Eight people are dead and at least 11 injured after a truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists and rammed into a school bus in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon.
The suspect, 29-year-old Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, is in police custody.
The first five people killed were identified as friends from Argentina in New York to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their graduation. One Belgian was also among the dead.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called the incident an “act of terror.”
At least eight people were killed and 11 people injured Tuesday afternoon after a man drove a Home Depot rental truck down a bike path in lower Manhattan in New York City, striking several people, authorities said.
According to police, the driver went down the wrong way of a bike path on the West Side Highway, hitting pedestrians and cyclists. He then rammed into a Stuyvesant High School bus, injuring two adults and two children. (One of the children is in critical condition, a New York Department of Education official confirmed.) The suspect then exited the vehicle brandishing what police described as “imitation firearms,” later identified as a paintball gun and a pellet gun. A police officer then confronted and shot the driver, who was then transported to the hospital.
“This was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror, aimed at innocent civilians,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a press conference Tuesday evening.
Even as President Trump was on Twitter insisting that the indictment of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was meaningless because it involved activities unrelated to Trump or the campaign came news that former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with, wait for it, Russia.
The Manafort news drew the bigger headlines Monday morning — understandable given his high-profile role at the top of the Trump campaign. But, the Papadopoulos guilty plea — and the fact that he has been cooperating with the special counsel investigation since his July arrest — strikes me as significantly more problematic for Trump and his White House in the medium-to-long term.
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This paragraph from the FBI’s guilty plea agreement with Papadopoulos is incredible:
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“In truth and in fact, however, and as set forth above, defendant PAPADOPOULOS met the Professor for the first time on or about March 14, 2016, after defendant PAPADOPOULOS had already learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the Campaign; the Professor showed interest in defendant PAPADOPOULOS only after learning of his role on the Campaign; and the Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS about the Russians possessing” dirt” on then-candidate Clinton in late April 2016, more than a month after defendant PAPADOPOULOS had joined the Campaign.”
So, Papadopoulos copped to lying to the FBI about the timing of his contacts with Russians. In his initial interview in January 2017, Papadopoulos was insistent that he had reached out to his foreign contact “The Professor” (amazing!) before he had formally joined the Trump presidential campaign. He was arrested in July, pleaded guilty in October and appears to have been cooperating in between.
President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was indicted Monday on charges that he funneled millions of dollars through overseas shell companies and used the money to buy luxury cars, real estate, antiques and expensive suits.
The charges against Mr. Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office.
The two men appeared in the Federal District Court in Washington on Monday afternoon and pleaded not guilty to all charges.
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Paul Manafort surrendered to federal authorities on Monday.Published OnCreditImage by Alex Brandon/Associated Press
A slight girl all of 6, she leaves the modest family farm, where the father minds the livestock and the mother keeps a painful secret, and walks out to the main road. Off she goes to primary school, off to the Sisters of Mercy.
Her auburn hair in ringlets, this child named Catherine is bound for Tuam, the ancient County Galway town whose name derives from a Latin term for “burial mound.” It is the seat of a Roman Catholic archdiocese, a proud distinction announced by the skyscraping cathedral that for generations has loomed over factory and field.
Two miles into this long-ago Irish morning, the young girl passes through a gantlet of gray formed by high walls along the Dublin Road that seem to thwart sunshine. To her right runs the Parkmore racecourse, where hard-earned shillings are won or lost by a nose. And to her left, the mother and baby home, with glass shards embedded atop its stony enclosure.
Behind this forbidding divide, nuns keep watch over unmarried mothers and their children. Sinners and their illegitimate spawn, it is said. The fallen.
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A shrine built to honor the children.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
The U.S. Special Forces unit that came under attack in Niger earlier this month had been pursuing a senior militant, multiple U.S. officials told NBC News.
The officials did not provide the name of the target, whom one of the officials described as an ISIS recruiter. The soldiers did not succeed in catching him.
Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Monday that the Green Berets set out on a reconnaissance mission, and that the intelligence suggested there was a low risk of contact with the enemy. He also said the military was investigating whether the mission changed as it unfolded.
One theory, said an official with direct knowledge of the military’s investigation, is that the soldiers were gathering information about the target, and, after learning his whereabouts, decided to pursue him. A big question would then be whether the unit got authorization, and whether the risks were assessed.
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A photo from the Department of Defense shows four U.S. soldiers killed in Niger: Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black (Top-L), Sgt. La David Johnson (top-R), Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright (bottom-L), and Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson (bottom-R). Dept of Defense / EPA
Nineteen days after her husband’s death and two days after his wrenching burial, the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson said she has “nothing to say” to President Trump, whose condolence call pulled the grieving widow into the center of a national controversy.
“Very upset and hurt; it made me cry even worse,” Myeshia Johnson told “Good Morning America” about her conversation with the president.
Making her first public comments since she took the call from Trump last week — on the same day her husband’s remains were flown back to the United States — Johnson recalled that the president said her husband “knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyways. And it made me cry. I was very angry at the tone of his voice, and how he said it.”
She added: “I didn’t say anything. I just listened.”
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Myeshia Johnson spoke out about President Trump’s condolence call to her after her husband, Sgt. LaDavid Johnson, was killed in Niger on Oct. 4. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Let’s be blunt: With U.S. and U.K. complicity, the Saudi government is committing war crimes in Yemen.
“The country is on the brink of famine, with over 60 percent of the population not knowing where their next meal will come from,” the leaders of the U.N. World Food Program, Unicef and the World Health Organization said in an unusual joint statement.
Yemen, always an impoverished country, has been upended for two years by fighting between the Saudi-backed military coalition and Houthi rebels and their allies (with limited support from Iran). The Saudis regularly bomb civilians and, worse, they have closed the airspace and imposed a blockade to starve the rebel-held areas into submission.
That means that ordinary Yemenis, including children, die in bombings or starve.
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Buthaina is the only member of her family not killed in a Saudi-led airstrike last week.Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
On my last week in India, I went to say goodbye to Jahiruddin Mewati, the chief of a small village where I had made a dozen or so reporting trips.
Jahiruddin and I were not precisely friends, but we had spent many hours talking over the years, mostly about local politics. I found him entirely without scruples but candid. He suspected my motives but found me entertaining, in the way that a talking dog might be entertaining, without regard for the particulars of what I said.
Jahiruddin, though uneducated, was an adept politician, fresh from winning a hard-fought local election. During our conversations, he would often break into rousing, patriotic speeches about truth and justice, thumping the plastic table in emphasis and making it jump. The effect was somewhat tarnished by his Tourette’s syndrome, which caused him to interject the word “penis” at regular intervals.
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Jahiruddin Mewati, the chief of Peepli Khera, a small village in Uttar Pradesh, presided over a particularly Indian form of justice.Credit Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
A federal jury convicted Ahmad Khan Rahimi, a loner from New Jersey drawn to online calls to jihad and instruction manuals for carrying it out, of setting the explosives in the Chelsea neighborhood that blew out windows and sent shrapnel flying into buildings, cars and people during a two-day bombing campaign in and around New York City last year.
Mr. Ramini, 29, a stocky and bearded husband and father born in Afghanistan who lived most of his life in New Jersey, remained mostly expressionless in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday as he listened to a single word — “guilty” — called out over and over, eight times, by the jury foreman. He blinked rapidly and at times appeared to nod.
Terror attacks that kill and injure scores of people have become all too common around the world. The Chelsea explosion, which took no lives, was widely seen as a near miss. But its proximity to the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in Manhattan, and its callbacks to that day, sent shudders through the city 15 years later. The police have said there have been some two dozen terror plots against the city since then, the vast majority thwarted, but none that shook and smashed a block as strongly.
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Ahmad Khan Rahimi in custody last year, after he was accused of setting bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey. He was found guilty on all counts Monday.Credit Mel Evans/Associated Press
Embattled movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was expelled Saturday from the ranks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the latest show of solidarity by Hollywood against a onetime titan of the industry.
The academy’s 54-member board said in a statement that they had “voted well in excess of the required two-thirds majority” to oust Weinstein, who has seen a wave of Hollywood actresses in recent days accuse him of sexual misconduct over the past three decades.
Members of the board include well-known stars such as Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Laura Dern, Michael Mann, Steven Spielberg and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy. Nearly half of the members of the academy’s board of governors are women.
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The Academy Expels Harvey Weinstein Amid Sexual Misconduct Claims
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Explore the dynamic relationship between faith and science, where curiosity meets belief. Join us in fostering dialogue, inspiring discovery, and celebrating the profound connections that enrich our understanding of existence.
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James' World 2 