Police block off a road after a shooting incident in downtown Fresno, California on April 18, 2017. (Fresno County Sheriff / Reuters)
A suspect was apprehended after killing three people and injuring one other Tuesday in downtown Fresno, California, in what authorities are calling “a random act of violence.” Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said at a news conference the suspect, who was identified as 39-year-old Kori Ali Muhammad, allegedly shot and killed three people in the city’s downtown area, including a Pacific Gas & Electric employee and two others outside a Catholic Charities facility. Muhammad, who police say yelled “God is great” in Arabic before he was apprehended, was wanted by police on suspicion of fatally shooting a security guard outside a Fresno hotel last week. Dyer added the suspect’s Facebook page indicated “he does not like white people,” and also included “anti-government sentiments.” Authorities did not label the incident a hate crime, and said it is too soon to determine if it was an act of terrorism. Muhammad is believed to have acted alone and faces four counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder.
This story is developing and we will update it as we learn more.
Pedro Hernandez Sentenced to 25 Years to Life in Etan Patz Murder Case
Louis Lanzano / Reuters
Pedro Hernandez was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison Tuesday for the kidnapping and murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz, marking an end to the infamous case that began nearly four decades ago. Hernandez was convicted by a New York jury in February at the end of the case’s second trial. The first, which took place in 2015, ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked. Hernandez confessed in 2012 that he lured Patz into the basement of the grocery store where he worked in 1979 and strangled him; Hernadez’s lawyers argued the confession was a product of police manipulation and that Hernandez is mentally ill. Patz, whose body was never found, was one of the first missing children to ever be pictured on a milk carton. The anniversary of his disappearance has since been commemorated as National Missing Children’s Day.
United Airlines CEO: No One Will Be Fired Over Dragging Incident
Lucas Jackson / Reuters
United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz said Tuesday no one would be fired from the airline over last week’s incident in which a passenger was dragged off what was thought to be an overbooked flight. The airlines’s executives added it was too soon to tell how the incident has affected ticket sales. Video of the incident, which showed police forcibly drag the 69-year-old passenger, Dr. David Dao, off his seat and down the plane’s aisle, generated global backlash against the airline and wiped nearly $1 billion off United Continental Holdings Inc’s value. Munoz condemned the event as a “system failure” and vowed the airline would no longer use law enforcement to remove passengers who are “booked, paid, seated.” The controversy prompted other airlines to revisit their policies, as well. Delta Airlines announced Friday it would increase its compensation to passengers removed from overbooked flights from $1,350 to $9,950, and American Airlines said it would no longer permit the removal of passengers who have already boarded the plane.
Police Say Facebook-Murder Suspect Steve Stephens Found Dead
(Reuters)
Updated at 1:23 p.m.
Pennsylvania State Police announced Tuesday that Steve Stephens, the man authorities in Cleveland say shot and killed a 74-year-old man and uploaded video of the slaying to Facebook, killed himself in Erie County.
Steve Stephens was spotted this morning by PSP members in Erie County. After a brief pursuit, Stephens shot and killed himself.
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams thanked the public for their help in finding Stephens, noting authorities had 400 tips on his whereabouts. He also warned of using social media to post videos of violence. “We can’t do this in this country,” Williams said in a news conference. “I think the people on social media kind of know the power and the harm it can do.” The video remained on Facebook for more than two hours before it was removed by the social-networking site. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “We will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening.”
Stephens made several Facebook posts before the shooting, saying he’d lost all his money gambling and that he was upset with his girlfriend. He also claimed to have committed a dozen other murders, though police have not verified if that is true. The killing happened Sunday afternoon, and the video, as described byThe Washington Post, shows Stephens approach a man, then ask him to repeat the name of his girlfriend. The man does so, then Stephens says, “She’s the reason why this is about to happen to you.” Stephens then raises the gun and fires, according to the Post. The victim was identified as Robert Godwin Sr., and police said there was no indication the men knew each other. Authorities say they believe Stephens left the state, and they cautioned residents in Pennsylvania and New York that he is armed and dangerous. Stephens was last seen in a white Ford Fusion.
Following the killing, Facebook said it needed to respond to such videos more quickly. “We know we need to do better,” Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice president of global operations, said Monday in a blog post. As early as this morning, Stephens’s whereabouts were unknown. Rumors that Stephens had been spotted in other cities and as far afield as Texas were dismissed by authorities in those places. This is not the first time a crime has been committed and video of it found on Facebook.
Protesters demonstrate against Arkansas’s scheduled executions outside the Capitol building in Little Rock on April 14, 2017. (Kelly P. Kissel / AP)
The U.S. Supreme Court declined early Tuesday to vacate the Arkansas Supreme Court ruling halting a scheduled execution from taking place. The high court’s ruling, which came just minutes before the death warrant of 54-year-old inmate Don Davis expired, prevented the state of Arkansas from conducting the first of eight lethal injections scheduled to take place this month, as well as the first execution to take place in the state since 2005. The court provided no explanation for the denial, and no dissents were recorded. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson said he was “disappointed” by the decision, but added the state “will continue to fight back on last minute appeals and efforts to block justice for the victims’ families.” As Garrett Epps noted, the state’s decision to schedule eight executions over the span of just 11 days—a rate the Death Penalty Information Center, which monitors executions in the U.S., called “unprecedented”—correlates with the state’s supply of execution-drug midazolam that is set to expire at the end of the month.
U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May Calls for New Elections on June 8
(Toby Melville / Reuters)
U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has called for early general election on June 8, a date that marks almost one year since the country voted to leave the European Union. “The country is coming together but Westminster is not,” May said, referring to the U.K.’s Parliament. Lawmakers will vote tomorrow on May’s call, and they are expected to approve early elections; elections were previously scheduled for 2020. While political opposition to Brexit remains high, polls still narrowly support the vote; more good news for May is that her Conservative party is comfortably ahead of most of its rivals.
A controversial new study raises questions about the optimal floor for pay.
Seattle’s decision to hike its minimum wage up to $13 an hour—on its way to $15—ended up costing its low-wage workers time on the job, hundreds of dollars of annual income, and a shot at a better livelihood.
That is a reasonable conclusion one could draw from a blockbuster, if not yet peer-reviewed, new study on the city’s famed minimum-wage increases. The research, performed by a group of academics from the University of Washington, looks at detailed data on the earnings and hours of workers affected by the hike of the wage floor from $9.47 an hour to $11 in 2015, and from $11 an hour to $13 an hour in 2016. It concludes that, for low-wage workers, that second wage increase reduced hours worked by nearly 10 percent and earnings by an average of $125 a month. The findings, though preliminary, call into question years of economic research and the decisions of dozens of states and cities to bump their wage floors up.
The president may be overstating the gang’s impact.
As President Trump sat for Time’s Person of the Year interview last year, he excused himself and returned with a copy of Newsday. He wanted to show editor Michael Scherer a headline. “‘EXTREMELY VIOLENT’ GANG FACTION,” it read, and the article told of murders in Suffolk County, New York, all linked to MS-13. One murder was that of 16-year-old Kayla Cuevas, who’d argued with MS-13 members at her high school. The gang, many of them also teenagers, found Cuevas and a friend walking along the street and beat them with baseball bats and hacked at them with machetes. “They come from Central America,” Trump said to Scherer. “They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met. They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal.”
If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class.
The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.
But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.
The South Coast, a 30-mile drive from Palo Alto, is facing an affordable-housing shortage that is jeopardizing its agricultural heritage.
On the drive up the coast from the southernmost part of Northern California’s San Mateo County, Highway 1’s two lanes are surrounded by wind-whipped seas on one side and redwood forests on the other. The landscape is dotted with wild yellow mustard in the spring and pumpkins in the fall. A popular place for day-trippers to picnic, go wine-tasting, and shop at roadside farm stands, the region—affectionately nicknamed “the Slowcoast” for its unhurried pace—is a balm to the busyness nearby in Silicon Valley, to the east, and San Francisco, to the north.
Home to fewer than 3,000 people, the South Coast is the least densely populated part of the Bay Area. While it feels like a region unto itself, it is part of San Mateo County, which is where—just over the Santa Cruz Mountains—several big tech companies, such as Facebook and Oracle, are based. South of those firms’ campuses (in Santa Clara County) are the well-known tech hubs of Mountain View, Cupertino, and Palo Alto. San Mateo County is also the home of some of the wealthiest tech executives: The city of Atherton, about a 30-mile drive from the South Coast, was, according to Forbes, the country’s most expensive zip code in 2015 and the third-most expensive in 2016. The countywide median price for a single-family home reached $1.2 million last year.
An analysis to see if the algorithms behind the new emoji contribute to political bubbles in America
James Berri traveled three hours to Sacramento earlier this month for his first Pride parade, one of hundreds of annual LGBTQ celebrations across America. Berri also talked about the experience on Facebook, reading and reacting to other people’s posts with thumbs-up likes and Facebook’s new rainbow “Pride” emoji. Throughout June, the platform is offering a rainbow flag alongside likes, hearts, and angry faces that people can click on to react to others’ posts and comments. Yet Berri, a 21-year-old transgender artist, is conflicted over the fact that not everyone can use this new rainbow button.
Back in Fresno, Berri wondered how Facebook decides who’s eligible. “Why don’t they have it, too?” he asked, referring to friends sitting with him in a salon in the larger, less-prominent California city. “It makes me confused for my friends.”
The latest winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race is a politically engaged oddball—which is, in its way, pretty traditional.
If you’reever in need of perspective on whether our society is in true upheaval or if we’re only experiencing the same cultural battles that have raged forever, old Geraldo clips on YouTube will always offer some clarity. Recently I found myself binging on the talk show’s coverage of “club kids,” a scene of 1990s New York City partiers who wore fantastical and frequently gender-bending outfits. In various episodes over the years, Rivera invited them on and then scoffed at their floral masks and harlequin makeup, their coy references to drug use, and their queerness. Once, they inspired him to ask, somewhat in earnest, “It’s four in the morning—do you know where your children are?”
Last week, RuPaul retweeted a link to one of those episodes, from 1990, which featured him a few years before he became America’s most famous drag queen. Midway through, Rivera asked whether dressing outlandishly is an art, and RuPaul gave an exuberant yes. “I dropped out of society when Reagan got in office,” he added, then took the opportunity to rally the audience: “Everybody say ‘love!’ Everybody say ‘love!’”
A new study found that people who identify as Slytherins may be measurably different from the Hufflepuffs of the world.
I’m not particularly proud of this fact, but here it is: Pottermore, the Harry Potter-themed website unveiled by J.K. Rowling in 2012, has peered deep into my soul, evaluated its findings, and pronounced me a Hufflepuff.
Fans of the series will know why this is upsetting. For all the non-Harry Potter buffs reading this, though, here are three quick points of explanation. One: At Hogwarts, the wizards’ academy that serves as the backdrop for most of the series, students are sorted into one of four houses, each with its own distinctive character. Two: On Pottermore, fans can take a personality quiz to do the same. Three: Hufflepuff’s defining trait is “nice.” Its mascot is a badger. Its members, if Hogwarts were an American high-school cafeteria, would be the ones in the corner, frantically combing the trash for their retainers.
The mercurial comedian, who plays the disruptive Erlich Bachman, departed the show under mysterious circumstances in Sunday’s season finale.
If you watched Sunday night’s fourth-season finale of Silicon Valley without reading the accompanying online chatter, you might not have realized that it marked the final appearance of one of its most beloved characters, Erlich Bachman (played by the comedian T.J. Miller). On a mission to retrieve the tech CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) from his retreat at a Tibetan monastery, Erlich gets waylaid at an opium den; a frustrated Gavin pays the proprietors to keep him busy there for five years. It sounds final, but it’s also exactly the kind of ridiculous predicament Erlich got himself in for the entirety of the show’s run. So why is this the way Silicon Valley chose to say goodbye to him?
As usual with an unexpected showbiz departure, there have been multiple reported sides to the story. It’s hard to imagine that Miller’s departure will be a good thing for Silicon Valley: Erlich has always served as a delightful narrative wrench for the show, sidetracking stories and upsetting the Pied Piper team’s apple cart with his oft-stoned, egotistical antics. A Silicon Valley without Erlich will be a smoother show, but not necessarily a better one—especially since the character embodied the sort of unrestrained, tech-industry id the series sought to satirize.
She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.
The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.
The Supreme Court granted review of the president’s travel ban in October, but the Court clearly hopes—and strongly hints—that the case will be moot by then.
The Trump administration finally got some good news from a federal court Monday. In the twin cases challenging the president’s executive order barring entry into the U.S. by nationals of six majority Muslim countries, the Supreme Court handed the government a genuine but very partial victory, with a hint of more to come.
But the victory was limited in a way that anyone who has ever been 12 years old will understand. The court didn’t say the government could never have a pony. But it didn’t say the government could have a pony either. Instead, it said, “If you still want a pony next October, we’ll see.”
The ambiguity arises because, as Georgetown Law professor Martin Lederman pointed out within minutes of the decision, the court merely granted review, and delayed actual consideration of the case until the opening of next October’s term—by which time the specific issue will most likely be moot. At the same time, the interim order preserved the important victories won by many of those actually harmed by the travel ban—family members of American citizens or residents, foreign students at American universities, and potential foreign employees of American corporations.
