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.

What happened

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) on Tuesday commuted the death sentence of a 75-year-old inmate scheduled for execution Wednesday night for a murder he did not commit or even witness. Charles “Sonny” Burton and five other men robbed an AutoZone in Talladega, Alabama, in 1991, but Burton had left the building before an accomplice, Derrick DeBruce, fatally shot a customer, Doug Battle. DeBruce’s death sentence was overturned on appeal and he died in prison in 2020.

Who said what

Ivey has presided over 25 executions and granted clemency to just one other inmate since taking office in 2017, and she said Tuesday that she strongly supports capital punishment “for society’s most heinous offenders.” But “I believe it would be unjust for one participant in this crime to be executed while the participant who pulled the trigger was not,” she said in a statement. Burton “will now receive the same punishment as the triggerman” and “rightfully spend the remainder of his life behind bars.”

Ivey had been “facing mounting pressure to intervene in the execution,” USA Today said. Battle’s family and “at least six of the eight living jurors who voted for Burton’s execution” were among those urging clemency. State Attorney General Steve Marshall said he was “very disappointed” with Ivey’s decision. “There has never been any doubt,” he said, that Burton has “Battle’s blood on his hands.”

What next?

Burton’s execution would have been Alabama’s eighth using nitrogen gas, a “method that has drawn controversy for its potential to cause pain and suffering during an execution,” The Washington Post said. “Thank you, governor,” Burton said in a statement issued through his attorneys. “Just saying thank you doesn’t seem like much. But it’s what I can give her.”

What happened

A federal jury in Manhattan on Monday found former star real estate brokers Oren and Tal Alexander and their brother Alon guilty on all 10 counts of sex trafficking and related crimes. During a five-week trial, prosecutors said the Alexander brothers worked together to drug and rape scores of women, including minors, from at least 2008 to 2021. Eleven women testified that one or more of the brothers had sexually assaulted them, and jurors were shown a video Oren Alexander recorded of himself raping an incapacitated 17-year-old girl in 2009.

Who said what

The verdict “caps the downfall” of Tal, 39, and Oren, 38, “the highflying real-estate agents who once brokered some of the country’s priciest transactions in New York, Aspen and Miami,” The Wall Street Journal said. Alon, Oren’s twin, worked at the family’s security business. The victims “testified that they met the brothers at nightclubs, parties and on dating apps,” The Associated Press said, then “were attacked after accepting their invitations to all-expense paid getaways.”

Defense lawyers “argued that the brothers were playboys and womanizers but not criminals,” The New York Times said. They unsuccessfully “cast the victims as a bloc of scorned women, all motivated by shame, regret and greed.” The jurors saw the Alexanders’ conduct “for what it was — calculated, brutal sexual abuse that, unimaginably, the defendants celebrated,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.

What next?

“We believe in our clients’ innocence,” Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Oren Alexander, said after the verdict. “We’re going to keep fighting.” U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni set sentencing for Aug. 6. The brothers, incarcerated since their 2024 arrests, face up to life in prison.

Economic abuse, a form of coercive control, plays a part in 51% of domestic abuse-related deaths in England and Wales. And, every 19 days, a victim of economic abuse loses her life, according to new research.

These findings are a “wake-up call”, said Surviving Economic Abuse, the charity behind the research. “Long overlooked” in standard risk assessments and “misunderstood by agencies that could have intervened”, economic abuse must now be “recognised as a serious and potentially fatal form of domestic abuse”.

What is economic abuse?

It’s a legally recognised form of domestic abuse, where one person – usually a partner or ex-partner – has control over another person’s access to money. This can include taking over the victim’s earnings, spending, bank accounts and credit cards, and often results in the building up of debts in the victim’s name. It can include controlling access to transport, property, food, clothing or technology – restricting the victim’s ability to work and stay connected. In some cases, it can also involve damaging belongings or refusing to contribute to household costs.

Last year, the BBC reported cases of economic abuse that included “crashing a car deliberately, taking control of benefit payments and threatening to share explicit images unless money is handed over”. One in six women in the UK has experienced economic abuse by a current or former partner, according to SEA, but many victims do not recognise it as abuse. Even if they do, they have often become so isolated by their abuser that they don’t feel able to talk about it. “It rarely happens in isolation” and is usually accompanied by physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

The reality of economic abuse can make it even more difficult for women to leave an abusive relationship. “They’re very scared to leave because of the financial side that holds them back,” MSP Pam Gosal told Holyrood magazine. Abused women she has tried to help often didn’t know what was in their name financially, what they could lose or what liabilities they could be left with. “You don’t know anything because you never, ever controlled the finances in a relationship.”

How does it contribute to deaths?

Although it is not a physical form of abuse, economic abuse can trap victims in dangerous situations, and “be an indication of escalating risk from a perpetrator”, said the SEA report.

And yet, the report found, agencies often missed opportunities to spot dangers linked to economic abuse. In over half of the domestic abuse-related deaths analysed in the report, economic abuse “was present”, but many of the women experiencing economic abuse were “failed” by those who “should have been there to help them”. Either because they missed the signs of economic abuse or because they did not understand the risk of this abuse, agencies “did not respond as they could have done”.

This is particularly noteworthy in the cases of victims to went on to take their own lives. Women who had experienced economic abuse from an intimate partner were significantly more likely to commit suicide than other abused women whose cases the report analysed. Risk assessments and safety planning should better recognise that “the nature of post-separation economic abuse (where it may start, continue or escalate after a victim has fled) can leave victims feeling hopeless”.

What can be done?

Economic abuse should be integrated into the government’s new guidance on best practice for domestic abuse risk management, recommends SEA. It also recommends specialist training on economic abuse for professionals involved in combating violence against women and girls.

This form of abuse “must be recognised, understood and acted upon across every agency, every review and every response”, said Sam Smethers, chief executive of SEA. “We cannot wait for another woman’s life to be lost.”

Prosecutors in Taiwan indicted 62 people on Wednesday for their alleged links to the Prince Group, a multinational network accused of running a vast system of scam centres from Cambodia.

Scam centres across Southeast Asia have become so powerful and entrenched that they are now building into “scam states”.

Sprawling, industrial-scale criminal economy

Scam states are similar to narco-states, which are countries where the entire government and economy become profoundly corrupted and controlled by the illegal drug trade.

A “scam state” is a country where an “illicit industry has dug its tentacles deep into legitimate institutions, reshaping the economy, corrupting governments and establishing state reliance on an illegal network”, said The Guardian. They’re growing in number because the “multi-billion-dollar global scam industry” has become “so monolithic”.

After beginning as small online fraud rings, scamming has transformed into a sprawling, industrial-scale criminal economy in parts of southeast Asia, an illicit industry has penetrated local economies and institutions to a degree that rivals some of the world’s most entrenched illegal trades.

According to analysts, the growth of scam states has been rapid and systemic, driven by sophisticated technology, weak law enforcement, and political tolerance or complicity.

KK Park in Myanmar’s Myawaddy region was once one of the most notorious scam centres. Ostensibly business complexes, these sites housed tens of thousands of workers – many of them trafficked or coerced – who were forced to defraud victims globally via romance scams, fake investment platforms, and so-called “pig butchering” cons, or investment fraud involving gaining the trust of victims and persuading them to invest in fake opportunities.

When authorities raided and destroyed parts of KK Park, operators had already moved their operations elsewhere, illustrating the adaptability and mobility of the scam networks.

States slow to dismantle networks

The “scale of the compounds” shows “how much the states hosting them have been compromised”, experts told The Guardian. For instance, in Cambodia, it's thought cybercrime operations contribute billions of dollars annually, amounting to a significant portion of the economy. Critics argue that state institutions have been slow to dismantle the networks and that political elites benefit directly or indirectly from their persistence.

The US and UK have launched joint efforts, like the Scam Center Strike Force, to target these networks and the infrastructure supporting them, but dismantling scam states is a complex task.

Analysts warn that without targeting the leadership and financial core of these networks, law enforcement may merely displace the problem rather than eliminate it. The rise of scam states highlights a new frontier of organised crime – one that intertwines digital innovation, exploitation and corruption on a vast scale.

What happened

A jury in Winder, Georgia, Tuesday convicted Colin Gray of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for allowing his son access to a gun he allegedly used to kill two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in September 2024. Prosecutors showed that Gray, 55, gave his son the rifle for Christmas and refused entreaties to lock it up as Colt Gray, then 14, showed signs of deteriorating mental health, including bouts of anger and an obsession with school shooters.

Who said what

“It wasn’t like one parent missed one warning,” Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith told reporters after the verdict. “This was multiple warnings over a lengthy period of time and, like we said, you just had to do one thing — take that rifle away and this would have been prevented.”

The trial was “one of the first in the nation in which a parent was held accountable for allegedly enabling a child’s access to a gun used in a school shooting,” said The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The “only other case like it to have proceeded to trial” sent the parents of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley to prison for 10 to 15 years. This legal strategy “has gained traction across the country,” The New York Times said, but Gray is the first parent convicted “before the son’s guilt had been determined.”

What next?

Colt Gray’s mother, Marcee Gray, unsuccessfully pushed her estranged husband to lock up the rifle after reading about the Crumbley case, “so Michigan was able to move the needle to the point that it almost stopped this tragedy,” Smith said. “We hope we’ve moved the needle a little further.” Colin Gray’s attorneys “are likely to appeal, setting up a lengthy legal battle for Georgia’s higher courts to determine a balance between parental responsibility and criminal negligence,” Georgia Public Broadcasting said.

A scenario often featured in popular culture and hypothetical discussions has come true and left investigators baffled.

A double murder trial in France has reached a “bizarre legal quagmire” because two of the suspects are identical twins and so have the same DNA, said The Connexion.

Open question

The 33-year-old brothers are among five defendants on trial in Bobigny, a suburb of Paris, accused of a double murder and several attempted killings in 2020. They deny the charges. Although both twins are suspected of conspiring to plot the double murder, the DNA on an assault rifle used in one of the later gun battles could only be from one of them.

Identical twins develop from the same sperm and a single fertilised egg that splits during pregnancy, so they have exactly the same DNA, making forensic identification difficult. A police officer told the court that forensic experts weren’t able to tell which of the brothers had been conclusively implicated. “Only their mother can tell them apart,” said an investigator.

Although advanced genetic testing techniques can sometimes help distinguish between identical twins, experts concluded that the amount of blood available in this case is insufficient, so the estimated €60,000 cost may not be justified.

Adding to the sense of confusion, police said that the twins frequently share clothes and use the same phone numbers and ID documents. So prosecutors are being forced to try other methods to establish who fired the gun, including phone tracing, interviews and wiretapping.

But for now the “crucial question” of who fired the recovered weapon “remains an open one”, said Sky News.

Onerous costs

In 2013, French police investigating a series of rapes in Marseille were similarly stymied after they traced DNA evidence to twins but couldn’t establish which one was responsible.

“It’s a rather rare case for the alleged perpetrators to be identical twins,” chief investigator Emmanuel Kiehl told France 24, and the cost of sufficient tests to distinguish the DNA, estimated to be up to €1 million, was too “onerous”.

A breakthrough came when investigators eventually determined that some victims reported that the attacker had a speech impediment, which matched a condition caused by partial deafness in one of the twins, who eventually confessed to all the counts.

No such breakthrough has occurred in the current case, though. The trial continues, with the court expected to reach a decision in late February.

When “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother, Nancy, was kidnapped on February 1, 2026, it was the first major kidnapping to spark a media frenzy in many years. Such episodes, prior to the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and advances in forensics, were much more common, including these watershed events.

Charles Lindbergh, Jr. (1932)

The abduction and murder of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son on March 1, 1932, was at the time considered the “crime of the century.” Lindbergh’s 1927 journey from New York to Paris was the first successful solo transatlantic flight and made him a household name.

“Awareness of the case was such that anyone seen with a small blonde child was looked at twice,” said Kase Wickman at Vanity Fair. Despite a frantic search that involved more than 100,000 people, the boy had likely been killed the night of the kidnapping, and his body was discovered 72 days later near the family’s home in Hopewell, New Jersey. A German immigrant named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried, convicted and executed for the crime.

Adolph Coors III (1960)

On February 9, 1960, 44-year-old Adolph Coors III, the grandson of the company’s founder, vanished. His car was found on the Turkey Creek Bridge near Denver, where he had been abducted by an escaped murderer, Joseph Corbett, looking for a quick get-rich scheme.

“The attempt went awry though and ended right there on that bridge” when Corbett shot Coors to death, said Colorado Public Radio. His wife, Mary, received a $500,000 ransom demand the next day, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dispatched an enormous operation to find the beverage heir. Coors’ body was discovered on September 15, 1960, and the FBI later traced a car matching a witness description to Corbett. Corbett was convicted and sentenced to life in prison but released on parole in 1980.

Frank Sinatra, Jr. (1963)

19 year-old Frank Sinatra, Jr., the son of one of the most renowned musicians and actors of his generation, was kidnapped from a hotel in Lake Tahoe, California, on December 8, 1963. Two men, Barry Keenan and Joe Amsler, tied up Sinatra, Jr.’s friend, John Foss, and spirited the singer to Canoga Park, California, where they contacted his father and issued a demand for a $240,000 ransom, which Sinatra delivered early in the morning on December 11.

A third conspirator, John Irwin, spilled the beans to his brother, who contacted the police. The three men were sentenced to life in prison, though none served even five years. At his trial, Keenan “testified that the crime was a hoax, a publicity stunt coordinated with people tied to the family,” an allegation that was later disproven, said Esquire.

Paul Fronczak (1964)

A woman posed as a nurse at Chicago’s Michael Reese hospital and made off with a 1-day-old infant named Paul Fronczak on April 27, 1964, triggering what was then the largest manhunt in the city’s history. Two years later, the FBI found a child that they believed to be Paul in New Jersey and he was returned to his parents, Dora and Chester Fronczak.

But in 2012, Fronczak took a DNA test that proved he was actually Jack Rosenthal, an Atlantic City child who had vanished in 1965 along with his twin sister, Jill (who has still not been found). In 2019, it was revealed that the real Paul Fronczak had been raised as Kevin Baty by a woman named Lorraine Fountain. By then, both Baty and Fountain had passed away, and the original kidnapper remains unknown. Rosenthal still goes by Paul Fronczak and published a memoir in 2022.

John Paul Getty III (1973)

Getty III, the grandson of petroleum magnate John Paul Getty, was abducted by Italian gangsters in Rome on July 10, 1973, when he was 16. The kidnappers demanded $17 million, but the elder Getty initially refused, suspecting his wayward grandson of complicity and saying “If I pay one penny, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.”

He only agreed later to dispatch $2.2 million — after he received his grandson’s ear in the mail — the highest amount that could at the time be considered tax-deductible. Getty III struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and suffered a stroke in 1981 that would leave him disabled for the rest of his life until his death in 2011. The story was made into a 2017 film, “All the Money in the World,” as well as a 2018 FX limited series, “Trust.”

Patricia Hearst (1974)

On February 4, 1974, 19 year-old Patricia Hearst, the heiress to William Randolph Hearst’s media dynasty, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a far-left radical group. Two months later, she participated in a bank robbery, after which she was considered a fugitive until her September 1975 arrest.

Hearst maintained that she was coerced, but she was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. “Hearst’s decision to stay with her kidnappers was a deeply symbolic transgression, one that articulated the anger so many felt against the American establishment,” said Smithsonian Magazine. She was released in 1979 after President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence, and she went on to perform in a number of Hollywood films, including the 1990 film “Cry-Baby.”

Shin Sang-ok (1978)

On January 11, 1978, South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee was abducted in Hong Kong by North Korean agents and taken to the North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang. Six months later, North Korea succeeded in kidnapping her husband, renowned director Shin Sang-ok, in Hong Kong as well.

Held for eight years at the behest of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung’s son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Il, Shin was forced to make seven films for his captors, including “Pulgasari,” a movie known as the “socialist Godzilla.” Kim “sought to create a film industry that would allow him to sway a world audience to the righteousness of the Workers’ Party of Korea,” said The Guardian. In March 1986, Shin and Choi escaped while in Vienna, Austria, where they were ostensibly seeking funding for a new project.

Aldo Moro (1978)

On March 16, 1978, during Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead,” former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the far-left terrorist group The Red Brigades while he was trying to broker the inclusion of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in a coalition government. He was executed by the Brigades on May 9, and his body was discovered in the trunk of a car in Rome.

There are still “unanswered questions” about the episode that remains “arguably the darkest episode of Italy's postwar history,” said The Guardian. Widespread revulsion at the assassination led to a crackdown on the Red Brigades and the beginning of the end of the group’s influence.

Abilio Diniz (1989)

Diniz, the co-founder of the Brazilian grocery chain Pão de Açúcar, Diniz was kidnapped on the morning of December 17, 1989, when the country was holding its first democratic presidential election after decades of autocracy. The 52-year-old Diniz was “dragged out of his Mercedes-Benz as he went to work and taken away in a station wagon disguised as an ambulance,” said The New York Times, and then held in a house in São Paulo before he was freed by authorities a week later.

The kidnappers were part of an ongoing abduction ring that had netted around $65 million. The group was connected to and included several members of the Chilean radical group the Movement for the Revolutionary Left.

Jaycee Dugard (1991)

11-year-old Jaycee Dugard was walking to a school bus stop in Lake Tahoe, California, when she was abducted by a couple, Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Phillip, already a convicted sex offender, and Nancy held Dugard for 18 years in a hidden backyard structure.

She was repeatedly raped and forced to carry two of Phillip’s children. The case attracted even greater attention when she was found in 2009. Authorities “discovered a hidden backyard compound made up of ramshackle tents and sheds, including a small, sparsely furnished two-room building” where she and her children were held, said The New York Times. Dugard founded a non-profit to help people recover from similar horrors and has understandably kept her daughters’ identities a secret. The Garridos remain in prison.

Elizabeth Smart (2002)

On June 5, 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her bedroom in the family’s Salt Lake City home by Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee. Mitchell, who had religious delusions, had previously worked as a roofer on the family’s house.

Though the case drew widespread national scrutiny, Smart remained in captivity for nine months, suffering daily sexual assaults, until she was recognized in Sandy, Utah, on March 12, 2003, and rescued by police. “Smart had to summon tremendous physical stamina to survive her captivity,” said Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker. Smart founded a non-profit to combat sexual exploitation and is now married with three children. Mitchell remains in federal prison; Barzee was granted parole in 2018.

To enter the “Epstein Library”, as it is grandly called, you just have to go to the website of the US Department of Justice, and click Yes on a pop-up that asks if you are 18 or over. That is all it takes to become immersed in a deeply disturbing world, said Helen Rumbelow in The Times.

‘Grand facade’

The more than three million documents and photographs related to the late paedophile are in a “careless jumble”; and the FBI warns that they may contain forgeries and false allegations. But after days poring through the Epstein files, I started to see these papers as a “Rosetta Stone through which women might understand male power”. They take us behind the “grand facade” presented by men who run the world, in government, academia, law and business; and they reveal how these figures speak to one another when “pussy” – in their parlance – is “out of the room where it happens”.

In this world, the men hold the cards, said Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. The women are powerless or peripheral. While Epstein and his male associates joke, network, trade information, swap favours and engage in “light displays of one-upmanship”, women appear mainly only as staff, or providers of sex. Trawling the files, you find yourself eavesdropping on the many female assistants who organise the diaries of these busy men and ensure their lives run seamlessly as they move from Paris to New York, Dubai to Davos.

More often, you hear the men. The word “pussy” comes up hundreds of times. In 2016, a contact promises Epstein “abundant young pussy flesh”; another routinely signs off business emails wishing him “lots of P”. The men speak unguardedly. In 2012, the ex-chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, tells Epstein about the “extraordinary girls” in Albania. An Emirati businessman complains that when the “Moldavian arrived”, she was a “big disappointment” – “not as attractive as the picture”. In 2019, the left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky laments the “horrible” press Epstein is getting, and bemoans the “hysteria” surrounding the abuse of women.

Meanwhile, in the background of all this, Epstein is constantly managing the women he has imported into his life. “Take a selfie of your pussy and send,” he tells one. It’s your “whore moans”, he suggests to another.

Clever conman

All the people who appear in the files insist they knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes, yet his homes were full of young women – “young girls with no last names”, as the Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal refers to them in an email. These girls were groomed and abused on an industrial scale, said Janice Turner in The Times: hundreds passed through his doors. Some were from poor families, offered $300 to give Epstein a massage that turned sexual; others were students or artists, lured to his homes by promises of grants or patronage. Still more were young models, flown in from eastern Europe. The pimp-in-chief was Ghislaine Maxwell, but the files suggest there were others, from the model agency boss Jean-Luc Brunel, who killed himself in jail, to the late socialite Annabelle Neilson.

Epstein’s friends seem to have accepted his taste for girls as though it were a hobby, like collecting fine wine. Take Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn, who messages Epstein about a pal with a jewellery business. “I know you have a lot of... young girls, women friends,” she says. “All women, and girls in your case, like jewellery.”

One of Epstein’s strategies was to pay his victims to recruit their friends, said Memphis Barker in The Daily Telegraph. And he pulled a similar trick in his parallel, sometimes overlapping, world of wealth and power – always leveraging his contacts, and the information they gave him, “to gain another, bigger prize”. There are all sorts of theories about how this working-class college dropout joined the elites, but the reality is simply that he was a clever conman.

In the 1970s, he blagged a lucrative Wall Street job, which he used to make contacts and engage in dodgy deals. Once a millionaire, he used his expertise in tax-avoidance and takeovers to gain access to the super-rich, whose fortunes he raided while acting as their adviser. He reportedly made some $200 million by advising the retail billionaire Les Wexner, and stole up to $100 million. With this sort of money, he could use donations to good causes, lavish hospitality and so on, to cultivate powerful people from all over the world, from senior Kremlin officials to Virgin boss Richard Branson to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli PM.

Although there are hints in the files that some of his contacts were drawn into his crimes – leaving them too exposed to turn on him – there is no clear evidence of a criminal conspiracy, said J. Oliver Conroy in The Guardian. What the files do seem to confirm, though, is the conspiracy theorist’s view of an elite stratosphere, where normal rules don’t apply, everyone knows each other, and ideological differences are subsumed to self-interested motives.

What happened

Ghislaine Maxwell, the former Jeffrey Epstein girlfriend and associate serving 20 years for sex trafficking, repeatedly invoked her “Fifth Amendment right to silence” Monday during a virtual deposition with the House Oversight Committee. Maxwell, appearing via video from her minimum-security prison camp in Texas, offered to talk only if she first received a pardon from President Donald Trump.

Who said what

Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), who first subpoenaed Maxwell in July, said it was “very disappointing” she refused to answer their “many questions” about “the crimes she and Epstein committed, as well as questions about potential co-conspirators.” Maxwell “answered no questions and provided no information about the men who raped and trafficked women and girls,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the committee’s top Democrat. “Who is she protecting?”

“Maxwell alone can explain why” Trump and former President Bill Clinton “are innocent of any wrongdoing,” her lawyer David Oscar Markus said during the hearing, and she is “prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump.” Maxwell is “campaigning over and over again to get that pardon,” and Trump “has not ruled it out,” said Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.). “That is why she is continuing to not cooperate with our investigation.”

What next?

Maxwell, who is “seeking to have her conviction overturned” in federal court, had “consistently told the committee that she wouldn’t answer questions,” The Associated Press said. But Comer “came under pressure to hold the deposition as he pressed for the committee to enforce subpoenas on Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” The Clintons are scheduled to be deposed later this month, and Comer reiterated Monday that he would not honor their request for a public hearing.

What happened

A Hong Kong court Monday morning sentenced former media tycoon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison. The 78-year-old British citizen, who founded the now-shuttered pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, was found guilty in December of conspiring to collude with foreign forces and publishing seditious materials.

His punishment is the “heaviest penalty yet meted out under a 2020 Beijing-imposed national security law,” said Bloomberg. Eight co-defendants received shorter prison terms.

Who said what

The judges said Lai was “no doubt the mastermind of all three conspiracies charged,” which “warrants a heavier sentence.” British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Lai had been jailed “for exercising his right to freedom of expression” and called for his release “on humanitarian grounds.” His heavy sentence “aligns with how the Chinese Communist Party has punished wealthy entrepreneurs and influential academics in the mainland for challenging the state,” said The New York Times.

What next?

President Donald Trump had encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to release Lai, so the sentence could “add another sticking point to negotiations between the world’s two largest economies,” scheduled for April, said The Wall Street Journal.

What happened

Former Illinois sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson was sentenced to 20 years in prison Thursday for the 2024 killing of Sonya Massey in her Springfield home. A jury last year found Grayson guilty of second-degree murder.

Who said what

The high-profile case was “defined by graphic police body camera footage shown widely across the nation,” said the Chicago Tribune. The footage showed Grayson, who is white, fatally shooting the 36-year-old Black mother of two after responding to a 911 call about a possible prowler outside her home. Massey “at the time was dealing with mental health challenges,” and Grayson shot her after she picked up a pot of boiling water from the stove.

This case marks a “rare instance of an American law enforcement officer convicted for an on-duty shooting,” The New York Times said, and Grayson’s 20-year sentence was the “maximum allowed in the state for that crime.” Massey’s family and friends “erupted into cheers” when Sangamon County Circuit Judge Ryan Cadagin handed down the sentence, said Chicago Public Media. Cadagin “admonished them for the outburst,” said The Associated Press.

What next?

Grayson, 31, “has been incarcerated since he was charged,” the AP said, and “with a day shaved off his sentence for every day of good behavior, plus credit for nearly 19 months already spent behind bars,” he “could be released in just under 8 1/2 years.”

While many American cities are painted as bastions of murder, a new report has revealed that this is not actually the case. The U.S. logged a more than 20% drop in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, marking the largest single-year fall on record and possibly the lowest homicide rate in the country in 125 years. But while both Democrats and Republicans are taking credit for this drop in crime, analysts say there’s more to the story than politics.

What did the commentators say?

The study, published by the independent Council on Criminal Justice, analyzed crime data from 40 of the largest American cities. The “rate of reported homicides was 21% lower in 2025 than in 2024 in the 35 study cities providing data for that crime, representing 922 fewer homicides,” said the study. When the data is finalized, there is a “strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents,” which would be the “lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900.”

This marks a significant shift from the Covid-era spikes in crime, and “elected officials at all levels — both Democrats and Republicans — have been claiming credit,” said The Associated Press. But even with this data, experts say it’s “too early to tell what is prompting the change.” There’s “never one reason crime goes up or down,” said Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, to the AP. Analysts are “seeing that broad, very broad social, cultural and economic forces at the national level can assert huge influence on what happens at the local level.”

President Donald Trump has claimed that his deployment of the National Guard in several cities and Washington, D.C., has drastically reduced crime. But homicide rates began falling during former President Joe Biden’s administration, and there’s “little to justify any claim that Trump is responsible for last year’s drop in crime,” said The New York Times. There are “many more cities that didn’t have the National Guard that saw their crime go down than cities that had the National Guard who saw their crime go down,” said Alex Piquero, who served as the Biden administration’s head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to the Times.

But while Republicans may not be responsible for the drop in homicides, Democrats may not be either. Rather than politics, countries with a “stronger market orientation may experience lower rates of homicide,” said a separate study from the University of Georgia. This is a concept that references how a “nation’s economy functions within a framework of legal rights and freedoms.” Researchers found that a “stronger market orientation could decrease murder rates, with even a one-point shift on a market freedom scale leading to a 22% drop in homicides.”

What next?

The drop in homicides could just reflect an up-and-down pattern, as murders had been “steadily dropping since the late 2000s” before the Covid spike, senior research specialist Ernesto López, the study’s lead author, told CBS News. It is “possible that these rates reflect a longer-term downward trend punctuated by periods of elevated homicides.”

In another piece of good news, the study found that other crime rates had fallen, too. Carjackings declined 27% from 2024 to 2025, burglaries fell 18%, larcenies fell 11% and shoplifting dropped 10%.

A new National Police Service dubbed the “British FBI” will be tasked with tackling the most serious crimes, enabling strained local forces to concentrate more resources on everyday offences, the Home Office has announced.

The announcement comes ahead of a series of reforms that will be “the biggest shake-up to the crime-fighting structure” in more than half a century, according to The Telegraph.

How will the new unit work?

The National Police Service will target terrorism, fraud and organised crime. Despite the “British FBI” nickname, the NPS will only operate in England and Wales, as policing is devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The new organisation, set out in a government White Paper, will bring together the responsibilities of existing agencies such as the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, Regional Organised Crime Units and National Road Policing. The NPS will also be in charge of setting professional standards and training requirements and purchasing new equipment for all forces. This includes overseeing the nationwide roll-out of controversial facial recognition software.

The NPS will have its own uniform and a new national police commissioner will be appointed to lead the force, serving as the most senior police officer in the country.

The establishment of the new body will be accompanied by a reduction in the number of police forces in England and Wales, “with some merged to create bigger regional constabularies tackling complex crimes, such as murder, drugs and county lines gangs”.

What is the goal?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has insisted the radical overhaul is urgently needed because the “outdated” and “fragmented” current model is “buckling under the strain” of tackling complex modern crime, leaving “serious offending unpunished”.

“The current policing model was built for a different century,” she said. The “British FBI” will deploy “world-class talent and state-of-the-art technology to track down and catch dangerous criminals”. Ministers claim the NPS will be better placed to tackle criminals whose activities increasingly cross local constabulary and national borders.

Another of the “main aims” of the new service is to “boost the 43 local forces’ ability to spend more time fighting crime in their communities, such as shoplifting, drug dealing, phone theft and anti-social behaviour”, said Sky News.

How have the plans been received?

The establishment of the NPS “reflects a widespread consensus” among law enforcement experts that “more specialised officers are needed to combat threats such as online fraud and international organised crime, and that only larger forces can support the level of expertise required”, said the Financial Times.

The heads of Counter Terrorism Policing, the Metropolitan Police, the College of Policing, the National Crime Agency and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have all welcomed the move, writing jointly in The Telegraph that the current system is “messy and complex, and neither as efficient nor as coherent as it should be. That is why reform is needed – not as an ideological exercise, but as common sense. National crime demands a national response.”

While the policing world is “almost giddy” about the plans, “amending police structures, processes and institutions won’t affect people’s lives in the short, or even the medium, term”, said crime expert and former BBC journalist Danny Shaw. The White Paper “is not intended as an urgent plan of action to address our immediate concerns about safety on the streets, crime and anti-social behaviour”, but rather “a roadmap towards a more efficient and effective police service in the decades to come”.

What happened

A growing number of Republicans on Sunday joined unified Democratic calls for a thorough, transparent investigation of an immigration agent’s killing Saturday of Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at Minnesota’s Veterans Affairs hospital, was pushed to the ground by a Border Patrol agent after stepping in to shield a woman being hit with pepper spray, then surrounded, beaten and shot in the back several times, multiple bystander videos show. Trump administration officials quickly blamed Pretti, baselessly calling him a “terrorist” intent on shooting federal agents with a legally concealed handgun. Videos show Pretti had a phone in his hand but never touched his gun, which was removed from his waistband by an agent before he was shot.

The Department of Homeland Security is investigating the shooting by its own agent, officials said, and it barred Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators from the scene of the shooting on Saturday, despite a signed search warrant. A federal judge late Saturday agreed to Minnesota’s request for a temporary restraining order barring DHS “from destroying or altering evidence related to” Pretti’s shooting.

Who said what

Minnesota’s “extraordinary legal maneuvers” are “meant to counter what state officials and legal experts framed as unprecedented obstruction by federal authorities” into Pretti’s shooting, Axios said. They also “appear geared toward avoiding a repeat of the aftermath of an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Good.” The FBI blocked state investigators and “briefly opened a civil rights investigation” into Good’s shooting, The Washington Post said, “but closed it and instead focused on investigating Good’s partner and protesters.”

Having DHS investigate Pretti’s killing is “not normal,” a former senior ICE official told CBS News. The Trump administration is “lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes,” urging us to “reject the evidence” of our own “eyes and ears,” The New York Times said in an editorial, so it “will be impossible to trust any federal investigation that it conducts.” Pretti’s killing is the “worst incident to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump presidency,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. The president “would be wise to pause ICE enforcement in the Twin Cities” and “consider a less provocative strategy.”

What next?

The “gentle and equivocal” public pushback from a “small but growing number of Republicans” is “increasingly conspicuous” as the political costs rise, Politico said. The “growing fury” among Democrats, “even among moderates,” said The Associated Press, pushed Senate Democrats on Sunday to say they would block a government spending bill unless the DHS funding was removed, raising the odds of a partial government shutdown starting next weekend.

How America has changed, said Molly Olmstead on Slate. When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, the country was united in horror. Republican commentators expressed their shock at the killing; President Trump called it “sickening” and “revolting”. Compare that with the response to the killing last week of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officer just a mile from where Floyd died.

Shocking lies

Within hours, the administration was slandering her. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson claimed that she’d “weaponised her vehicle” in an attempt to kill Ice officers, in “an act of domestic terrorism”. A Fox News pundit accused Democrat leaders of emboldening “thugs” to attack law enforcers. Vice President J.D. Vance called Good a “deranged Leftist”. All this despite an abundance of video evidence suggesting that Good’s killing was unjustified.

The lies were shocking, said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. Officials could have pleaded patience while the full facts were established, yet they chose instead to spout falsehoods, such as that there were riots at the scene. “The federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest and devoted to vilifying Trump’s perceived enemies rather than informing the public.”

Trump was the worst offender, said Eric Levitz on Vox. He condemned Good on social media as a “professional agitator” who had “violently, wilfully, and viciously” run over the Ice officer who shot her. “Based on the attached clip,” he said, “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in hospital.” Anyone who has seen footage of the event knows that’s nonsense. While the officer might have been clipped by the bumper of Good’s SUV as she turned to drive off, he clearly wasn’t run over. After firing through the windshield and open driver window, he calmly reholstered his gun and walked away. It’s frightening. “If Ice agents know that they can kill US citizens on video – and still count on the president to lie in support of their freedom – Americans’ most basic liberties will be imperilled.”

Useful distraction

Let’s keep things in perspective, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. To listen to some people, you’d think Ice agents were wandering around randomly executing people. While Good certainly didn’t deserve to die, she did appear to disobey police orders. The agent who fired at her, Jonathan Ross, may well have feared for his life, said The Wall Street Journal. He reportedly received dozens of stitches last year after a fleeing car dragged him about 300 feet.

Both sides need to lower the temperature. It’s not helpful for Mayor Jacob Frey to demand that federal immigration officials “get the f**k out of Minneapolis”. Trump should also tone down his rhetoric and reconsider his aggressive deployment of Ice agents. “His mass deportation policy is already unpopular and will become more so if there are more such violent incidents.”

On the contrary, the row over Ice may serve as a useful distraction for Trump, said Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine. At a time when his ratings have slumped and the Democrats are making headway by relentlessly highlighting cost-of-living issues, shifting the battleground towards immigration, crime and policing puts the Republicans in “more familiar and comfortable” territory. Hence why they were so eager to misrepresent the circumstances of Good’s death. Beyond the desire to show deference to Trump, they recognised that, facts aside, “support for the shooter is good politics for the GOP”.

What happened

Minnesota officials on Thursday said the FBI was barring state and local investigators from participating in the inquiry into an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good on Wednesday. Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) Superintendent Drew Evans said in a statement the FBI “had reversed course” on an initial agreement to conduct a joint investigation, and since the BCA will “no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews,” his agency “reluctantly” stepped back.

Who said what

“Minnesota must be part of this investigation,” Gov. Tim Walz (D) told reporters, or “it feels very, very difficult that we will get a fair outcome.” State Attorney General Keith Ellison said he hoped the FBI would “reverse” its “very concerning” decision. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Minnesota officials “have not been out. They don’t have any jurisdiction in this investigation.”

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that the ICE agent who killed Good, identified in court papers as Jonathan Ross, “is protected by absolute immunity.” Vance’s claim was “quickly met with skepticism by experts,” CNN said. But keeping the investigation in federal hands means the BCA has “few tools available to fully scrutinize the shooting and provide its findings to county prosecutors, who would then determine whether the agent should face state charges.”

What next?

In Oregon, Portland Police Chief Bob Day said Thursday night the FBI was leading the investigation into a Border Patrol agent’s non-fatal shooting of two people in a car yesterday afternoon. DHS said the agent fired a “defensive shot” at an alleged Venezuelan gang member after he fled a “targeted vehicle stop.” In previous cases, including Good’s killing, “video evidence cast doubt on the administration’s descriptions of what prompted the shootings,” The Associated Press said. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said his state’s Department of Justice would conduct its own investigation.