Baltimore police arrested the driver of a suspected stolen car who crashed into another vehicle. City police said an officer detected a possible stolen vehicle around 12:55 p.m. Tuesday at West Lafayette Avenue and Poplar Grove Street in southwest Baltimore. Police said the officer tried to stop the vehicle, but the driver fled.
More than a decade into a life sentence for assisting in the sale of $20 worth of marijuana to an undercover cop in Louisiana, Fate Winslow is set to be released on Wednesday. "Today redemption has come," he told Yahoo News in an email.
‘I suspect the timing is anything but coincidental,’ said one ally of the vice president
In newly declassified messages, ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok, who oversaw the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia, touted the Steele dossier’s ability to “influence” media.Senate Republicans on Thursday released a number of internal FBI messages from Strzok that provide insight into Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation into the Trump campaign. The Justice Department declassified the records on December 1 after Senators Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) asked Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray to declassify the documents in October as part of their investigation into Crossfire Hurricane.Strzok’s messages suggest that he was aware that former British spy Christopher Steele, whose dossier was used by the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants against Carter Page, was a source for a Yahoo! News story alleging that Page had a secret meeting in Moscow with two Kremlin insiders.“Looking at the Yahoo article, I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform,” Strzok, who was fired from the FBI in August 2018, wrote on Sept. 23, 2016.It was later uncovered that Steele was a source for the article and he had met with a number of journalists in Washington, D.C. as part of an opposition research campaign commissioned by the DNC and Clinton campaign.Though Strzok expressed his suspicion that Steele was the source for the article, the Bureau continued working with the ex-spy and did not disclose Steele’s contact with journalists to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).The FBI later ended its relationship with Steele after he spoke to Mother Jones for another dossier story on October 31, 2016.A number of the allegations included in the dossier have since been discredited and a December 2019 report by the Justice Department inspector general criticized the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team for failing to communicate key details about Steele and the dossier to the FISC.
A man has been sentenced to death in Japan for the murders of nine people in 2017, ending a case that grabbed local headlines as the 'Twitter killer.' 30-year-old Takahiro Shiraishi was found guilty of murdering, dismembering and storing the bodies of the victims in his apartment outside Tokyo. According to the Jiji news agency, the prosecution said Shiraishi first contacted the nine on Twitter after they expressed suicidal thoughts. The agency also says he used a handle that loosely translates to 'hangman' and that Shiraishi invited them to his home promising to help them die. Kyodo news reported that his defense lawyers argued he killed the victims with their approval. The judge ruled the victims did not consent to being killed, and that Shiraishi was mentally fit to be held responsible for their murders. One juror spoke to media on Wednesday. "When I listened his testimony, it made me imagine the killings he committed inside my head. Sometimes I remembered the savage ways he committed the murders at night so it was a bit of a burden on me." According to Japanese media, Shiraishi said before the trial that even if he was handed the death penalty he would not appeal. In Japan the death penalty is carried out by hanging, with execution dates not made public until after it happens.
President Vladimir Putin said media reports that Russian state security agents had poisoned opposition politician Alexei Navalny were part of a U.S.-backed plot to try to discredit him, saying Navalny was not important enough to be a target. Navalny, one of Putin's leading critics, was airlifted to Germany in August after collapsing on a domestic flight. Laboratory tests in three European countries, confirmed by the global chemical weapons watchdog, established he was poisoned with a Soviet-style Novichok nerve agent but Russia denies this and says it has yet to be shown any evidence.
The Northeast’s first whopper snowstorm of the season buried parts of upstate New York under more than 3 feet of snow, broke records in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and left snowplow drivers struggling to clear the roads. “It was a very difficult, fast storm and it dropped an unbelievable amount of snow,” Tom Coppola, highway superintendent in charge of maintaining 100 miles of roads in the Albany suburb of Glenville, said Thursday morning. The storm dropped 30 inches on Glenville between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. Thursday, leaving a a silent scene of snow-clad trees, buried cars and heavily laden roofs when the sun peeked through at noon.
Jen O’Malley Dillon became first woman to manage successful Democratic presidential campaign this year
President Trump was privately coming to terms with his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, but he "has now reversed and dug in deeper -- not only spreading misinformation about the election, but ingesting it himself," CNN reports, "egged on by advisers like Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis who are misleading Trump about the extent of voting irregularities and the prospects of a reversal." One adviser told CNN, "He's been fed so much misinformation that I think he actually thinks this thing was stolen from him."Even the Electoral College formalizing Biden's win "did not appear enough to shake Trump from his delusions of victory," CNN says, "but it is adding urgency to a push by several of his advisers to gently steer Trump toward reality." Discussions of Trump's post-presidency future tend to go nowhere because Trump "all but shuts down," CNN reports. "In his moments of deepest denial, Trump has told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, only to be walked down from that ledge. The possibility has alarmed some aides, but few believe Trump will actually follow through.""To be perfectly clear about this, Trump 100 percent will leave the White House on Inauguration Day, if not well before," Jonathan Chait writes at New York. "Even the scholars who expressed the deepest fears of Trump's intentions to undermine the system did not put credence in the possibility he could defy the outcome by simply refusing to leave. Squatting is not one of the tools in his authoritarian tool kit." But the fact that Trump thinks that's even a viable option suggests he's "engaged in more than a scheme to grift his supporters," Chait says. He's "drinking his own poisoned Kool-Aid."If Trump does have to be forcibly removed from the White House, you can credit Bill Maher with the prediction. More stories from theweek.com 5 insanely funny cartoons about Trump's election-fraud failure Senators expect to pass government funding, coronavirus relief bills this weekend Russia banned from use of its name, flag, or anthem at next 2 Olympics after doping scandal
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday he hoped for good news soon about two citizens who have been held in China for the last two years in what Ottawa has described as a case of hostage diplomacy. China arrested businessman Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Kovrig in December 2018, shortly after Canadian police picked up Huawei Technologies Co Ltd Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. warrant. Asked by Global News whether he thought there would be good news for the men's families before the New Year, Trudeau replied: "I certainly hope so."
Tobias Ellwood has insisted he did not break tier restrictions after attending a 27-person function in London this week. The Tory MP and chairman of the defence select committee was among the attendees at an event dubbed a “Christmas party” by the Iraq Britain Business Council. Under London's Tier 3 restrictions, people must not meet anybody outside their household or support bubble in any indoor or outdoor setting, and the "rule of six" also applies. Mr Ellwood has defended his attendance at the gathering by insisting it was a business function and therefore permitted under current restrictions. "It was a Covid-complaint event. We have troops out in Iraq, the security situation is deteriorating and I was invited. "It was the wrong word. There was nothing Christmassy about it at all." The reference to the gathering being a "Christmas party" has since been removed from the group's website. Mr Ellwood said he gave a speech at the event, "spoke to a few people and then left".
The dashcam video captured a horrific scene: a Kansas sheriff's deputy in a patrol truck mowing down a Black man who was running, shirtless, across a field in the summer darkness after fleeing a traffic stop. Lionel Womack — a 35-year-old former police detective from Kansas City, Kansas — alleges in a excessive force lawsuit filed Thursday that he sustained serious injuries when Kiowa County Sheriff's Deputy Jeremy Rodriguez intentionally drove over him during the Aug. 15 encounter. Womack said in a statement that he hadn't been speeding nor was he under the influence of anything when he was initially pulled over.
She said due to the absence of a plan, ‘nefarious forces’ can come into play to fill the vacuum
Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, has the awkward responsibility of overseeing President-elect Joe Biden's final victory — and President Trump's official defeat — with the formal counting of Electoral College votes at a special Jan. 6 joint session of Congress. "Then he'll likely skip town," Politico reports. "According to three U.S. officials familiar with the planning, the vice president is eyeing a foreign trip that would take him overseas for nearly a week, starting on Jan. 6."Pence's tentative itinerary includes Bahrain, Israel, and Poland, and more stops may be added, Politico reports. The trip, which hasn't been finalized, is ostensibly designed to underscore the Trump administration's role in brokering diplomatic deals between Israel and a handful of Arab states, and it will helpfully bolster Pence's "already-strong credentials with the Christian right, which strongly supports Israel," Politico notes. But it also takes the vice president out of range of Trump's wrath following the final confirmation of Biden's win. "I suspect the timing is anything but coincidental," a Pence ally said.One White House official compared Pence's role in counting electoral ballots to delivering a death notice, telling Politico, "By no means is this going to be an easy moment for the vice president or president to stomach." Worse for Pence, Trump is currently "at a juncture when loyalty appears his principal concern, complaining repeatedly over the past weeks that Republicans are deserting him when he needed them to help overturn the election results," CNN reports. "When he is not phoning Republican lawmakers to assess their willingness to help him overturn the election results, he is busy devising ways to exact revenge on those he believes abandoned him."Pence hasn't traveled out of the country since last January. Read more about his emerging escape plan at Politico.More stories from theweek.com Trump has reportedly been convinced he actually won, tells advisers he may not vacate the White House 5 insanely funny cartoons about Trump's election-fraud failure Senators expect to pass government funding, coronavirus relief bills this weekend
The storm could dump over a foot of snow in parts of Pennsylvania, New York and elsewhere; wintry conditions have begun in North Carolina and Virginia.
William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. has long claimed that he had no involvement in the death of Ahmaud Arbery but newly released bodycam footage has revealed otherwise. On Monday, News Jax exclusively obtained the body camera footage of a police officer who interviewed Bryan after Arbery, an unarmed Black man, was fatally shot in February. As theGrio reported, Arbery was chased by Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael while jogging in Brunswick, Georgia in February.
In many ways, normal life has resumed in China, the country where COVID-19 first appeared one year ago. “It feels like life has recovered,” said moviegoer Meng Xiangyu, when Beijing theaters re-opened with 30 percent of their seating after a six-month hiatus. China's ruling Communist Party has withdrawn some of the most sweeping anti-disease controls ever imposed, but remains on guard against fresh outbreaks and cases from abroad.
Joe Biden will not shy away from using President Donald Trump's weapon of choice - sanctions - as he seeks to reshape America's foreign policy, according to people familiar with his thinking. But when Biden takes office on Jan. 20, he is expected to quickly begin recalibrating Trump's blunt-force approach while taking time to deliberate before making any major changes with top sanctions targets like Iran and China, the sources said. This will come after four years in which Trump has imposed punitive economic measures at a record pace – often unilaterally - but has failed to bend U.S. rivals to his will.
Discover the top tomes for every interest—from fashion to design to travel–that our editors loved this yearOriginally Appeared on Architectural Digest
More than 40 inches of snow was reported in parts of New York State
The riders died on U.S. Highway 95 last week near Las Vegas due to "reckless behavior" by the defendant, the Clark County district attorney said.
