News

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has vowed to continue defending what he considers Texans' right to carry firearms on land owned or leased by governmental entities.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday night that it would not block a firearms ban at the State Fair of Texas. Paxton's office had sued claiming the city and the fair are violating state law by prohibiting most people from bringing firearms onto public property.

A Dallas County judge declined to issue an injunction preventing the ban's enforcement. Neither the Fifteenth Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court intervened.

A Massachusetts woman accused of operating a high-end brothel network with wealthy and prominent clients in that state and the Washington, D.C., suburbs pleaded guilty in federal court Friday.

Han Lee and two others were indicted earlier this year on one count of conspiracy to persuade, entice, and coerce one or more individuals to travel in interstate or foreign commerce to engage in prostitution and one count of money laundering, according to prosecutors.

A Massachusetts woman pleaded guilty on Friday to running a high-end brothel network in the greater Boston area and the suburbs of Washington that served wealthy and well-connected clientele including politicians, corporate executives, lawyers and military officers.

Han Lee appeared in Boston federal court to plead guilty to charges that she conspired to persuade, induce and entice primarily Asian women to travel to Massachusetts and Virginia to engage in prostitution and committed money laundering.

She was the first to admit wrongdoing of the three individuals who prosecutors charged in November in connection with a sex ring run out of apartment complexes in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts and Fairfax and Tysons, Virginia.

Lee, 42, faces up to 25 years in prison when she is sentenced Dec. 20. She stressed when addressing U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick that while she ran an illegal prostitution business, she did not force any women to engage in sex work.

The final three anti-abortion activists convicted of a 2021 Tennessee clinic blockade were sentenced this week, including the person considered to be the main organizer of the action.

Chester Gallagher was sentenced on Thursday to 16 months in prison, by far the longest sentence among 11 people convicted of various offenses. In addition to organizing the March 5, 2021, blockade of a Carafem clinic in Mount Juliet, Tennesse, a town 17 miles (27.36 kilometers) east of Nashville, prosecutors said Gallgher “exploited his specialized knowledge gleaned from his law enforcement experience to prolong the blockade as long as possible.”

Gallagher and a co-defendant stalled police with phony negotiations, prosecutors said. Their actions disrupted not only the Carafem clinic, but other medical offices that shared the same building.

A few dozen New Yorkers boarded a bus in Harlem on Friday with civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton and members of the group formerly known as the Central Park Five, bound for Philadelphia, where they toured the city hoping to energize the youth vote ahead of the 2024 election.

With less than 40 days until Election Day, the choice of a battleground state for a get-out-the-vote bus tour made sense: whichever presidential candidate wins Pennsylvania is likely to do so by a slim margin and with a lion’s share of the Black vote. But it was a strategic choice to recruit speakers who many first knew as Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted in a case that former President Donald Trump supported so vociferously, Sharpton said.

“There are polls saying that some Black men are moving toward Trump,” he told The Associated Press on Friday. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. But Black men need to hear some Black men saying, ‘Let me tell you about the Trump I know.’”

Israel killed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a powerful airstrike in Beirut, dealing a huge blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.

The Israeli military said on Saturday it had eliminated Nasrallah in the strike on the group's central command headquarters in Beirut's southern suburbs a day earlier. Hezbollah confirmed he had been killed, without saying how.

His death is not only a major blow to Hezbollah, but also to Iran, removing an influential ally who helped build Hezbollah into the linchpin of Tehran's constellation of allied groups in the Arab world.

WASHINGTON COURT HOUSE, Ohio (AP) — Stubborn drought in Ohio and the shifting weather patterns influenced by climate change appear to be affecting North America’s largest native fruit: the pawpaw.

Avocado-sized with a taste sometimes described as a cross between a mango and banana, the pawpaw is beloved by many but rarely seen in grocery stores in the U.S. due to its short shelf life. The fruit grows in various places in the eastern half of North America, from Ontario to Florida. But in parts of Ohio, which hosts an annual festival dedicated to the fruit, and Kentucky, some growers this year are reporting earlier-than-normal harvests and bitter-tasting fruit, a possible effect of the extreme weather from the spring freezes to drought that has hit the region.

Take Valerie Libbey’s orchard in Washington Court House, about an hour’s drive from Columbus. Libbey grows 100 pawpaw trees and said she was surprised to see the fruit dropping from trees in the first week of August instead of mid-September.

“I had walked into the orchard to do my regular irrigation and the smell of the fruit just hit me,” said Libbey, who added that this year’s harvest period was much shorter than in previous years and the fruits themselves were smaller and more bitter.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — U.S. Peace Corps volunteers returned to El Salvador Friday for the first time since the American force left in 2016 because of violence in the Central American country.

It was the latest sign of a thaw in U.S. relations with El Salvador, whose President Nayib Bukele was once shunned because of his harsh crackdown on street gangs.

It was also a sign of how much Bukele’s widespread arrests of suspected gang members - which also jailed a considerable number of apparently innocent young men - has reduced the country’s once-fearsome homicide rate.

The Peace Corps said the first nine volunteers would work on community economic development, education, and youth initiatives. All nine had previously worked two-year stints in other Central American countries.

“Today is not just a celebration, it’s a commitment to continue building on the decades-long partnership with the people of El Salvador,” said Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn.

More than 2,300 Peace Corps Volunteers had worked in El Salvador since 1962. The Peace Corps volunteers left after El Salvador’s gang-fueled homicide rate reached a high of 106 murders per 100,000 inhabitants on 2015. That year there were 6,658 killings in the country of 6.3 million.

Under a state of emergency originally declared in 2022 and still in effect, Bukele’s government has rounded up about 81,900 suspected gang members in sweeps that rights groups say are often arbitrary, based on a person’s appearance or where they live. The government has had to release about 7,000 people because of a lack of evidence.

‘I believed things he told me that I now understand to be … lies,’ Dave Hancock says in new Rittenhouse documentary

A former spokesperson for Kyle Rittenhouse says he became disillusioned with his ex-client after learning that he had sent text messages pledging to “fucking murder” shoplifters outside a Chicago pharmacy before later shooting two people to death during racial justice protests in Wisconsin in 2020.

Dave Hancock made that remark about Rittenhouse – for whom he also worked as a security guard – on a Law & Crime documentary that premiered on Friday. The show explored the unsuccessful criminal prosecution of Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

As Hancock told it on The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 90-minute film’s main subject had “a history of things he was doing prior to [the double slaying], specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a fight”.

New indictment leaves Anthony Odiong facing seven sexual assault charges – all in connection with three women

A grand jury in Texas has handed up more felony sexual assault charges against a Roman Catholic priest accused of preying on women whom he met while ministering to them in that state as well as in south-east Louisiana, officials said.

Anthony Odiong is now facing a total of five charges of sexual assault in the first degree and two more such counts in the second degree – all in connection with three separate women – after a new indictment was handed up against him on Thursday in the McLennan county, Texas, state courthouse.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20797683

> By Nader Durgham in Beirut and Umar A Farooq in Washington > Published date: 28 September 2024 09:35 BST

There’s no romance in being a child bride. And whether the “groom” is R. Kelly, with his marriage to 15-year-old Aaliyah, your great-grandmother, or Justine (name changed for protection)—a minor married to a man twice her age in the state of Maryland—more often than not, these marriages are a form of child abuse ... government-sanctioned child abuse, in some states.

Child marriage remains legal in well over half of all U.S. states, with over 300,000 minors married between 2000 and 2018. Every year, hundreds of children of every gender, ethnicity and religious background are married, with no regard for their consent. “Groom” might be the technical term in these marriages, but “grooming” is more accurate.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that traces of harmful bacteria have been found in several varieties of pet food.

The recall affects pet food from two well-known brands: Answers Pet Food and Darwin’s Natural Pet Products. All of the affected products are raw dog food varieties. Food from both brands was found to be contaminated with salmonella and listeria, two types of bacteria that can cause illness in pets and their owners.

Currently, no illnesses have been confirmed in relation to these recalled products, according to the FDA.

The devastating impact of Hurricane Helene is being felt far and wide across the South tonight. At least 40 people are dead in four states. Millions are without power. And there have been harrowing air rescues from Florida to Tennessee.

And although the Category 4 hurricane is now a tropical depression, the threat is not over yet.

In August, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced a plan to remove noncitizens from the voting rolls, citing 3,251 individuals who had registered to vote who were not American citizens.

The Justice Department is asking a federal court to reinstate eligible voters and require Alabama to inform anyone impacted that their ability to vote has been restored.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, in an airstrike on the organization’s underground headquarters near Beirut on Friday. Hezbollah has not commented on the Israeli claim.

In the statement announcing Mr. Nasrallah’s death, the Israeli military also said the strike had killed Ali Karaki, the commander of the southern front in Hezbollah, along with several other Hezbollah leaders.

**(CBS DETROIT) — **A 61-year-old Farmington Hills man faces multiple criminal charges after he allegedly assaulted a female postal carrier Thursday evening upon receiving a flyer in the mail featuring Vice President Kamala Harris.

Investigators say Russell Frank Valleau was allegedly upset about receiving the particular piece of mail and told the postal carrier that he did not want that "Black b\\\\" in his mailbox. He's accused of yelling derogatory, racist and sexual remarks about Harris and the carrier, calling the postal carrier a "Black b\\\\" and lunging at her with a knife.

The postal carrier used pepper spray on Valleau to stop the attack. Farmington Hills police later arrested him in a neighbor's yard.

Already the longest-lived of the 45 men to serve as U.S. president, Jimmy Carter is about to reach the century mark.

The 39th president, who remains under home hospice care, will turn 100 on Tuesday, Oct. 1, celebrating in the same south Georgia town where he was born in 1924.

Here are some notable markers for Carter, the nation and the world over his long life.

By all accounts, Milagra the “miracle” California condor shouldn’t be alive today.

But now at nearly 17 months old, she is one of four of the giant endangered birds who will get to stretch their wings in the wild as part of a release this weekend near the Grand Canyon.

There is no more appropriate name for a young bird that has managed to survive against all odds. Her mother died from the worst outbreak of avian flu in U.S. history soon after she laid her egg and her father nearly succumbed to the same fate while struggling to incubate the egg alone.

Milagra, which means miracle in Spanish, was rescued from her nest and hatched in captivity thanks to the care of her foster condor parents.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top Biden administration officials met Friday with port operators ahead of a possible strike at East and Gulf coast ports, with a union contract expiring after Monday.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council, told members of the United States Maritime Alliance that they should be at the table with the union and negotiating ahead of the contract expiring. That’s according to a White House official who insisted on anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

Administration officials have delivered a similar message to the union this week.

Two weeks of testimony suggested the company responsible for an experimental deep-water submersible that imploded, killing five people, either recklessly ignored warning signs in the name of profits or represented the nation’s explorer spirit in taking calculated risks to push humankind’s boundaries.

Those contrasting viewpoints emerged as the Coast Guard panel tasked with determining why the carbon-fiber Titan was lost 12,500 feet (3,810 meters) deep wrapped up testimony Friday with new information that could have changed how rescuers responded and more discussion of the company co-founder’s cavalier attitude.

Capt. Jamie Frederick, commander of the Coast Guard sector based in Boston, appeared surprised to learn that the crew of Titan’s support vessel, in hindsight, felt there was a slight shudder around the time the submersible imploded on its way to the wreckage of the Titanic last year.

Frederick said it was “unconscionable that they wouldn’t share that” and it could have changed the rescue response. “It certainly would’ve changed the equation,” he testified.

Also Friday, an OceanGate employee testified that he resigned after a “tense” conversation in which co-founder Stockton Rush told him the vessel would be flagged in the Bahamas and launched from Canada to avoid U.S. scrutiny — and arrogantly brushed aside U.S. regulatory concerns if it went to a U.S. port.

A TV weather reporter in Atlanta interrupted his live shot about Hurricane Helene Friday to rescue a woman from a vehicle stranded by rising floodwaters.

In video of the rescue, standing in the rain with the submerged vehicle behind him, FOX Weather meteorologist Bob Van Dillen describes how the woman drove into a flooded area.

He says he has called 911, and she can be heard screaming as he tries to assure her that help is on the way. Then he says to the camera: “It’s a situation. We’ll get back to you in a little bit. I’m going to see if I can help this lady out a little bit more you guys.”

Van Dillen is then seen wading through the water with the woman on her back, carrying her to safety.

For months, New York City Mayor Eric Adams — a former cop — refused to criticize the federal authorities investigating his administration.

Not anymore.

The day news of his indictment on corruption charges broke, Adams defiantly suggested, without providing evidence, that U.S. prosecutors had gone after him because he had criticized President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

“Despite our pleas, when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics,” he said. “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target — and a target I became.”

The accusation from Adams marked a sharp turn for a retired police captain turned politician, whose commitment to law-and-order has been a calling card during his time in office.

The rhetoric was also similar to that of other politicians who have found themselves facing various accusations.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20788726

> By MEE staff > Published date: 27 September 2024 17:45 BST

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20788199

> Jessica Corbett > Sep 27, 2024