The South Korean government has launched an app which allows victims of stalking offences to be notified if their stalker comes within range. More than 400 people are enrolled in the scheme, which has been operating since June.

Control centres in Seoul and Daejeon cover more than 5,000 people under electronic monitoring, and handle 19,000 alerts a day, said The Guardian. “Most are filtered out by staff at the centres but about 300 a day are serious enough to send out a probation officer.”

Stalking cases are “on the rise” in South Korea. In the four years since a dedicated stalking law was introduced in 2021, reports have tripled, reaching 44,687 in 2025. Many South Koreans believe the government needs to do more to address the root causes behind the epidemic.

Greater visibility

Previously, survivors received a text message warning if their stalker was nearby and giving an estimated distance, said The Guardian. The new app notifies the victim if their stalker is within a 2km radius, flagging their precise location on a real-time map.

If the offender comes closer than a kilometre, the app notifies police; probation authorities will then call the victim to establish their safety and can dispatch officers to the area.

One case in particular fast-tracked the development of the app, said The Korea Times. In March, a woman in her 20s was allegedly murdered by her ex-partner, who was the subject of multiple restraining orders and was wearing an ankle monitor to track his location. The victim had been wearing a smartwatch issued to her by police for her protection. According to lawmaker Lee Gwang-hee, a member of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, between 2021 and August 2025, 23 murders or attempted murders involved victims who had been issued emergency alert devices, said The Korea Herald.

Tracking remains contentious. Under current laws, police must apply through the legal system to force a suspected stalker to wear an ankle tracker. In 2024 and 2025, 29,404 people were arrested in stalking cases, of which only 1,187 had court applications brought against them. Only 427 of those were granted.

‘Mixed’ reactions

Though the app is “in its early days” and on a “limited scale”, it has drawn “mixed” reactions, said The Guardian. One stalking victim who spent “two weeks moving between state-run shelters for survivors of domestic violence before being given a panic-button” told the newspaper that she would have “welcomed” the detailed real-time information provided by the app.

“Knowing a perpetrator’s whereabouts can be more helpful than not knowing,” Sujeong Kim of Korea Women’s Hotline told the paper. But victims may end up “checking wherever they go” to see whether the perpetrator has entered the radius, “adding to the psychological burden of living with the threat”. Too much information on the stalker’s location “risks shifting responsibility for their safety” onto the victim.

Non-technological measures are also planned to increase victim safety. In April 2027, the government is changing the legal process to allow stalking victims to “directly petition courts for restraining orders”, instead of relying on law enforcement agencies to file requests on their behalf, said The Straits Times. In July, a new taskforce was launched to focus on “addressing gaps in laws, systems and on-the-ground responses” around stalking offences, said Korea JoongAng Daily. The country’s justice ministry has also developed a “specialised psychological treatment programme to identify risk factors for recidivism” in stalkers.

While U.S. homicide rates have been plummeting, especially in the last year, one type of murder has been steadily increasing: domestic-violence-related killings. And many are worried the rise could be part of a larger trend of domestic violence.

‘Make national headlines’

There is no singular database for tracking domestic violence killings, but records from individual cities and states show a near-universal rise. In Chicago, homicides dropped by nearly half between 2021 and 2025, but domestic-violence-related deaths in 2025 rose by 15%, according to Chicago Police Department statistics. In Kansas City, Missouri, overall homicides have fallen since 2023, but 2025 marked the “city’s second deadliest year for domestic violence since 2014,” said Jackson County, Missouri, officials in a press release.

Statewide domestic violence killings are also seeing a surge. In Nebraska, at least 30 people “were killed in domestic abuse incidents last year,” said Nebraska Public Media. Overall, there were “89 domestic abuse deaths recorded in Nebraska between July 2022, when tracking began, and December 2025,” with about 56% of the victims being female. In Massachusetts, there were 31 people killed in domestic violence incidents in 2024, according to a report from the state’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team, marking a 19% increase from the prior year.

Sometimes these domestic violence killings “make national headlines,” said The Guardian. Notable cases this year include a shooting in which “eight children were killed and two women were injured in Shreveport, Louisiana,” or another instance “when several people were murdered in rural Oregon and in Billings, Montana.” Domestic violence deaths remain a “devastating and often fatal reality,” Vilma Uribe, the executive director of Massachusetts’ Governor’s Council to Address Sexual Assault, told GBH News.

‘Impossible to pinpoint a single cause’

Officials and anti-domestic-violence advocates have called for more resources to be pooled into preventing these killings and helping the victims of them. The “number-one need articulated over and over again is housing, and number two is legal support,” Nikhita Ved, the chief programs officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told The Guardian. The hotline shows additional evidence of increasing domestic violence; in 2020, it “received nearly 637,000 calls. In 2025, it answered a million,” said The Guardian.

Even in states where overall crime has dropped, like Maine, concerns over domestic violence killings remain. “Very, very frequently, the victim of homicide has told someone in their life, ‘I’m afraid that my partner is going to kill me,’” Francine Stark, the executive director of the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, told WGME-TV Portland. Many people “experience abuse and violence and never bring in the criminal system,” which can allow domestic violence crimes to go unpunished.

Though it is “nearly impossible to pinpoint a single cause for stubbornly high rates of domestic violence homicides,” the “resources to prevent such tragedies are well-known,” Ved told The Guardian. But concerns about funding have arisen during the Trump administration, as officials “cut hundreds of millions in grants from research institutions, and domestic violence prevention and response nonprofits that serve people of color, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities.” These types of cuts are “always devastating,” said Ved, because “this work, it’s always been underfunded.”

The Italian government has “moved in a unilateral and arrogant way, treating Sardinia like the Cayenne of Italy”, said Alessandra Todde, governor of Sardinia.

The official, referring to the former penal colony off the coast of French Guiana, nicknamed “Devil’s Island”, has accused the government of ignoring her objections, and not permitting her to be “involved in decisions that directly affect” Sardinia, said Il Sole 24 Ore.

Last weekend, 88 high-security prisoners arrived on the island, said The Times. They are among the “746 inmates held under Italy’s toughest solitary confinement rules”, taking Sardinia’s total to 183, a quarter of the national total.

Starting with protest flashpoints in February, Sardinians continue to oppose the prisoners’ relocation to the island, but one prison official told the newspaper: “we can’t send them to Sicily because many of them come from there in the first place”.

‘Alcatraz of Italy’

This is not the first time the island has been perceived by the central government as a favourable location for prisons, said The Times. In the 1990s, Sardinia “endured an influx of mobster prisoners” after a government crackdown on Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia. Many were locked up on Asinara, a small island off the Sardinian coast, including Raffaele Cutolo, a crime boss from Naples, and Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the head of Cosa Nostra. Asinara was nicknamed the “Alcatraz of Italy”, and only one prisoner escaped during its 112 years as a prison before it closed in 1997.

Implementing this process is the “first concrete result of the government’s plan to concentrate harsh imprisonment in seven Italian facilities, three of which are located in Sardinia”, said L’Independiente. Transferring the prisoners to the island also required significant logistical planning. Transporting the 88 prisoners required two finance police aircraft plus “10 military flights, 65 vehicles, eight ground convoys, seven ambulances, two drones and 207 officers”.

The prisoners will continue to be detained under the “hardline” “41 bis” programme, which promotes near-complete isolation, said The Italian Times. Introduced in 1992 following the assassinations by the mafia of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the regime is designed to “sever” contact with criminal networks outside jail.

The government has framed this “Sardinia expansion” as part of a “multi-region overhaul” of this system, concentrating the most high-risk criminals in regional posts. But the 41 bis regime has come under fire, being repeatedly challenged by the European Court of Human Rights. The initial stages of this rollout are a “test of how far Rome can concentrate its highest-security prisoners without triggering a fresh rights dispute at home and abroad.”

Movement of mafia clans

With its “silky, white beaches, turquoise bays and terracotta villages, Sardinia has worked hard” to forget its past and to “position itself as one of Europe’s most popular holiday destinations”, said The Telegraph. Asinara, which once hosted a maximum-security prison, became a national park in 1997. Now, it is “famed for its unique population of albino donkeys”. Local businesses are concerned this appealing image will be “tarnished” by the government’s plans to “dump hundreds of maximum-security prisoners in its jails”.

Locals fear that the island’s culture, once linked to “notorious mobsters and convicted terrorists” incarcerated away from the mainland, could re-emerge, said The Independent. As more high-security prisoners arrive, mafia clans could “move from mainland Italy to be near jailed relatives”. The risk would no longer be of violence, but of “white-collar crime”, with authorities concerned that the “precarious working conditions and low salaries provide an ideal environment for the clans”. There would be clear opportunities to “launder illicit money and infiltrate business, particularly in less developed areas”.

Sardinia already faces one of the country’s highest prisoner-to-inhabitant ratios, and increasing that could strain services. Like much of southern Italy, Sardinia has a “fragile healthcare system and an ageing population”. Additionally, islanders face “higher inmate healthcare costs than in other parts of the country.” If a “mobster” in prison were to require hospital treatment, they would require an escort of “dozens of prison guards”, and in order to accommodate them, and protect the public, authorities could be forced to “shut entire wards”.

Hundreds of arrests across dozens of countries have been linked to “The Com”, an online community of predominantly young men who carry out acts of violence termed nihilistic extremism.

“It’s violence for the sake of violence,” EU counter-terrorism coordinator Bartjan Wegter told the Associated Press in an interview ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. Unlike Islamic jihadism, “there’s not a direct link with ideology”.

What is ‘nihilistic terrorism’?

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the leading UK-based think tank dedicated to combating extremism, defines nihilistic terrorism as “violent acts lacking an ideological motivation and driven by a misanthropic world-view”.

Communities such as The Com form a “decentralised web of chats, forums and channels characterised by support for violence” but “with no specific political, ideological or religious goal”, although some factions have adopted extreme right-wing beliefs. The tactics and resultant harms of nihilistic extremists “often mirror those of ideologically motivated extremist networks”, with “some overlap between the two phenomena’s digital ecosystems, activities and cultural references”.

But this is “violence as a means of asserting oneself”, said the EU’s Wegter. It’s “a means of gaining status in those online communities”.

How do these networks recruit and operate?

Short for “The Community”, The Com is a broad online ecosystem that encourages and engages in cybercrime, extortion and violence.

Largely made up of young, male native English-language speakers, members range from “11-year-olds trying to hack Minecraft to people in their mid-20s targeting vulnerable kids online,” Aiden Sinnott, principal threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Sophos, told The Guardian.

Communicating via encrypted platforms such as Discord and Telegram, the networks serve as a pipeline where “older members of The Com contact kids and try to get them to commit increasingly sophisticated acts of criminality”.

Activities are split into three subsets. Hacker Com includes groups such as Scattered Spider, linked to last year’s massive data breaches of retailers Marks & Spencer and the Co-op. In Real Life Com phones in fake bomb threats to schools and offers violence-as-a-service contracts, and is associated with a spate of random stabbings over the last year. Lastly, Extortion Com coerces young people into sharing or live-streaming acts of self-harm, sexually explicit behaviour or even suicide.

One of the most notorious networks within Extortion Com is 764. Founded by Texas teenager Bradley Cadenhead, who is currently serving an 80-year sentence in the US for possessing child sexual abuse material, the network now has victims and perpetrators in dozens of countries.

The UK’s National Crime Agency has said reports of Com networks increased six-fold in the UK from 2022 to 2024, and researchers at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center in the US have identified at least 295 arrests across 33 countries linked to The Com.

What is being done to tackle them?

These attacks are tough to prevent or track because the perpetrators are young individuals without a criminal record, usually, “who don’t leave any footprints other than online perhaps, but then it’s often behind encrypted walls and communities,” Wegter told AP News.

Over the summer, Europol ran a campaign to target nihilistic violent extremist content online. Investigators from nine countries participated in “Referral Action Days” to disrupt the online ecosystem, limit propaganda dissemination, and find new investigative leads, including identifying around 4,340 web addresses linked to The Com.

The campaign also aimed to enhance “platforms’ response to and awareness of terrorist content online produced and disseminated by The Com groups”, said the agency.

What happened

A man armed with two handguns and a Taser charged toward Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee Dr. Amy Acton on Sunday as she addressed a crowd at the Canfield Fair, the Ohio State Highway Patrol said. The man, Patrick Havas, knocked down at least two elderly people but was stopped before he reached Acton and did not draw his weapons, police said.

Who said what

The apparent attack attempt came as the “unofficial start of the campaign sprint” kicked off on Labor Day weekend, Reuters said, and President Donald Trump’s “deep unpopularity is imperiling Republican chances” of keeping control of Congress and state offices. Acton’s “closer-than-expected race” against Republican Vivek Ramaswamy “has become extraordinarily toxic,” The Washington Post said. Ohio politicians from both parties condemned Sunday’s political violence, which a Ramaswamy spokesperson called “completely unacceptable.”

What next?

Havas, 38, was booked in the Mahoning County ​Jail for disorderly conduct and two counts of assault. Even before the Labor Day kickoff, this year’s “campaigns already have been combative, busy and expensive,” The Associated Press said, and “they are expected to get even more so” as “voters tune in ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.”

Every now and again, a single news story exposes what is “going wrong in modern Britain”, said The Telegraph. The head-on crash that killed two policemen and five joyriders in Middlesbrough in August, and its aftermath, is the latest.

This is “a community beset by brazen criminality”. The five young men were linked to organised crime and had 37 convictions between them. And the horrific crash has been followed by a series of gang-related incidents and acts of destruction. A house was rammed by a car and a man stabbed in suspected tit-for-tat attacks. At a memorial for one of the men, cars were smashed into each other in a field and set alight. In a separate incident, a seven-year-old and her aunt died in an arson attack. Last week, 200 officers from the National Crime Agency and other forces were drafted in to calm tensions.

‘Feral underclass’

“Almost all of the recent crimes have taken place in just one postcode,” said Felix Pope on UnHerd: TS6, a collection of deprived estates in southeast Middlesbrough with what one local politician calls “a feral underclass”. Residents speak of balaclava-clad young men on electric bikes and scooters terrorising the community. One local told The Yorkshire Post: “TS6 has gone mad.”

All this in a town that “once brimmed with pride”, said Ross Clark in The Sun. “Middlesbrough was once ‘Ironopolis’, one of the biggest producers of pig iron in the world.” Teesside shipyards turned out trawlers by the dozen. But after heavy industry went into a long and deep decline in the 1980s, Middlesbrough never recovered. The steelworks closed in 2015; the town is now one of the most deprived places in England – a place where the last two generations of many families have never known paid employment.

Successive governments should have done more to help these people, said Simon Heffer in The Telegraph. Instead, “the white working class has been pushed aside to stew on welfare benefits or in low-esteem jobs” – abandoned by a state whose first duty is to protect them. “No wonder so many of them feel no connection with it.”

‘Potential powder kegs’

Cleveland Police, the local force, is also a victim of neglect, said Leigh Jones in The Independent. Its area now has the highest crime rate outside central London. Yet it is one of the smallest forces in the country, and has been gutted by years of austerity. Had its budget kept up with inflation, it would be at £246 million this financial year; instead, it is just £196 million.

Yet this force is not an outlier, said Dominic Adler on UnHerd. Across the country, cash-strapped local constabularies are sitting on “potential powder kegs”, but these forces don’t have the resources to deal with even “modest” manifestations of organised crime, such as county-line drug gangs. Look beyond the police, and the whole criminal justice system – prisons, the courts and probation service – is poorly run, and often in crisis. Middlesbrough’s plight is the sign of a “full-spectrum failure, from nose to tail”.

What happened

A jury in Las Vegas on Monday found former gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of first-degree murder for orchestrating the 1996 drive-by killing of rap icon Tupac Shakur. During the three-week trial, prosecutors leaned on Davis’ public admissions that he procured and handed a fellow Crips member the gun that killed Shakur. Davis’ lawyer said his client’s admissions, including in his 2019 memoir, were “fiction” to “make money” from Shakur’s murder.

Who said what

Prosecutors said Davis and his nephew, Orlando Anderson, “went hunting” for Shakur after Anderson was beaten amid a bitter bicoastal rap feud between Shakur’s Death Row Records label, allied with the Bloods gang, and Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records, protected by the Crips. Both factions were in Las Vegas for a Mike Tyson fight.

The case “had languished” for years “as important evidence, including the murder weapon, remained missing and key witnesses” refused to cooperate, The New York Times said. Davis “began speaking to the police” in 2008 to avoid serious drug charges, but the plea deal that made him “untouchable” was rendered moot after he “began repeatedly addressing the shooting publicly” under the “mistaken belief that he was fully immune from prosecution.”

What next?

Davis, 63, faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced Oct. 13.

The trial of a Libyan man linked to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has been postponed at the 11th hour after new evidence emerged just days before jury selection was due to begin in Washington.

Two hundred and fifty-nine passengers and crew, as well as 11 people on the ground, were killed when Pan Am flight 103, from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, southwest Scotland, on 21 December 1988. It remains the UK’s worst ever terrorist attack.

Who was behind the bombing?

The bombing was “one of the largest and most complex acts of international terrorism ever investigated” by the FBI. “Solving the case required unprecedented international cooperation.”

Painstaking analysis of 319 tons of wreckage and thousands of pieces of evidence from a crime scene covering 845 square miles, along with thousands of interviews in 16 countries, eventually led investigators to two Libyan intelligence operatives.

In 1991 the UK and US governments charged Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah with the murders, which were believed to be retaliation for a series of confrontations between the US and Libya in the 1980s. A decade later Megrahi was found guilty at a trial held in a Scottish court specially built on a former US army base in the Netherlands and jailed for life. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and returned to Tripoli to a “hero’s welcome” before dying in 2012. Fhimah was acquitted at the trial and returned to Libya.

In 2003, the Libyan government formally “accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials” and agreed to pay nearly $3 billion to the victims’ families. “It never admitted Megrahi’s guilt directly”, though, said STV News, and “questions over the evidence, competing theories about who ultimately ordered the attack, and the involvement of only one convicted individual for an operation understood to have required a state intelligence apparatus have all persisted for decades”.

Then in December 2020, 32 years to the day after the bombing, the US charged Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi as a “third conspirator”. He was taken into custody in the US two years later and has awaited trial ever since.

Why has his trial been postponed?

US prosecutors alleged the Libyan and Tunisian dual national, now in his mid-seventies, was a long-time bomb maker for Libya’s External Security Organisation, and built and primed the explosive device placed in a radio cassette player hidden inside a suitcase on flight 103.

The trial of Al-Marimi, the first person to face justice for the bombing in a US court, was due to start in May 2025 but was delayed after his lawyers said they needed more time to work through more than 400,000 files of evidence.

Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled earlier this month that an alleged 2012 confession given to a Libyan investigator could be used as evidence at the trial that was finally due to begin this week. But the trial was again pushed back, this time to early next year, after “newly discovered evidence” previously unknown to the defence and prosecutors emerged on Friday.

The fact that Friedrich “would have been extremely reluctant to allow an 11th hour postponement after months of preparation and marathon pre-trial legal battles” underlines “the potential importance of the new evidence”, said the BBC.

For the families of those killed in the attack, the trial “represents something rare in this case: a chance for evidence gathered over nearly four decades to finally be tested, cross-examined and argued over in open court, in front of a jury asked to reach a verdict”, said STV News. This would provide some closure even though a conviction “would not, on its own, resolve the wider questions that have followed the case for decades about who else was involved in ordering and directing the operation”.

What happened

San Francisco 49ers principal owner Jed York on Monday pleaded no contest in Ohio to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and possessing criminal tools, after being arrested over the weekend at an East Palestine trailer park on suspicion of “engaging in prostitution.” As part of a plea deal to reduce the prostitution charge, York was fined $1,150, completed an online course and was credited with time served for one day in the Columbiana County Jail.

Who said what

The “criminal tool in ​York’s possession was believed to be a cellphone used to reply to a prostitution advertisement,” Reuters said. The cellphone was returned to him but “$160 that was seized was to be given to the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force,” The Associated Press said. Columbiana County Prosecutor Vito Abruzzino told the AP that prostitution cases typically ended in plea deals. The 49ers said in a statement the issue was a “legal matter” that “has been resolved” and there would be no “further comment at this time.”

What next?

The NFL said the case “will be reviewed under the personal conduct policy.” But it’s yet to be determined “whether York will emerge with the same punishment that a player would receive for the same offense,” said NBC Sports. “Owners are supposedly held to a higher standard than players,” but “there’s a perception” they are often “held to a lower standard in practice.”

A government minister has urged social media companies to “step up” and remove “content that celebrates dangerous driving”, after recent fatal collisions caused by young people driving on the wrong side of the road.

Seven people died in the early hours of Saturday morning when a Volkswagen Passat, containing five young men, sped the wrong way down the A66 near Middlesbrough and crashed into a police armed response vehicle. Last weekend, five teenagers were killed when their BMW, heading the wrong way down the M9 near Dublin, hit another car head-on, seriously injuring three women and a child.

“What makes this reckless behaviour even more appalling is that, in some cases, it is being done for social media likes,” said Justin Kelly, head of the Irish police force.

How big a problem is it?

One of the young men killed in the Passat seems to have previously shared TikTok videos of himself in a car chase with the police. And other social media accounts linked to the car’s passengers “appeared to show men in balaclavas on motorbikes and previous police chases set to rap music,” said The Times. Hundreds of videos “shot in the UK” are being “posted online to encourage young drivers to act recklessly for kudos”, according to the paper’s social media analysis.

The crash in Ireland has drawn attention to the activities of the “Lucky Dip” gang, whose members steal cars for thrills and upload footage of their joyriding “for validation and popularity”, said The Telegraph. Irish authorities have warned that they, and groups like them, are “trying to outdo each other” with videos of ever more dangerous driving.

Why are they doing it?

For excitement and for admiration from their peers. Showing off with risk-taking behaviour is nothing new, Mary Aiken, a professor of forensic cyberpsychology at the University of East London, told The Guardian, but social media “is psychologically immersive and could amplify a predisposition to taking risks and ignoring consequences”.

While they are driving, she said, they are “simultaneously filming and capturing content for posting later or live streaming. They have one foot in the real world and one foot in cyberspace. They’re thinking about the likes; they’re thinking about kudos.”

Is TikTok to blame?

The “macabre” video trend “has astonished and outraged” Ireland, and prompted debate not only about policing and criminal justice but also about social media regulation, said The Guardian.

UK defence minister Luke Pollard this morning warned social media companies that they have a decision to make. “They’ve argued against regulations, saying they can police themselves. Well, this is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate it.” The government can use powers in the Online Safety Act to compel them to take this content down but, if they took steps not to allow “their algorithm to share this type of content” to begin with, then “I think we’d be in a better place”.

Ireland’s media regulator said it has asked TikTok for a “full account” of what measures it has taken over risky and reckless driving content on its platform. TikTok has said it monitors content, and removes videos and accounts that break its rules.

TikTok has declined an invitation to appear before an Irish parliament’s media committee, partly because it was the only social-media company to be asked to do so. “We all know” it’s those boys who “are responsible for what happened”, said Alan Kelly, chair of the media committee, but the platform they used was TikTok. And we “want to have assurances, not only that they’ll be reactive and take down such content, but that also they’ll proactively make sure that it doesn’t go up. Because they have the AI tools to prevent this from happening, and they need to show that they’re going to do that.”

Almost 500 people have been arrested on suspicion of starting wildfires in France this summer as countries across Europe continue to “tackle ferocious blazes”, said The Guardian.

More than a thousand people were forced to flee from a Croatian holiday resort last week, while hundreds more were evacuated from villages in western Germany and southwest France. Stranded holidaymakers were picked up from beaches “threatened by flames” in Greece, and the army rescued “historic relics” in Spain. In Belgium’s Liège province, residents were asked to leave their homes as the biggest fire in the country’s history burned through the High Fens nature reserve.

By 16 August, fire and rescue services in England and Wales had been called to 1,132 wildfires this year, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council – that’s more than the record-breaking 1,017 for the whole of last year.

The recent heatwaves have led to a rise in blazes but how they start and if they are set deliberately then why does this happen, are keenly debated questions.

‘No common picture’

Almost all UK wildfires are started by people, said a 2024 report by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. A separate report by the Forestry Commission the previous year found that 97% of all wildfires are “related to some form of human action”, whether “deliberate” or “accidental”.

Nearly nine out of 10 forest fires in France are started by humans and some people “do so deliberately”, with the perpetrators “often difficult to identify”, said Le Monde. Although climate change “fuels the droughts, heatwaves, and winds that turn forests into tinderboxes, it is humans who set them alight”, said Euractiv.

In Portugal, which is known as the EU’s “most flammable country”, arson accounts for around a fifth of wildfires. In France, the authorities have calculated that nine out of 10 fires have a human origin, with 30% started deliberately. But the causes of fires elsewhere in the Mediterranean are “often not established, let alone investigated” so the “lack of reliable data” makes it “harder to design social and policy interventions to prevent fires”.

In Spain, some landowners set fires to move livestock around, and blazes can result from property disputes and acts of revenge. Arson “is not always random destruction”.

Europe may have “built advanced systems to detect wildfires and coordinate emergency response”, said Euronews, but there’s “no common picture of who starts deliberate fires or why”, because arson “remains a fragmented national matter”.

‘Fire is powerful, beautiful’

A man charged with starting a wildfire in Spokane, Washington, this month had planned the crime for weeks and even researched when the weather would be best for igniting it, said police. The suspect said “fire is powerful, beautiful, and that things that go through fire experience a kind of rebirth”, said The Associated Press.

In California, a suspect “spent days obsessing about arson” before heading to a clearing in Pacific Palisades late on New Year’s Eve, where he allegedly started a fire with a lighter, said the Los Angeles Times.

Although firefighters “quickly put out” that fire, investigators believe that the “embers continued to smoulder underground” and reignited to become one of California’s “most devastating” wildfires. It “consumed more than 6,500 structures” and left 12 people dead and billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

The disappearance of 43 students in 2014 has come to symbolise Mexico’s “brutal cartel violence and government impunity”, said The Guardian.

The case “rocked” the nation, and continues to “haunt” it. Now, the former governor of the state of Guerrero has been formally charged over his alleged involvement, after a judge ruled that Mexico’s attorney general had sufficient evidence to proceed.

Ángel Aguirre, who resigned as governor a month after the students vanished, is accused of “forced disappearance”, as well as the “obstruction of justice”: ordering the destruction of surveillance footage that “may have shed light on what happened”. He was ordered to remain in maximum-security detention pending trial. A lawyer for Aguirre denied any wrongdoing.

An elaborate cover-up

In September 2014, 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College “commandeered several buses” in the city of Iguala, Guerrero state, to get to a protest in Mexico City, said The Associated Press.

The local cartel is believed to have attacked the students “in collusion with security forces as well as local, state and federal authorities, including the millitary”. The students are presumed to have been killed, but only bone fragments of three of them have ever been identified.

Now, the federal prosecutor’s office has confirmed what international investigators “denounced years ago”: that camera footage, which recorded the moment security forces stopped a bus, was “hidden or destroyed to conceal evidence”.

It shows the students “lying face-down on the back of police pick-up trucks as they were spirited out of the city”, said the BBC. An initial investigation concluded that “corrupt municipal police” had “handed the students over” to the cartel, but that federal police and the military had been “uninvolved”. This provoked “widespread scepticism”; international experts called the findings “scientifically impossible”.

It was an “elaborate cover-up”, said The Guardian. Suspects were “tortured into giving false confessions”, and evidence from the crime scene was “manipulated”. A “years-long international investigation” later determined that both federal police and the military were involved, either by “participating directly”, or “failing to intervene as the students were taken away” and killed.

A state crime

The case, considered one ​of Mexico’s “worst human-rights atrocities”, has been “marred by missteps and interference”, said Reuters.

The Mexican government’s 2022 truth commission concluded that the cartel, Guerreros Unidos, and government authorities had been involved. Then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador described the case as a “state crime”. But almost all of those detained have since been released. Many claim López Obrador’s administration “blocked the investigation as it began to close in on the military”, said the BBC.

Last year, President Claudia Sheinbaum formed an investigative unit to re-examine the case, and the new attorney general, Ernestina Godoy, began a re-analysis. Godoy said new testimony had helped establish that Aguirre not only requested the footage, but had ordered its destruction. The concealment was “the result of a malicious operation, deliberately orchestrated from the highest levels of the State Executive Branch”, she told reporters last week.

“Key questions” still remain unanswered, said AP News. The motive is also “unclear”. Authorities believe the case is linked to “heroin trafficking in buses to the US”, organised by the cartel “in collusion with authorities”. But Aguirre’s indictment is the “biggest breakthrough” since the 2022 arrest of Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general in 2014, said The Guardian. Karam faces charges of forced disappearance, obstruction of justice and torture.

“We want no more deception,” said Meltión Ortega, spokesperson for the 43 students. The victims “deserve to have the actual perpetrators and the masterminds punished”.

What happened

ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to outfit immigration agents with gloves that can deliver electric shocks to debilitate people they are trying to detain, the Department of Homeland Security said in a procurement notice this week. Local law enforcement has been using the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (GLOVE) devices “more often in jails than in the streets, where ICE officers have increasingly used force to extract people from cars” and confront protesters, said The Associated Press.

Who said what

The GLOVE user manual says it can inhibit subjects from “performing coordinated muscle movement.” Demonstration videos “show it inflicting pain,” NPR said. Many of the police officers subjected to the device “grimace or yell, and almost all of them fall to the ground.”

DHS calls the gloves a “de-escalation device.” But “critics worry they could instead be used to intensify ICE’s already-aggressive enforcement tactics,” The New York Times said. GLOVE maker Compliant Technologies warns the devices “should not be used in response to verbal defiance, or for punishment,” said the AP, or “against some populations that ICE agents routinely encounter: the elderly, small children, pregnant women and the severely handicapped.”

What next?

The “size of the purchase suggests ICE plans to give the device to most or all of its officers,” the AP said. ICE agents have already shown “they are willing to disregard the law and are too quick to use force, with devastating and at times fatal consequences,” said the ACLU’s Jenn Rolnick Borchetta in a statement. Adding gloves that can covertly shock people is “a recipe for more harm to the public and less accountability.”

Is the honeymoon over already?

After a confident start in No. 10, Andy Burnham is facing his first real test as PM over his handling of the controversial prisoner early-release scheme.

Having already bowed to public pressure once to stop rapists and child sex offenders being released early, the PM this week insisted he was “increasingly confident” that the scheme can be adapted to exclude the killers of PC Andrew Harper.

Keen to find a line of attack that sticks, his critics have branded Burnham a “people pleaser” and a flip-flopper who does not want to take difficult decisions.

What did the commentators say?

The “conundrum” of how to manage the early release of prisoners required to free up much-needed prison capacity is an “acute example of the tricky political decision-making that inevitably comes with power”, said BBC political correspondent Jack Fenwick.

But Burnham’s choice to focus on the type of crime, rather than the length of offenders’ sentences, has “caused a political storm of its own” which has left the government scrambling to stop Harper’s killers being set free ahead of time.

His shifting position, and the decision to go on holiday while the row snowballed, is “his first serious mistake on the job”, said The Independent’s political editor John Rentoul. He has “belatedly realised that the politics of the problem are simple” and his premiership “would be over almost before it had begun if those two killers were let out early”.

But “the question posed by this course correction is whether the initial mistake was simply down to inexperience”.

While many politicians “seek to avoid the suggestion that they are swayed by public sentiment, Burnham has leaned into the idea that he is responding to Britons’ outrage”, said Lucy Fisher in the Financial Times.

U-turns are not necessarily a bad thing if they are judged to be the result of a government listening to the public’s concerns, as long as they don’t become a habit. Just ask Keir Starmer.

What next?

The row over exactly which offenders may or may not be eligible for early release “masks an uncomfortable reality”, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman: “our criminal justice system fails to keep people out of prison once they have left”.

If we were prepared to have a genuine debate about the issue, the “political fury” currently aimed at the government would instead “be directed at our dangerous reoffending rates” and how best to bring them down.

In place of that, the Home Office is pressing ahead with its aim to build 14,000 more prison places by 2031. In the meantime, in a Facebook post, Burnham has suggested removing foreign offenders more quickly, tackling the “long-running injustice of IPP sentences”, which have kept many minor offenders locked up for decades, and re-purposing some women’s prisons for male offenders, as ways to expand prison capacity.

But these are medium- to long-term solutions. The immediate task facing the government is trying to find a way to keep Harper’s killer behind bars without making a similar exemption for all manslaughter convictions.

Downing Street will hope its efforts over the past week “will be remembered as a PM who has forced the system to do what he wanted”, said Fenwick. They will “fear that the lasting impression could instead be of a misstep that’s left victims’ families in anguish”.

Nearly 30 years to the day since the fatal shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur, and Duane “Keffe D” Davis is standing trial for one of America’s most notorious unsolved murders.

At the core of the case is a self-published memoir by Davis, in which he claimed to be “one of the only living eyewitnesses” to the rapper’s killing.

It means, rather unusually, “he’s the defendant but he’s also the all-star witness,” said CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson.

What is in the book?

“Compton Street Legend”, published in 2019, opens in Las Vegas on the night of 7 September 1996, with a step-by-step account of the plan to confront Shakur and Death Row Records CEO Marion “Suge” Knight in retaliation for an earlier fight.

Davis writes how he secured a gun, jumped into a Cadillac with three others and drove around before spotting the pair at a junction.

“No words exchanged, the time for talking had passed, the shit was about to go down!” he wrote. Shakur was hit multiple times in the shooting that followed, and died from his wounds six days later.

At first, the book “drew little attention outside of online circles devoted to hip-hop lore and true crime”, said Julia Jacobs in The New York Times. But a detective with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department quietly began to build a case around it, and in 2023 excerpts from it convinced a grand jury to indict Davis on one count of murder, which Davis denies.

How will it be used at trial?

Given there is no murder weapon, getaway vehicle or surveillance video of the shooting, the prosecution’s case is “largely built on the defendant’s own words”, including his book, as well as podcast and documentary interviews and statements made to police, said CNN’s Eric Levenson.

Authorities accuse Davis of orchestrating the killing, without actually being the one who pulled the trigger, although he denies involvement. The prosecution team has painted him as a “shot caller” in the gang rivalry of the East and West coasts that climaxed in the shooting of Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. six months later. They say passages in the book are a confession made public in the mistaken belief he had immunity.

What does Davis say?

Davis, who has pleaded not guilty, claims that his prior statements about the night in question were false and merely an attempt to sell books.

“Not a confession to a priest, not a confession to a police officer, but rather to promote a book, to sell a product”, one of his lawyers said at a hearing last month.

His defence team unsuccessfully fought to block the use of the book during the trial, arguing that it was fictionalised and written with a co-author, making it impossible to know which parts Davis wrote.

It means the jury will face an “unusual dynamic”, said Levenson: “prosecutors are set to argue the accused murderer is credible and trustworthy, while defence attorneys will deride their client as a liar and fraud”.

The trial, which is taking place not far from the location of the shooting, is expected to take several weeks.

Alleged drug kingpin Daniel Kinahan is back on home soil in Ireland after being extradited from Dubai, marking “the end of a global game of cat and mouse with European, US and Gulf authorities”, said The Guardian.

Ten years after “escaping assassination and fleeing into exile”, the alleged head of Ireland’s biggest organised crime syndicate landed in Dublin on Sunday. “But it is not the homecoming he wanted.”

Met at the airport by a massive security operation, the 49-year-old was immediately taken to the Criminal Courts of Justice to face a charge of directing organised crime, then whisked away to the high-security Portlaoise Prison.

Who is Daniel Kinahan?

The son of Christy “the Dapper Don” Kinahan, a convicted drug trafficker, he allegedly took over from his father as leader of the Kinahan Cartel, a crime ring that is said to control about a third of Europe’s cocaine supply. He has been charged with directing the activities of a criminal organisation from 18 October 2015 to 6 April 2017, which he has denied.

The married father of five is also the founder of the boxing management company MTK Global, although the organisation, which ceased operation in 2022, has insisted it had cut ties with Kinahan.

He is said to have fled to Spain and then Dubai after an attempt on his life at the Regency Hotel in Dublin in 2016. “Six men, some disguised as police and one wearing a dress and a wig, entered the hotel” and opened fire at a boxing weigh-in, said The Washington Post. Kinahan escaped, but his associate, David Byrne, was shot dead, sparking a feud between the Kinahans and the rival Hutch gang.

How did he end up back in Ireland?

In April 2022, following pressure from the Irish authorities, the Kinahan Organised Crime Group was sanctioned by the US, which compared the group to “Mexico’s Los Zetas, Japan’s yakuza and Russia’s ‘Thieves In Law’”. A $5 million (£3.7 million) reward was also offered for tips leading to the arrest of Kinahan, his father or brother.

From then on, “it was always a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ the man labelled by Europol as one of the bosses of Europe’s ‘super cartel’ would be getting a one-way ticket home”, said Paul Williams in the Irish Independent.

Kinahan’s presence in the UAE over the past decade had “become a source of international embarrassment” for the Gulf state, especially when his 2017 wedding at the luxury Burj Al Arab was tweeted by heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury.

The breakthrough came in 2024, when Ireland managed to negotiate an extradition treaty with the UAE. Kinahan was arrested in April this year, and has remained in custody, clearing the way for his forced return to Ireland over the weekend on an Irish government jet.

When will he face trial?

In his brief court appearance on Sunday, Kinahan “cut a dejected but polite figure” as he addressed the three judges from the dock, said The Irish Independent. He will remain on remand in Portlaoise Prison until his trial, in a block cleared especially for him, spending up to 20 hours a day in his cell.

How long Kinahan stays there “has not been decided”, said The Irish Times. If he chooses to fight the case and wins at trial next year, “he would be released immediately”. If convicted, he faces “somewhere between 20 and 30 years in prison”. However, “nothing is proven against him at this point”, so “he is an innocent man in the eyes of the law.”

What happened

A Spokane resident charged with first-degree arson for allegedly starting the biggest of three wildfires surrounding Washington state’s second-largest city was questioned by police during two fire investigations last year, according to court documents released Tuesday. Aaron Farinacci, who was arrested and made his first court appearance earlier this week, served nearly a decade in prison in Arizona for fatally shooting his father during an argument over washing dishes. Spokane’s three fires, which have destroyed more than 700 buildings, are “ranked as the top firefighting priority in the ​U.S.,” Reuters said.

Who said what

Two sheriff’s deputies stopped Farinacci, 37, near the fast-growing Old Trails Fire on Saturday, but they were “unaware” of his “prior fire-related contacts,” The Associated Press said. Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels said Farinacci was carrying waterproof matches, a butane lighter and cigarettes. Nowels credited local resident Paul Child, 64, for noticing and reporting Farinacci’s suspicious behavior at the site where the fire began. When smoke appeared 10 to 15 minutes after he saw Farinacci bending over the grass and acting nervous, “my immediate thought was that SOB started a fire,” Child told The Spokesman-Review.

What next?

Farinacci is expected to enter a plea at his arraignment on Thursday. First-degree arson is punishable by up to life in prison.

One company in Austin, Texas, claims to have found a new solution to school shooters: drones. Mithril Defense is currently designing pepper-spraying drones, inspired by the Ukrainian military’s successful drone program, that the company says can respond to an active shooter within seconds. But while some are lauding the idea, others feel that adding this technology into schools might bring more problems than solutions.

‘It gives another set of eyes and ears’

The drone program developed by Mithril, called Campus Guardian Angel, provides an “elite, on-site safety response capability that works alongside school safety teams, confronting any active shooter threat,” the company’s website said. The drones are flown remotely and can reportedly arrive at a shooter’s location in 15 seconds. Upon engaging, the drones will “unload pepper rounds and are capable of hitting the shooter at a speed of up to 70 mph,” said The Independent.

The drones, currently being provided to schools in Colorado, Florida and Georgia, are “equipped with non-lethal effects, flown by several of the top drone pilots in the world and are supported by an elite team of former military operators, law enforcement and first responders,” Justin Marston, the founder and CEO of Mithril, told The Independent. These types of responses “matter and save lives during an active shooter situation.”

Law enforcement has lauded the use of these drones. “It gives another set of eyes and ears of the campus that I can't see all the time,” Deputy Trevor Autrey, the school resource officer at Deltona High School in Deltona, Florida, told WPTV West Palm Beach. Non-police officials were similarly enthusiastic. “As principal, I’m really excited about having this enhanced security on our campus,” Deltona High School Principal Dr. Christina Lapnow said to WPTV.

‘I have some really serious reservations’

For all those who support the drone program, others say they may not be as effective as tech enthusiasts hope — and could cause additional safety issues. The drones “might accidentally target a fleeing student instead of a shooter” or “remote pilots, in a split-second decision, might mistake a law enforcement officer for a shooter, especially if teachers initiate a false alarm,” Curtis Lavarello, the head of the advocacy firm School Safety Advocacy Council, said to The Washington Post.

It is “almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” Lavarello told the Post. “I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools.” Other experts have argued that “low-tech measures, like simply locking external doors, are just as effective,” said the outlet. If schools “spend significant resources on technologies designed to respond after shooting begins, we have to ask what we’re not investing in instead,” Jaclyn Corin, a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, told the Post.

Others connected with that shooting seem to agree. “These drones aren’t patrolling; they just pop up when needed. So that’s part of the problem,” Tony Montalto, whose daughter Gina died in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas attack, told WPTV. “We need to focus on the prevention piece rather than the reaction piece.” The larger approach “seems to reflect that part of America which says the way to address recurrent school shootings” is “not with stricter gun control laws,” said Moisés Ávila at Barron’s, but “rather with weaponry, such as giving teachers guns.”

What happened

German police on Sunday shot and killed a man suspected of carrying out a deadly attack at Berlin’s Pride celebrations less than 24 hours earlier. Officers opened fire after Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese heritage, charged at them with a “stabbing weapon” after being tracked to a community garden in the city’s Spandau district, authorities said in a translated X post.

A van allegedly driven by Ballout rammed into a crowd in Berlin’s Tiergarten park on Saturday as partygoers celebrated Christopher Street Day, the city’s oldest Pride event. Authorities said the suspect then attacked bystanders with a machete. One woman was killed and 29 people were injured, with three in critical condition.

Who said what

German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters that “everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack.” Hundreds of mourners gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on Sunday to “grieve the victims of the attack and express the anger and shock over what is seen as an attack on the LBGTQ+ community,” Deutsche Welle said. It “was an attack on all of us,” one speaker said. “But we will not let it defeat us.”

What next?

German authorities will review security arrangements for major public events — including upcoming Pride celebrations — amid concerns about possible copycat attacks.

What happened

Vance Boelter, the man who assassinated former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman (D) and her husband at their home last summer, was sentenced on Thursday to two life terms plus 40 years in prison. Boelter, 59, who also shot and critically injured state Sen. John A. Hoffman (D) and his wife, pleaded guilty last month to federal charges “so federal prosecutors would not seek the death penalty,” said The Associated Press.

Who said what

Boelter’s attacks “raised nationwide alarm” about “rising political violence,” said The Washington Post. His is the “longest sentence I have imposed,” said Judge John Tunheim, but “I do believe it is deserved.”

“No sentence can do justice for the horrific and unconscionable acts this monster perpetrated,” members of the Hoffman family said in a statement to The Minnesota Star Tribune. We must “start leading with kindness in grace in our public dialogue.”

What next?

With his federal case over, Boelter “will soon face accountability in a Hennepin County courtroom” on state charges, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement. Boelter is scheduled to appear in court on August 3.

What happened

French professional model recruiter Daniel Siad, who introduced Jeffrey Epstein to young women and teenage girls, was found dead in his home near Paris, French prosecutors said Wednesday. Siad’s name “appears more than 2,000 times” in the Justice Department’s Epstein files, which also document the deceased Epstein paying him “tens of thousands of dollars,” CNN said.

Who said what

Siad, 69, had been the “subject of special investigative techniques,” including phone taps, as part of an ongoing investigation of Epstein-related human trafficking and tax fraud, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement. But nothing had “produced evidence justifying his immediate arrest.”

The Epstein files exposed not only the sex offender’s “cozy relationships with high-profile and powerful” people, The Washington Post said, but also a “network of lesser-known associates — including those from the modeling industry — who offered to bring women into his orbit,” often via “crude and sexualized” emails in which the “purpose of the introduction was not explicitly stated.” Siad is the “second man publicly linked to Epstein who has died in France,” Reuters said, after modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who was “found hanged in his prison cell in 2022.”

What next?

Siad died of a heart attack, his lawyer Ménya Arab-Tigrine told Reuters, though “we must await the autopsy results to confirm.”

What happened

U.S. Marshals arrested controversial “manosphere” influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate in Florida on Saturday after British prosecutors said they had filed 38 new criminal charges against the brothers. Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said the Tates, who are dual U.S.-British citizens, now face a total of 59 charges, including rape, assault, sex trafficking and offenses relating to “indecent images of a child.” They were arrested “pursuant to extradition proceedings,” a U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson told NPR.

Who said what

The arrest of the Tate brothers, whose “social media empire” promotes “wealth, male dominance and misogyny,” puts the U.S. “at the center of an international legal saga,” The Associated Press said. In 2024, British police “secured European arrest warrants for the pair to have them returned from Romania, where they are based and are under criminal investigation,” the BBC said. But after what Romania said was intervention from the Trump administration, the Tates were allowed to fly to Florida last year.

What next?

The brothers are expected to appear before a magistrate judge in Miami on Monday. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will make the “ultimate decision” about whether to order their extradition, the AP said, but the State Department has “granted nearly every British request since ratifying a strengthened extradition treaty in 2007.”

“Westminster is reeling” from the news that, it seems, Ann Widdecombe was murdered, said Tim Shipman in The Spectator. “At this stage it is the done thing to urge people not to jump to conclusions” – but “the leaping has already begun”. Nigel Farage declared on Saturday that it was “premeditated murder”; Reform UK clearly believes she was targeted because she was its migration spokesperson.

Targeted attack

Devon and Cornwall Police had declared on Sunday that there was “nothing to suggest” the killing was “politically motivated”. On Monday, though, there was an about-turn. Counterterrorism police took over the investigation; a 28-year-old man, who had reportedly driven 300 miles from his home in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, to her village on Dartmoor on the day she died, was arrested. The crime was described as a “targeted attack”, perhaps linked to extremism. If the police don’t know what happened, said The Daily Telegraph, it’d “be better for them to say so”. Official speculation and obfuscation only fuels “mischief”.

Once again, MPs found themselves considering the question of their own safety, said Chris Mason on BBC News. The veteran Tory Sir Bernard Jenkin, recalling the deaths of Jo Cox and David Amess, claimed that as a member of Parliament “you are more likely to meet a violent death than a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces or a member of the British police forces”. MPs need to remain both “accessible and safe”. This, today, is a massive task. Farage believes the Royal and VIP Executive Committee, which is responsible for MPs’ security, has not taken his own safety seriously enough. And Widdecombe’s death suggests that not only the 650 sitting MPs, but also former members, may need help

‘Parasocial fixations’

Her death is shocking, “not just for its brutality”, said Mary Harrington on UnHerd. It’s shocking because it highlights “how much better, kinder and more trusting a country Widdecombe believed Britain to be, than the place we actually live in”. She was a traditional “British battleaxe”: a staunch conservative who never shied away from controversy, but was open, warm and courteous to those with whom she disagreed.

Britain, sadly, has grown “more fractured, skint, alienated and online” than the world she grew up in. “Parasocial fixations” on public figures are more and more common; harassment, and serious violence, often result. This baleful trend seems to have pursued Widdecombe to her home in a sleepy Dartmoor village – the last place on Earth, you’d imagine, “something so horrifying might happen”.

Florida has executed the oldest prisoner in its history, the latest in a spate of capital punishments against elderly death-row inmates.

Dennis Sochor was 74 when he was pronounced dead on Tuesday. He was convicted of killing Patricia Gifford in 1982, hours after meeting the 18-year-old at a party. The US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal without comment, said The Guardian.

Sochor is the second of three Florida inmates over the age of 70 to be executed within five weeks. The executions have drawn attention to the ageing death-row population in the US, as well as Florida’s status as the foremost death penalty state.

A spate of executions

Florida, known as the Sunshine State, is considered “a mecca for senior citizens”, said The Hill. But it has shown “no compunction about carrying out executions of elderly death-row inmates”.

In October last year, Florida executed 72-year-old Samuel Lee Smithers for the 1996 killings of two women. He was the oldest person to be executed in the state since the US reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Last month, Dusty Ray Spencer, just a week younger than Sochor, died by lethal injection. The 74-year-old had been convicted of stabbing his wife to death in 1992.

Florida is also preparing to execute its first octogenarian later this month. Dominick Anthony Occhicone, who killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 1986, turns 81 next month, after his scheduled execution. If his execution goes ahead, he’ll be the second-oldest known inmate put to death in modern US history, after 83-year-old Walter Leroy Moody Jr. in 2018.

Florida has carried out 10 executions this year, more than all other US states combined. Unlike many states, in Florida the state governor has “practically sole discretion” when it comes to deciding whether, and when, the death penalty is applied, said The Associated Press. About half of its 242 death-row inmates have “exhausted their appeals” and could see their death warrant issued at any time. Three of them, not including Occhione, are over 80.

A rapid acceleration

Donald Trump is one of the death penalty’s “most outspoken champions, making it a cornerstone” of his agenda, said The New York Times. And “nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more relentlessly than in Florida”, thanks to the “unusual concentration of power” in the office of Republican governor Ron DeSantis. In 2025, a record 19 of the 47 executions that took place in the US were in Florida: more than under any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a four-year nationwide moratorium.

DeSantis has “offered little public explanation” for this acceleration, after “years of relative inactivity”. The governor “makes execution decisions behind closed doors”, so there is “no way to know what criteria” he uses. “He could be deciding who is next to die by throwing darts at a list of names,” said Maria DeLiberato, attorney with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, “or spinning a roulette wheel.”

But Florida isn’t the only state “killing the old and infirm”, said The Hill. Death rows across the US are “filled with old people”. And more are being executed than in the past. The average age of inmates executed in the US has increased from 36 in 1977 to 52.3 in 2024, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The ageing population also creates new challenges for the penal system, with inmates who have spent decades on death row “sometimes developing medical conditions that can complicate efforts to execute them”, said the AP. Occhicone, the 80-year-old facing execution later this month, has multiple health problems and “needs help getting in and out of the shower”.

Some question “the humanity of administering capital punishment” to prisoners who might soon die naturally. For others, it shows how “lengthy appeals” and reviews designed to prevent an innocent person being executed “can also delay justice”.

Sara Duterte, vice president of the Philippines, has appeared in court to face impeachment proceedings in a trial that has brought long-standing political tensions to a head.

The 48-year-old daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte is accused of corruption, bribery, misappropriating millions in government funds and threatening to have the current president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, assassinated.

Duterte, who in 2024 became the first Philippine leader to face impeachment proceedings, denies the charges, calling them political harassment. The trial, which began on Monday, is the culmination of the fallout and feud between the Marcos and Duterte families, the country’s most powerful political dynasties.

Who are the Duterte and Marcos families?

Rodrigo Duterte ruled the Philippines with an iron fist from 2016 to 2022. In the 2022 election, Sara was the running mate of presidential candidate Marcos Jr, son of the dictator who ruled for 20 years before being deposed in 1986.

The two younger scions were “unstoppable”, said the BBC. The so-called “Tiger of the North” and “Eagle of the South” – in reference to the families’ geographical origins – were “seen as a dream team” and won a landslide. In the end, however, “there was not enough power to share between them”.

Cracks appeared when Marcos’ allies in the Senate began investigating Duterte for alleged misuse of government funds. The pair also disagreed on their approach to Beijing; Marcos ordered the navy to “stand up to China” in the South China Sea, said Al Jazeera, in “sharp contrast” to pro-China Duterte. This trial shifts the “power struggle” to “a new battleground”, said the BBC, which will now “play out on livestreams for the entire nation”.

What is the case against Duterte?

In October 2024, Duterte said “her relationship with Marcos had become so ‘toxic’ that she sometimes imagined beheading him”, said Al Jazeera. She also “threatened to dig up the remains of Marcos’ father” and “dump them in the sea”. In November, Duterte claimed during a “profanity-laced” livestream that she had told someone: “If I get killed, go kill BBM” (Marcos’ nickname is Bongbong so he’s commonly referred to as BBM) and his wife.

His supporters filed an impeachment complaint based on this livestream, and the alleged misuse of funds. But last year that case was “derailed for procedural reasons”, said Foreign Policy. Marcos’ supporters then refiled the case, leading to a new trial.

What is the significance of the trial?

Prosecutors see the case as “a test of accountability ‌and public trust”; the defence denounces it as “a politically driven bid” to unseat an elected official, said Reuters. The outcome could “shape the 2028 presidential race”, in which Duterte has announced she intends to run. Marcos cannot run as Philippine law permits presidents only a single term, but his family and coalition “expect to remain powerful”, said Al Jazeera.

There are “fears of widespread protests” and political turmoil that would “impact the Philippines’ economic growth” should Duterte – the current frontrunner – be convicted and barred from standing in 2028.

But “conviction will be difficult”, said Foreign Policy. Two-thirds of the chamber, 16 senators, must support impeachment. Of the 24 sitting senators, 14 are “Duterte allies”. However, “those allies are coming under pressure”, with two arrested on corruption charges and one “on the run from an ICC warrant”. More pro-Duterte senators may “come under fire in what looks like political pressure tactics”.

What happened

A federal judge in Manhattan Monday sentenced self-exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui to 30 years in prison for financial fraud. Guo was convicted in 2024 after transforming himself from wealthy Beijing insider to U.S.-based anti-Communist crusader with prominent conservative allies and a luxury lifestyle.

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres said he had “preyed on people seeking to bring democracy to China,” causing more than 1,000 supporters “substantial financial and emotional harm.”

Who said what

“The reason I came to the U.S. is to destroy” the Chinese Communist Party, Guo said in court Monday. “Guo did not lead a movement; he led a criminal enterprise,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Finkel countered.

Guo fled China in 2015 amid an anti-corruption crackdown. “By 2017, he was a member of Mar-a-Lago” and quickly “built political and business connections with some powerful people” in President Donald Trump’s orbit, notably Steve Bannon, The New York Times said. Bannon was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht in 2020 for allegedly defrauding investors, though “Trump eventually pardoned him.” Bannon “has repeatedly called for Guo’s freedom,” The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

Trump faces “calls from Guo’s supporters to pardon him” but also “Beijing’s long-running demand to hand him over,” the Journal said. Despite “Guo’s political alliances, a presidential pardon appears unlikely,” the Times said.

“There’s arguably been no greater fall from grace in the modern political era than that of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson,” said John Manley in The Irish News. The former Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader was once regarded as the “nice man” of unionism. He was always polite in media appearances, and wore a fish badge on his lapel as a symbol of his Christian faith. But it’s now clear that this virtuous demeanour was “a mask that hid serious crimes”.

This week, he was convicted of abusing two girls over a period of more than 20 years. The jury found him guilty of raping one victim when she was seven or eight, and carrying out multiple other indecent assaults. It concluded that his wife of 39 years, Eleanor Donaldson, had enabled his crimes by failing to act when red flags were raised or when she witnessed abuse herself. She was deemed unfit to stand trial on medical grounds.

‘Sinful nature’

Donaldson’s journey to the top had been a long one, said Mario Ledwith in The Times. Born in 1962, he began his political career working for the MP Enoch Powell and was first elected to Stormont when he was 22. It was around that time, the court heard, that his depravity towards children began.

Years later he wrote a letter to one of his victims, expressing regret for causing her “hurt, pain and distress” and asking forgiveness for his “sinful nature”; he apologised in person to the other victim at a meeting organised by a Christian group in 1997. In court, Donaldson claimed that those apologies referenced not abuse, but unrelated matters.

Closure at last

Even as a victim of sexual abuse myself, I never picked up on Donaldson’s dark side during my time as a politician, said Máiría Cahill in The Irish Times. “He duped everyone.” We can only wonder at the hypocrisy of the man and the sense of entitlement that led him, despite his secret crimes, to seek “such public roles and prominence”.

We should be grateful to the two women for breaking their silence and revealing the truth about Donaldson, said Gail Walker in the Belfast Telegraph. He is scheduled to be sentenced in September, and the judge has warned him to expect a lengthy jail term. Let’s hope that this late arrival of justice brings his victims “some form of closure”.

What happened

Two federal judges in Texas on Tuesday sentenced seven anti-ICE protesters to 50 to 100 years in prison over a demonstration last July outside the Prairieland Detention Center during which one of the defendants, Benjamin Song, shot and wounded a police officer. Prosecutors won terrorism convictions after portraying the group as part of antifa, the decentralized movement of antifascist activists. An eighth defendant who wasn’t at the protest received 30 years behind bars.

Who said what

Prosecutors “described the case as the first domestic terrorism trial” that convicted “alleged antifa cell members,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said. “The defendants denied having connections to antifa.” President Donald Trump last year “issued an executive order declaring antifa a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ — a designation that does not actually exist under U.S. law,” The New York Times said. The “remarkably stiff penalties” handed down by the “staunchly conservative” judges signaled that, at least “in Texas, the courts would deal aggressively with ICE protesters,” especially those accused of antifa ties.

What next?

Lawyers for the eight defendants said they would appeal the sentences, as critics warned the convictions “could have wide-reaching impact on protests and First Amendment free-speech rights,” The Associated Press said. Eight other Prairieland defendants will be sentenced July 1.

What happened

Federal law enforcement officials on Tuesday said they disrupted a plot to attack last weekend’s UFC cage match at the White House with explosive-laden drones and “snipers,” after an alleged plotter’s mother called local police. FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed on social media that “multiple” arrests had been made in a “multi-state operation.” Hours later, the Justice Department announced five suspects had been arrested in Ohio, Nebraska, Missouri and California.

Who said what

The mother of the Ohio suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper, told police that her son had been communicating online with “ex-military and Christian-based” people who “expressed ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments,” according to an FBI affidavit. Proper allegedly said the attack on the UFC fight was meant to “jumpstart” a revolution. The charging documents “outlined a plot ambitious in scope” but “left less clear that the conspirators had the means to carry it out,” The New York Times said.

What next?

Secret Service officials are “angry” with Patel for having “prematurely posted” news of the arrests, CNN said. The Secret Service led the “ongoing” investigation “from the beginning,” Deputy Director Matthew Quinn said at a news conference. And to “maintain the integrity” of the investigation, “we chose not to leak it.”

What happened

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota on Tuesday announced charges against 15 people for “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” and “violently oppose immigration law enforcement” during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said the defendants were part of two groups aligned with antifa, a loose collective of anti-fascist activists targeted under an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year.

Who said what

The 15 people are accused of “coordinating Signal chats and rapid-response networks to track federal immigration officers,” said MPR News, but Rosen “turned aside specific questions connected to the alleged conspiracy.” They “quite deliberately got together and planned violence, used violence,” he told reporters. “Whether or not they actually at the end of the day caused bodily harm is not the measure” of a “serious federal crime.”

The charges come at a “fraught moment for Minnesota federal prosecutors, who have had trouble sustaining many criminal cases” they filed against anti-ICE protesters, The New York Times said. At least a third have been dismissed “for a variety of reasons,” said The Minnesota Star Tribune.

What next?

The indictment is “pretty thin,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said to The Washington Post. “The evidence will prove it all out,” Rosen told reporters.

What do the statistics show?

That the U.S. is experiencing the largest and most sustained drop in homicides on record. After spiking sharply at the start of the pandemic, peaking at 6.8 murders per 100,000 people in 2021, the homicide rate started to come down in 2022. Since then, murders have dropped by an average of 16% a year; they fell 21% across 35 large cities from 2024 to 2025, according to the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. Killings declined in cities in blue and red states: Chicago and Baltimore both recorded a 31% drop (to 416 and 133 homicides, respectively), Salt Lake City 27% (to 8), and St. Louis 11% (to 121). If a similar decline is reflected in national data, the homicide rate will drop to 4 per 100,000, the lowest since 1900. Early figures for this year suggest the downward trend is continuing: New York City registered 102 murders from January to May, the lowest number on record for the period and down 21% from the same months in 2025. Such numbers are “absolutely astonishing,” said CCJ president Adam Gelb. “It’s a historic collapse in the homicide rate.” Other violent crimes are also down. From 2019 to 2025, the robbery rate fell 36% in major cities, carjackings 29%, and domestic violence incidents 19%.

What’s driving this drop?

Some of it is a reversal of the pandemic effect. The factors that sent the murder rate soaring 30% in 2020—social disruption, workplace and school closures that put young men on the street, stay-home recommendations that trapped people with abusers— faded as normal life returned. But murders have since dropped well below pre-pandemic levels. The Trump administration has a simple explanation: It says President Trump “turned the tide” by “removing savage criminal illegals” and flooding blue cities with federal agents. Experts give that claim no credibility, noting that murders started dipping years before Trump returned to office. Instead, it seems as though multiple factors are behind the decline, including important shifts in policing.

How has policing changed?

After temporarily retreating from many communities following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, which led to Black Lives Matter protests and calls to defund the police, “cops got back to work,” said former New York Police Department chief Kenneth Corey. They also became “much more focused on gun violence.” Part of that involved zeroing in on the small number of repeat violent offenders responsible for an outsize share of crimes. Advances in DNA technology and the spread of surveillance cameras also helped catch killers. “There’s nowhere in this city where you can walk without being on video,” said Frank Simpson, chief homicide prosecutor in Camden, N.J., which recorded 12 murders last year, down from 67 in 2012. But some experts question the role of law enforcement in the homicide drop, noting murders have fallen as police departments across the nation have lost manpower. Philadelphia, for example, has the fewest officers per capita in 40 years and just posted its lowest annual homicide total—222—since 1966.

What else could explain the decline?

Crime experts and local leaders point to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which then-president Joe Biden signed in March 2021 to combat the pandemic’s impacts. It sent hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments, which in many locales funded community violence intervention (CVI) programs. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett credits his city’s plunging murder rate in large part to Indy Peace, a CVI program that offers support to gunshot victims and their families in the hope of preventing retaliatory shootings. “It saves lives,” said Hogsett. The federal windfall also went to other community investments that may have made a difference: summer jobs programs for teens, after-school programs, community centers, and mental health services. “I think it has gone unrecognized how incredibly effective it was in stabilizing communities,” Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey says of ARPA. Other changes in American habits could also be curbing violence.

What kind of changes? 

A decline in drunkenness—54% of U.S. adults now say they drink alcohol, the lowest in nearly 90 years—has likely helped shrink the number of murders. “You get drunk, you do something stupid,” said Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Experts also nod to the effects of social media—many young people now socialize online rather than in person—the way the 2020–22 homicide spike took potential killers off the street, and even the possible influence of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, which may diminish impulsive behaviors. But none of these factors can explain the sheer scale of the murder drop, said crime analyst and former CIA agent Jeff Asher, and neither can changes in poverty or the availability of guns. “We didn’t fix any of those things,” Asher said. “So, what you’re left with is a bunch of explanations, none of which explains all of it.”

How low will the murder rate go?

Experts don’t know that either—and point to two factors that could nudge it back up. One is that the Biden stimulus money is running out, and its effect “will wane substantially this year,” said John Roman, a University of Chicago criminal justice researcher. Then there are the steep cuts to community funding by the Trump administration. As part of its offensive against “DEI and cultural Marxism,” it terminated at least 373 grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs last year, wiping out some $500 million in funding for efforts including CVI programs, victim services, and programs to aid ex-offenders. Some experts call that a tragic miscalculation after such historic gains. “Don’t take our foot off the gas,” said criminal justice researcher Jennifer Doleac. “We do have control over our destiny here.”

What happened

Bill Gates told the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday he made a “grave error in judgment” by ever meeting with Jeffrey Epstein but “never witnessed nor had any indication” of his “ongoing criminal conduct,” according to his opening statement. As Gates appeared for his closed-door testimony, The New York Times published new details on the White House’s “freakout over the Epstein files.”

Who said what

Gates met with Epstein between 2011 and 2014 to discuss global health fundraising, the Microsoft founder said, and later discovered he “was working to use information about my infidelities — in addition to many lies that he layered on top — to pressure me to re-engage with him.” Gates said his extramarital affairs had “nothing to do with” Epstein, but the “unsuccessful” blackmail effort “shows some of the ways he tried to leverage his interactions with me to further his agenda.”

The Epstein scandal “consumed and often paralyzed the highest levels of the Trump administration” last summer, the Times reported. President Donald Trump “wanted the whole thing buried,” but Vice President JD Vance “wanted to release all the files,” including “nipple-related documents” and other “unsubstantiated material” about Trump.

What next?

Following the Times report, the White House is “abuzz over the leak about leak control,” said Axios.

Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, appeared “for 20 excruciating minutes” at the High Court in Edinburgh on Monday, said Tom Peck in The Times. His earlier guilty plea meant there was little prosecuting to be done. “What we saw, instead, was a High Court edition of ‘Supermarket Sweep’”, as the prosecutor detailed how Murrell had embezzled £400,000 from the SNP over 12 years and spent it on 627 items in total, from £3.60 door fixings to the infamous £124,000 motorhome. How did he get away with it? Because “the Great Expenser” was in charge of the process. “He submitted his expenses to himself, then he signed them off himself.”

The list “makes for dazzling reading”, said Louis Wise in the FT: not just the Jaguar, the Golf, the luxury watches, the £2,000 salt and pepper shakers – but also “no fewer than seven – seven! – vacuum cleaners”. One luxury goods PR described Murrell's splurge as “like a regional sales manager's idea of living large”. But actually it's stranger than that – from the £75 men's “slouch pouch” onesie, to the Xbox, the 108 Covid-era loo rolls, and the posh edition of Hannah Arendt's “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

Double life

“She should have known. She must have known. Nobody can get away with it for that long, in secret, in a marriage.” These are some of the accusations levelled at Nicola Sturgeon, said Victoria Richards in The Independent. Except it's not that simple. As she has pointed out, they were both well-paid, and they had no children. None of these items were unaffordable, except perhaps the motorhome, which Murrell parked at his mother's house.

Countless people find their partner has been living a double life. And, as Sturgeon told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, a lot of women “end up finding themselves blamed for the actions of the men in their lives”. She's right to reject that sort of misogyny. “This isn't Sturgeon's fault.” That's a “risible” defence, said Oliver Kamm in The i Paper. The accusations are against her as a politician, not as a wife. She is not the “wronged party”.

Conflicts of interest

When Sturgeon became SNP leader, Alex Salmond advised her that having Murrell as chief executive might create conflicts of interest, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. She chose to ignore this. She allowed three members of the party's finance and audit committee, its treasurer and its auditors to resign, “all complaining they were being prevented from doing their jobs properly”. Through all this, Sturgeon defended the arrangements, and fiercely discouraged further inquiries. “This was grotesque behaviour. It produced one of the worst scandals of modern political history.”

I still have “a smidgen” of sympathy, said Susan Dalgety in The Scotsman: Sturgeon's “legacy has been reduced to jokes about motorhomes”. But only a smidgen. “She failed on every count.” Long after we have stopped laughing at Murrell's purchases, “the stench of government corruption will linger over Scotland”.

What happened

Kenneth Iwamasa, actor Matthew Perry’s live-in assistant and the person who injected him with a fatal dose of ketamine in 2023, was sentenced to three years and five months in prison on Wednesday. Iwamasa was the last to be sentenced of five people who pleaded guilty in the case, apparently “bringing a yearslong legal saga to a close,” The New York Times said. Only “Ketamine Queen” Jasveen Sangha drew a longer sentence, at 15 years.

Who said what

Iwamasa was Perry’s “enabler, drug messenger and de facto doctor,” The Associated Press said. Wednesday’s hearing was “largely a debate” over the “level of responsibility that can be put on the employee of a powerful person when addiction is in the mix.” Iwamasa’s lawyers asked for six months, but the judge matched the recommendation from prosecutors, who said the assistant “violated his position of trust” but also became their most important informant. “Matthew trusted Kenny. We trusted Kenny,” Perry’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, said in a letter to the court. “Kenny’s most important job — by far — was to be my son’s companion and guardian in his fight against addiction.”

What next?

Iwamasa was ordered to report to prison on July 17. His sentence also included two years of supervised release and a $10,000 fine.

What happened

Three men were killed Monday at San Diego’s largest mosque and the two teenage suspects were later found dead of apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a car nearby, officials said. One of the victims was a guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego, which also houses a school. “I think it’s fair to say his actions were heroic, and undoubtedly he saved lives,” San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said at a news conference. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime.

Who said what

Police had been urgently searching for the alleged gunmen, ages 17 and 18, after the 17-year-old’s mother called to report her potentially suicidal son missing along with several firearms and her car, Wahl said. Investigators found “anti-Islamic writing in the car” where the teens were found and the words “hate speech” written on one of the firearms, The New York Times said, citing law enforcement officials. A suicide note “contained writings about racial pride,” according to CNN.

What next?

In a “grim and familiar American ritual,” the Times said, political leaders “condemned the violence” and promised that “police officers would increase patrols at religious sites” in San Diego and other major cities.

The Metropolitan Police are trying to bring the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann to the UK to stand trial before the 20th anniversary of the incident next year. German national Christian Brückner was named prime suspect in her disappearance in 2022, while serving a prison sentence for the rape of an elderly woman.

“If the evidence is strong enough to extradite the prime suspect and try him here, that is what we would seek to do,” a Scotland Yard source told The Telegraph crime editor Martin Evans. “Clearly, there are numerous hurdles but our priority at the moment is to amass the strongest evidence we can against that prime suspect.”

‘Diplomatic and legal row’

The force “believes it can gather a strong enough case” for the Crown Prosecution Service to authorise charges against Brückner, said The Telegraph. A “small team of specialist detectives” are handling the missing person case, though they are building evidence for the CPS for suspected abduction and murder.

Telecoms data placed his phone in Praia da Luz around an hour before the abduction in 2007, and he had been “suspected of burgling hotel rooms and breaking into apartments and villas” in the area. In 2021, the lead prosecutor on the German investigation into Brückner, Hans Christian Wolters, said that he was “100% sure” that Brückner had murdered Madeleine McCann.

But despite Brückner remaining the only suspect in the McCann case, no charges were brought against him before he was released after his most recent sentence in September last year. Last year, he refused to be interviewed by the Met, just days before he was due to be released from prison.

Attempts to bring Brückner to British shores could provoke a “diplomatic and legal row”, said The Times. Despite the 2021 introduction of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement – a reciprocal extradition agreement – Article 16 of the German constitution retains the right to overrule extradition of its citizens to non-EU countries. If Germany refused to hand him over, it is understood that the Met would be “committed to ensuring that he still faces charges in Germany or in Portugal”.

‘Dropped off the radar’

Since his release from Sehnde prison last autumn, Brückner has “drifted around northern Germany”, “rarely staying in the same place for more than a few weeks”, said The Telegraph. Though his current whereabouts are unknown, he must wear an “ankle tag” as a condition of his release, living “under constant German police surveillance”.

He had initially relocated to Kiel on Germany’s north coast, into sheltered housing because he had reportedly “run out of money”. Following local “outcry” and the leak of his address online, he had to be escorted away from the area by German authorities. Since then, he is thought to have been living in a “makeshift campsite” in woodland near the city.

In November 2025, he was approached by ITV News reporters, “asking whether it was true that he had killed Madeleine”, said The Telegraph. Brückner responded by shouting at the news crew, and “knocked over a reporter’s microphone without answering”. After another failed attempt to relocate to a private flat, this time in Braunschweig in March 2026, he has “dropped off the radar”.

A mysterious new pro-Iran terror group has been linked to a series of recent attacks on Jewish communities and US financial institutions in the UK and Europe.

The only “catch”, said CNN, is that it “may be a mirage”.

Who are they and what have they claimed?

Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI), the Arabic name meaning “The Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right(eous)”, first appeared online shortly after the US and Israel launched their war on Iran at the end of February.

On 9 March, HAYI posted on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that “military operations” against US and Israeli interests around the world had begun. Two weeks later, a Telegram channel claiming to represent the group made an unsubstantiated claim of responsibility for an arson attack on four Jewish ambulances in Golders Green, north London.

It then posted videos of four other arson attacks in Belgium, Greece and the Netherlands, as well as threatening a further attack against the Bank of America building in Paris, before the channel was deleted.

Who is behind the group?

Examining the group’s digital footprint, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism found “no known references, neither online nor offline, to HAYI prior to 9 March”.

The Netherlands-based think tank highlighted “suspicious dissemination patterns” that were seemingly coordinated with the pro-Iranian online ecosystem. This raises the question “whether HAYI is a genuine terrorist group or merely serves as a façade for Iranian hybrid operations that enable plausible deniability”.

“This group is an Iranian creation,” Phillip Smyth, an analyst on the counterterrorism advisory board for Homeland Security Today, told The i Paper. “The scope of their actions, branding, and Iran’s own messages all demonstrate a clear link.”

For Western security experts, HAYI is “either a construct aligned with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or an opportunistic network operating within the broader pro-Iranian online ecosystem”, said Radio Free Europe.

Do the attacks follow a pattern?

UK security officials have previously warned of a “rise in ‘gig-economy’ Iranian spies offered cash for operations across Europe”, and have been “actively investigating Iran’s use of social media platforms” to create “sleeper cells with the potential to carry out violent attacks”, said The i Paper.

The spate of arson attacks since the start of the war in Iran are “similar in nature to Russia’s so-called hybrid operations in Europe”, in which people have been recruited online “to carry out sabotage attacks”, said CNN. These are often perpetrated “by non-Russian nationals for small amounts of money and without full knowledge of who the operations serve”.

The series of “low-intensity” incidents involving Jewish and US targets have so far carried “limited material damage but strong symbolic impact, disseminated and amplified through channels linked to the pro-Iranian ecosystem”, said Decode 39.

These “operational and propaganda dynamics point to a possible hybrid model of terrorism in Europe: simple actions, local perpetrators and maximum ambiguity”.

What happened

The gunman accused of trying to charge into the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night appears to have “set out to target folks who work in the administration, likely including the president,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said over the weekend. Law enforcement officials said they are trying to determine the assailant’s motive, but he was believed to have acted alone.

The suspect, identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of California, was tackled after sprinting through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton carrying a handgun, a shotgun and knives, police said. A Secret Service agent was shot but protected by a bulletproof vest.

Who said what

After popping sounds were heard outside the ballroom during the salad course, Secret Service agents swarmed in, ushering President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and top Cabinet officials to safety as most guests ducked for cover. The gunman “barely breached the perimeter,” Blanche told CNN, calling it a “massive security success story.”

At a White House press conference after the shooting, Trump “was unusually conciliatory,” The Associated Press said. But he “flashed a familiar anger” during a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, when Norah O’Donnell read from a manifesto Allen reportedly sent relatives before the attack, even though it did not mention Trump by name, Politico said. “I’m not a rapist,” and “I’m not a pedophile,” Trump said. “You shouldn’t be reading that on ‘60 Minutes,’ you’re a disgrace.”

What next?

Allen is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court Monday on preliminary charges of assaulting a federal officer and weapons charges.

What happened

The Justice Department on Tuesday charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with financial crimes, accusing the civil rights organization of secretly paying informants in the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups without telling its donors. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the SPLC paid at least eight unidentified insiders a total of $3 million between 2014 and 2023.

Who said what

Nonprofits like the SPLC are legally required to “have certain transparency and honesty” with donors, Blanche said at a press conference, and by paying KKK, neo-Nazi and Unite the Right leaders for intelligence, the group was “not dismantling extremism, but funding it.” The indictment “offers little to support the notion” the SPLC’s payments were “meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated,” The New York Times said.

The SPLC began working with informants in the 1980s and kept the since-disbanded program secret to ensure their safety, interim CEO Bryan Fair said in a video statement. The group “frequently” shared “what we learned from informants” with law enforcement, including the FBI, and “there is no question” the program “saved lives.”

What next?

Fair said he was “outraged by the false allegations” and his organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work.” No individuals were charged in the indictment, but Blanche said the investigation was ongoing.

What happened

A man in Shreveport, Louisiana, on Sunday shot dead his seven children and their cousin and critically wounded his wife and another woman. The gunman, identified as Shamar Elkins, then stole a car and led police on a chase that ended in his death, law enforcement said.

Who said what

Police did not speculate what prompted the murder of the children — five girls and three boys ages 3 to 11 — but detectives were confident it was “entirely a domestic incident,” Shreveport Police Department spokesperson Chris Bordelon told reporters. Elkins, 31, and his wife were separating and due in court Monday, Crystal Brown, a cousin of one of the wounded women, told The Associated Press.

It was the deadliest U.S. mass shooting since January 2024, according to a database from the AP, USA Today and Northeastern University. “Domestic violence shootings generally receive less media attention,” but each of the six other mass killings this year were “carried out by someone who knew the victims,” The Washington Post said. All six “occurred in southern states near Louisiana.”

What next?

“We’re holding the victims, their families” and “our Shreveport community close in our thoughts and prayers,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R), who represents Shreveport in Congress.

A mysterious, shadowy group has been appearing online recently, and it has parents and law enforcement concerned about potential child exploitation. The group, known as 764, is a decentralized network operating across the United States and internationally, and while the FBI has urged parents and kids to be cautious, experts say tracking down the perpetrators is easier said than done.

What is 764?

This is an international online organization that “operates at the intersection of violent extremism, child sexual exploitation and other forms of extreme violence, including animal cruelty, self-harm and assisted suicide,” said the Global Network on Extremism & Technology. The group is part of a “loosely connected network” of similar organizations, including those with ominous names like the Maniac Murder Cult and No Lives Matter.

Those who identify with 764 are classified by experts as nihilistic violent extremists, people who are “characterized by the encouragement, glorification or engagement in acts of extreme violence without a coherent ideological framework,” said the nonpartisan think tank Vision of Humanity. Victims of 764 are often “pressured to send sexually explicit videos and photos, which are later used to blackmail them into extreme and violent acts,” said The Baltimore Banner. Most of them are victimized on online gaming platforms and social media websites.

Many of the victims “may be dealing with one or more vulnerabilities: neurodiversity, eating disorders, social isolation, mental illness, family problems” and are then exploited, said Vision of Humanity. Criminal cases linked to 764 have been opened in numerous states, including Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland and Texas, as well as Canada. The latter has since designated 764 as a terrorist group, and New Zealand did the same.

How is law enforcement fighting back?

The FBI and local police organizations are working to shut down the 764 groups, and “every FBI field office in the country is now involved in tracking the network,” said CBS News. At least 450 cases nationwide “are under investigation, with authorities classifying the activity as domestic terrorism.” The investigations have “documented how multiple perpetrators can become involved in a single victim’s exploitation,” making it harder for the victims to escape.

These investigations have led to some justice for victims of 764. In March 2026, a Maryland man pleaded guilty to federal child sexual abuse charges, and in November 2025, a Texas man pleaded guilty to racketeering and sexual exploitation. Both men were identified as 764 members. In March 2025, a Florida man was “sentenced to serve 84 months in federal prison for possessing child sexual abuse material,” said the Department of Justice. The man, a 764 member, owned devices containing over 8,300 images of child sexual abuse material, including “images and videos depicting the sexual abuse of infants and toddlers.”

In order to protect kids, the FBI is “urging families to look for behavioral changes that could signal a child is being targeted,” said CBS News. Kids who exhibit sudden mood swings or depression, as well as an “obsession with a new online ‘friend,’” could be warning signs that they are being victimized by 764. The FBI is also encouraging parents to “take proactive steps,” including monitoring children’s activity online and reporting suspicious behavior to the authorities.

The tragedy of the Southport murders, in which three young girls were killed and several more injured in a random attack by knifeman Axel Rudakubana, “defies description”, said The Sun. The report on the first stage of the inquiry, released this week, “laid bare” what its chair called an “inappropriate merry-go-round” of public sector agencies handing off responsibility for the increasingly troubled teenager. “Catastrophe was inevitable”, said the newspaper.

The inquiry report highlighted five key factors that prevented an adequate response to the threat posed by Rudakubana: a lack of risk acceptance, poor information sharing, lack of examination of online activity, a “misunderstanding of autism”, as well as “significant parental failures” at home.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said in a statement that the government has “already taken action to prevent such an awful tragedy from happening again”, but many are calling for concrete legislation to act on some of the 67 recommendations outlined in the inquiry.

What did the commentators say?

The murder of Bebe King, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Elsie Dot Stancombe was “one of the most depraved acts of violence ever seen on these shores”, said The Telegraph in an editorial. “But this did not come out of a clear blue sky.” Rudakubana’s “violent behaviour was known to his parents, his school, the police and to various agencies”. In the years leading up to the killings, he had attacked fellow pupils, been caught with a knife in public, and was referred to the Home Office anti-terror programme Prevent three times. Retired Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, who led the inquiry, said the culture of unaccountability “has to end”. “The trouble is we have heard that before”, said the newspaper, “and it never does”.

The “nightmare” of the July 2024 attacks in Southport “would never have happened if public bodies had done their jobs properly”, said The Guardian. The report did not “single out” any individual police or council officers, but “this does not make them any less culpable”: in fact, the “collective failure” to take responsibility for the events is the “single most disturbing conclusion”. The “grave failures” of those involved, including police, council officers, health professionals and Prevent, revealed the “deadly flaws” of the multi-agency systems linking them, said the paper. “Ministers must not wait for the inquiry’s second phase to explain how they plan to bring this dangerous culture of buck‑passing to an end.”

All those involved with Rudakubana’s case “should hang their heads in shame”, said Jawad Iqbal in The Spectator. The inquiry uncovered a “comprehensive” and “depressing” catalogue of “missed opportunities and systems of protection that were found wanting”. One such failure was officials using Rudakubana’s autism diagnosis to “excuse” his “increasingly erratic and violent behaviour”, rather than considering that, in this instance, his condition “heightened, rather than lessened, the risk he posed”.

“The Southport inquiry is damning in its clarity,” said The Mirror. “This tragedy was preventable.” But this report also “speaks to something far wider”: the roles and duties of parents. Fulford found Rudakubana’s parents bore “considerable blame for what occurred”, and that if they had “done what they morally ought to have done” by reporting his violent behaviour – including collecting knives and concocting poison at home – it is “almost certain” the attack would not have occurred. Parenting has “never been more consequential” in our age of “online radicalisation”, and children “disappearing into the darkness of their bedrooms”. “The duty to know your child, truly know them, and act on what you find has never mattered more.”

What next?

The next stage of the inquiry will consider the “need for a new mechanism” to manage the “growing threat” of Prevent being “overwhelmed” with referrals of teenagers who are “obsessed with violence” but do not display the “coherent ideology of political extremists”, said The Guardian. It will also consider “tighter regulation of social media use” and the “online sale of weapons”.

Any changes to the law will naturally need to be “carefully considered”, weighing up the risks of “making policy off the back of one case, however tragic”, but this case points to the need for “new policies”, “tighter processes and increased resources”. “The failures went beyond missed communications and overstretched staff.”

Questions of those who will take “organisational and individual accountability” and how government agencies will make meaningful change “remain unanswered”, said Iqbal in The Spectator. “Does anyone involved seriously reflect on their conduct and failures rather than simply seek to avoid blame and consequences?” One thing that the report makes “abundantly clear” is that “this culture must change”. “The tragedy of Southport demands nothing less.”

In 2022, Shan Hanes, the chief executive of the Heartland Tri-State Bank in Kansas, met a friendly investment adviser from Australia on WhatsApp. The adviser persuaded Hanes to invest a few thousand dollars in an online cryptocurrency-trading platform, which generated impressive returns. Hanes ended up investing all his own money, $60,000 from his daughter's college fund, $40,000 from his local church and $47 million from the bank he ran.

The “adviser” was, it transpired, not in Australia but most likely in Asia; the “trading platform” was fake; and Hanes had become the highest-profile US victim of a practice known in Chinese as sha zhu pan, a “pig-butchering scam”. Some money was recovered, but investors lost $9 million, the bank collapsed, and Hanes was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

How do the scams work?

“Long cons” have been around for ever, but these – in which the scammers invest a lot of time in building a relationship with the victim, a process they liken to fattening a pig for slaughter – have distinctive features.

Scammers actively seek out victims on social media: pig-butchering originated on regional Chinese dating sites around 10 years ago, but it has since spread to platforms such as Telegram, WhatsApp and LinkedIn. They create trusting relationships with their victims, sometimes of a romantic nature; one former scammer told The Economist she’d been trained to target people who were “rich but not good-looking”.

They rely heavily on crypto, which is easy to launder and difficult to recover. These and other online scams are increasingly run out of Chinese-linked “scam hubs” or “fraud factories” in Southeast Asia.

How did such operations develop?

Gambling – illegal on mainland China – is one of the main revenue streams for domestic and foreign-based Chinese mafias. Casinos and online gambling hubs for Chinese-speakers, based in Cambodia and Myanmar, were one of their main enterprises until 2019, when Cambodia tightened its regulations; Covid lockdowns then emptied the casinos. The criminal syndicates refitted their properties as centres where teams of workers – often trafficked and coerced – run online scams at scale.

Chinese citizens were their original targets, followed by Chinese communities around the world. But they soon expanded to other nationalities, which also meant expanding their trafficking activities. In the four years from January 2020, at least $75 billion was taken in crypto scams; estimates suggest the industry generates over $500 billion a year, comparable to the global drugs trade.

Why do they traffic people?

Many of the gangs’ voluntary workers went home during Covid; not enough locals had the necessary language and computer skills, and recruiting people into cybercrime isn't always easy. The scammers’ solution was to lure people – typically young graduates from developing countries – to cities such as Bangkok with fake offers of legitimate employment, then drive them to compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia or Laos, and put them to work under threats of torture, organ harvesting and sexual slavery.

A UN report this February found that there is a workforce of at least 300,000 people from 66 countries, about 75% of them in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia. Many live in vast compounds, like self-contained towns – some over 500 acres in size, heavily fortified, with armed guards. It's unlikely that all the workers are coerced, but many of them certainly are; some families have had to pay ransoms in cryptocurrency to get them out.

What are the nations doing about it?

Weak local governance, along with easy access to China, is the reason the gangs set up shop in the Mekong region in the first place. Myanmar's military junta doesn’t control the whole territory; much of it is controlled by insurgent groups and warlords; while Cambodian politics has been dominated by one family since the 1980s. Transparency International ranks both governments among the most corrupt in the world. Analysts calculate that Cambodia’s scam hubs generate earnings worth about 60% of the nation's GDP. According to the US Treasury Department, the Huione Group, a financial conglomerate with ties to Cambodia’s ruling Hun family, has provided the gangs with financial and practical services. Like Latin American “narco-states” before them, these countries are well on the way to becoming “scam states”.

Is there international pressure to close them down?

Influenced partly by stories like the kidnapping of the actor Wang Xing, and even a popular film about scam hubs, “No More Bets”, China has launched an aggressive crackdown. There have been heavily publicised rescues of coerced workers in the Mekong countries; under Chinese pressure, local law enforcement has dismantled notorious scam hubs like the KK Park complex in Myawaddy, Myanmar, thought to have been run by Macau-based triads. Thai forces shelled several other hubs during a border conflict with Cambodia last year. China has arrested hundreds of thousands of people over scams, and in January it executed 11 members of the “Ming family” crime group, who had been extradited from Myanmar.

Is the situation improving?

Experts worry that police raids on compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar are largely for show: the bosses are often tipped off in advance. In any case, they have globalised their operations, popping up as far afield as Peru and the Philippines. Police even closed down an operation targeting Chinese citizens on the Isle of Man in 2024. But developments in AI may mean that the scammers are getting less reliant on human trafficking for language skills. One report on AI-assisted scams found that they rose by 450% in 2024-25 compared with 2023-24. The scammers now often use “deepfakes” of increasingly good quality to groom their victims.

What happened

Rex Heuermann, the Long Island architect long suspected of the so-called Gilgo Beach killings between 1993 and 2010, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to strangling seven women and dismembering some of them. He also confessed to murdering an eighth woman, Karen Vergata, in 1996. Heuermann initially pleaded not guilty following his 2023 arrest. The remains of several of the women were found near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach in 2010 and 2011.

Who said what

Wednesday’s guilty pleas “bring finality to a case that bedeviled investigators, tormented victims’ families and tantalized a true-crime obsessed public for years,” The Associated Press said. The investigation was long “delayed by dysfunction, disarray and corruption,” The New York Times said. It finally ended with Wednesday’s “extraordinary proceeding,” where Heuermann “maintained a normal demeanor, as if having a morning chat,” while confessing to serial murders. He “walked among us play-acting as a normal suburban dad” while “obsessively targeting innocent women for death,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said at a post-hearing press conference.

What next?

Heuermann will be sentenced in June to life in prison with no possibility of parole. As part of his plea deal, he also agreed to be interviewed by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Units profilers, potentially helping “investigators hunt down others with similarly violent minds,” the Times said.

West Texas is not the first place you would expect to find a French aristocrat suspected of murdering his family and going on the run for 15 years.

But last week the Sheriff’s Office of Brewster County posted a request for information about Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès on its Facebook page, following a tip-off from an investigative news team that he had been seen in the south of the county in 2020, accompanied by a black Labrador. Ligonnès “had previously travelled to Brewster County and reportedly claimed it was one of his favourite places”, the sheriff said he’d been told.

The post, which included the most recent known images of Ligonnès, was “enough to stir a frenzy” among French “amateur sleuths and crime fans”, said The Times. Their “favourite mystery, involving multiple supposed sightings over the years, is equivalent to” the enduring controversy around the UK’s “elusive Lord Lucan”.

‘Fantasy life’

Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès was 50 when the bodies of his wife, Agnès, and his children – Arthur, 20, Thomas, 18, Anne, 16, and Benoît, 13 – were discovered under the patio at their home in Nantes in April 2011. They had all been shot, wrapped in sheets, covered in quicklime and buried, along with the two family dogs. The last confirmed sighting of Ligonnès was at a motel near Saint-Tropez two weeks after the bodies were discovered. His car was later found abandoned in the car park.

Initial investigations revealed that, in the days before the killings, Ligonnès had bought cement, digging tools and four bags of lime in various locations in the Nantes area. He also owned a .22 rifle similar to the one used in the killings, had recently bought ammunition and gone to practise at a local shooting club.

Ligonnès, who had an aristocratic lineage, was a “failed businessman”, said The Times. He “lived a fantasy life in which he claimed he was, among other things, a US intelligence agent”. By the time of the murders, he had accrued significant debts and was struggling to maintain his family’s outwardly comfortable lifestyle.

Following his disappearance, reports emerged that Ligonnès had written to friends up to a year before the killings warning that, crippled with debts, he was contemplating “suicide, alone or collective” and “shooting up the house while everyone is sleeping”.

Red herrings and false leads

In the months and years following the murders, hundreds of sightings of Ligonnès were reported to police, “all proving to be false leads”, said France 24.

Then in July 2015, a photo of two of Ligonnès’ sons was sent to an Agence France-Presse journalist, with the words “I am still alive” scrawled on the back, along with his name. Handwriting analysis failed to ascertain if it was genuine.

In 2018, police raided a monastery in Roquebrune-sur-Argens (the Provençal town near Saint-Tropez where his car was abandoned) after a witness reported seeing a man who resembled Ligonnès, but this again proved to be a dead end. A year later, a man was arrested at Glasgow airport and held in custody before tests confirmed it was another case of mistaken identity.

The case then went cold for years, until a new book published earlier this year by Gilles Galloux, a former police investigator on the case. He claimed Ligonnès “boarded a flight from Nice airport using fake ID documents” and has been hiding out in the US, “a place he had long admired”, said The Connexion. It was this lead that drew attention to Brewster County, which Ligonnès visited in the 1990s.

Ligonnès’ sister, Christine, maintains her brother’s innocence, believing the murders “were staged by a foreign intelligence agency, and that the family is living in witness protection in the US”, said The Times. Prosecutors in Nantes remain “sceptical” of such theories. Their somewhat more pedestrian hypothesis is that Ligonnès “probably killed himself in the rocky hinterland of Provence”.

What happened

Minnesota on Tuesday sued the Trump administration for access to evidence related to three federal shootings during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The lawsuit said the federal government’s “arbitrary and capricious” refusal to cooperate or share any evidence with state investigators came from leaders at the Justice Department and Homeland Security Department, and violated Minnesota’s 10th Amendment right to enforce its own laws and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Who said what

“We are prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison stressed “how absolutely extraordinary it is, how rare and unprecedented it is, how completely unnecessary it is, if justice is our goal, for us to have to file this lawsuit.”

DHS said in a statement that the federal government is investigating all three shootings. The FBI is leading the Pretti probe, DHS said, while federal prosecutors are investigating two agents for making false statements about their arrest of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Sosa-Celis — though not for shooting him in the leg. The Good shooting was “still under investigation,” the statement said, though its claims that the unarmed mother “weaponized her vehicle” and the officer shot her “in self-defense” were “contradicted by video evidence,” The New York Times said. Trump officials previously asserted that the Good killing “was not under investigation,” The Minnesota Star Tribune said.

What next?

Minnesota officials “say they are seeking a court order requiring federal agencies to turn over evidence so the state can determine whether any criminal charges are warranted,” Minnesota Public Radio said.

Many people might think of powdered or injectable drugs as being widespread items in jails and prisons. But now something far simpler has reportedly become ubiquitous. Correctional facilities across the United States have seen an uptick in drug-laced paper being smuggled into their complexes, causing concerns that these maneuvers are leading to deadly overdoses among inmates.

Why has drug-laced paper become a major problem?

At least 16 states have prosecuted individuals for introducing drug-laced paper into correctional facilities, according to The New York Times, with the issue stretching from “New York to Texas to Hawaii.” Paper is often seen as an easy way to bring drugs into these facilities because paper is a “lifeline in jail, a tether to parents, partners and children in the outside world.”

One of the most problematic institutions for this laced paper is Chicago’s Cook County jail. In 2023 alone, at least six inmates “died of overdoses, putting the jail at the vanguard of a new kind of drug war,” said the Times. Drug manufacturers are “churning out a dizzying array of synthetic drugs — not only fentanyl but also hazardous new tranquilizers, stimulants and complex cannabinoids.” These drugs are then “sprayed onto the pages of the most innocuous-seeming items: books, letters, documents, even photographs,” and they are then smoked.

But while Cook County is the epicenter of the problem, cases have been springing up across the country. A librarian in 2025 was “accused of smuggling sheets of paper infused with synthetic marijuana” as part of a “$65,000 drug ring” into a jail in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, said CBS News. This year, an attorney in Houston claimed he was “tricked into smuggling drug-laced paper into the Harris County jail,” said KTRK-TV Houston. Inmates are “taking advantage of lawyers that are trying to build trust with their clients,” Brent Mayr, the president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, told KTRK-TV.

How can this problem be solved?

The drugs themselves make this a difficult task since “as quickly as the authorities ban one substance, narco-chemists drum up novel, more potent variations that have not been outlawed,” said the Times. Simply ridding inmates of their access to paper would “rob them of what they missed most in lockup: human connection.” To “dismissively say we’re going to ban everything from coming in, it was just something that I didn’t want to do,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told the Times.

But there have been efforts to crack down on drug-laced paper. Cook County jail “stepped up random searches and taught inspectors to master the natural touch and smell of paper,” said the Times. In Ohio, officials with the state’s correctional department have “confiscated over 16,000 pieces of synthetic drug-laced paper,” said WOIO-TV Cleveland. Officials in Kansas cited the laced contraband being smuggled into prisons as the “reason for changing print newspaper subscription policies,” said the Kansas Reflector.

This sounds promising, but experts say there is a long way to go to eradicate these drugs. In 2024, Cook County jail officers found a single piece of paper with 10 different chemicals sprayed on it, a “mix of opioids, depressants, cannabinoids and stimulants,” said the Times, “all jumbled together on the same page, like a Rosetta Stone of synthetic drugs.”

What happened

A California jury Monday awarded Donna Motsinger $59.25 million in civil damages after finding comedian Bill Cosby liable for drugging and sexually assaulting her in 1972. Motsinger, a waitress at the time, accused Cosby of giving her pills that incapacitated her as he escorted her to his stand-up comedy show, then raping her while she was unconscious. The jury awarded her $17.5 million in past damages, $1.75 million for future damages and $40 million in punitive damages. Cosby, 88, did not testify.

Who said what

The jury’s decision “further tarnished” Cosby’s reputation, The New York Times said, after his “standing as one of America’s most beloved entertainers dissolved” in the face of dozens of similar sexual assault allegations. Cosby has “denied all allegations involving sex crimes,” USA Today said, but he was the “first Hollywood figure to be convicted following the #MeToo movement.” He served almost three years in prison for drugging and raping protégé Andrea Constand before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out his conviction on a technicality in 2021.

Cosby has “settled some similar lawsuits and has been ordered to pay in others,” The Associated Press said, but Monday’s award is “likely the most he has had to pay in a case.” The money is “icing on the cake,“ Motsinger told reporters after the verdict, but the accountability is more important. “It has been 54 years to get justice, and I know it’s not complete for the rest of the women, but I hope it helps them a little bit.”

What next?

Cosby’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean said they were “disappointed in the outcome,” but “we believe we have a strong appeal and we’ll pursue that.”

What happened

Labor leaders and state lawmakers on Wednesday scrambled to cancel or rename upcoming events celebrating United Farm Workers founder César Chavez after The New York Times reported it had “uncovered extensive evidence” he sexually abused multiple underage girls and women, including Dolores Huerta, the union’s co-founder and fellow labor icon. Huerta said in a statement that Chavez, who died in 1993, had pressured her into having sex once and raped her another time, with both encounters resulting in children who were raised by other families.

Who said what

“I am nearly 96 years old,” Huerta said, and “I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.” She said she had “carried this secret” for 60 years “because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” but Chavez’s “deplorable” actions “do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people.”

For many, Chavez and Huerta “were akin to Martin Luther King. Jr. and Rosa Parks because of their work advocating for racial equality and civil rights,” The Associated Press said. Huerta’s “accusation shatters what was a widely celebrated — and seemingly egalitarian — bond between two of the most influential Hispanic activists in U.S. history,” the Times said. Chavez’s “name should be removed from landmarks, institutions and honors,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said on social media. “We cannot celebrate someone who carried out such disturbing harm.”

What next?

The allegations “have prompted swift fallout,” the AP said. The UFW and AFL-CIO unions both said they will not participate in or endorse any activities for César Chavez Day, celebrated on or around his March 31 birthday. Cities, states and Latino advocates are moving to rename schools, streets and holidays bearing his name.

What happened

A man rammed a truck into a Michigan synagogue Thursday, hours after a convicted Islamic State supporter opened fire in a classroom at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, killing one person and wounding two. Both of the attackers were killed. None of the staff or 140 preschoolers at Temple Israel in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township were injured. “The back-to-back outbursts of violence added to rising concerns about the possibility ‌of attacks on U.S. soil amid the tension since U.S. and Israeli forces launched airstrikes on Iran,” Reuters said.

Who said what

The gunman at Old Dominion, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, was a former member of the Army National Guard who was arrested in 2016 for plotting an ISIS-inspired attack. He served eight years in prison. ROTC students in the classroom “rendered him no longer alive” after he started shooting, FBI Special Agent Dominique Evans said, crediting their “extreme bravery and courage” for stopping the attack. Jalloh shouted “Allahu Akbar” before the shooting, Evans told reporters.

In the attack at Temple Israel, the nation’s largest Reform synagogue, Lebanon-born U.S. citizen Ayman Mohamad Ghazali drove his truck through the doors and down a hallway before temple security “engaged the individual and neutralized the threat,” West Bloomfield Police Chief Dale Young said. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said “something ignited in the vehicle” after the crash. Ghazali’s vehicle was carrying “mortar-type explosives,” CBS News said, citing two law enforcement officers. It wasn’t clear whether Ghazali was shot by security guards or killed himself.

Investigators are trying to determine the motives in both shootings, but Ghazali was “devastated” after an Israeli airstrike on his family’s village in Lebanon “roughly 10 days prior” killed two of his brothers and two of their children, CBS News said, citing a source in Michigan’s Lebanese American community. “What happens around the world sometimes affects us, so we have to prepare for it,” Bouchard ​said at a news conference.

What next?

The FBI said it was investigating the synagogue attack as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community,” and the Old Dominion shooting as an act of terrorism.