A suspect has been arrested after a five-year-old boy was reportedly thrown from the third floor of the Mall of America in Minnesota.
Police rushed to the scene in Bloomington after witnesses called, reporting a woman was screaming her child had been thrown over a balcony around 10 a.m., local time.
One man told the New York Daily News he saw the immediate aftermath of the incident and that the child was laying “motionless...in a pool of blood.”
In a press conference outside the mall, Bloomington Police Chief Jeff Potts said that authorities arrested a 24-year-old man they believe threw or pushed the boy and that he does not appear to have any connection to the boy or his mother.
“Our officers initially responded and performed first aid on the child along with some other witnesses and passersby,” Potts said. “The child did suffer significant injuries.”
The majority agreed the performance of Syed’s trial counsel was “deficient” in failing to investigate the story of an alibi witness, but rejected the argument that the deficiency prejudiced Syed, the Sun reported.
“Given the totality of the evidence the jury heard, we conclude that there is not a significant or substantial possibility that the verdict would have been different had trial counsel” called the alibi witness to the stand, the court ruled.
A jury convicted Syed of murdering his 17-year-old ex-girlfriend and fellow high school classmate, Hae Min Lee, in 2000. He was sentenced to life in prison.
The 2014 “Serial” podcast casting doubt on Syed's conviction became the most downloaded podcast of all time – and the investigation into his claims of innocence led to a hearing in which his attorneys challenged the evidence against him.
Syed has remained in prison after his request for bail in December was rejected.
An armed father shot a carjacker in Florida after his vehicle was stolen with his six-year-old boy inside.
The incident began at a home in West Palm Beach on Saturday, when the car thief happened upon a car with the engine on.
The father says he’d turned on the vehicle and went inside to say bye to friends.
The armed dad pursued the thief, Lamar Thurman, 29, in another vehicle and was able to catch up to him after he crashed.
But Thurman again attempted to take off when the dad tried to rescue the boy.
That’s when the dad opened fire “in an attempt to stop him from fleeing further with his child in the car,” according to Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Teri Barbera.
Thurman crashed the vehicle a second time about 200 yards away, police say, and needed to be hospitalized in critical condition.
FILE PHOTO - Police officers stand guard outside Downing Street in London, Britain, March 30, 2019. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis
April 4, 2019
LONDON (Reuters) – British police have tested plans in recent months to have 10,000 officers respond within 24 hours to any disorder or increase in hate crime if Britain leaves the European Union with no deal.
In a statement, they also urged restraint in a political and public debate that has often been angry:
“There’s a responsibility on us all to think carefully and be temperate in how we communicate so we don’t inflame tensions,” said Martin Hewitt, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
Chief Constable Charlie Hall added: “National and global events have the potential to trigger short-terms rises in hate crime and we saw this with the significant spike following the EU Referendum in 2016.”
Three years after Britons voted to quit the EU in a referendum, and with only a week left before a new, delayed exit date, government and parliament are still bitterly divided over how, when or even whether to leave.
An exit on April 12 without any transition deal to cushion the shock to trade, business or consumers remains a real possibility.
At the same time, there have been warnings from a number of Brexit supporters that failing to get Britain out of the EU could lead to civil unrest. Many lawmakers have received threats from extremists or are under police protection.
“At the moment, we have no intelligence to suggest there will be rises in crime or disorder,” said Hall, “but we are well prepared to respond to any issues that may arise.”
Part of that is a national mobilization plan that enables 10,000 officers to respond to emergencies within 24 hours.
Hall said the level of hate crime had abated since 2016, but was still higher than before the referendum.
(Writing by Elisabeth O’Leary; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Victor McElhaney, a music student at the University of Southern California, was shot and killed in what authorities believe was a robbery attempt near the school’s campus early Sunday. (Facebook)
LOS ANGELES – A student who is the son of an Oakland, California, city councilwoman was shot and killed in what might have been a robbery attempt near the University of Southern California campus, officials said.
Victor McElhaney, who was studying at USC's Thornton School of Music, was killed shortly after midnight Sunday about a mile from the campus, USC Annenberg Media reported.
McElhaney, 21, is the son of Oakland Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney, Zachary Wald, the councilwoman's chief of staff, told the Los Angeles Times.
On Sunday night, the councilwoman posted a statement mourning her son's death.
"I miss my baby. Please keep me, my family, and all of my son's friends in your thoughts and prayers," she wrote. "We are beginning a new chapter in this reoccurring circle of violence ... And it will take all of us together to make it through this tragedy."
Three or four men approached the victim at the corner of Maple Avenue and Adams Boulevard in what might have been a robbery attempt and one shot him, LAPD Officer Mike Lopez told Annenberg Media. The men fled in a vehicle, police said.
McElhaney was in critical condition when he was taken to a hospital, where he died, police said. He was pronounced dead at 11 a.m. Sunday, Annenberg Media said.
No arrests had been made in connection with the shooting as of Sunday afternoon.
USC Interim President Wanda Austin sent a letter to students and faculty in which she praised the police investigation. "We appreciate the ongoing and diligent efforts of the Los Angeles Police Department to quickly identify and arrest those responsible for this senseless crime," Austin said.
The school, which is on spring break, has been in touch with McElhaney's family, she said.
McElhaney is from Oakland, where he was an instructor at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, the university said. In the fall of 2017, he transferred from California State University East Bay to USC to pursue Jazz Studies. He was an active member of USC's Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs.
"He believed in the power of music to touch lives, to heal, and to bring hope," Austin said in her statement. "Victor's loss will affect all of the faculty and students who knew him."
The USC community has previously been hit by violent crime. On July 24, 2014, 24-year-old student Xinran Ji was killed after he was attacked by a group of four people as he walked home from a study group near the campus. He made it back to his apartment and died before he was found by a roommate.
The attackers were convicted of the killing and sent to prison.
"They were clearly devising how they will roll out a new narrative," the California Republican told Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "Despite all of that, they still came out and came out with a fake news story that has now been debunked."
And no matter how much "witness tampering" was done, "you're not going to find collusion in this unless you talk about the collision that the Democratic Party and the [Hillary] Clinton Campaign was doing with Russians," Nunes said.
Even though he used the term witness tampering, Nunes acknowledged it was not in the legal sense, as there is "nothing illegal about talking to witnesses beforehand."
However, if it was a "real investigation," Republican and Democratic lawyers would have met with the lawyers of whoever was to testify, Nunes said.
Meanwhile, he said he finds speculation members of Trump's family could face any kind of legal charges.
"The whole point of this Mueller investigation was, was there collusion or not?" Nunes said. "It is like this mythical creature that's out there running around somewhere around the capital. You've got, you know, dozens and dozens of reporters who spend all day looking for this mythical creature. The Democrats, they prance out a new, new mythical creature every day. The press follows it."
Campaigning in Iowa hours after the former vice president officially announced his candidacy, Warren contrasted on Thursday her longtime record of taking on Wall Street with that of Biden.
“At a time when the biggest financial institutions in this country were trying to put the squeeze on millions of hard-working families who were in bankruptcy because of medical problems, job losses, divorce and death in the family, there was nobody to stand up for them,” said the populist senator who’s producing progressive policy proposal after another as she runs for the White House.
“I got in that fight because they just didn’t have anyone,” she said. “And Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies.”
The comments reignited a nearly two decades old fight between the two over the country’s bankruptcy laws.
Fox News reached out to the Biden campaign for reaction to Warren’s words but had yet to receive a response at the time this article was published.
It’s not just Warren. The head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee – which has backed the senator from Massachusetts – also took aim at Biden, who enters the race as the front runner in most national polls and early primary and caucus voting state surveys, slightly atop of Sanders and well ahead of the rest of the large field of 20 contenders.
“With billionaires deciding not to run, progressive candidates have been in need of a foil. If Joe Biden positions himself as the political insider from yesteryear who says big ideas like universal child care, student debt relief, and a wealth tax on ultra-millionaires are not possible, he would be an easy foil, Adam Green, the co-founder of PCCC, told Fox News.
The former vice president spent Thursday evening raising campaign cash at the suburban Philadelphia home of David Cohen, a senior executive of the Comcast Corp. and a former Democratic operative.
In a fundraising email to supporters around the same time, Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir wrote that “it’s a big day in the Democratic primary and we’re hoping to end it strong. Not with a fundraiser in the home of a corporate lobbyist, but with an overwhelming number of individual donations in response to today’s news.”
Earlier in the day, a rising progressive group called Justice Democrats that has championed Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called Biden “out of touch” and stressed that “we can’t let a so-called ‘centrist’ like Joe Biden divide the Democratic Party and turn it into the party of ‘No, we can’t.’”
Biden, of course, is considered to be more moderate than many of the current contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, especially Warren and Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist.
These kind of jabs from the candidates, their campaigns and outside groups could be foreshadow a building clash between the progressive and establishment sings of the party.
Biden has pushed back against the perception that he’s a moderate in a party that’s increasingly moving to the left. Earlier this month he described himself as an “Obama-Biden Democrat.”
Former President Barack Obama, Biden’s boss for eight years, remains extremely popular with Democrats.
FILE PHOTO: An aerial photo looking north shows shipping containers at the Port of Seattle and the Elliott Bay waterfront in Seattle, Washington, U.S. March 21, 2019. REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson/File Photo
April 26, 2019
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. economic growth is running at a 1.1% pace in the second quarter as the gains in exports and inventories recorded in the first quarter are expected to reverse, Morgan Stanley economists said on Friday.
“Our preliminary expectations for growth in the second quarter sees large drags from net exports and inventories after their contributions in 1Q,” they wrote in a research note.
Gross domestic product increased at a 3.2% annualized rate in the first three months of the year, driven by a smaller trade deficit and the largest accumulation of unsold merchandise since 2015, the Commerce Department said earlier Friday.
FILE PHOTO: The Deutsche Bank headquarters are pictured in Frankfurt, Germany, April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski/File Photo
April 26, 2019
By Tom Sims
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Within hours of the collapse of merger talks with Commerzbank, Christian Sewing scrambled to convince investors and employees that Deutsche Bank can stand on its own two feet.
The Deutsche Bank chief executive told staff, many of whom opposed a merger because of significant job losses, that while he had not been “skeptical” about the Commerzbank talks, he was cautious about the chances of success from the start.
And another top Deutsche Bank executive said on Friday that it had been Commerzbank that initiated the talks, suggesting there was no desperation on their part for a deal.
Commerzbank denied that version of events, ending the apparent truce between the normally highly competitive cross-town Frankfurt rivals over the past six weeks.
German hopes of creating a national banking champion able to challenge global competitors were finally dashed on Thursday when Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank ended their talks due to the risks of doing a deal, restructuring costs and capital demands.
For Sewing, the failure to clinch a deal has left the 49-year-old chief executive of Germany’s largest bank, who took over just over a year ago, with his back to the wall.
Credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, which downgraded Deutsche Bank last year, said on Friday that Deutsche Bank “will remain under strain”, adding that it “seems to have acknowledged the need to adjust its strategy”.
Under Sewing, a new leadership has tried to revive Deutsche Bank’s fortunes, but it has faced money laundering allegations and failed stress tests, as well as ratings downgrades.
At the heart of the debate over its future is whether it should focus its business on Germany and draw a line under its costly global ambitions to take on Wall Street’s big guns.
“MARKET PLAY”
Without a deal, Deutsche Bank now finds itself back at the mercy of equity and debt markets, with UBS analysts warning that in a “stress scenario” it could again “be forced into a ‘debt-driven capital increase’ even with solid capital ratios”.
“Deutsche remains a levered market play vulnerable to external events,” the UBS analysts said in a note.
Sewing, along with many analysts, believes Deutsche Bank can go it alone in the short-term, but will be counting on a turnaround in market conditions to do so in the long-run given its dependence on volatile investment bank earnings.
“To reach our return objective, we also need to see a revenue recovery in our more market-sensitive business,” Sewing said on Friday after reporting results.
“These revenues are available to us in better market conditions given our leading positions in many of these businesses, but we need to capture them,” he added.
Revenue at Deutsche Bank’s bond trading division fell 19 percent in the first quarter, it said on Friday, underscoring weakness at its investment bank.
If those earnings do not improve, Berlin’s desire to keep its biggest bank out of foreign hands may start to wane.
“Germany’s globally active companies need competitive financial institutions that can support them around the world,” German finance minister Olaf Scholz said on Thursday.
(Writing by Alexander Smith; Editing by Keith Weir)
Panama’s former president Ricardo Martinelli reacts to the media while arriving to the Electoral Court in Panama City, Panama April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Erick Marciscano
April 26, 2019
PANAMA CITY (Reuters) – Panama’s electoral tribunal has ruled that former President Ricardo Martinelli, who is awaiting trial on wiretapping charges, cannot take part in elections on May 5 in which he was running for mayor of Panama City and a seat in Congress, a spokesman for Martinelli said on Friday.
“The ruling of the electoral tribunal has disqualified him as candidate,” said the spokesman, Eduardo Camacho, calling the court’s ruling a “political decision.”
Officials at the tribunal did not immediately confirm the ruling, which also was reported in local media in Panama.
Martinelli, a supermarket tycoon who ran the Central American country from 2009 to 2014, was extradited to Panama last June from the United States and charged with spying on 150 people, including politicians, union leaders and journalists.
A judge had previously cleared Martinelli to run for mayor of the capital. His critics vowed to appeal that decision.
(Reporting by Elida Moreno and Stefanie Eschenbacher; Editing by Bill Trott)
FILE PHOTO: Amazon boxes are seen stacked for delivery in the Manhattan borough of New York City, January 29, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
April 26, 2019
(Reuters) – Shares of Walmart, Target and other U.S. retailers fell on Friday as Amazon.com Inc unveiled a one-day delivery plan for its Prime members in a move to further disrupt the fiercely competitive retail landscape.
The e-commerce giant’s announcement on Thursday could cause other brands, manufacturers, retailers, and logistics companies to have to invest more aggressively to compete with Amazon and its delivery, analysts said.
Retailers in recent years have poured billions into ecommerce and faster shipping options and are trying to close the gap with Amazon.
“This is about making it more expensive to catch up and affirms our world view that only the largest and smartest will survive,” Bernstein analyst Brandon Fletcher said.
The move is expected to heighten consumer expectations on e-commerce delivery just like Amazon did with its two-day shipping option for members of its loyalty club Prime, noted analysts.
“The faster you ship, the more people buy,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said.
The challenge for non-Amazon players was that very few of the existing logistics and parcel delivery players now have the ability to do nationwide one-day delivery, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak said.
“And even fewer can do it at the vast scale and reasonable cost that AMZN would need for Prime delivery,” Nowak said in a note.
Walmart Inc’s shares fell about 3 percent, while Target Corp dropped about 5 percent in morning trade.
Shares of Kohl’s Corp, Macy’s Inc and Nordstrom Inc fell about 1 percent. Grocer Kroger Co was nearly 3 percent lower, while consumer electronics retailer Best Buy Inc dropped 2.1 percent.
(Reporting by Soundarya J and Akanksha Rana in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
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