentanyl in there? Did you know your drug dealer is vegan?”
“The point of the campaign is to get people to think about the serious and very often life-threatening consequences of using illicit substances that contain fentanyl — a risk of which both the dealer and the user may not be appropriately aware,” department spokeswoman Linda Reilly told GoLocalProv.com.
Rhode Island saw a 22 percent spike in accidental drug overdoses in the first quarter of this year. | 0 | non |
717 | Title: AOC machine gets a boost after New York Primaries
She beat the machine in 2018.
Now, she’s got one all her own.
Once dismissed as a fluke, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is proving her political power, successfully backing two progressive Congressional candidates in New York’s June 23 primaries as she cruised to victory over her own challenger, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera.
AOC proved discerning in her choices: of the three primary challengers or political newcomers she endorsed at the federal level, two — Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones — won, with Bowman defeating liberal stalwart Eliot Engel and Jones triumphant in the first step of his bid for retiring Rep. Nita Lowey’s seat.
Ocasio-Cortez also supported Rep. Jerry Nadler, who sailed to victory.
“In two short years, the progressive movement has dramatically shifted New York’s Congressional delegation, the state legislature, and city policy,” AOC said in a statement to The Post.
“Last Tuesday’s wins proved that this dynamic is not going away anytime soon — it is a powerful, generational force in our politics that will be a part of our country for years to come.”
With a bigger Squad at her side, Ocasio-Cortez is entering her second term strong, analysts said.
“She absolutely smoked her well-funded opponent, a few of her endorsed candidates won in New York and she’s shown that she’s good at lifting people up as she herself rises,” Democratic strategist Eric Koch told The Post. “She’s going to be a force for a long time.”
“The Squad is growing,” crowed Paco Fabian, a spokesman for the Bernie Sanders-aligned political non-profit Our Revolution.
Wins by Bowman and Jones “will help us move the Democratic party in the right direction,” he said.
Ocasio-Cortez still has $4.6 million in the bank and can use it to shore up allies. No Democrat dinosaurs in the five boroughs will be safe in the campaigns ahead, Fabian warned.
“Wherever we can, we will support candidates that are progressive, that are seeking public office if they’re going up against centrists or Democrats in name only,” he said.
Even so, it wasn’t a perfect night for the Squad leader, who found less success on the state level.
AOC-backed Assembly candidates Phara Souffrant Forrest and Marcela Mitaynes are so far trailing their establishment rivals in tight races.
The contests are close, however, and the city plans to begin counting a surge of absentee ballots next week.
Ocasio-Cortez did land a winner with Jabari Brisport, who now looks to have triumphed for the open seat to replace retiring Brooklyn State Sen. Velmanette Montgomery.
It remains to be seen whether an expanded Squad will become an unruly one — or will just be a rubber stamp for her political ambitions.
“The real challenge will be holding the band together [and] actually getting anything done,” one senior staffer in New York’s Congressional delegation told The Post.
“There are some bright new stars coming to the delegation who I’d imagine won’t be too interested in just being seen as AOC’s sidekick.” | 0 | non |
718 | Title: Dead newborn found in woods near Atlanta
A call led sheriff’s deputies near Atlanta to a wooded area where they found a dead newborn.
A homeowner in Dawson County discovered the body and called 911, Sheriff Jeff Johnson told Channel 2 Action News.
Officials estimate the baby’s age at 1 to 2 weeks old.
Deputies are questioning at least two people; the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is assisting with the investigation, the news outlet said. | 0 | non |
719 | Title: President Trump extends Paycheck Protection Program
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President Trump signed legislature Saturday extending the deadline for businesses to apply for funding under the Paycheck Protection Program.
The COVID-19 relief legislation enacted in March expired on Tuesday with more than $130 billion in unused funds remaining. With his signature, the deadline for eligible businesses to apply was extended until Aug. 8.
The program has been an essential lifeline for businesses around the country, which have been crippled by pandemic-related lockdowns.
The PPP program was among the most visible parts of a $2 trillion relief package passed by Congress as the coronavirus threw the country into a painful recession and created millions of newly unemployed Americans.
Congressional Democrats have been looking for an even more sweeping round of stimulus to arrest damage to the economy. In May they passed a $3 trillion package, with additional relief for businesses and a $1,200 round of direct transfer payments for individual Americans.
Trump has said he supports some form of additional direct payments, but Congressional Republicans have balked at the idea. | 0 | non |
720 | Title: Alabama mall shooting leaves 8-year-old boy dead
A gunman opened fire in an Alabama shopping mall, killing an 8-year-old boy and injuring a girl and two adults.
The shooting started around 3:30 p.m. Friday at Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, a suburb of Birmingham. The shooter fled, AL.com reported.
Police identified the dead boy as 8-year-old Royta Giles Jr., who died at a hospital. The injured were all taken to hospitals, but officials didn’t give their names or list their conditions.
Royta was with his family — mother, stepfather and two siblings — outside a children’s clothing store, waiting to be allowed in because the story limits the number of customers because of coronavirus precautions, his mother told AL.com.
“That’s my baby, my firstborn,” she said of Royta, who was going to be in third grade and wanted to be a rapper. “The person who did this is going to have to answer for that whether it is to whoever they pray to or if it’s the streets.”
The mother, who asked not to be identified, added: “This one hits home. They took a good one.”
The principal of Royta’s school, Jonesboro Elementary, called him a jewel and talked about how smart he was. Dr. Anjell Edwards and other staff members tried to convince him to consider becoming a lawyer.
Officers are collecting evidence and reviewing surveillance tapes to try to identify possible suspects, Police Chief Nick Derzis told reporters late Friday, according to AL.com.
A trail of blood leading to a parking deck is leading investigators to believe the suspect left in a car, Derzis said.
The shopping mall has been the scene of other shootings in the past few years, AL.com reported.
A police officer who was responding to a shooting on Thanksgiving in 2018 killed Emantic Fitzgerald “EJ” Bradford Jr. The state later ruled the shooting was justified. And last June, police found a man inside a vehicle dead from a gunshot wound. | 0 | non |
721 | Title: US embassies spend big on July 4 celebrations
The coronavirus pandemic has put a damper on Fourth of July celebrations in the US, so the State Department is helping Americans abroad ring in the holiday.
At least five US embassies are spending big on fireworks displays, according to federal procurement documents obtained by TMZ.
The US Embassy in Madrid spent $67,551 on “mapping services for 4th July celebrations,” the website reported. Hong Kong spent nearly $50,000 on an “Independence Day reception 2020” while the Hanoi embassy in Vietnam shelled out $35,496 to rent a venue, and Bangkok spent $31,356 on a July 4 party. The embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay spent $12,871, according to the outlet.
Other US embassies, such as those in Berlin, Mexico City and Managua, Nicaragua, are throwing virtual parties because of the coronavirus pandemic. | 0 | non |
722 | Title: Madeleine McCann suspect was extradited from Portugal — twice
The German suspect in the case of missing toddler Madeleine McCann was extradited twice from Portugal for child sex crimes, but Portuguese authorities never linked him to her disappearance, according to a report.
Christian Brueckner, 43, who had been living in southern Portugal, was sent back to Germany in 1999 after spending four years on the lam for sexually abusing a child.
Brueckner was extradited to his home country again in 2017 to serve a 15-month prison sentence for the sexual abuse of another child and for possessing child pornography.
That same year, he was taken into custody for exposing himself at a children’s playground close to Praia da Luz, the Portuguese resort where the British toddler disappeared in 2007, the Daily Mail reported.
“It may be hard to believe, but it is true,” said a broadcaster on the Portuguese RTP network last week. “The suspect in the murder of Madeleine McCann was twice extradited from Portugal to Germany for sex crimes against children but was never investigated into her disappearance from Praia da Luz.” | 0 | non |
723 | Title: Michael Cohen wishes fans a happy July 4 as critics blast restaurant romp
Recently sprung jailbird Michael Cohen certainly appears to be enjoying his independence.
Cohen on Saturday wished his Twitter followers a happy Fourth of July, hours after being pictured on The Post’s front page dining al freco at a chic Upper East Side restaurant Le Bilboquet — a move some legal experts have suggested could cost him his freedom.
“Wishing everyone a #safe and #happy #4thofJuly2020,” President Trump’s former lawyer wrote at 7:28 a.m in a tweet featuring an image of the Stars and Stripes and fireworks.
Cohen, 53, was released to house arrest from the Federal Correctional Institution at Otisville, New York on May 20 over COVID-19 concerns.
He’s supposed to be serving three-year sentence for his role in paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, bank fraud, tax evasion and lying to Congress.
At the time of his release, Cohen was only 10 months into his prison stint, which was to extend to Nov. 2021.
“Michael Cohen eating at NYC restaurant could land him back in prison. Revoke his bail?” tweeted Corey Lewandowski, a former manager for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page branded the snack attack an “ostentatious summertime scene.”
Cohen was pictured dining with his wife, Laura, and another couple Thursday night. They departed their sidewalk table around 11:30 p.m. as staff were closing the restaurant, which charges $49 for a dish of veal filet mignon, wild mushrooms, and potato blinis.
The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., ripped what he saw as a double standard.
“Don’t worry they’ll only enforce a crime against someone who’s pro Trump not someone who tries to turns against him for a lesser sentence. I’m sure Michael, won’t get in trouble for breaking the terms of his house arrest he’s above the law,” he tweeted.
Others dished up some biting humor.
“Meet at Katz’ for breakfast?” tweeted Mike Nyland.
Experts, such as ex-federal Bureau of Prisons official Cameron Lindsay, have said the jaunt to the restaurant, which is around the corner from Cohen’s Park Avenue home, didn’t pass the smell test.
“I find it unusual that he’s out to dinner,” said Lindsay, now working as an expert witness and consultant.
Cohen’s lawyer Jeffrey K. Levine, has insisted that his client “is currently on furlough” and “did not violate any of the terms and conditions of his release.”
Laura Cohen hung up on a Post reporter who reached out for comment Saturday. | 0 | non |
724 | Title: Friends fear Ghislaine Maxwell is in 'danger,' worried for her safety
Friends of Ghislaine Maxwell are worried the disgraced socialite could get whacked in prison or die by suicide like her predator ex-lover and boss, Jeffrey Epstein.
“I’m absolutely worried for her safety,” said Christopher Mason, a TV host and journalist who has known Maxwell since the 1980s. “Do I think [she’s] in danger? Yes.”
Mason, who is appearing in the new docu-series “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein” in August on Lifetime, added that the threat to Maxwell — now headed to the same Manhattan lock-up where Epstein died last August — could be greater because of reports she might cooperate with authorities.
“The authorities are open to the possibility of some cooperation,” Mason said.
“In a way, I can’t imagine her ever giving up Prince Andrew, but if it’s life imprisonment with no hope of parole, it might be tempting. She of all of those people knew who slept with whom and [which young girl] was assigned to whom.”
Epstein, 66, hanged himself last year inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center while facing charges he sexually abuse of dozens of minors and young women.
The death was ruled a suicide but a pathologist hired by the Epstein family claims his death was murder.
Video footage outside Epstein’s cell just prior to his death was mysteriously wiped and two corrections officers, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, have been charged with falsifying documents claiming they checked on him the night of his death.
Mason said Maxwell had access to potentially compromising videotapes.
He said he was told that Epstein rigged his many homes with cameras and kept surveillance tapes of everyone and everything that went on in them. The tapes have all disappeared, he said.
“I’m sure she has access to the videos,” Mason said. “A lot of powerful people will be more than a little worried. I hope [Maxwell won’t] end up like Epstein. I’m a little worried about that. I think she’s in danger. There is too much power involved if she really talks. “
Another friend who asked to remain anonymous said: “I don’t understand why [Maxwell] didn’t leave the country. She has very high-powered friends and I am wondering why she stayed in the US. She must have some major dirt to stay in this country.”
Maxwell has American, British and French citizenship, this friend said.
The friend speculated that Prince Andrew had the most to worry about but added, “I can’t tell you how much he was involved.”
Mason said Maxwell “was my friend, but after the brutality of the treatment of these girls and the threats she made, it’s hard. Sympathy for her has evaporated.
“She’s the daughter of a monstrous man and Jeffrey was the ideal replacement for her monstrous father so one could be exceedingly sympathetic — poor thing she had no chance, her father was a monster. That’s all she knew. But she’s also a highly intelligent adult with choices.” | 0 | non |
725 | Title: 26-year-old Ohio police officer dies in line of duty
A police officer in Ohio died early Saturday when a man he was trying to check on shot him.
Officer Anthony Dia, 26, of the Toledo Police Department, had been dispatched just after midnight to a Home Depot to check on a man who was reportedly in the parking lot, the Toledo Blade reported.
The man, identified by police as 57-year-old Edward Henry, turned and fired at Dia — and the officer fired back before he was hit, witnesses told police.
Dia was struck once in the chest; he died at a hospital, police told the Blade.
Henry ran into a wooded area, where he killed himself about three hours later. He had bench warrants out for his arrest on misdemeanor charges, police told the Blade.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has ordered flags throughout Lucas County and at the state capitol building to be flown at half staff. | 0 | non |
726 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell was Epstein’s 'victim': friends
Jeffrey Epstein had “complete control” over Ghislaine Maxwell from almost the moment they met, even ordering her to fetch him chicken soup when he was sick, a pal of the disgraced British socialite told The Post.
“She’s a kind of a victim of [Epstein],” said the friend, who called Maxwell’s relationship with Epstein “a tragic story.”
“If you ask any psychiatrist, [they will tell you] there are bad marriages where you will do anything for the person you’re with. … I feel like yelling at her. ‘Ghislaine, for God’s sake, why? WHY?’ It was about money, the glamor and the lifestyle.”
Ghislaine was “already a damaged, broken girl,” when she arrived in New York and met Epstein, said her friend, who has known Maxwell since the 1990s.
“She came to United States after the horrific death of her father, whom she adored, her brother went to jail, the mother was freaking out and [the British government] had just took the big house she grew up in away.
“She used to sit and cry on her sofa and say, ‘They even took the silver spoons,’” the friend recalled.
Then she met Epstein.
“He saw this attractive, broken bird who was very smart, very entertaining and he thought, ‘That’s the woman who could do a lot for me,’” the friend said.
Epstein started exerting severe control over Maxwell from the beginning — just like her father had when she was growing up, according to Maxwell’s friend.
“One day,” the friend recalled, “Jeffrey wasn’t feeling well. [We] were having a meeting and he called her and said, ‘You have to get the chicken soup from the deli on Third Avenue for me.'”
Maxwell apparently protested, telling him, “Jeffrey — but you have all this staff [who can do it],” to which Epstein replied, “No you have to bring it,” the friend said.
“I remember thinking this girl is being brainwashed, controlled,” the friend added. “I saw that happening. That power he had on her.”
Maxwell became “totally obsessed” with her then-lover Epstein — during and after their affair, they said.
The former high society hostess was arrested this week in New Hampshire after being in hiding since Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail last year.
She is accused of procuring and grooming girls as young as 14 for Epstein and on Friday, one woman filed suit against Maxwell claiming the socialite raped her “up to 30 times — starting when she was just 14 years old and continuing until she became pregnant with Jeffrey Epstein’s child.” | 0 | non |
727 | Title: Coronavirus cases surging in Russia after controversial Putin vote
The coronavirus pandemic is surging in Russia, days after voters went to the polls in a controversial vote to allow Russian leader Vladimir Putin to hang on to power until 2036.
On Saturday, the country reported 6,632 new cases in a 24-hour period.
There are 674,515 confirmed cases of the virus in Russia, and authorities said 168 people had died in the last 24 hours. The new deaths brought the official death toll to 10,027, according to a report in the Moscow Times.
The spike comes after a referendum allowing Russian President Vladimir to hang on to power until 2036. During the voting last week, government authorities said the pandemic was in retreat and it was safe to go to the polls in the week-long vote. | 0 | non |
728 | Title: Pubs reopen in England after four-month shutdown
It was bottoms up live on the BBC Saturday morning when an eager patron pounded down a Jägerbomb at a London bar to celebrate pubs and restaurants re-opening all across England for the first time in four months.
It’s officially called “Super Saturday” and thirsty Brits lined up even before pubs threw open their doors at 6 a.m. to ensure they could sink a pint — or three — for breakfast.
Fire protection installers Ben Clark, 33, Curtis Birch, 22, and Connor Cowen, 22, didn’t waste any time getting to the pub first thing Saturday morning after they finished their night shift in Birmingham.
Clark told The Sun that he’d been craving a pint since the start of lockdown. “We walked past and saw the lights on and got ourselves booked in,” he said.
Pub staff and customers will have to adjust to new COVID-19 rules, however. Some of the new regulations include keeping the sound low on football games to prevent people from spreading droplets when they shout. Customers will have to leave their contact details with pubs or restaurants for 21 days so they can be tracked if there is an outbreak and are being asked to use contactless payments rather than cash. Groups of up to six can come to a restaurant or pub but must be from the same general household and cannot mix with other groups.
Staff wore masks and some protective gear in photos from British pubs Saturday but many of the patrons were not even though Prime Minister Boris Johnson said they should. | 0 | non |
729 | Title: Heavy rains slam Japan, leaving dozens dead and missing
Torrential rain hammered Japan early Saturday, triggering landslides and flooding that forced tens of thousands from their homes, left more than a dozen presumed dead and many more missing.
Hardest hit is one of the country’s main islands, Kyushu, where rain fell at 4 inches an hour overnight. The deluge pushed authorities to order the evacuation of some 76,000 residents, reported DW, an international news outlet.
In the island’s district of Kumamoto, floodwaters and mud overtook a nursing home near a river, leaving 60 residents trapped, the Associated Press reported. Fourteen are presumed dead.
Video from NHK TV, Japan’s public channel, shows rescuers airlifting residents from their roofs and whisking away others in boats.
The forecast calls for more heavy rain through Sunday. | 0 | non |
730 | Title: Japanese Diplomat crushes Jimi Hendrix-inspired national anthem
Kanji Yamanouchi, the Consul General of Japan in New York, rang in July 4th with a Jimi Hendrix-inspired rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
The 62-year-old, bow-tied clad diplomat crushed a version of the American national anthem on an electric guitar in a video posted to the consulate’s official Facebook page this week.
“This year marks the 160th anniversary of the arrival of the very first Japanese delegation to the United States and New York City,” he said. “On top of that, the Fourth of July is just around the corner, so I would like to perform the American national anthem with my deepest gratitude and respect — inspired by Jimi Hendrix.” | 0 | non |
731 | Title: North Korea doesn't want talks with the U.S.
North Korean diplomats don’t need to sit down with the US for talks because they would merely be a “political tool” for Washington, the country’s state media agency said.
North Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang are essentially fruitless. Her Saturday remarks came on the eve of a US envoy’s trip to Seoul to discuss the stalled nuclear talks with North Korea and escalating tensions.
“We do not feel any need to sit face to face with the US, as it does not consider the DPRK-U.S. dialogue as nothing more than a tool for grappling its political crisis,” Choe said in comments carried by state-run KCNA news agency.
South Korea President Moon Jae-in suggested Wednesday that President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un should meet prior to the US election to break the impasse.
The next day, Trump’s former security advisor John Bolton told reporters in New York that Trump might schedule another summit with Kim before the election as an “October Surprise.” | 0 | non |
732 | Title: Neil Young is still whining about Trump using his music
Neil Young is still griping that President Trump is using his music.
The aging Canadian rocker whined Friday about the use of his song “Rockin’ in the Free World” at Trump’s rally at Mount Rushmore.
“This is NOT ok with me…,” Young said in a tweet. “I stand in solidarity with the Lakota Sioux & this is NOT ok with me”
The rally drew thousands of enthusiastic fans, but the iconic American monument has been criticized in recent days by some activists.
“It’s an injustice to actively steal Indigenous people’s land then carve the white faces of the conquerors who committed genocide,” said Nick Tilsen, of the Oglala Lakota tribe and president of the activist nonprofit NDN Collective.
The president’s musical tastes are eclectic and his rallies have been known to feature numbers from the Rolling Stones and “Phantom of the Opera.”
It’s not the first time Young has complained about unauthorized use of his jams. Trump used the same song in 2015 during a now-historic speech in New York City, when he first announced his run for president.
“Donald Trump was not authorized to use ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’ in his presidential candidacy announcement,” a rep for Young said at the time. “Neil Young, a Canadian citizen, is a supporter of Bernie Sanders for President of the United States Of America.”
With Post wires | 0 | non |
733 | Title: Suicide car bomber drives into checkpoint at Somalia's Mogadishu port
At least five people were injured when a suicide car bomber plowed into a checkpoint near the port in Mogadishu, Somalia early Saturday, Reuters reported.
The explosion shook parts of the capital and metal debris fell far and wide, witnesses said. Police had no immediate comment on casualties. Security forces immediately blanketed the area. The injured were taken to the city’s Madina Hospital for treatment.
Somalia has been a conflict zone since 1991 when clan warlords overthrew dictator Siad Barre and then began fighting with one another. The militant Islamist group al-Shabaab has been trying to take control and impose a harsh form of Sharia law since 2008. | 0 | non |
734 | Title: US warships deployed to South China Sea for drills
A fleet of US warships have been deployed to the South China Sea and are expected to hold some of the largest military drills the area has seen in recent years.
Two aircraft carriers, the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz, and four other warships, are set to begin their exercises Saturday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The deployment comes as a direct response to China, which has stirred regional ire for holding their own set of drills near the Paracel Islands, one of several disputed territories in and around the South China Sea. The land is claimed by the Philippines and Vietnam, both of whom also condemned the Chinese military activity.
The dueling US and Chinese drills will take place at the same time.
“The purpose is to show an unambiguous signal to our partners and allies that we are committed to regional security and stability,” said Rear Adm. George M. Wikoff, told the Journal.
China has responded by saying the drills are appropriate and a matter of national sovereignty.
“Some country outside the region often comes all the way to hold massive military activities to flex its muscles, and that is the rooted reason that affects the stability in the South China Sea,” Zhao Lijian, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said Friday. | 0 | non |
735 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein exchanged $20M in transactions
Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein engaged in a series of mysterious high-dollar transactions suggesting the pair were financially interwoven, according to federal prosecutors.
The two shifted $20 million back and forth between their bank accounts over a period of five years beginning in 2007, according to a memo from US attorneys arguing Maxwell’s financial resources made her a flight risk and she should be held without bail.
“There may be a completely innocent explanation for it, but it definitely is a sinister data point,” Duncan Levin, a former Brooklyn federal prosecutor, told CNN of the cash transactions between Maxwell and Epstein.
Maxwell was arrested Thursday on charges of procuring and grooming underage girls she and Epstein allegedly abused. The arrest followed a months-long investigation that led federal law enforcement to a chalet in the New Hampshire woods where Maxwell had been hiding out.
Maxwell allegedly kept a labyrinth of 15 banks accounts, which were at one point valued at more than $20 million, investigators found, describing the British socialite’s financial standing as “opaque and indeterminate,” The New York Times reported.
The source of Epstein’s wealth has long been a mystery. He claimed to manage money for his billionaire friends, but has only one known client — Victoria’s Secret founder Leslie Wexner, who has said he cut ties with Epstein years ago.
Maxwell claimed the two were so financially connected she should have rights to his estate in the Virgin Islands, according to a civil suit she field there following his August death. In court papers, she claimed Epstein vowed to always support her.
The transactions made between 2007 and 2011 suggest “they had a very close business relationship and that he clearly trusted her with a phenomenal amount of money,” Levin said. | 0 | non |
736 | Title: Seattle protesters struck by car
A car in Seattle plowed into protesters on a closed freeway Saturday, sending bodies flying.
Two women marching in another round of George Floyd protests were seriously hurt after a white vehicle tossed them into the air, according to video of the incident.
Dawit Kelete, 27, of Seattle was taken into custody, and troopers expected him to be charged sometime Saturday with several felonies.
Summer Taylor, 24, of Seattle, was in critical condition at a hospital while Diaz Love, 32, of Portland, Ore., was in serious condition in the intensive care unit, officials said.
Capt. Ron Mead told reporters the driver wasn’t drunk and authorities were investigating if the crash was a “targeted attack.”
Mead also warned demonstrators to stay away from highways.
“My hope is the result of this tragedy, the protesters will reconsider their desire to be on the interstate because I cannot guarantee their safety, plain and simple,” he said.
With Post wires | 0 | non |
737 | Title: Lawyer for Epstein victims thinks Ghislaine Maxwell will die in jail
Ghislaine Maxwell will likely kill herself or “be silenced” in jail, a victim lawyer has reportedly predicted — a year after he correctly forecast Jeffrey Epstein’s early death behind bars.
“I don’t think she is going to get out of jail alive,” Spencer Kuvin, an attorney for several Epstein victims, told The Daily Mail.
“I said the same thing about Jeffrey Epstein and people laughed at me,” he told the news site.
“I think she knows way too much information — I just have this gut feeling.”
Maxwell, who was arrested Thursday by the feds on charges she groomed underage women to have with Epstein, is currently being held without bail at Merrimack County Jail in New Hampshire.
Experts told the Post Friday that there’s a good chance the 58-year old British socialite will be transferred to Lower Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center — the same facility where officials say Epstein hanged himself last August while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
Kuvin told the outlet there are a few reasons why he feels Maxwell will endure the same fate as Epstein.
“It may be that she can’t handle the fear of what’s going to happen to her and takes matters into her own hands or there will be people who are very afraid of what she has to say,” he said.
Prosecutors on Thursday did not rule out the possibility of Maxwell cooperating in their investigation.
“In the event that if she even were to become a cooperator, I think we could deal with that,” Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in response to a question about a perjury charge brought against Maxwell. | 0 | non |
738 | Title: Trump announces creation of 'National Garden of American Heroes.'
President Trump concluded his Friday night Mount Rushmore speech by announcing he has signed an executive order creating a “National Garden of American Heroes.”
The president described the garden as a “vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived.”
An interagency task force will look for potential sites, and the Department of the Interior will provide funding for the garden, which should be open before July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The executive order reads: “The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright.”
The order notes, “none will have lived perfect lives, but all will be worth honoring, remembering, and studying.”
The order also notes the recent toppling and vandalization of historic monuments across the country amid racial injustice protests.
Many of the targeted statues involved Confederate military heroes and historical figures who owned slaves or caused harm to Native Americans.
“My Administration will not abide by an assault on our collective national memory,” the order says.
“In the face of such acts of destruction, it is our responsibility as Americans to stand strong against this violence, and to peacefully transmit our great national story to future generations through newly commissioned monuments to American heroes.”
Trump, in his pre-firework show speech, expressed similar sentiments, blasting what he called the “angry mobs” who “are trying to tear down statues of our founders.” | 0 | non |
739 | Title: Justin Trudeau might skip USMCA due to tariff threats and coronavirus
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might be skipping the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) summit in Washington DC next week.
Comments made by Trudeau on Friday indicated he intended to stay in Canada due to the recent uptick in the coronavirus cases in the United States.
He also cited US threats to re-impose a 10 percent tariff on Canadian aluminum — part of Washington’s efforts to limit exports, says Politico.
“We’re obviously concerned about the proposed issue of tariffs on aluminum and steel that the Americans have floated recently. We’re also concerned about the health situation and the coronavirus reality that is still hitting all three of our countries,” says Trudeau.
Trump had lifted aluminum and steel tariffs on Canada — and Mexico — last year as part of USMCA negotiations.
“What we simply highlight is the United States needs Canadian aluminum. They do not produce enough, nowhere near enough aluminum in the States, to be able to fill their domestic manufacturing needs.”
President Donald Trump is set to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on July 8th and 9th. | 0 | non |
740 | Title: Trump blasts the left in fiery Mount Rushmore speech
In a fiery speech at Mount Rushmore Friday night, President Trump slammed what he called the “left-wing cultural revolution” that has led to “violent mayhem” in the streets and the toppling of historic statues.
“They want to silence us. But we will not be silenced,” Trump said to cheers of “USA! USA!”
“We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people. It will not happen!” he said to more cheers from the thousands of supporters in the monument’s amphitheater before a Fourth of July fireworks show.
“We will never surrender the spirit and the courage and the cause of July 4, 1776,” he said.
Sticking in large part to prepared notes, the president delivered a powerful, base-boosting speech that pushed back against weeks of protests, declared economic optimism in the face of the coronavirus and repeated many of the promises that helped elect him.
“We will state the truth in full without apology,” he said before launching into a familiar litany of rally-popular priorities, including keeping America first, building a border wall, supporting law enforcement and protecting the right to life, guns and freedom of religion.
“We stand tall, we stand proud and we only kneel to almighty God,” he thundered. “This is who we are. This is what we believe.”
The president also vowed that Mount Rushmore “will never be desecrated.”
“These heroes will never be defaced … Their legacy will never ever be destroyed,” Trump said of the Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
He said he would sign an executive order to establish “the national garden of American heroes,” a park that would feature statues of great Americans.
Trump repeatedly decried the recent civil unrest and the “angry mobs” who have targeted historic statues amid racial injustice protests spurred by the death of George Floyd.
“Make no mistake, this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American revolution,” Trump said.
“They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,” the president said.
“But no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all its values … to be taken from them.”
Hours before Trump’s arrival, Native American protesters briefly blocked a road to the South Dakotan site before being pushed back by a contingent of National Guard soldiers in riot gear, the Rapid City Journal reported.
The demonstrators chanted “Land back!,” referring to the Black Hills, tribal lands where the monument stands that were taken from Native Americans by the US government.
The roadblock, consisting of three vans, two of which had their tires removed, reportedly left some ticket holders to the event on the outside looking in for a time, the report said.
Trump arrived at Mount Rushmore via Marine One around 9:30 p.m. and took the amphitheater stage shortly after 10 p.m.
An exact headcount to the monument’s first firework show in over a decade was not clear, but the event was expected to attract up to 7,500 people.
Most audience members in the packed amphitheater stands Friday night went mask-less; many upper level seats were empty.
South Dakota’s GOP Gov. Kristi Noem had said both social distancing and masks will be optional as daily cases in the US have skyrocketed.
Leaders of local Native American tribes, a population particularly hard hit by the virus, have expressed dismay about the coronavirus risk.
“The president is putting our tribal members at risk to stage a photo op at one of our most sacred sites,” Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, had told The Associated Press.
Others have also raised concerns about the fireworks themselves, complaining they are a fire risk to the surrounding national forest.
With Post wires | 0 | non |
741 | Title: Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend, has COVID-19
Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, has tested positive for coronavirus, Fox News reported. citing a campaign staffer.
Guilfoyle received the result in South Dakota, ahead of President Trump’s Friday address at Mount Rushmore.
Trump Jr. tested negative, according to the report, and the couple has not been in contact with the commander in chief.
“After testing positive, Kimberly was immediately isolated to limit any exposure,” a campaign spokesman said in a statement.
“She’s doing well, and will be retested to ensure the diagnosis is correct since she’s asymptomatic, but as a precaution will cancel all upcoming events.”
Page Six reported that Guilfoyle and Trump Jr. were spotted at a Bridgehampton party last weekend where revelers weren’t wearing masks.
Sources close to Trump Jr. told The Post that the pair were in attendance for an hour.
At the president’s last public event, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last month, two Secret Service members and at least eight Trump campaign advance staffers tested positive for the virus.
News of Guilfoyle’s positive COVID-19 test was first reported by The New York Times. | 0 | non |
742 | Title: This is the fed's case against Ghislaine Maxwell
She befriended girls by asking about their lives and taking them shopping or to the movies.
But Ghislaine Maxwell’s motives for cultivating the friendships were dark — she was grooming the teens to be abused by her ex-boyfriend and best buddy, the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, federal prosecutors say.
Once she developed a rapport with an underage girl, Maxwell, 58, “would try to normalize sexual abuse,” according to the 18-page indictment she was charged with Thursday.
The British socialite would allegedly do this by stripping in front of the minors, discussing sexual topics or being present when the teens were undressed.
She was also there when the girls interacted with Epstein, putting them at ease “because an adult woman was present” — but then encouraging them to give the pedophile massages that often ended with the teens being sexually abused by both him and her, according to the feds and accusers.
Maxwell allegedly encouraged the victims to accept Epstein’s offers to help pay for their travel or educational opportunities to make them feel indebted to the perverted pair.
“Through this process, Maxwell and Epstein enticed victims to engage in sexual activity with Epstein,” the indictment states.
It’s not clear exactly where Maxwell met the children. Epstein accusers who have spoken out publicly have said the heiress would hand her number out to girls outside schools or prowl around Central Park looking for young prey.
The three victims that Maxwell is charged with helping Epstein abuse between 1994 and 1997 were as young as 14 when they got caught in her web.
Here’s the case against Maxwell, as laid out by prosecutors:
The first victim in the complaint met Maxwell when she was 14.
Maxwell befriended the girl by inquiring about her school, classes and family. She also took her on outings to stores or the movies.
She “sought to normalize inappropriate and abusive conduct,” including by undressing in front of the girl.
Within a year, Epstein began abusing the minor, and “Maxwell was present for and involved in some of this abuse,” prosecutors allege.
In particular, the socialite would take part in “group sexualized massages” of Epstein with the teen, during which either she or the girl would engage in sex acts with the creep.
The couple also allegedly encouraged the minor to travel to the financier’s Upper East Side mansion from Florida in 1996 in order to sexually abuse her.
The second victim in the complaint was under 18 in 1996 when she interacted with Maxwell at Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico.
She had flown to the sprawling Santa Fe residence from out of state at Epstein’s invitation.
Epstein had invited her “for the purpose of being groomed for and/ or subjected to acts of sexual abuse,” the complaint states.
During the trip, the adults took the girl shopping and to a movie, and Maxwell chatted her up.
Though she knew the girl was a minor, Maxwell “began her efforts to groom [her] for abuse by Epstein.”
This included allegedly giving the child an unsolicited rubdown when the girl was topless and encouraging her to give Epstein massages.
In London, between 1994 and 1995, Maxwell befriended the third victim, knowing the girl was underage.
Among other things, they discussed the minor’s life and family before Maxwell allegedly took her to meet Epstein on multiple occasions.
During those interactions, Maxwell allegedly would push the teen to massage Epstein, though she was aware “that Epstein would engage in sex acts with Minor Victim – 3 during those massages.”
The girl gave the requested rubdowns and was sexually abused during them, the complaint states.
Maxwell “was aware that Epstein engaged in sexual activity with Minor Victim – 3 on multiple occasions, including at times when Minor Victim – 3 was under the age of 18.” | 0 | non |
743 | Title: Protesters block roadway to Mount Rushmore ahead of Trump's arrival
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The National Guard has stepped in to remove protesters who blocked access roads at Mount Rushmore Friday night ahead of President Trump’s arrival.
The demonstrators, mainly Native Americans, are protesting that South Dakota’s Black Hills — where Mount Rushmore stands — had been taken from the Lakota people against treaty agreements.
Authorities eventually cleared out the protesters, but not before 15 of them were arrested for missing a police-imposed deadline to leave.
The roadblock, consisting of three vans, two of which had their tires removed, reportedly left some ticket holders to the event on the outside looking in, Rapid City Journal reported.
President Trump is expected to take the amphitheater stage at Mount Rushmore just after 10 p.m. to deliver a speech before a massive fireworks show.
With Wires | 0 | non |
744 | Title: Trump in Fourth of July mood ahead of Mount Rushmore speech
President Trump told reporters that he’s looking forward to a “fantastic evening” tonight ahead of a speech at Mount Rushmore.
“We’re going to Mount Rushmore,” he told reporters on a tarmac before boarding a flight to the South Dakota landmark.
“Mount Rushmore is in great shape and it’s going to be in great shape for centuries to come.”
Despite the ongoing march of the coronavirus and continued domestic unrest, Trump said he was encouraged by signs of economic life.
“The economy’s doing very well. Our jobs number was the biggest number in history, in the history of our country, bigger even than last month by almost double,” he said.
“So a lot of good things are happening, a lot of very powerful things are happening, and our country’s doing very well.”
Trump’s appearance will feature fireworks and a military plane flyover. | 0 | non |
745 | Title: World's oldest cat passes away at 31
He lived life to the feline fullest.
Rubble, long considered the world’s oldest cat, has passed away at the age of 31 — or 150 in human years, according to People magazine.
“He was an amazing companion that I had the pleasure to live with for such a long time,” said his owner, Michele Heritage of Exeter, England.
Now 52, Heritage was given Rubble as a gift for her 32nd birthday.
“He was part of a litter of cats that my sister’s friend had and I had just left home,” she recalled. “I was lonely living on my own, so I got him in as a kitten.”
Heritage attributed Rubble’s longevity to her doting care and attention.
“I have always treated him like a child,” she said. “I don’t have any children and had another cat who passed at the age of 25. If you care about something, no matter what it is, it does last.”
Rubble’s condition suddenly began to falter towards the end of his life and he eventually stopped eating and would only drink water.
“He was a creature of habit,” she added. “[He] had his favorite places to sleep and liked his food, so when that stopped happening, we knew.”
The aged feline recently left home one day and never returned.
“We believe he went off to die as cats do,” Heritage told People. | 0 | non |
746 | Title: 4 hospitalized after shooting at Alabama shopping mall
HOOVER, Ala. — A shooting at an Alabama shopping mall left at least four people hospitalized Friday afternoon, police said.
Multiple shots were reported near the food court inside the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Police Capt. Gregg Rector said in a news release. He said the victims were hospitalized for treatment. “Their conditions are unknown at this time,” authorities said.
“We don’t know at this point what led to the shooting or how many gunmen were involved,” Rector added.
Authorities did not say whether anyone had been arrested.
The mall has been evacuated “and the scene is secure,” police said.
Annalisa Pope, who works at Hollister in the mall, told WBMA-TV in a telephone interview that she heard six to seven shots fired.
“It wasn’t just one or two,” she said. “That’s what got me off guard. They (the shots) just kept going.”
She said the gunshots “sounded like they were coming from every direction.”
Hoover police asked anyone was in the mall who witnessed the shooting to call authorities.
“It felt so close,” she said. “It was so surreal. It doesn’t even feel real right now. You wouldn’t expect something like that to happen out of nowhere on a normal, Friday afternoon.”
The mall in suburban Birmingham was the site of a 2018 police shooting where an officer fatally shot a Black man with a gun after mistaking him for the gunman in an earlier shooting at the mall.
The shooting of 21-year-old Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr. prompted a series of protests at the mall. The Alabama attorney general’s office cleared the officer, saying he acted “reasonably under the circumstances” in the encounter that spanned approximately five seconds.
“We are heartbroken by the tragic, senseless incident that took place in our shopping center this afternoon,” the mall said in a statement Friday. | 0 | non |
747 | Title: 93 infected with coronavirus at University of Washington frathouse
A coronavirus outbreak at the University of Washington’s off-campus frat houses has left at least 93 students sickened with the illness, the school announced Friday.
Eighty-nine of the infected students at the Seattle school live on Greek Row, while the other four came into close contact with frat house residents.
“What is occurring north of campus provides lessons for students as they consider their return to campus this fall,” Dr. Geoffrey Gottlieb, chair of the UW Advisory Committee on Communicable Diseases, said Tuesday, when the outbreak was first reported.
Gottlieb warned that in order to establish some semblance of “normalcy” — with socializing and attending classes — students must wear face coverings and practice social distancing.
“If we don’t, measures such as what are now required on Greek Row will be inevitable,” he said.
While the university’s official coronavirus count related to Greek Row is 93, the school’s student-led interfraternity council said 117 fraternity members residing in 15 separate houses have self-reported testing positive.
The university said it’s working to confirm the increased tally. | 0 | non |
748 | Title: UK scraps quarantine for some visitors as pubs set to reopen
LONDON — Boris Johnson wants a haircut and a beer.
Like millions of other Britons, the prime minister will be able to have a trim and a tipple on Saturday, when the country takes its biggest step yet out of coronavirus lockdown with the reopening in England of restaurants, pubs and hairdressers, along with secular and sacred venues including cinemas and churches.
Britain is also opening up to travel, announcing Friday that it will scrap a requirement for people arriving from dozens of countries to spend 14 days in isolation. Starting July 10, quarantine will be lifted for arrivals from countries deemed “lower risk” for the coronavirus, including Australia, Japan, France, Spain, Germany and Italy — but not the United States, the world’s worst-hit country from COVID-19.
For isolation-weary Britons and cash-starved businesses, relief at easing the three-month lockdown is mixed with trepidation. Britain has the highest COVID-19 toll in Europe, with more than 44,000 confirmed deaths, and scientists say the coronavirus is still on the loose. Even the usually ebullient Johnson said this week that the virus was “ still circling like a shark in the water.”
“Without doubt, lockdown has saved many hundreds of thousands of lives,” Johnson said at a news conference Friday. “But it has also had a devastating impact on our way of life and our economy.”
Johnson urged Britons to enjoy themselves, and has said he plans to have a pint and get his shaggy blond locks trimmed this weekend. But he also urged people to be careful and follow social distancing rules.
“This is a big turning point for us,” he said. “We’ve got to get it right.”
When pubs and restaurants reopen Saturday, it will be anything but business as usual.
They will have to take contact details for each group, and people can only socialize with one other household at a time. There will be more cleaning, a ban on queuing at the bar for a drink, and reduced capacity, with patrons told to stay at least one meter (three feet) apart.
“I think the vast majority of pubs and restaurants are welcoming and opening with enthusiasm,” said Jane Pendlebury, chief executive of Hospa, the Hospitality Professionals Association. “Still, the restrictions are making it tough.
“And of course, the pub environment, the restaurant environment is going to have a very different vibe,” she said.
Some pubs are staying closed over the weekend, or even longer. Even so, police have questioned the wisdom of reopening pubs on a Saturday. Tim Clarke of the Metropolitan Police Federation warned the weekend could be “as busy as policing New Year’s Eve.”
One city in England will not be joining in the reopening. Leicester, population 300,000, was sent back into lockdown this week amid a spike in coronavirus infections. Non-essential shops have been closed and pubs and restaurants won’t be reopening on Saturday.
They are also staying shut north of the border in Scotland.
Johnson’s Conservative government is increasingly at odds on virus-fighting strategy with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Scotland controls its own health policy, and Sturgeon has been more cautious about lifting lockdown than authorities in England. Pubs in Scotland can open beer gardens from Monday, but won’t be able to serve people indoors until July 15.
Scotland also hasn’t agreed to the plan to end quarantine for travelers, which for now applies only to England.
The list of 73 countries and territories exempted from quarantine includes Australia, New Zealand and much of western Europe — though not Portugal or Sweden, which have relatively high infection rates. Also on the list are Asian nations such as South Korea and Vietnam that have tamed their outbreaks and several Caribbean nations including Jamaica.
Some of those countries will still quarantine British visitors.
The U.S., which has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the world, isn’t on the list. Neither are China, Russia or Brazil.
The British government also changed its official advice against all but essential travel outside the country. Starting Saturday, travel for work or leisure has been OKed to dozens of countries, including some, such as Canada, that are not on the quarantine-free list. The U.K. still advises against travel to the U.S.
Sturgeon accused the U.K. government of changing its list of safe countries up to the last minute.
“When so much is at stake, as it is right now, we can’t allow ourselves to be dragged along in the wake of another government’s, to be quite frank, shambolic decision-making process,” she said.
The leader of Wales, Mark Drakeford, also said dealing with Johnson’s government over the travel plan had been “an utterly shambolic experience.”
Bharat Pankhania, an expert in communicable diseases at the University of Exeter Medical School, said the government was sending “mixed messages.”
“The virus is still in circulation,” he said. “I do worry that the enormous cost of the lockdown, the pain and suffering, may be undone very, very quickly.”
England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, said authorities were trying “to balance as best we can the multiple risks”
“No one believes … this is a risk-free next step,” he said. “It’s absolutely not.
“This virus is a long way from gone.” | 0 | non |
749 | Title: Brazil set to pass 1.5 million coronavirus cases, cities reopen anyway
SAO PAULO — Brazil was set to pass 1.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases on Friday, as the virus continues to ravage Latin America’s largest country even as cities reopen bars, restaurants and gyms sparking fears infections will keep rising.
Brazil has the world’s second largest outbreak after the United States and the virus has killed over 60,000 people in the country.
In Rio de Janeiro, crowds gathered to drink on the sidewalk of an upscale beach-side neighborhood on Thursday night, the first evening bars in the city were allowed to reopen.
Pictures of the revelry in Leblon, where few were wearing face masks and people were huddled close together, went viral on social media drawing condemnation and concern.
“A tragedy foretold,” David Miranda, a federal congressman for Rio, wrote on Twitter above a picture of the crowded sidewalk. He criticized the city’s mayor Marcelo Crivella.
“Crivella’s decision to throw open the doors of business will come with a high cost,” he added.
In an emailed statement, Crivella’s office said local law enforcement had asked several establishments to close on Thursday as public health rules prohibit the gathering of crowds drinking outside bars. It said enforcement would be ramped up over the weekend.
In Rio alone, more than 6,600 people have died of COVID-19 in the past four months. Only 14 countries in the world have a death toll higher than the city. Intensive care units in public hospitals are at 70% capacity.
Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest and worst hit city, is expected to open bars and restaurants next week.
President Jair Bolsonaro has been widely criticized by health experts for downplaying the severity of the virus which he has dismissed as just “a little flu.” Bolsonaro has pressured governors and mayors for months to reverse lockdown measures and reopen the economy.
On Friday, Bolsonaro vetoed parts of a law that would have made wearing a face mask obligatory in enclosed spaces where large groups gather — such as churches and schools.
Bolsonaro has regularly flouted social distancing guidelines advised by most health experts, shaking hands and embracing supporters. He has said publicly that his past as an athlete makes him immune to the worst symptoms of the virus. | 0 | non |
750 | Title: Trump's July 4th military air show flying from Boston to DC
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s July Fourth celebration will feature an extensive U.S. military air show over Washington, D.C., but four other cities will get mini-versions of the air power display on Saturday.
The “Salute to the Great Cities of the American Revolution” will feature military flyovers in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore. While the flights will likely be visible from a number of locations in the cities, they are taking place as Americans deal with surging cases of COVID-19 and mixed messages on the need for masks and social distancing.
Trump has been criticized for pushing to go ahead with large rallies and other public gatherings, like the upcoming holiday event, despite the increased risks of infection.
The flyovers will start in Boston at about 4 p.m., with Air Force and Marine Corps jets flying over in five waves. The show will be kicked off by the Air Force Thunderbirds, followed by B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers, F-15 and F-22 fighter jets and U.S. Marine Corps F-35 fighters.
In Boston, they’ll go over the center of the city, approaching from the northeast and flying over the U.S.S. Constitution and Fenway Park.
They will then fly on to New York City, heading down the Hudson River at about 5 p.m., passing just east of the Statue of Liberty. The aircraft will get to Philadelphia at about 5:15 p.m., flying over Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, then they’ll head to Baltimore, where they will reach Fort McHenry around 5:30 p.m., and then continue south toward Washington, D.C. The jets will be flying at about 1,000 feet.
They will then join the larger air show in the nation’s capital, which will begin at about 6:30 p.m. with a demonstration by the U.S. Army Golden Knights Parachute Team and a 21-gun salute by the military’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, known as The Old Guard.
The air show will follow at 7 p.m., and will begin with a flyover by Air Force One. The aerial show will include a wide range of military fighter jets, bombers, helicopters, cargo and tanker aircraft, And it will finish with the military’s elite demonstration teams, the U.S. Navy Blue Angels and Air Force Thunderbirds.
The aircraft will approach the city from Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia and fly directly over the Ellipse.
The Army, Navy, Marines Corps and Air Force bands will play.
According to the Pentagon, the shows will not cost taxpayers much because the aircraft crews are using the flyovers to meet routing training and proficiency requirements that would normally be conducted at other locations. | 0 | non |
751 | Title: UN staffers put on leave after having sex in official car
Two U.N. staff members have been put on leave, pending an investigation, after a video emerged last week of an apparent sex act in an official U.N. car in Israel, the organization announced Thursday.
“According to information initially gathered by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) as part of its investigation, two male international staff members who were in the U.N. vehicle in Tel Aviv have been identified as having engaged in misconduct, including conduct of a sexual nature,” the U.N. Truce Supervision Office (UNTSO) said in a statement.
The video, released by Inner City Press on Tuesday, shows a woman in a red dress straddling a man in the back seat of a vehicle with U.N. markings as the motorist drives off. Inner City Press first reported that the members belonged to the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO).
The organization was set up in 1948 to monitor ceasefires in the region. According to its website, observers “remain in the Middle East to monitor ceasefires, supervise armistice agreements, prevent isolated incidents from escalating and assist other United Nations peacekeeping operations in the region.”
“Given the seriousness of the allegations of failing to observe the standards of conduct expected of international civil servants, the two staff members have been placed on Administrative Leave Without Pay, pending the results and conclusion of the ongoing OIOS investigation,” the statement said.
It added that UNTSO has “re-engaged in a robust awareness-raising campaign to remind its personnel of their obligations to the U.N. Code of Conduct.”
The video quickly went viral when it was posted online, and a spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the chief was “shocked and deeply disturbed by what is seen in the video” and that it “goes against everything that we stand for and have been working to achieve in terms of fighting misconduct by U.N. Staff.”
“We expect the process to be concluded very quickly and intend to take prompt appropriate action,” said the spokesman, Stephane Dujarric. | 0 | non |
752 | Title: Virginia Giuffre cried 'tears of joy' after Ghislane Maxwell's arrest
Maxwell, Epstein’s former lover, now stands criminally accused of gathering underaged girls for sexual exploitation at the hands of him and other wealthy and famous men from across the globe.
“This woman found me, groomed me, abused me and handed me over to Jeffrey and his friends,” Giuffre told the paper.
She has said Maxwell and Epstein forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew when she was only 17 — a claim the royal has denied.
“Obviously, Prince Andrew is a liar,’’ Giuffre said. “He knows what he has done. … He is going to go to jail. He has already lost so much but that is not enough. Justice has to prevail. He has to be held accountable.’’
Manhattan federal prosecutors handling Maxwell’s case have said they want to speak to the fallen British royal in connection with the case.
see also
Prince Andrew 'concerned' as Maxwell will cooperate with feds
Now married with kids and living in Australia, Giuffre said she hopes Maxwell’s bust will expose the men who took advantage of her and other young women.
“Maybe she will squeal and turn other people over, which is obviously what we hope because we want the truth out,” she said of Maxwell. “Or maybe she will stay quiet and do her time in jail. These people did a lot of damage to a lot of other people’s lives.
“We are not just talking about Tom, Dick and Jane down the street — we are talking about billionaires, the people that run the world.’’
Giuffre said Maxwell initially coaxed her into Epstein’s seemingly glamorous orbit by telling her he needed a massage therapist.
“This woman came off like Mary Poppins, like this really genuine nice lady, nicely dressed who wanted to help people get further in life,’’ she said.
While Maxwell met her at Trump’s Florida property, Giuffre said he never misbehaved with her.
“I met Trump, but I have never seen him doing anything towards me or towards any other victim of Jeffrey Epstein,” she said. “I can’t comment on what I don’t know.”
Maxwell faces up to 35 years in jail if convicted of trafficking underaged women. | 0 | non |
753 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell won't give up Prince Andrew: close pal
Accused sex abuser Ghislaine Maxwell would “never sell out” Prince Andrew by implicating him in any of their pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, a close pal told the Telegraph.
“The only way she can walk is if she gives someone up, but that definitely won’t be Andrew,” said Laura Goldman, one of Maxwell’s closest confidantes, to the news site.
“She is so appreciative that when she first came to New York, the duke helped to launch her into high society,’’ Goldman told Telegraph — which published a photo of a grinning Ghislaine sitting with Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey atop the Buckingham Palace thrones of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Andrew’s parents, in 2002.
Spacey has himself been separately accused of sexual misconduct.
“[Maxwell] always talks about what a true friend [Andrew] is. She doesn’t see any reason to speak about him to the authorities,” Goldman said, adding that Maxwell would “never sell out” the royal.
Goldman, a New York stockbroker, said Maxwell once had a “fling” with the queen’s son and that they’ve remained close friends, meeting most recently at the palace last July.
The friend claimed that the prince was clueless as to the child sex-trafficking that Epstein and Maxwell were allegedly involved in. Andrew also has been accused of being served up one of Epstein’s sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, when she was 17 — a claim the royal vehemently denies.
“Ghislaine’s always told me that Andrew’s kind of stupid and naive, and if there were girls in the house while he was there, he would have thought they were servants,” Goldman said.c
“All these people thinking he is evil are just wrong. He is just the kind of entitled person who sees everyone as a servant.” | 0 | non |
754 | Title: Cops axed for reenacting Elijah McClain chokehold at memorial
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Two police officers in Colorado have been fired over a photograph showing them reenacting the chokehold maneuver used on Elijah McClain before his 2019 death, officials said Friday.
A third Aurora cop, Jason Rosenblatt, was also discharged for receiving the image and replying “with the inappropriate comment ‘ha ha,'” Interim Police Chief Vanessa Wilson said at a press conference.
Rosenblatt was one of the three cops involved McClain’s violent arrest last August, according to The Denver Post.
Officers Erica Marrero and Kyle Dittrich were fired for posing in the photo taken on Oct. 20 at the site of McClain’s Aug. 24 arrest and near a memorial for the 23-year-old massage therapist.
A third cop who posed in the picture, Jaron Jones, has already resigned Tuesday before he could face discipline, Wilson said.
The department announced on Monday that an internal investigation had been launched after a report that multiple officers posed for a photo where they pretended to use chokeholds on each other.
That same maneuver was used on McClain by cops who stopped him as he walked from a grocery store after someone called 911 to report a “suspicious person.”
McClain was then injected with the sedative ketamine by paramedics and went into cardiac arrest before being declared brain dead. He was taken off life support a couple of days later.
The Aurora Police Association, the union representing officers, alleged in a statement that the internal investigation into the photo was conducted too hastily and violated officers’ due process.
“It appears that interim Chief Wilson’s participation in the chief selection process drove her decision making in this case,” the union wrote on Facebook. “The appearance of impropriety is obvious.”
Federal authorities announced in a statement Tuesday that they have been probing McClain’s death for possible civil rights violations since last year.
The feds also said they were “aware” of reports that some Aurora cops were put on administrative leave during an internal probe into an offensive picture they allegedly appeared in.
“We are gathering further information about that incident to determine whether a federal civil rights investigation is warranted,” the statement said. | 0 | non |
755 | Title: Quadriplegic dies of COVID-19 after hospital refuses treatment: family
A Texas quadriplegic died of the coronavirus after a hospital refused to treat him, according to a report.
Michael Hickson, 46, was admitted to St. David’s South Austin Medical Center on June 2 when he developed pneumonia after contracting COVID-19 at his nursing home.
But the hospital refused to treat him, according to Hickson’s wife Melissa, who recorded doctors contending that invasive COVID treatments wouldn’t improve his “quality of life” because of his advanced disabilities.
“Will [treatment] affect his quality? Will it improve his quality of life?” a doctor is heard telling Melissa, according to the recordings obtained by local news station KVUE. “And the answer is no.”
The startled spouse then presses the doctor.
“Why wouldn’t it?” she asked. “Being able to live isn’t improving the quality of life?”
“There’s no improvement with being intubated, with a bunch of lines and tubes in your body, and being on a ventilator for more than two weeks,” he replied.
“As of right now, his quality of life — he doesn’t have much of one,” the doctor can then be heard saying.
“What do you mean?” Melissa responded. “Because he’s paralyzed with a brain injury, he doesn’t have quality of life?”
“Correct,” the doctor said.
Six days later, on June 11, her husband was dead.
“The reason we go to hospitals is to be treated, and it is not to be based on a scale of whether or not you’re disabled or anything else,” Melissa told KVUE.
However, hospital officials denied that they stopped treatment because of Hickson’s pre-existing state.
“Every clinical decision that was made for him was done as part of a multidisciplinary team that included his caregiver, who was his surrogate family, according to the law,” Dr. DeVry Anderson told the station.
A court appointed Family Eldercare as Hickson’s caregiver after his wife and sister tussled over his custody.
“Mr Hickson’s spouse, family, and the medical community were in agreement with the decision not to intubate Mr Hickson,” Family Eldercare said in a statement.
But pro-life activists ripped the hospital’s decision to cease treatment no matter the circumstance.
“Whenever you say quality of life, that is completely subjective, and is about whether I think this person deserves to live or not live,” Texas Right to Life official Kimberlyn Schwartz told the station. | 0 | non |
756 | Title: St. Louis County police seek witnesses in death of rapper Huey
KINLOCH, Mo. — St. Louis County police investigating the death of the rapper known as Huey are urging witnesses to his fatal shooting to come forward.
The rapper, whose real name was Lawrence Franks Jr., was shot to death on June 25 in the St. Louis County town of Kinloch. The shooting wounded a second man, whose injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.
Huey was best known for his 2006 debut single, “Pop, Lock & Drop It,” which reached the No. 6 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The music video has more than 50 million hits on YouTube.
Police said in a news release Friday that detectives believe a suspect or suspects drove down the street and opened fire on a group of people outside a home. Investigators believe that up to 10 people were at the scene, and encouraged anyone with information to come forward.
Police have not disclosed a possible motive. | 0 | non |
757 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest rocks small New Hampshire town
BRADFORD, NH — Ghislaine who?
Locals in the sleepy, rural New Hampshire town of Bradford say it was “exciting” to learn that an infamous socialite chose their neck of the woods to hide in — even if some didn’t know who Ghislaine Maxwell was before her bust there Thursday.
“I wouldn’t know her if she kicked me,” said a host from the local eatery Suna.
“It’s pretty exciting, though,” she said of the case, which has grabbed international headlines.
Early Thursday morning, Maxwell’s year on the lam came to a screeching halt when the former Jeffrey Epstein buddy and accused recruiter of underage sex victims was ripped from the bucolic mansion where she’d been hiding on East Washington Road and arrested by officers from the FBI and NYPD.
She had purchased the million-dollar property in the tiny, 1,600-person town with cash under a “carefully anonymized LLC” in December last year, federal prosecutors said, but was never seen by neighbors.
“There were some footprints in the snow over the winter from someone who I guess was hiking,” said a neighbor, whose property abuts Maxwell’s.
“But I never saw anyone.”
News of Maxwell’s high-profile arrest swept through Bradford and the surrounding towns and soon became the hottest piece of gossip by far in the area.
From the local Dunkin’ Donuts on Bradford’s East Main Street to the lakeside taverns in nearby Sunapee, everyone had something to say about Maxwell’s arrest.
“Someone said they saw an FBI guy with his badge in the convenience store,” a local waitress told The Post as other staffers clamored around to discuss the story.
“Why would she come here? Of all places,” the woman said.
A resident who keeps an office down the road from Maxwell’s compound marveled at her decision to choose Bradford as her hideaway.
“It’s pretty cool, but we don’t know anything,” he said. “We’ve never seen her.”
Locals said there’s “nothing fancy” about Bradford and pointed to a few neighboring towns as possible spots that a socialite such as Maxwell might have liked to frequent.
In the town of New London, a boutique worker said she’d had “some British customers” but couldn’t say for sure if any were Maxwell or her UK caretaker.
While most residents were enthralled to be part of such an enormous, international story, with some spotted posing for photos at the mouth of Maxwell’s driveway, her next door neighbor was less than thrilled to see his quiet life so loudly disturbed.
“I wish it happened somewhere else,” he said. | 0 | non |
758 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell probe could target public officials: report
The federal prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell could have public officials in its sights, according to a report Friday.
The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan assigned the explosive case to a unit that deals with public-corruption cases, said Law & Crime.
The SDNY notably did not assign Maxwell’s case — which revolves around underaged sex-trafficking — to the office’s Violent and Organized Crime Unit.
“The fact that it is staffed out of Public Corruption tells me that a public official – past or present – is involved in at least some capacity,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig told the site.
“[That] could mean a potential target, witness or a potential co-conspirator. It could mean a lot of different things.”
According to the US Department of Justice, the Public Corruption Unit zeroes in on governmental misconduct.
“The unit oversees the investigation and prosecution of corruption crimes committed by elected and appointed officials, government employees, and individuals and companies doing business with the city, state, and federal government,” according to the DOJ’s Web site. “Corruption crimes investigated by the unit include bribery, embezzlement, and frauds committed against local, state, and federal government agencies.”
Maxwell’s former lover, the late Jeffrey Epstein, was linked to a long list of high-profile associates both before and after his sweetheart 2009 deal for soliciting prostitution for a minor. He killed himself in August in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting a fresh sex-trafficking case.
Epstein’s underage-prostitution investigation began in Florida, and observers speculated the Maxwell’s case could scrutinize the role of officials there, according to Law & Crime.
“The Public Corruption Unit was the unit that brought the original Epstein charges and thus these additional Maxwell charges, likely because of the involvement of public officials in Florida in giving Epstein the sweetheart plea deal a number of years ago,” former SDNY deputy chief and current CNN legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers told the site. “My educated guess is that part of this investigation has involved whether any of those officials had done anything wrong [such as accepting bribes] in connection with that matter.” | 0 | non |
759 | Title: Seattle cops caught kneeling on necks of CHOP protesters
Cops attack peaceful protestors at Broadway and Pine. 5:30pm July 2nd. Dive tackled the kid next to me, put a knee on his neck. Can’t stress enough he did nothing.
Please share.#SeattleProtests #SeattleProtestComm #Seattle pic.twitter.com/mI5DTASEI4
— eli (@sre_li) July 3, 2020
Seattle cops were filmed kneeling on the necks of two protesters as they tried to clear the city’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone on Thursday — just weeks after George Floyd died under the same circumstances.
In one video shared online, a dozen police officers can be seen rushing on the group of demonstrators before tackling one person to the ground and detaining them using the same kind of force which has since been condemned by police departments across the country.
Protesters can be heard yelling and telling the officers to get their knee of the person’s neck.
“What the f—, man?! What in the f—?!” one person in the crowd yells, according to the clip obtained by the Daily Mail.
“Get your knee of their neck!” another person repeatedly pleads. “What did they do?”
Seattle authorities on Wednesday finally moved in and cleared the lawless protest zone, or “CHOP,” after weeks of squatting and violence which resulted in the shooting death of two teens.
But by Thursday, more activists had returned to the downtown area and crossed the police line, resulting in the arrest of more than 25 people, according to authorities.
“You cross the line, you get arrested,” one officer can be heard telling the protesters as they hurled abuse at the police.
In another clip posted online, one demonstrator arrested earlier Thursday can be heard pleading with an officer who also pinned him to the ground by pressing his knee into his neck.
see also
Seattle sees 525 percent spike in crime thanks to CHOP, mayor says
“Can you please not put your knee on his neck?” the man can be heard yelling.
“Can you take your f—ing knee off my neck, dude?” he continued.
At least 40 people were arrested on Wednesday when Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan finally issued an order for demonstrators to clear the area after protesters moved in on June 8 in the wake of Floyd’s death and drove out police.
Seattle business owners have sued the city for allowing the squalid camp to flourish for weeks, arguing it decided to “abandon and close off an entire city neighborhood.” | 0 | non |
760 | Title: Nathan's Famous hot dog-eating champs defend titles in secret locale
The coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on most sports and entertainment venues this summer, but Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog-Eating Contest will take place as scheduled Saturday — just not in Coney Island.
The annual wiener-eating spectacle, a New York tradition for decades, will take place in an air-conditioned, private, warehouse-like location with COVID-19 precautions in place and far fewer fans.
“The Nathan’s Famous contest is synonymous with July 4, America and the celebration of freedom,” said George Shea, who hosted the weigh in Friday, according to ABC News, which broadcast parts of it on Facebook.
“We are honored to use the contest to highlight the incredible spirit of those who have supported our city and nation through the current challenge.”
Twelve-time champion Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, who wore a mask that kept slipping off of his nose, covering only his mouth during much of the event, weighed in at 220 pounds, and said he was wary of competing in an air-conditioned space.
“We’ll find out if air conditioning will let me keep my up pace a little longer,” he said, noting that he was used to performing outdoors before an audience.
“It’s super weird. One of the best things about this contest is the energy, the energy the audience brings. There’s absolutely no chance of that this year. I have to know that people are watching and push it,” said Chestnut, who set a world record in 2018 by chowing down on 74 franks and buns.
And the champ admitted the coronavirus lockdown affected his eating habits.
“I ate too much and I gained a little bit of weight. Once I realized I was gaining weight, I started eating healthy — lot more vegetables,” he said. “It’s hard to eat healthy during quarantine. It’s so easy to order take out and delivery food.”
But, he added: “I’m really happy we’re able to keep this tradition alive.”
Perennial women’s champ Miki Sudo, who weighed in at 132 pounds and whose all-time best is chomping 41 hot dogs and buns, was also stoked for the competition.
“I’m really excited to compete. I’ll be going for the women’s world record,” she said, while adding that the AC also could be a factor.
“I prefer to eat in 95 degree weather rather than air conditioning but we’ll roll with the punches. I’m more ready than ever.”
Chestnut and Sudo then posed for pictures, including a socially distanced, masked stare-down — and then pretended to eat from a platter of tube steaks with their masks still on.
ESPN will air the contest, which will include only five eaters rather than the usual 15 to allow for social distancing, at noon New York time.
The contest makes an annual donation of 100,000 Nathan’s Famous hot dogs to Food Bank for New York City, and will also raise cash for food banks. | 0 | non |
761 | Title: Inside Ghislaine Maxwell's unglamorous, undercover life
Ghislaine Maxwell’s life on the lam was a far cry from the years of glitz and glamour she was used to.
Once a jetsetting socialite and fixture on the New York social scene, Maxwell was living a stripped-down existence before her bust in New Hampshire on Thursday — cooking for herself, working out with a punching bag and wearing casual clothing to stay incognito, according to a Vanity Fair report.
Maxwell, 58, tried to go undercover after the death of her pedophile ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein in August 2019, with a friend telling the mag she spent the time hopping from home to home.
Gone were the days of catered dinners — instead, Maxwell whipped up meals inspired by her French mom in a cheap pressure cooker, including beef bourguignon, red cabbage and apples and leek soup.
She kept up her exercise regimen: Before gyms closed down due to the coronavirus, she’d box regularly, jabbing away at a punching bag, the pal said.
While on the run, she also literally sprinted daily on public roads or hiking trails. If there was a pool where she was staying, she swam laps, according to her friend.
To close out her days, Maxwell would exercise again, lifting weights or stretching while she watched the news, the report said.
Then she’d turn off the TV for the night and read, including a biography of Winston Churchill by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — and a book on Epstein’s accusers by victims lawyer Bradley Edwards, in which she featured prominently.
Maxwell, who is named in several lawsuits against Epstein’s estate, spent a lot of her time in hiding hashing out her defense, the friend said.
She assembled a team of lawyers in New York, Colorado, the UK and the Virgin Islands — whose fees ranged from $500 to $1,500 an hour.
“Her life is lawyers,” the friend said. “She speaks to lawyers and blood relatives. That is her universe. Defending all of these cases is a full-time job.”
As rumors of Maxwell’s whereabouts ran rampant, she was getting a flood of death threats by social media, email, phone, text and snail mail, the pal said.
“It’s the volume of threats,” the friend said. “These are credible threats. … So you take appropriate action.”
That meant hiring a professional security firm, with plainclothes operatives who were veterans of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the mag reported.
Last July, Maxwell started “hiding out in locations in New England,” according to the detention memo filed Thursday by federal prosecutors in New York.
She made “intentional efforts to avoid detection including moving locations at least twice, switching her primary phone number (which she registered under the name ‘G Max’) and email address, and ordering packages for delivery with a different person listed on the shipping label.”
The accused madam was finally found Thursday in a luxury home on a 156-acre estate in Bradford, NH, that she bought in an all-cash deal in December, prosecutors said.
When the FBI and local cops showed up, Maxwell ran into a bedroom, but she eventually came out on her own and immediately asked for her lawyer, sources have told The Post.
Before her arrest on federal sex-abuse charges, Vanity Fair asked the friend how Maxwell sees her future.
“I don’t think she sees there is a future,” the pal replied. | 0 | non |
762 | Title: Portland police declare riot as protests turn violent again
An anti-police brutality demonstration involving several hundred people in Portland, Oregon, descended into violence, prompting police to declare a riot in the city for the second time in three days.
The protest late Thursday began with a “couple hundred” people outside the Multnomah County Justice Center, where some demonstrators shot off fireworks as the crowd blocked nearby streets, Portland police said in a statement Friday.
The demonstration then turned violent just before midnight after federal officers moved outside the courthouse to protect the building and were met by protesters who used slingshots to launch projectiles at them, including large rocks and bottles, police said.
Protesters also threw lit fireworks into the broken glass doors of an adjacent federal courthouse, police said.
Officers at the scene warned protesters minutes later that they’d be subjected to use of force, including “crowd control munitions,” if they did not leave the area, department officials said.
As cops broke up the crowd, some demonstrators were “very hostile and violent” toward officers, including someone who threw an open pocketknife at them, police said.
Protesters then started launching mortars towards the federal courthouse, causing a fire to break out inside the building. Several people were taken into custody, but police had not provided an official tally as of midday Friday, The Oregonian reports.
A message seeking comment from Portland police was not immediately returned.
Video of the incident shows police in riot gear as they emerged from the graffiti-covered Multnomah County Justice Center. It’s unclear what type of projectiles were fired by the officers, but Portland police said no CS gas was used by its officers while responding to the riot.
That wasn’t the case Tuesday, when Portland police used canisters of 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, more commonly known as CS gas, to disperse protesters outside the Portland Police Union headquarters.
Police declared a riot late Tuesday after protesters launched fireworks and threw baseball-sized rocks at cops. In all, 29 people were arrested and six police officers were assaulted, police said Wednesday.
Portland police are temporarily barred by a federal court order from using tear gas unless they believe a life is in danger, The Oregonian reports.
Thursday’s demonstration marked the 36th day of protests in Portland in the aftermath of George Floyd’s police-custody death on May 25 in Minneapolis, according to the newspaper.
Video posted to Twitter early Friday showed the courthouse covered in graffiti — including some messages that referenced Floyd. Glass from broken bottles and spent fireworks that were used as weapons against police littered the ground, video shows.
A flier posted outside the federal courthouse, meanwhile, offered a four-step plan for “revolution” in the United States, according to an editor-at-large for The Post Millennial.
This four-step plan for overthrowing the U.S. government was posted outside the federal courthouse that was attacked by antifa last night in Portland. Step two says US economy should be kept in tatters. I wonder if @GreenPartyUS supports this plan? pic.twitter.com/YDBiynzypT
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 3, 2020
“Vote Green Party in the November election to prevent a corporate shill candidate from being elected,” the flier read. “Keep the country mostly shut down by way of strikes, boycotts and peaceful demonstrations.” | 0 | non |
763 | Title: Investigators eye Guinness beer aristocrat amid Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest
Investigators probing Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring want to speak to a British aristocrat — and member of the Guinness brewing family — as the inquiry continues following the arrest of the convicted pedophile’s alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Authorities would like to contact Clare Hazell, who worked for Epstein in the 1990s and who later became the Countess of Iveagh when she married into the Guinness brewing dynasty in 2001, sources with knowledge of the probe told the Daily Beast. It is not suggested that Hazell is suspected of any crime.
Hazell flew on Epstein’s private jet — dubbed the “Lolita Express” — 32 times between 1998 and 2000, including trips to his luxury homes in Florida and New York, and to his island Little St. James, just off the southeast coast of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, the Daily Mail reported.
According to flight logs, Epstein accompanied Hazell on all but one of the trips onboard the plane, according to the news outlet.
Maxwell, a 58-year-old British socialite who was arrested Thursday on a six-count indictment charging her with grooming young girls for sex, was also a passenger on some of the flights, the Daily Mail reported.
A college pal of Hazell’s told The Daily Beast that Hazell attended Ohio State University on Epstein’s dime in 1995 and that she described the financier as her benefactor.
The friend said he got the impression that Hazell, who married the 4th Earl of Iveagh Edward Guinness in 2001, was at Epstein and Maxwell’s beck and call.
“It’s my opinion, but at some level I kind of felt like she was being shopped to eligible suitors,” the former friend told The Daily Beast.
Federal prosecutors hinted Wednesday as they announced the arrest of Maxwell that the criminal case won’t end there.
“These charges announced today are the latest results of our investigation into Epstein and the people around him who facilitated his abuse of minor victims,” said Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Prosecutors also said Prince Andrew is among those who they still want to talk to.
Epstein “sex slave” Virginia Roberts Guiffre has repeatedly claimed that she was forced to have sex with Andrew at the behest of Epstein and Maxwell.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and hanged himself about a month later at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. | 0 | non |
764 | Title: Woman says Ghislaine Maxwell repeatedly raped her: ‘Just as evil as’ Epstein
A woman says Ghislaine Maxwell raped her up to 30 times — starting when she was just 14 years old and continuing until she became pregnant with Jeffrey Epstein’s child, according to a bombshell report Friday.
The unidentified woman, who claimed she got an abortion, said she is willing to take the stand and testify against the disgraced British socialite if authorities want her to, Fox News reported.
“She did rape me. I would say it’s more than 20 or 30 times,” the woman told Fox of Maxwell, adding that the abuse started in 1991 in Florida.
“She is just as evil as Jeffrey Epstein … She is a rapist,” the woman claimed.
Maxwell was arrested Thursday morning in Bradford, NH, and slapped with a series of child sex-abuse charges. She faces up to life in prison.
The woman who spoke with Fox said the abuse came to an end when she became pregnant with Epstein’s baby when she was 16 and had an abortion.
“I had never been with anyone except for him,” said the woman, a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against Epstein’s estate.
“The fact that I had to kill my child really affected me and my family.”
The woman added that when Maxwell suspected she told her grandparents about the abortion, Maxwell, Epstein and others gang-raped her to punish her, the outlet reported.
“Ghislaine was a part of it,” the woman alleged. “I was drugged.”
The woman said that after the gang rape, a driver with a gun drove the teen home and dumped her in her grandparent’s yard, naked, the outlet reported.
“[I] was told that I wouldn’t come back alive the next time,” the woman told Fox.
Scared for her life, the woman alleged she went into hiding after the incident and “basically kind of vanished.
“Ms. Maxwell was a participant, and she made it very clear that I was to keep my mouth shut or harm would come to my family and myself and harm did come to me,” the survivor said.
She claims she was recruited by Maxwell back in 1991 and Epstein’s righthand woman soon began making big promises to help the teen with her modeling career while picking her up from school or her grandparents’ house, the woman said.
Maxwell gifted her with a pager and would take her out for luxury shopping trips, buying her pricey Louis Vuitton purses as part of the grooming process, the outlet reported.
When the abuse first started, the survivor was a virgin and a child, so Maxwell would penetrate her with her fingers and use toys to prepare her for Epstein’s rapes.
“When this started, she told me that Epstein was getting upset because I kept bleeding, and that she was helping so that it wouldn’t hurt so much because it should be satisfying,” the woman told Fox.
She added Maxwell wasn’t always present during Epstein’s abuse but when she was, she stood by “coaching.”
“Do it this way and do it that way, because once you become a model, this is what they’re going to expect from you,” Maxwell allegedly told the teen.
Maxwell’s lawyer, Larry Vogelman, had “no comment” for Fox News when asked about the allegations.
The survivor called Maxwell “evil” and said she doesn’t believe that Epstein would’ve been able to abuse the “magnitude of victims” that he did without her.
“She destroyed what was supposed to be the best years of my life, being a teenager and being a cheerleader,” the woman told Fox, adding she is “absolutely” willing to help prosecutors in their case against Maxwell.
“I would definitely take the stand and testify because I believe she deserves to be where she is today and she deserves to stay there for the rest of her life,” the survivor said. “I hope by me coming forward, it encourages other victims.” | 0 | non |
765 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell could land in same jail where Epstein died
Ghislaine Maxwell may end up in the same notorious Manhattan jail where her infamous pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein killed himself while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, experts told The Post on Friday.
“They’ll probably keep her at the Metropolitan Correctional Center,” said Jeffrey Lichtman, whose client, drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, was held at the Lower Manhattan facility.
“The place is probably the worst federal prison in the country,” Lichtman added of the grim concrete building in Lower Manhattan. “It’s a horror show. That’s putting it mildly. [Maxwell] is really going to pay for the MCC’s failure to keep Epstein safe, and it’s probably going to make it even more restrictive and difficult for her.”
Epstein, 66, hanged himself last year inside his cell after his arrest for the alleged sexual abuse of dozens of young women.
Maxwell, 58, was busted in New Hampshire on Thursday on a six-count Manhattan federal indictment for allegedly recruiting underage girls for Epstein, her former lover.
While the disgraced British socialite is currently being held without bail at Merrimack County Jail in New Hampshire, she’s expected to be transferred in the coming days to New York to face trial.
Roland Riopelle, a former Assistant US Attorney with the Southern District of New York, who now works in private practice, said Maxwell could end up at the MCC or the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. But he said the MCC is more likely since the building is connected to the Manhattan federal courthouse.
She’ll most likely end up in the Special Housing Unit, known as the SHU or solitary, which has stringent security measures.
“That is where particularly high profile or particularly dangerous inmates sometimes go,” Riopelle said.
Former inmate Franz Michael, who co-founded Prison Consulting Services to help inmates transition to life in the slammer, served a combined six months at MCC and MDC.
“The conditions are so egregious and designed to make a person either cooperate or plead guilty,” he said, recalling the rats that scurried across his cell floor, the freezing winters and the sweltering summers.
He predicted that Maxwell would be put in SHU, which he called “a sad place designed to mess with your psyche.”
Inmates are locked in their cell 23 hours a day with one hour for either solo exercise or an excursion to the law library.
Food, usually cold, is slopped on a tray and served through a slot in the door.
“You don’t have any human contact,” he said.
Still, lawyer Dawn Florio, who represented Tekashi 6ix9ine in his federal racketeering case, said it’s possible Maxwell could end up at the Queens Detention Center, a small, privately run federal jail.
Her rapper-turned-snitch client, whose real name is Daniel Hernandez, had been locked up there before he was released in April to home confinement due to the pandemic.
“They often put cooperators there for safety reasons,” said Florio, who declined to discuss Tekashi’s case.
She added that conditions at the Queens jail are markedly better than MMC or MDC.
If Maxwell lands at the MCC — sometimes dubbed the “Guantanamo of New York” — authorities are expected to keep a close eye on her after their failure to prevent Epstein’s demise.
“Ghislaine Maxwell is probably the most important federal inmate right now,” said Lichtman. “They are not going to be taking any chances.”
Epstein’s death was officially ruled a suicide by hanging, but a forensic pathologist hired by his brother says he believes Epstein was murdered. | 0 | non |
766 | Title: Hydroxychloroquine can help save hospitalized coronavirus patients, study finds
A new study has found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine helped COVID-19 patients better survive in the hospital.
A team at Henry Ford Health System in southeast Michigan said Thursday that a study of 2,541 hospitalized patients found that those given the drug were far less likely to die, CNN reported.
Dr. Marcus Zervos, the system’s division head of infectious disease, said 26 percent of those not given hydroxychloroquine died, compared to 13 percent of those who got the drug.
“Overall crude mortality rates were 18.1 percent in the entire cohort, 13.5 percent in the hydroxychloroquine alone group, 20.1 percent among those receiving hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, 22.4 percent among the azithromycin alone group, and 26.4 percent for neither drug,” the team wrote in a report published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.
The study came a little more than two weeks after the Food and Drug Administration yanked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus in hospitals, citing a lack of evidence it worked and that the risks outweighed any potential benefits.
The agency said the drug, along with a similar version called chloroquine, which is normally prescribed to treat malaria and some forms of severe arthritis, was “unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19,” according to a statement.
“Additionally, in light of ongoing serious cardiac adverse events and other serious side effects, the known and potential benefits of CQ and HCQ no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for the authorized use,” the FDA said.
The FDA authorized the emergency use of the drugs in March, and President Trump has touted the drug — which he said he himself took as a preventive measure with no side effects.
“I can’t complain about it,” he said after the FDA’s move, which did not prevent doctors from prescribing it for individual patients. “It certainly didn’t hurt me.”
Researchers not involved in the new research said it wasn’t as sound as others studies showing hydroxychloroquine did not help patients, and said other treatments, such as the use of the steroid dexamethasone, might have accounted for the better survival rate, according to CNN.
“Our results do differ from some other studies,” Zervos told a news conference. “What we think was important in ours … is that patients were treated early. For hydroxychloroquine to have a benefit, it needs to begin before the patients begin to suffer some of the severe immune reactions that patients can have with Covid,” he added.
The Henry Ford team also monitored patients carefully for heart problems, he said.
“The combination of hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin was reserved for selected patients with severe COVID-19 and with minimal cardiac risk factors,” the team wrote.
The researchers said their findings showed that hydroxychloroquine could be potentially useful as a treatment for coronavirus, which has killed nearly 130,000 Americans to date, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“It’s important to note that in the right settings, this potentially could be a lifesaver for patients,” Dr. Steven Kalkanis, CEO of the Henry Ford Medical Group, said at the news conference.
Researchers not involved with the study said the Henry Ford team did not randomly treat patients but selected them for different treatments based on each individual’s condition.
“As the Henry Ford Health System became more experienced in treating patients with COVID-19, survival may have improved, regardless of the use of specific therapies,” Dr. Todd Lee of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Canada, and colleagues wrote in the same medical journal. | 0 | non |
767 | Title: Shortage of fireworks in US expected in coming days
Fireworks may soon be hard to find on shelves in the United States, thanks to sizzling sales fueled by bored Americans emerging from coronavirus lockdowns.
Owners of fireworks companies and industry leaders told CNN stocks are rapidly diminishing after demand for sparklers and firecrackers has more than doubled this year as people sought a way to sonically bust out of quarantine.
“People were coming outdoors for the first time and they wanted something to do,” Phantom Fireworks CEO Bruce Zoldan said. “And the entertainment is consumer fireworks.”
Zoldan, who owns one of the country’s largest fireworks companies, said he was initially debating whether to file bankruptcy since he didn’t think he’d be able to move his merchandise amid the pandemic.
But his 1.2 million-square-foot distribution center that was packed just four weeks ago is now depleted, Zoldan said.
Another owner of a fireworks company in Indiana said he’s had the busiest season of his 30-plus-year career, prompting him to hire additional staff.
“We’ve been working harder, longer hours and probably twice a week for the past two or three weeks,” Robert Tomsich of Lightning Family Fireworks in Gary told the Chicago Tribune Tuesday. “We’ve been scrambling.”
And once stocks are depleted, it’ll be difficult to restock. Imports from China, where more than 90% of the world’s fireworks are manufactured, have plummeted as the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered many factories there.
As a result, Chinese exports dropped to near zero in January — and the United States imported 35% fewer fireworks in the first four months of 2020 compared to the same period a year ago, CNN reports.
“I think by July 5th, there probably will not be very many fireworks available in the United States until China can start producing again and shipping here,” Zoldan said.
Julie Heckman, executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Associations, told CNN there are typically 16,000 July Fourth fireworks shows across the US each year.
However, with mass cancellations of Independence Day shows — as well as weddings and sporting events — she said “we’re probably looking at about 10% max going forward.”
This sudden drop in demand for professional fireworks sent the demand for bottle rockets, sparklers and other consumer fireworks soaring. Demand for consumer fireworks rose at least 115% compared to 2019, CNN reports.
China’s production of fireworks generally increases during the winter months, but that may not be possible this year due to the closed factories.
“It’s a really bizarre situation that we have one segment of the industry that’s going to have a record-breaking year, and the other side of the industry is potentially crippled forever,” Heckman told CNN. | 0 | non |
768 | Title: 10% of COVID-19 patients won't recover lost senses: study
Almost 90 percent of people who lost their sense of smell and taste from the coronavirus fully regained them or improved within a month – but about 10 percent never got them back, according to a new study.
The Italian research found that 49 percent of patients fully regained their sense of smell or taste and 40 percent improved, but the rest reported that their symptoms either stayed the same or worsened, the BBC reported.
The loss of the sense of smell or taste, known as anosmia, among some people infected by COVID-19 has been recognized as core symptoms of the bug, but the new study found that it doesn’t always come back.
The international team of researchers studied 187 Italians who were infected but were not ill enough to be hospitalized. They were asked to rate their sense of smell or taste soon after being diagnosed and then a month later.
Of the total of 113 who reported a change in their sense of smell and/or taste, 55 said they had recovered fully, 46 reported improvements in their symptoms and 12 said their symptoms were unchanged or worse, according to the news outlet.
Those who reported severe symptoms said it took them longer to get better.
The experts published their findings in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery.
“Even with a high rate of resolution, the staggering number affected by this evolving pandemic suggests an almost certain deluge of patients likely to present for the treatment of unresolved symptoms,” Dr. Joshua Levy of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta wrote in the journal.
Levy suggested that in long-term cases, people could consider therapy such as smell-training to help restore the senses.
Professor Claire Hopkins, one of the researchers, said her team is conducting more research on people with long-lasting symptoms.
“Data from other viral illnesses, and some of the new data we are gathering, suggest the vast majority of people will get better but for some, recovery will be slow,” Hopkins, president of the British Rhinological Society, told the BBC.
“For people who recover more quickly it is likely the virus has only affected the cells lining their nose,” she said. “For people who recover more slowly it may be that the virus has affected the nerves involved in smell, too. It can take longer for these nerve cells to repair and regenerate.” | 0 | non |
769 | Title: Blasts at Turkish fireworks factory kill two, wound 73
ISTANBUL — A series of large explosions shook a fireworks factory in northwest Turkey’s Sakarya province on Friday, killing two people and wounding 73, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said.
Fire crews fought to contain the blaze ignited by an initial blast at 11:15 a.m. in the province’s Hendek district, Turkey’s disaster and emergency management directorate AFAD said in a statement, describing it as an industrial accident.
Some 85 ambulances and two helicopters were among emergency vehicles sent to the complex, Koca wrote on Twitter, adding President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had instructed him to go to the scene.
Video footage obtained by Reuters showed smoke billowing into the sky from the complex as firework explosions rang out. The initial blast was heard up to 50 km (31 miles) away, state-owned Anadolu news agency said.
Turkey’s interior and labor ministers also went to Sakarya to monitor the situation, Anadolu said. | 0 | non |
770 | Title: Trump staffer tweets photo of 'improved' Mount Rushmore
A staffer for President Trump’s campaign on Friday tweeted a photo of what she called an “improved” Mt. Rushmore — with the commander in chief’s image added to the national landmark in South Dakota.
“Mt Rushmore, improved,” read the caption accompanying the post, which was tweeted out Friday morning by Abigail Marone, a member of the campaign’s 2020 rapid response team, according to her Twitter bio.
The tweet came hours before the president and first lady Melania Trump were scheduled to leave Washington to visit the monument — which features huge sculpted images of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln — and view a pre-July 4 fireworks display.
The origin of the doctored image — which shows Trump positioned to Washington’s right — was unclear. | 0 | non |
771 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell 'groomed' young Epstein assistant: lawsuit
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Ghislaine Maxwell hired and groomed a young executive assistant whom Jeffrey Epstein then raped, new court papers allege.
An amended federal civil suit filed in Manhattan on June 17 alleges that “Epstein Associate 1” — who sources identified to the Daily Mail as Maxwell — interviewed the woman in September 2003 for the position as Epstein’s assistant, telling her he was a “a very powerful man.”
The amended complaint was filed just weeks before Maxwell was arrested in New Hampshire on charges she helped the infamous late pedophile exploit and abuse underage girls.
It alleges that during the job interview, Maxwell told the victim — identified only as “Jane Doe 5” — that Epstein would “control a substantial portion of her employment” and that “her physical appearance would be a priority.”
She was hired shortly after — and Epstein began his “systematic, near constant abuse” of the young woman, the documents claim.
When the young woman first met the perverted financier at his office, he commented that she “had a good body” and he “liked her small breasts,” according to the complaint.
“To emphasize this point, Epstein then groped Jane Doe 5’s breasts in the middle of the office,” leaving her in shock and not knowing how to respond, the papers say.
The woman eventually “had three non-consensual sexual encounters with Epstein” — all at his Upper East Side mansion, the suit alleges.
During two of the encounters, Maxwell allegedly summoned the assistant to the billionaire’s home, where he directed another woman to perform oral sex on her while he watched.
The third time, Epstein called the assistant to his home himself and raped her, the court documents charge.
“Jane Doe 5 was left naked, abused and alone in the small, dark room on the second floor,” the suit reads.
Before the alleged assaults, “Epstein created a hyper-sexualized work environment,” — making inappropriate remarks in each of their phone conversations, including interrupting her to ask what she was wearing, the papers state.
Once, the creep allegedly asked his assistant to take off her shirt so he could compare her breasts with Maxwell’s.
The woman’s job duties included managing and organizing the renovation of Epstein’s Manhattan home and his private island in the US Virgin Islands and various tasks tied to his daily life.
During her work day, Epstein would grope her, including once grabbing her vagina in front of another employee and repeatedly trying to put his fingers in her mouth, the complaint states, adding “the abuse was constant.”
She’d respond with “Inappropriate, Jeffrey” or “Not the time and place, Jeffrey” and push him away, but he continued the gross behavior and never apologized, according to the document.
Epstein also controlled the woman’s appearance, canceling her food orders, forcing her to work out at his private gym, buying tight and low-fitting clothes for her to wear and even choosing her hairstyle, the papers say.
The woman said Epstein threatened her and her close friends and family, including by referencing his powerful friends and business partners.
“You are nothing without this job. I’ll see to it that you will never work in New York again,” he’d allegedly tell her.
The threats and harassment continued even after she stopped working for Epstein, the suit states.
At a wedding in 2011, a guest who was an associate of Epstein’s approached the woman and asked if she wanted to work with the financier and Maxwell again. Two years later, Maxwell herself allegedly offered the victim another gig.
The woman was dependent on Maxwell for a recommendation for other jobs, and when she asked her for one, Maxwell allegedly said: “Our door is always open. You are welcome to come work for us at any time.”
But the woman “understood that the ‘offers’ to work for Epstein were attempts to entice [her] into providing sexual favors in exchange for financial advancement.”
She refused both offers.
The woman first filed suit against Epstein’s estate in August after his death, joining a lawsuit involving now a total of six women. | 0 | non |
772 | Title: Story of Robert Maxwell: Ghislaine's disgraced media-mogul dad
Accused Jeffrey Epstein madam Ghislaine Maxwell is far from the only one in her family to have led an eccentric, troubled lifestyle.
Maxwell, the British socialite who was busted Thursday on charges she groomed underage women to have sex with the infamous pedophile, is the youngest daughter of flamboyant, disgraced late media mogul Robert Maxwell.
Robert Maxwell was born into poverty in Czechoslovakia in 1923 and built a publishing empire over decades that included titles such as the New York Daily News and Mirror Group Newspapers.
Before earning his fortune, Robert Maxwell escaped Nazi occupation to join the Czechoslovak army in World War II and became a decorated war hero.
Robert Maxwell also spent six years in the British Parliament, serving as a Labour MP from 1964 to 1970.
The newspaper giant was estimated to be worth $1.9 billion at the height of his career.
But the world learned after his death that he had been in severe financial straits and had been robbing his employees’ pension funds to prop up his crumbling empire.
Robert Maxwell was last seen Nov. 4, 1991, on his yacht, sailing past the Canary Islands off Africa.
He had missed a meeting with the Bank of England that day over his defaulting on a more than $62 million loan.
His naked body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean one day later. Multiple pathologists disagreed on Maxwell’s cause of death, but the official ruling was listed as a heart attack combined with accidental drowning.
Robert Maxwell’s publishing empire collapsed in the aftermath of his death, when it was discovered that he had completely emptied his employee pension funds to the tune of at least $900 million in the months prior.
Maxwell had illegally taken the funds to prop up an empire that few knew was on the brink of total collapse, according to the Guardian.
Two of Maxwell’s sons, Ian and Kevin Maxwell, tried to save the company but were ultimately unsuccessful. The publishing empire filed for bankruptcy in 1992.
The fallout from Maxwell’s financial dealings and his death left the family’s reputation severely damaged.
In 1996, Ian and Kevin Maxwell were indicted — and later acquitted — on fraud charges related to their roles in their father’s company. | 0 | non |
773 | Title: US, Vietnam rip China for military drills in disputed waters
The US, Vietnam and the Philippines have ripped China for provocative military drills in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
China is in the midst of five days of drills that began Wednesday near the Paracel Islands, a disputed archipelago that is also claimed by Vietnam, the South China Morning Post reported Friday.
China calls the Paracels the Xisha Islands, while Vietnam refers to them as the Hoang Sa Islands, and the two sides engaged in a naval battle in 1974 over the islands that resulted in China claiming ownership.
“The military exercises are the latest in a long string of PRC [People’s Republic of China] actions to assert unlawful maritime claims and disadvantage its Southeast Asian neighbors in the South China Sea,” the US Defense Department said in a statement.
“The PRC’s actions stand in contrast to its pledge to not militarize the South China Sea and the United States’ vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region, in which all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty, free from coercion, and able to pursue economic growth consistent with accepted international rules and norms,” the statement continued.
The US called on China to “reduce its militarization and coercion of its neighbors in the South China Sea.”
The US criticisms came as Beijing and Washington were trading barbs over a wide range of issues relating to Taiwan and new, Beijing-imposed national security legislation in Hong Kong.
Zhao Lijian, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, claimed Friday that the Paracel Islands were undisputed Chinese territory and that the People’s Liberation Army drills in the waters were within its sovereignty.
“Some country outside the region often comes all the way to hold massive military activities to flex its muscles, and that is the rooted reason that affects the stability in the South China Sea,” said Zhao, apparently referring to the US, which conducts drills in the region with South Korea and other allies.
On Thursday, the US Pacific Fleet said the littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords was conducting routine operations in the South China Sea.
Vietnam and the Philippines also slammed China’s military drill, the outlet reported.
Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said China’s exercises near the Paracel Islands were “highly provocative,” while Vietnam’s foreign ministry called them a violation of sovereignty that could harm Beijing’s relationship with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The Vietnamese ministry sent a diplomatic note to China to oppose the exercises that “seriously violate Vietnam’s sovereignty,” spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said.
The drills “further complicate the situation, and are detrimental to the relationship between China and [the association],” she said.
The South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative, a think tank linked to Peking University, said Friday that 692 Vietnamese fishing vessels had “intruded” into China’s waters in the South China Sea, up from 569 in May. | 0 | non |
774 | Title: Oregon cop refuses to wear mask in shop, curses out governor
An Oregon state trooper has been placed on leave for refusing to wear a mask in a coffee shop — and allegedly saying, “F— Kate Brown,” referring to the Democratic governor, whose statewide order went into effect the same day, according to a report.
The trooper was among four who entered Allan’s Coffee & Tea in Corvallis on Wednesday without wearing face coverings, according to The Oregonian, which obtained a video of the group entering the eatery.
Travis Boss, the assistant manager, said the trooper is a friendly regular.
“Hey, you gotta have your mask on,” he recalled saying on the same day Brown’s mask order went into effect and hours before she urged Oregonians to wear them as a “simple, common-sense way to protect yourself and others.”
“Governor Brown has no authority to take our civil liberties. We aren’t going to wear masks,” the trooper allegedly told Boss, the outlet reported.
“He said, ‘F— Kate Brown,’” Boss said. The video does not include sound.
The three other troopers also refused to wear masks, but Boss said he served them anyway because they were in uniform. He added that he has sent other customers away earlier for not complying with the rule.
“He’s a state trooper, he’s in uniform,” Boss said. “He’s more or less saying, ‘This is how it’s going to be, and this is what I want.’”
Allan’s Coffee & Tea reported the incident to local police.
“The involved trooper has been placed on administrative leave,” state police spokesman Capt. Timothy Fox told The Oregonian in a statement.
“OSP is early in the investigation, but if found to be true, we are thoroughly disappointed and expect our troopers to follow the governor’s executive orders and be examples in the community,” he added.
Fox, who would not name the trooper, said all four are assigned to Oregon State University.
State Police Superintendent Travis Hampton reacted to the incident on Twitter.
“Not only are police officers expected to comply with the Governor’s emergency declaration orders, I expect them to set the example for Oregon’s residents as we strive to fight this invisible enemy- the Coronavirus,” Hampton wrote.
“This conduct is embarrassing and indefensible, especially in the wake of thousands of Oregonians taking to the streets each day to rightfully demand police accountability,” he continued.
I would like to publicly address the conduct in this article. https://t.co/GoQssPMmZ3
— Oregon State Police (@ORStatePolice) July 2, 2020
“Like any police misconduct, the actions of a few bring discredit to the scores of dedicated officers that do not believe they are above the law they are sworn to uphold,” he said, as he offered his apology to the coffee shop workers and the community.
“I am ultimately responsible for all actions of OSP Troopers & should rightfully be accountable for their conduct. I hope my apology is accepted & the swift actions of my agency provide evidence of our commitment to accountability,” Hampton added.
In a statement Thursday, the governor said: “It is inexcusable that a few Oregon State Troopers disregarded my face covering requirement yesterday, and ignored a request from a fellow Oregonian to follow the rule.”
Brown added: “Oregon State Police Superintendent Hampton and I agree that their actions and behaviors were absolutely unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, store owners Robert and Kathryn Morgan — whose business brews a special “Oregon State Police blend” — said they respect the work of troopers and did not want the incident to turn political.
“We’re in this to follow the mandate, to try to get back to some form of normalcy somewhere down the road,” Robert told The Oregonian. | 0 | non |
775 | Title: Elon Musk denies knowing Ghislaine Maxwell after photo surfaces
Ghislaine who?
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday denied knowing Ghislaine Maxwell after a picture of them at the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty resurfaced.
The image, which shows the pair standing side by side in evening wear, was shared online after Maxwell’s arrest in New Hampshire on Thursday for allegedly conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors.
Asked by a Twitter user whether the two were friends, Musk responded: “Don’t know Ghislaine at all.
“She photobombed me once at a Vanity Fair party several years ago. Real question is why VF invited her in the first place,” the SpaceX founder added.
Maxwell, a British socialite, was known to be well-connected, and photos show her and Epstein, the now-dead pedophile, rubbing elbows with some of the world’s most prominent businesspeople, celebrities and politicians.
The Vanity Fair party took place six years after Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring an underage girl for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute in Florida — but before his 2019 arrest on federal charges for the sex-trafficking of minors.
Replying to Musk, one Twitter user wrote: “They love to use this against you on [conspiracy theorist] forums but… it sounds like Epstein was just trying to get his hands on you.”
“Pretty much,” Musk responded.
Epstein, who committed suicide in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10, 2019, suggested to a New York Times reporter that he was advising Tesla in 2018.
At the time, a rep for Musk and Tesla said: “It is incorrect to say that Epstein ever advised Elon on anything.”
In regards to the photo of Musk and Epstein’s alleged madam, the rep also said at the time: “Ghislaine simply inserted herself behind him in a photo he was posing for without his knowledge.”
The Times reporter who wrote the piece acknowledged that much of what the financier told him was vague or speculative.
“It seemed clear Mr. Epstein had embellished his role in the Tesla situation to enhance his own importance and gain attention,” James B. Stewart wrote. | 0 | non |
776 | Title: Top Barr ally Seth DuCharme considered for NY US attorney job
The Justice Department is considering a top official and ally of Attorney General William Barr to replace the outgoing US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, according to a report.
Seth DuCharme, who previously built his career as a prosecutor in the Brooklyn-based office, is being considered by department leadership for the top job, according to CNN.
DuCharme left EDNY last year to join Justice Department headquarters in Washington, DC, where he served as principal associate deputy attorney general and advised Barr on criminal and national security matters.
The principal associate deputy attorney general works with the nation’s 93 US attorneys to bridge communication between them and department headquarters.
The news comes as Richard Donoghue, the US attorney for EDNY, announced Thursday that he was leaving his job for the role currently filled by DuCharme.
Donoghue will report to Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen in his new role.
Donoghue, also a Barr ally, oversaw the prosecutions and convictions of drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman and Nxivm sex-cult founder Keith Raniere.
Both DuCharme and Donoghue are said to be favorites of the attorney general, who intends to keep them in senior positions within the department, the network reports.
The moves come amid tension in the nearby Southern District of New York, where controversy erupted over the firing of former US Attorney Geoffrey Berman.
In June, Barr announced that Berman was stepping down and that US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton would be his successor.
Berman refused to resign until the Senate confirmed his successor, and said his office’s investigations would continue.
Only after Barr agreed to let Berman’s deputy Audrey Strauss take the reins did Berman agree to step down.
The very public spat led to allegations that Barr was interfering with the independence of one of the country’s most important federal prosecutor’s offices, as Berman was investigating President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment. | 0 | non |
777 | Title: Michigan business owner under fire for 'ghetto' BLM post
A Michigan business owner is being blasted as a racist over a Facebook post claiming the Black Lives Matter movement is reinforcing “ghetto stereotypes,” according to reports.
Gary DeCarlo, owner of DeCarlo’s Banquet & Convention Center in Warren, shared his beliefs on the BLM movement late last month, according to Facebook screengrabs posted by a Detroit woman on June 30, the Detroit Free Press reports.
“The entire country is sick of your sh-t,” the shared post read. “Sick of the lawlessness, sick of the riots, sick of the threats and demands. The only thing you’ve managed to accomplish in all of this is to live up to the ghetto stereotypes. Congratulations.”
DeCarlo, who could not be reached for comment Friday, has apparently removed his Facebook page since Yolonda Davis noticed the post and shared it on her personal page, the newspaper reports.
“Thanks for letting us know how you really feel!!!!” Davis wrote.
Davis, who has previously visited DeCarlo’s family-owned business, said she was shocked by what she saw.
“I knew exactly what it meant,” Davis continued. “I think he knew what it meant.”
Several people who spotted Davis’ post on DeCarlo’s shared message said they now plan to take their business elsewhere for future events.
DeCarlo, for his part, apologized Wednesday for the post while claiming he didn’t intend to “harm anybody,” WDIV reports.
“I should have read it more thoroughly before I shared it and I made a mistake and I take full responsibility for it,” DeCarlo told the station.
Pressed further, DeCarlo insisted he’s not a racist but said violence associated with the ongoing social-justice movement was “not helping the cause” of BLM protesters.
“I like some of the things that were shared in there, but not all,” DeCarlo continued. “I certainly want to apologize.”
But Davis, meanwhile, thinks DeCarlo’s mea culpa is not entirely genuine.
“I think he’s upset about the money he’s gonna miss out on,” Davis told the Free Press.
Messages seeking comment from DeCarlo were not immediately returned Friday. | 0 | non |
778 | Title: Senate passes China sanctions bill amid Hong Kong crackdown
WASHINGTON — The US Senate on Thursday voted to pass a sanctions bill punishing China after the Communist regime enacted a national security law which effectively strips Hong Kong of its autonomous status.
The bill, which now heads to President Trump’s desk, will authorize the Treasury Department to identify Chinese banks and financial firms which enable the Communist Party regime, and punish them by restricting their access to the US dollar and visas for their executives.
“If a Chinese bank decides they value doing business with the oppressors more than they value access to the U.S. dollar … then they can make that decision,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R. Pa) told reporters after the vote, per a Politico report.
China’s parliament in May passed sweeping national security legislation which grants Beijing broad powers to crack down on political protests in the region which has long enjoyed a degree of independence from mainland China as an international financial hub.
The sanctions are all but certain to be signed into law by the president who last month issued a sharp rebuke of China’s actions in Hong Kong.
“Hong Kong was secure and prosperous as a free society. Beijing’s decision reverses all of that,” Trump said at a May 29 press conference in the White House Rose Garden.
“It extends the reach of China’s invasive state security apparatus into what was formerly a bastion of liberty,” he added.
The sanctions are the last example of worsening relations between the US and China, with the Trump administration accusing the CCP of covering up the origins of the coronavirus and allowing it to spread overseas. | 0 | non |
779 | Title: Iran vows revenge if nuclear enrichment facility attacked
Iran has vowed to retaliate against any country that launches cyber attacks on its nuclear sites after a fire at its Natanz plant that some Iranian officials said could have been caused by such sabotage.
“Responding to cyber attacks is part of the country’s defense might. If it is proven that our country has been targeted by a cyber attack, we will respond,” civil defense chief Gholamreza Jalali told state TV late Thursday.
The underground Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant is one of several Iranian facilities monitored by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog.
Iran said that the cause of the “incident” at the nuclear site had been determined, but “due to security considerations” it would be announced at another time.
Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization initially reported an “incident” had occurred early on Thursday at Natanz, located in the desert in the central province of Isfahan.
It later published a photo of a one-story brick building with its roof and walls partly burned, and a door hanging off its hinges, the image suggesting that there had been an explosion inside the building.
An article issued Thursday by state news agency IRNA addressed what it called the possibility of sabotage by enemies such as Israel and the United States, although it stopped short of accusing either directly.
“So far Iran has tried to prevent intensifying crises and the formation of unpredictable conditions and situations,” IRNA said, adding that there was no release of radiation from the fire.
“But the crossing of red lines of the Islamic Republic of Iran by hostile countries, especially the Zionist regime and the US, means that strategy … should be revised.”
Three Iranian officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said they believed the fire was the result of a cyber attack, but did not cite any evidence.
One of the officials said the attack had targeted the centrifuge assembly building, referring to the delicate cylindrical machines that enrich uranium, and said Iran’s enemies had carried out similar acts in the past.
Two of the officials said Israel could have been behind the Natanz incident, but offered no evidence.
Asked on Thursday evening about recent incidents reported at strategic Iranian sites, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters: “Clearly we can’t get into that.”
The Israeli military and Netanyahu’s office, which oversees Israel’s foreign intelligence service Mossad, did not immediately respond to Reuters queries on Friday.
In 2010, the Stuxnet computer virus, which is widely believed to have been developed by the United States and Israel, was discovered after it was used to attack the Natanz facility.
The underground Natanz site remains the centerpiece of Iran’s enrichment program, though Tehran denies ever seeking nuclear weapons, saying its atomic program is only for peaceful purposes.
Iran curbed its nuclear work in exchange for the removal of most global sanctions under an accord reached with six world powers in 2015, but has reduced compliance with the deal’s restrictions since President Trump withdrew the US from the deal in 2018.
With Reuters | 0 | non |
780 | Title: President Trump, Melania to spend July 4 weekend at Mount Rushmore
WASHINGTON — President Trump will ring in the Fourth of July weekend with a patriotic fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore — an event that, like much of the holiday weekend, will test Americans’ social distancing discipline amid a still-spreading pandemic and raging debate about the nation’s historical figures.
The president is expected to deliver remarks at the celebration, which will attract up to 7,500 people to South Dakota’s iconic monument to America and Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Trump has promised a “display like few people have seen.”
“We’re going to have a tremendous evening. It’s going to be a fireworks display like few people have seen. It’s going to be very exciting. It’s going to be beautiful,” he said Thursday.
Trump and first lady Melania Trump will arrive around 10 p.m. Eastern Time for the rally and a fireworks display at 10:50 p.m. before returning to the White House on a red-eye flight around midnight. South Dakota is on Mountain Time, which is two hours earlier than New York and Washington, DC.
The celebration has drawn criticism on multiple fronts. South Dakota’s GOP Gov. Kristi Noem has said both social distancing and masks will be optional as daily cases in the US have skyrocketed.
“We told those folks that have concerns that they can stay home, but those who want to come and join us, we’ll be giving out free face masks if they choose to wear one, but we won’t be social distancing,” Noem told Fox News on Monday.
As of Friday, there were 2.7 million confirmed cases and 130,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Leaders of local Native American tribes, a population particularly hard hit by the virus, have also expressed dismay about the coronavirus risk and the fact the monument stands on the Black Hills, tribal lands taken by the US government.
“The president is putting our tribal members at risk to stage a photo op at one of our most sacred sites,” Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, told the Associated Press.
Protesters are also expected to try to disrupt the display as the nation undergoes a conversation — and protests — about race in the wake of George Floyd’s police-involved death and a fierce debate over national monuments, which has led to the illegal toppling of many statues.
Trump has deployed Homeland Security officers to protect monuments around the country on July 4.
Others have also raised concerns about the fireworks themselves, claiming they are a fire risk to the surrounding national forest. This will be the first fireworks at the monument in a decade.
The president brushed aside the concerns in January, telling reporters: “What can burn? It’s stone. You know, it’s stone. It’s granite.
“So I called up our people. And within about 15 minutes, we got it approved,” he continued. | 0 | non |
781 | Title: Prince Andrew 'deliberately evading' US authorities: victims lawyer
Prince Andrew is “deliberately evading authorities” who are seeking to interview him about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the lawyer for dozens of the late pedophile’s alleged victims said in an interview.
Brad Edwards, who represents 55 women who claim they were abused by Epstein, who killed himself in a Manhattan federal lockup last year, said he believes the Duke of York has information that will help his clients, Sky News reported.
Edwards told the British news outlet that he has personally invited the royal “at least three times” to provide information but that Andrew “flat out refuses.”
On Thursday, the financier’s alleged procuress Ghislaine Maxwell was busted on charges that include alleged sex crimes in her London townhouse — where Andrew has separately been accused by an Epstein “sex slave” of sleeping with her when she was 17.
“The Duke of York has offered his assistance to the Department of Justice investigation on a number of occasions this year,” a source close to the prince’s legal team told Sky News.
The source said: “In addition, the working group have proactively contacted the DoJ twice in the last month and have received no response.
“That is why we remain utterly bewildered by the DoJ’s approach. However, a request from a commercial law firm is not and never will be the same as an official judicial process,” the source added.
Edwards said his clients are angry at the claims that Andrew has been cooperative with authorities and that the royal is “bewildered” by reports he hasn’t been.
“His bewilderment is subsidiary to my bewilderment because he’s been personally invited to provide all the information he knows for more than a decade,” Edwards told Sky News.
“I know personally, for over a decade we have been asking him to come and provide all of the information that he has. I think I’ve personally invited at least three times to tell us what he knows and he just flat out refuses,” he continued.
“There’s clients who are familiar with the fact that he was around and, you know, they’re familiar with the evidence. They know that he was on the flight logs. They know that he was in Ghislaine’s apartment with Virginia Roberts,” he said, referring to Epstein’s alleged “sex slave” Virginia Roberts Giufffre.
“They know that there are hard questions that he should be answering, especially if there’s any bit of a defense for his own actions then. These are things that he should be, you know, kind of owning up to. The fact that he is not is very frustrating to the victims,” the lawyer added.
“There’s no doubt that he’s deliberately evading authorities. I mean, how much more clear — when have you ever heard a US Attorney’s Ofice at a press conference say: we’re inviting you to come over,” he said.
“And he’s still — he’s not on a plane right now coming over. You know, there’s no doubt that they want to talk to him.” | 0 | non |
782 | Title: Kim Jong Un claims 'shining success' by North Korea against COVID-19
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un cheered the Hermit Kingdom’s “shining success” in keeping the coronavirus from infiltrating his borders — once again claiming that no one in the reclusive country has contracted the deadly virus, according to reports.
A maskless Kim told the politburo Thursday that the country — which closed its borders and quarantined anyone with symptoms as the bug spread across the world — “prevented the inroad of the malignant virus and maintained a stable situation,” the BBC reported, citing the Korean Central News Agency.
But the despot, whose health has been the subject of rumors in recent months, urged officials to keep vigilant against the virus, warning that complacency risks “unimaginable and irretrievable crisis.”
North Korean health officials reported to the World Health Organization that the country has tested 922 people for the coronavirus as of June 19 and that all of the results were negative, according to Edwin Salvador, the WHO’s representative to the North.
He told the Associated Press in an email that North Korea told the WHO it has so far released 25,551 people from quarantine and that as many as 255 people remain isolated.
Outsiders remain very skeptical that the rogue regime has managed to elude the pandemic entirely, given its poor health infrastructure and close trade and travel ties to China, where the disease emerged late last year.
During the politburo meeting, Kim “analyzed in detail the six-month-long national emergency anti-epidemic work” and said the success in handling the outbreak was “achieved by the far-sighted leadership of the Party Central Committee,” according to KCNA.
“He repeatedly warned that hasty relief of anti-epidemic measures will result in unimaginable and irretrievable crisis,” the outlet reported Friday.
Volunteers with the International Federation of the Red have been working along the border area on virus prevention measures amid multiple unconfirmed reports of cases within the country, according to the BBC.
But most recent accounts of life in the capital of Pyongyang appear to show life carrying on as normal.
Describing its antiviral efforts as a “matter of national existence,” North Korea earlier this year shut down nearly all cross-border traffic, banned visitors and placed symptomatic people under strict lockdown.
The official Rodong Sinmun newspaper published several images of Kim at the meeting — the first state media photos of him in weeks — where neither he nor the ruling party officials who attended wore masks.
Even before the pandemic, Pyongyang was struggling with the pain of UN sanctions imposed over its nuclear program and its trade volume with China was more than halved last year compared with 2016 figures.
Kim launched an ambitious five-year national development plan last year, but experts say the pandemic likely derailed some of his major economic goals.
In December, he declared a “frontal breakthrough” against the sanctions while urging his people to stay resilient in the struggle for economic self-reliance.
Rumors about Kim’s health swirled after he did not appear at a celebration dedicated to his late ruling grandfather, Kim Il Sung, on April 15. North Korean state media later reported that he attended the opening ceremony of a fertilizer plant on May 1. | 0 | non |
783 | Title: Trump cheers Nasdaq's record high, predicts more economic growth
President Trump on Friday cheered the Nasdaq’s record high — and predicted “BIG MONTHS” ahead on the road to the November election.
“NASDAQ HAD ITS 23RD RECORD CLOSE OF THE YEAR. OTHER EXCHANGES ARE FOLLOWING CLOSELY BEHIND,” the president exclaimed.
“TREMENDOUS POTENTIAL REMAINING. BIG MONTHS UPCOMING. NEXT YEAR, DEPENDING ON AN ELECTION WIN, WILL BE ONE OF THE BEST EVER!” the commander-in-chief added.
Trump’s tweet followed better-than-expected jobs data that sent stocks higher Thursday amid signs that the shaky economy appears eager to rebound.
The Nasdaq climbed 0.5 percent to 10,207.63, a gain of 53 points, while the Dow Jones industrial average index of blue-chip stocks ended the day up 0.4 percent, to 25,827.63, and the S&P 500 rose 14.2 points, or 0.5 percent, to 3,130.01.
The rise came after the economy added a record 4.8 million jobs last month, sending the unemployment rate to 11.1 percent, down from 13.3 percent in May and a peak of 14.7 percent in April. | 0 | non |
784 | Title: Trump administration launching new pandemic response unit
The Trump administration is planning to launch a pandemic response division at the State Department, according to a new report.
National Security Council officials hosted an interagency meeting Thursday to discuss plans for the new office, CNN reports, as a similar division previously existed within the NSC.
That office was shuttered in 2018.
A senior administration official told the network that the pandemic unit will be overseen by a new position that is being created: coordinator for pandemics.
Thursday’s meeting focused on fleshing out details and establishing a proposal for President Trump to approve.
The original NSC pandemic unit was created by President Barack Obama during his second term in office.
Former national security adviser John Bolton, who was present when the unit was shuttered, defended that decision in a tweet in March this year.
“Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false. Global health remained a top NSC priority, and its expert team was critical to effectively handling the 2018-19 Africa Ebola crisis,” he wrote, adding, “The angry Left just can’t stop attacking, even in a crisis.”
Trump also defended the closing of the office at the time, denying any involvement in the move.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said.
The administration had come under scrutiny for the office being shut down as the coronavirus pandemic began to hit in full.
In a statement to The Post, a State Department spokesperson said, “The Administration is examining ways to leverage the expertise of key U.S. Government departments and agencies and the American private sector to rapidly deploy and deliver this essential support to other countries to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks at their source.
“We are in deliberations within the Administration and across the U.S. Government to identify potential solutions. While we are not going to address any pre-decisional information, we are glad to consider proposed policy issues and potential solutions.”
With Post wires | 0 | non |
785 | Title: Cops face murder charges for alleged excessive Taser use
Two Oklahoma police officers are facing charges of murder for allegedly using their Tasers more than 50 times on a man who refused to comply with their demands, court documents show.
Wilson police officers Joshua Taylor, 25, and Brandon Dingman, 34, surrendered to authorities Thursday on second-degree murder charges in the July 2019 death of Jared Lakey, a 28-year-old man who died at a hospital days after being hit with stun guns “multiple times” by the two cops, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation announced.
Lakey, of Wilson, died two days after encountering the officers on July 4, 2019, when Taylor and Dingman responded to a report of a man running down a street naked while screaming, the Daily Ardmoreite reports.
Dingman allegedly deployed his Taser 23 times — for a total of 114 seconds — as Lakey refused to comply with the officers’ commands, according to court filings cited by the newspaper.
Taylor, meanwhile, allegedly used his stun gun on Lakey a total of 30 times over a nine-minute span, or 122 seconds. In all, Lakey was tased for nearly four consecutive minutes within a nine-minute span, according to an affidavit cited by the newspaper.
Lakey never made any aggressive move toward either officer during the incident and both Taylor and Dingman never tried to subdue him by using their hands, which runs counter to department training methods, an OSBI agent wrote in court documents.
Lakey, who stopped breathing after he was taken into custody, died from multiple heart attacks and “critical coronary atherosclerosis and law enforcement use of electrical weapon and restraint,” according to records cited by the newspaper.
Arrest warrants for Taylor and Dingman were issued Wednesday. They surrendered to the Carter County Sheriff’s Office before being released on $250,000 bond, OSBI officials said.
Brandon DingmanOklahoma State Bureau of Investigation
It’s unclear if Dingman and Taylor remain employed by the Wilson Police Department, the New York Times reports. If convicted, they face up 10 years to life in prison.
“The death of Mr. Lakey saddens us all,” an attorney for both officers, Ryan Hunnicutt, told the newspaper in an email late Thursday. “We are confident that the legal system will provide an opportunity for all the facts to be known and look forward to our day in court.” | 0 | non |
786 | Title: Ex-US attorney Geoffrey Berman to testify before House panel
Geoffrey Berman, the former US attorney for the Southern District of New York, will testify next week before the House Judiciary Committee about the circumstances surrounding his ouster, The Post has learned.
Berman will speak to lawmakers behind closed doors next Thursday, as Judiciary Committee Democrats investigate Attorney General William Barr for his firing of the former top prosecutor, a committee source said.
Barr has denied any wrongdoing, and will testify before the committee later this month.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) pledged to investigate Berman’s removal after he became engaged in an extraordinary standoff with the attorney general over his employment status.
In June, Barr announced that Berman was stepping down and that US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton would be his successor.
Berman refused to resign until the Senate confirmed his successor, and said his office’s investigations would continue.
Only after Barr agreed to let Berman’s deputy Audrey Strauss take the reins did Berman agree to step down.
The very public spat led to allegations that Barr was interfering with the independence of one of the country’s most important federal prosecutor’s offices, as Berman was investigating President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Nadler has slammed Barr over Berman’s ouster, arguing that Barr deserved to be impeached for his actions while cautioning that the effort would be a “waste of time.”
The New York Democrat argued that Senate Republicans would block any efforts to impeach Barr.
Barr spokeswoman Kerri Kupec hit back at House Democrats last month as Nadler was threatening to impeach the attorney general, calling their threats a “political thing.”
Speaking to Fox News, Kupec said, “If people have a problem with Bill Barr coming back to the Department of Justice to restore one system of justice, not a two-tiered system, I think that says a lot more about the critics than it does about the attorney general.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany addressed the controversy while speaking to reporters in late June, saying the president had only been involved in the firing “in a sign-off capacity.”
A spokesperson for the House Judiciary Committee could not be reached by The Post for comment. | 0 | non |
787 | Title: Japan requests Americans' extradition in Carlos Ghosn case
Japanese officials have formally asked the US to extradite two Americans accused of helping ex-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn carry out his action-movie escape from Tokyo.
Japan submitted its requests for the extradition of former Green Beret Michael Taylor and his son Peter to the US State Department pursuant to the two nations’ extradition treaty, federal prosecutors said in a Thursday court filing.
The disclosure came more than a month after the feds nabbed the Taylors in May. Tokyo prosecutors had issued arrest warrants for the father-son duo, who allegedly helped execute an elaborate December caper to get Ghosn to Lebanon that involved stuffing the former auto exec into an audio equipment box.
Federal prosecutors said they would provide copies of Japan’s extradition requests to the Taylors’ lawyers, but the documents did not appear in federal court filings Friday morning. The State Department referred questions to the Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Neither the Japanese embassy nor an attorney for the Taylors immediately replied to emails seeking comment.
The requests came amid a legal battle between the feds and the Taylors’ lawyers over whether to quash the warrants for their arrests. The pair’s legal team has argued that their alleged role in Ghosn’s escape did not amount to an actual crime in Japan, a claim prosecutors say relies on a “flawed” interpretation of Japanese law.
At the time of his escape, Ghosn, 66, was out on bail in Tokyo while awaiting trial for allegedly under-reporting $80 million in compensation earnings and siphoning off company cash for his own use. He has denied the allegations and said he fled “persecution.” | 0 | non |
788 | Title: Boris Johnson denies FBI contacted him to help with Prince Andrew
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson denied Friday that the FBI has contacted him for assistance in interviewing Prince Andrew about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, according to a report.
“No such approach has been made and otherwise it is really is a matter for the royal family. … It is a hypothetical question,” Johnson said amid reports that Queen Elizabeth II is anxious about the crisis involving her son, the Daily Mail reported.
“Of course, the law must be carried out and the law must be observed,” he added.
Meanwhile, Andrew’s legal team said Friday that the royal is “bewildered” by allegations that he is stonewalling the probe about Maxwell and the late pedophile.
“The duke’s team remains bewildered given that we have twice communicated with the DOJ in the last month and to date we have had no response,” an unnamed source on his legal team was quoted as saying by the Press Association, Agence France-Presse reported.
On Thursday, investigators who busted Maxwell, 58, the financier’s alleged procuress, said they still want to talk to Andrew, who has been accused by an Epstein “sex slave” of sleeping with her when she was 17.
While refusing to discuss the “status” of the Duke of York — who famously claimed he cannot sweat — prosecutors made it clear he is still on their radar during the probe into Epstein’s inner circle.
Johnson also expressed sympathy for the alleged victims.
“I think everybody’s sympathies are very much with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, but you wouldn’t expect me to comment on matters affecting the royal family,” he said. | 0 | non |
789 | Title: White Massachusetts man who confronted black woman will be charged
A white Massachusetts man who confronted a black woman and allegedly followed her in his BMW in her own neighborhood will face charges, police said.
The 65-year-old Groveland man, who was caught on camera in footage posted Monday by 21-year-old Julia Santos, accused the woman of acting suspiciously as she picked up free dog food from a residence about a mile away from her home in Groveland, WHDH reports.
The man, who was not identified by police, will be charged with disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. He will be summonsed to Haverhill District Court for a hearing, Groveland police said Thursday.
A source close to the investigation identified the man as Paul Birkhauser, who was also identified in Santos’ tweet on Monday, the Boston Globe reports. He did not return several messages seeking comment Wednesday, the outlet reports.
Investigators determined that the man seen in the video “disturbed neighbors” during the incident and caused another motorist to drive off a road to avoid him as he allegedly argued with Santos, police said in a statement.
“I started to get really, really scared,” Santos told WHDH. “Especially when I pulled over, and he pulled over right behind me, almost bumper to bumper. I’m like, OK, something’s going to go down.”
Santos then whipped out her phone and started recording the ensuing encounter, she said.
Groveland Police Chief Jeffrey Gillen said he was “deeply disturbed” by the incident in the small town that’s 98 percent white, according to census data cited by the Globe.
Santos, meanwhile, said she was pleased with Thursday’s development.
“It’s super nice to know the police department worked very quickly and just trying to do their best, so it has a really good outcome,” Santos told WHDH. “I just hope that he know he can’t do this and get away with it. That’s all I really hope, that he gets held accountable for it.” | 0 | non |
790 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell to cooperate as Prince Andrew is 'concerned'
Jeffrey Epstein’s former mentor claimed Ghislaine Maxwell will fully cooperate with the feds after being busted on charges that she groomed underage women to have sex with the infamous pedophile, according to a report.
Steven Hoffenberg, 75, who spent 18 years behind bars for a Ponzi scheme that he has claimed Epstein was part of, told the UK’s Sun that Maxwell will “totally cooperate,” adding that Prince Andrew “may be very concerned.”
“There’s a lot of people very worried, a lot of powerful people been named [in the scandal], and she knows everything,” Hoffenberg told the outlet about Maxwell.
Investigators who busted Maxwell, Epstein’s alleged procuress, confirmed Thursday that they still want to talk to the prince — as lawyers predict his socialite pal could turn against him.
The charges against the 58-year-old British socialite include alleged sex crimes in her London townhouse — where Andrew has separately been accused by an Epstein “sex slave” of sleeping with her when she was 17.
Buckingham Palace said in a statement last year that “any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”
Andrew said that “at no stage during the limited time I spent with [Epstein] did I see, witness or suspect any behavior of the sort that subsequently led to his arrest and conviction,” the Sun reported.
Hoffenberg told the outlet that he’s working with Epstein’s victims and is in regular contact with Maxwell’s spokesperson.
“She was convinced she wasn’t getting arrested, I speak to her spokesperson all the time,” he said. “She’s definitely someone who I understand quite well, I’m able to articulate how she feels right now, the tragedy she’s involved in now is horrible.”
He added: “If they keep her in prison, she’ll crack in two seconds. She’s not able to take that sort of cruel punishment. Prison is too tough and hard, she’ll have to be in solitary confinement, and she’ll snap.”
Hoffenberg, who briefly funded The Post in 1993, said he spent three and a half years in solitary as retaliation for performing legal work for inmates against prison officials.
“I know the confinement and I know how hard it is for people to adjust. It’s too painful, very psychologically painful, and she’ll never be able to take it,” he told the Sun.
“It’s very painful, the suffering is enormous, I believe she’s already agreed to cooperate, which means her incarceration would be much more comfortable,” he added. | 0 | non |
791 | Title: Ghislaine Maxwell asked Realtor about traffic patterns over property
The real estate broker who sold Ghislaine Maxwell the luxury home on a 156-acre estate in New Hampshire said Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged madam inquired about the flight patterns over the property before buying the spread, according to a report.
“She wanted to know what the flight patterns were over the house, which was very strange,” the broker told The Daily Beast about the remote property in Bradford where the 58-year-old British socialite took refuge.
The broker told the outlet she had never met Maxwell, but that a British man who she assumed was the husband showed up for the home inspection, telling her he had just sold his tech company and was looking to buy a house in the US.
Maxwell, who was busted Thursday for allegedly conspiring with the disgraced financier to sexually abuse minors, bought the spread in an all-cash deal through what prosecutors called a “carefully anonymized LLC” in court papers filed Thursday.
Law enforcement sources confirmed that the property at 338 East Washington Road sold for $1.07 million on Dec. 13, according to the Zillow website. | 0 | non |
792 | Title: NYC-funded art programs slashed by $23 million
The latest New York City budget slashed its support for municipally funded arts programs by 11 percent, the result of the $9 billion loss in tax revenue fueled by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The decrease in spending was included in the city’s $88.19 billion budget passed Wednesday — a sum that included a roughly $23 million cut to the Department of Cultural Affairs, the city agency that handles grants to arts organizations, according to the New York Times.
Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who chairs the cultural affairs committee, told the outlet that he voted against the proposed plan over those cuts, and the fact that the budget also cuts $15 million from arts education services.
“I fight like an animal inside the budget negotiating team for those things,” Van Bramer said.
John Calvelli — chair of the city’s Cultural Institutions Group (CIG), which represents 33 museums and other organizations — said they were “trying to figure out how we do what we have done with less.”
The Coalition of Theaters of Color, which supports theaters in communities of color, will keep its funding of $3.7 million. Van Bramer said that in a national time of reckoning over racial injustice, the council wouldn’t consider cutting anything from the initiative.
The Bronx Children’s Museum also faces the possibility of having to limit the programs it usually provides for children as a result of the budget cuts. | 0 | non |
793 | Title: Convicted pedophile serving 1,000-year sentence gets parole
A Georgia pedophile sentenced to 1,000 years in prison was let out on parole following an appeals court ruling, prompting the district attorney to lament that he was “powerless to stop it.”
Peter Mallory was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography, tampering with evidence and invasion of privacy in 2011. At his sentencing in 2012, a circuit judge called him “probably the most prolific collector of child pornography in the entire world,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
But an appeals court ruled in May that the sentence Mallory served was appropriate, and he was released three weeks later, on May 27.
Before his arrest, Mallory served as a county commissioner and owned an independent television station based on the campus of West Georgia Technical College.
When police began detecting downloads of child porn on the campus, they originally suspected it was the work of a student, according to WSB-TV 2 in Atlanta. But when the station was raided, investigators found more than 26,000 files of child pornography on Mallory’s computer.
“The evidence demonstrated that Mallory knowingly and intentionally sought out, gathered, downloaded and saved these images and videos of children being raped, tortured and sexually exploited,” said District Attorney Herb Cranford in a press release.
“In the current digital age, no amount of supervision can stop a compulsive sexual deviant like Mallory from seeking out the most heinous images and videos of small children being sexually abused.” | 0 | non |
794 | Title: Fauci warns of new, faster-spreading coronavirus mutation
The country’s top infectious disease expert said Thursday that a more infectious strain of the coronavirus may be emerging.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the claim Thursday in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Fauci said research suggests Italy was devastated by a different strain of the coronavirus than the one that originated in Wuhan, China.
The main difference between the two, Fauci said, is that Italy’s version passes from person to person more effectively, making it even more difficult to contain.
“It just seems that the virus replicates better and may be more transmissible,” said Fauci.
The study he referenced, which was released by researchers affiliated with the Sheffield COVID-19 Genomics Group, states that the new strain “has become the most prevalent form in the global pandemic.”
However, the researchers also found no evidence that this new strain causes worse symptoms than the original.
As of Thursday, the United States had more than 2.7 million confirmed cases, the highest in the world. | 0 | non |
795 | Title: Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre applauds Ghislaine Maxwell arrest
Orange is the new black- #GhislaineMaxwellArrested Thank you to @FBI @SDNYnews and anyone involved in the arrest of this insidious creature. Hope the judge throws the book at her. So so so happy- she’s finally where she belongs. #LOCKEDUP #ChildTrafficking #FightingBack 🦋 pic.twitter.com/CuZd4W0Cli
— Virginia Giuffre (@VRSVirginia) July 2, 2020
Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged “sex slave” Virginia Giuffre applauded the arrest of Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell on Thursday night, tweeting: “Orange is the new black.”
“Thank you to @FBI @SDNYnews and anyone involved in the arrest of this insidious creature. Hope the judge throws the book at her.”
Giuffre added that she was “So so so happy- she’s finally where she belongs,” adding the hashtags #LOCKEDUP #ChildTrafficking and #FightingBack.
Maxwell, 58, was arrested by the FBI in New Hampshire around 8:30 a.m. and is charged with grooming young girls for sex.
Prosecutors also charged the British socialite and one-time girlfriend of Epstein’s with repeatedly lying about her involvement in the financier’s sex trafficking ring during a deposition in 2016
Giuffre and others have long accused Maxwell of aiding in Epstein’s crimes, and the former socialite had worked to go into hiding to avoid the feds, sources told The Post.
She was eventually found and taken into custody in a house in the woods of Bradford, New Hampshire, a home she bought under an LLC in December, the sources said.
Giuffre has been one of the most prominent Epstein accusers over the years. She and Maxwell settled a defamation lawsuit earlier this year on a claim Giuffre filed back in 2015.
Giuffre said the dead financier sexually abused her between 2000 and 2002, and she has also claimed she had sex with Prince Andrew, one of Epstein’s buddies. | 0 | non |
796 | Title: 11-year-old boy becomes Florida's youngest coronavirus victim
An 11-year-old Florida boy who fought various illnesses his entire life has become the state’s youngest coronavirus victim.
Daequan Wimberly, of Miami, had suffered from body deformities and kidney failure at 18 months old, when he was taken in as a “medical foster child” by Bishop Jerry Lee Wimberly of Ambassadors of Christ church, the Miami Herald reported.
After he was officially adopted, Daequan became a shining presence at the church until his death Tuesday, Gladys Brown, a family friend and church member, told the paper.
“He was happy. He could have been an usher anywhere,” Brown said. “He wouldn’t stop until he shook everyone’s hand.”
As a toddler, Daequan persevered through rickets and underwent dialysis three times a week. But his health took a turn for the worse after he came down with a fever two weeks ago.
He was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he was diagnosed with COVID-19 on June 19 and passed away from pneumonia 11 days later, according to the Herald.
Daequan was the third Florida minor to die due to an infection after two 17-year-olds had passed away from COVID-19, the Herald reported.
Florida is among many states across the country experiencing a huge spike in coronavirus cases after moving to reopen their economies. The state has suffered massive daily increases throughout June, with more than 169,100 confirmed cases and more than 3,600 deaths.
Wimberly, 74, didn’t know where Daequan contracted the virus. The boy rode a bus to a school for special-needs students and regularly took trips to Jackson Memorial Hospital for treatments before catching the bug.
Despite his condition, Daequan was always brimming with charisma and quickly became beloved by churchgoers, according to Wimberly.
The pastor tragically couldn’t comfort Daequan in his final moments. Wimberly has also contracted the coronavirus and remains hospitalized, though he is expected to be released this week.
“We taught him to be a good person,” Wimberly said. “The Lord blessed him. He turned out to be a very loving person.” | 0 | non |
797 | Title: Inmate with coronavirus dies after spending nearly 30 years on death row
A California inmate with coronavirus died last week after spending nearly 30 years on death row for raping and murdering a 47-year-old woman.
Richard Stitely, 71, died last Wednesday night at San Quentin State Prison, which is in the midst of a major coronavirus outbreak infecting over one-third of its inmate population, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Stitely was tested for the virus after his death and the Marin County Coroner’s Office on Monday confirmed the positive results, CBS SF reported.
The official cause of Stitely’s death is still being determined, the coroner’s office said.
As of late Thursday, 1,347 of San Quentin’s roughly 3,700 prisoners had tested positive for COVID-19, according to a CDCR tracker.
The majority of the prison’s cases, 1,079, occurred in the last two weeks.
San Quentin, as of Thursday, was home to half of all inmate virus patients in the state prison system, the state data shows.
Staffers at the prison have not been spared, with 114 of them testing positive for the virus as of Wednesday.
Stitely had been on death row since September 1992 for raping and killing Carol Unger, then dumping her body in the parking lot of a North Hollywood industrial complex. | 0 | non |
798 | Title: Woman charged in connection to murder of Vanessa Guillen
A Texas woman has been charged with helping to mutilate and dispose of the body of missing Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen.
Cecily Aguilar, 22, faces one count of conspiracy to tamper with evidence in Guillen’s April 22 disappearance from the Texas US Army base, NBC News reported Thursday.
The announcement comes one day after Guillen’s family said during an emotional press conference that they believed that remains found near the military base were those of the 20-year-old 3rd Cavalry Regiment soldier — and that a serviceman who shot himself as cops closed in was her killer.
Authorities on Thursday identified the serviceman as Aaron David Robinson, 20.
Investigators have not confirmed that the remains found in a mound near the base are those of Guillen.
But authorities said Thursday that a second suspect taken into custody this week was Aguilar, who was allegedly told by Robinson that he killed Guillen by hitting her in the head with a hammer, NBC said.
Aguilar, the estranged wife of a former Fort Hood soldier, is accused of helping Robinson get rid of the body by burying it in a remote site in Bell County near the base.
Authorities said last month that they suspected foul play in the disappearance of Guillen, who left her car keys, room key, ID card and wallet in the Fort Hood armory where she had been working.
Also on Thursday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) called for a federal probe into Guillen’s case.
“We believe a thorough investigation by the Department of Defense Inspector General can help establish a number of crucial facts about SPC Guillen’s workplace, disappearance, and the Army’s response to both,” they said in a letter for Defense Department Acting Inspector General Sean O’Donnell.
“We are dismayed that we must ask these questions in the wake of SPC Guillen’s disappearance.” | 0 | non |
799 | Title: Exclusive | Drone footage shows Ghislaine Maxwell hideaway in the mountains
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Ghislaine Maxwell was living in seclusion in the mountains of New England until justice came knocking at her door Thursday morning.
The British socialite, who went into hiding after the infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was charged with sex trafficking last year, resided in a luxurious, $1 million home outside Bradford, New Hampshire.
According to new drone footage obtained by The Post, Maxwell’s estate was secluded along the 5-mile mountain ridge of picturesque Mount Sunapee, a major area for hiking and skiing.
The 4,300-square-foot timber frame house sits on 156 acres of land, at the top of a half-mile dirt driveway, making it an ideal location for someone looking to stay out of view.
“It’s where you go to be secluded and it’s where you go if you want to be left alone,” a resident told The Post over the phone.
“Bradford is a town for second and third homeowners — you’re rich enough to own a few homes to live there.”
A large stone engraved with “TUCKEDAWAY” stands at the foot of the property, with a locked metal gate blocking the gravel driveway up to the house.
Maxwell, 58, bought the spread in the tiny town in an all-cash deal in December 2019, through what prosecutors called a “carefully anonymous LLC” in court papers filed Thursday.
“From every room there are views of the Mt Sunapee foothills to the west,” says the listing for the home.
The home’s features include a great room “with floor to ceiling fieldstone fireplace, cathedral ceiling, and a spectacular chandelier,” as well as a “fabulous barn for square dances and hoedowns!” the listing says.
Maxwell was ordered locked up in New Hampshire on Thursday pending her transfer to face trial in Manhattan for allegedly recruiting underage girls so they could be sexually abused by her ex-lover, Epstein. | 0 | non |
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