But Mr. Biden’s comment went beyond providing military means for Taiwan to defend itself and was widely seen as suggesting direct American military involvement.

Mr. Biden has ignored the strategic ambiguity of his predecessors with regard to China and Taiwan before. Last August, while reassuring allies that “we would respond” if there were an attack against a fellow NATO member, he added, “Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan.”

Taiwan, however, has never been granted the same U.S. security guarantees as Japan, South Korea or America’s NATO partners, so the comment was seen as significant. Two months later, Mr. Biden was asked during a CNN town hall if the United States would protect Taiwan from attack. “Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” he said.

Mr. Biden’s improvisation in Tokyo stirred a mix of reactions back in Washington, where some political leaders praised his candid support for an ally while others mocked him for indiscipline.

“President Biden’s statement that if push came to shove the U.S. would defend Taiwan against communist China was the right thing to say and the right thing to do,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, wrote on Twitter.

On the other hand, Tommy Hicks Jr., a Republican National Committee co-chairman and close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, saw incompetence not courage. “Another clean-up job from the Biden spin room,” he wrote. “He cannot go overseas without saying something that his team has to walk back minutes later. It’s reckless and embarrassing.”

Mr. Trump, of course, was far more prone than Mr. Biden to issue provocative, off-the-cuff and unvetted statements at odds with traditional American policy. At various points, he threatened war with North Korea, Venezuela and Iran; castigated American allies like Germany, Japan, Canada and South Korea; and defended adversaries like Mr. Putin.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/us/politics/biden-taiwan-comments.html

A federal affidavit released this week has jolted California’s tenth-largest city, laying out evidence that Sidhu sought to turn the city’s prolonged attempt to sell Angel Stadium — home of the major league Angels — to his personal advantage.

The city has spent years negotiating terms for selling the ballpark and the land on which it sits to a group led by Angels owner Arte Moreno. According to an affidavit from Federal Bureau of Investigation Agent Brian C. Adkins, Sidhu used an intermediary to pass confidential information about those talks to an Angels representative and then sought to conceal his actions. An Angels representative did not respond to requests for comment.

More explosively, the affidavit alleges that Sidhu repeatedly discussed his intention to ask an Angels representative for half a million dollars or more in campaign donations in exchange for his work advancing the proposed stadium deal. Meyer said in his statement that the affidavit showed Sidhu “never asked for a political campaign contribution that was linked in any way to the negotiation process.”

“His unwavering goal from the start has been to keep the Angels in Anaheim, so that this vibrant social and economic relationship will continue,” Meyer said in his statement.

An underlying federal investigation alleges a pervasive culture of corruption in Anaheim, which Adkins described as being “tightly controlled by a small cadre of individuals” that included Sidhu.

In a separate affidavit laying out a money laundering investigation accusing former Anaheim Chamber of Commerce President Todd Ament of lying on a mortgage application, Adkins alleged that Ament and a campaign consultant sought to influence policy via what Ament and his consultant called their “cabal” of people who wield power over Anaheim’s affairs.

The affidavit describes the two discussing how they expect loyalty after securing an elected official’s reelection and that they could “give” him a promotion, and recounting how an elected official used a “script” they wrote for him to read at a city council meeting.

A California Democratic Party official, Melahat Rafiei, resigned her posts on Sunday after having told the Voice of OC that she was an unnamed confidential informant whom Adkins’ affidavit describes as offering to bribe elected officials.

A judge has halted the planned stadium transaction at the request of the California Department of Justice. The DOJ had secured a stipulated judgment in which Anaheim paid a $96 million fine to resolve allegations that the city’s ballpark deal violated state land-use laws.

Source Article from https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/23/anaheim-mayor-resigns-angel-stadium-00034559

Gov. Gavin Newsom met with leaders of the state’s largest urban water suppliers Monday and implored them to step up efforts to get people to reduce water use as California’s drought continues to worsen. He warned that if conservation efforts don’t improve this summer, the state could be forced to impose mandatory water restrictions throughout the state.

Ten months ago, Newsom called for Californians to voluntarily cut water use 15%, but the state remains far from that goal.

The latest conservation figures have been especially poor. Water use in cities and towns increased by nearly 19% in March, an especially warm and dry month. Compared with a 2020 baseline, statewide cumulative water savings since July have amounted to just 3.7%.

“Every water agency across the state needs to take more aggressive actions to communicate about the drought emergency and implement conservation measures,” Newsom said in a statement. “Californians made significant changes since the last drought but we have seen an uptick in water use, especially as we enter the summer months. We all have to be more thoughtful about how to make every drop count.”

For part of the 2012-16 drought, then-Gov. Jerry Brown ordered a mandatory 25% reduction in urban water use. Many Californians responded by cutting back and taking steps such as converting lawns to drought-tolerant plants.

Local water agencies told state officials they preferred an approach that allowed for greater flexibility and would be more tailored to their local situations. Newsom has favored a locally driven approach. But the governor’s office said in a statement that Newsom “voiced concerns today given recent conservation levels around the state.”

“Gov. Newsom warned that if this localized approach to conservation does not result in a significant reduction in water use statewide this summer, the state could be forced to enact mandatory restrictions,” his office said. “The governor will reconvene these same agencies in the next two months to provide an update.”

Despite official calls for conservation, California cities and towns increased water use by 19% in March.

Monday’s meeting was not open to the public and was not aired live. Officials who attended the meeting at the California Natural Resources Agency, in Sacramento, included leaders of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, San Diego County Water Authority, East Bay Municipal Utility District and other large water suppliers. Their agencies together supply water to about two-thirds of Californians.

Newsom issued an executive order in March calling for local water agencies to implement more aggressive conservation measures. Following that order, the State Water Resources Control Board will vote Tuesday on emergency regulations that require local water suppliers to activate “Level 2″ of their local contingency plans to prepare for a shortage of up to 20%. The regulations also include a statewide ban on using potable water to irrigate “non-functional” grass at commercial, industrial and institutional properties — which include homeowners’ associations as well as businesses.

About half of California’s population is now under water restrictions implemented by local water agencies, according to the governor’s office. If the state water board approves the emergency regulations, every urban area throughout the state will be covered by a local plan for reducing water use.

The severe drought, now in its third year in California, is one of the most extreme on record and has been worsened by hotter temperatures with global warming. The first three months of the year were the driest on record. The state’s largest reservoirs are now at about half their average levels.

Across the western U.S., scientists have found that the extreme dryness since 2000 has become the driest 22-year period in at least 1,200 years, a megadrought that research shows is being intensified by climate change.

Some scientists describe the trend as aridification and say the West must prepare for heat-driven drying to continue as temperatures climb with the burning of fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Newsom has proposed an additional $2 billion this year for drought response efforts.

The state government has scaled up its drought campaign, called Save Our Water, and is urging Californians to conserve by taking steps such as limiting outdoor watering, taking shorter showers and washing full loads of clothes.

Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, attended Monday’s meeting and said the district supports Newsom’s call for reducing water consumption to stretch California’s shrinking supplies ahead of the summer months.

“We appreciate the governor’s collaborative approach in addressing statewide drought conditions by allowing water agencies to determine the water savings actions appropriate for the specific circumstances of their communities,” Hagekhalil said in a statement. “Different parts of our state have different water supply sources and are being affected by the state’s drought differently.”

The Metropolitan Water District in April declared a water shortage emergency and ordered restrictions on outdoor watering in parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties that rely on the hard-hit State Water Project, which transports water southward from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The water restrictions are set to take effect June 1 and are aimed at reducing water use by about 35%.

Though Newsom’s meeting with managers of water agencies focused on improving conservation in urban areas, the drought is also affecting agriculture and food production. Many growers have seen their water deliveries cut sharply, and have turned to pumping more groundwater or leaving some farmland dry and unplanted.

Of the water that’s diverted and pumped in California, state data show that on average about 80% is used by agriculture while the other roughly 20% is used by cities and towns.

In a recent report for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, researchers calculated that reduced water deliveries resulted in 395,000 acres of cropland left dry and unplanted last year — an area larger than Los Angeles.

The researchers calculated that the drought last year caused the state’s agriculture industry to shrink by an estimated 8,745 jobs and shoulder $1.2 billion in costs due to water cutbacks. Those costs are expected to grow this year as more farmland in the Central Valley is left dry.

Source Article from https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-05-23/newsom-urges-more-aggressive-water-conservation-amid-drought

Small waves crash into the beach surrounded by cliffs in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif. Four people fell off a Southern California ocean cliff in the early morning darkness on Monday.

Jae C. Hong/AP


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Small waves crash into the beach surrounded by cliffs in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif. Four people fell off a Southern California ocean cliff in the early morning darkness on Monday.

Jae C. Hong/AP

PALOS VERDES ESTATES, Calif. — A man was killed and two women were critically injured when four people fell off a Southern California ocean cliff before dawn Monday, authorities said.

The fourth person, a man who suffered minor injuries, managed to climb back up from the beach below and alert a passing officer at about 4:30 a.m., said Capt. Steve Barber of the Palos Verdes Estates Police Department.

A 25-year-old man from Los Angeles died at the scene, Barber said. Two women were airlifted from the beach and each hospitalized in critical condition, he said.

TV news helicopters showed a Los Angeles County Fire Department helicopter hoisting one of the victims to a rescue vehicle at the top of the cliff.

Police were investigating the event as an accident, Barber said.

An onlooker stands near an ocean cliff in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., on Monday.

Jae C. Hong/AP


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An onlooker stands near an ocean cliff in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., on Monday.

Jae C. Hong/AP

Palos Verdes Estates is on the Palos Verdes Peninsula at the southern end of Los Angeles County. A trail runs along the bluff top about 300 feet above the Pacific Ocean.

There have been several accidents in the area over the years, Barber said, and a few suicides.

“There’s no indication at this point that this was anything other than an accident,” he said.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2022/05/23/1100857154/4-people-fell-off-a-cliff-in-southern-california

Tokyo (CNN)President Joe Biden said Monday that the United States would intervene militarily if China attempts to take Taiwan by force, a warning that appeared to deviate from the deliberate ambiguity traditionally held by Washington.

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    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/23/politics/biden-taiwan-china-japan-intl-hnk/index.html

    President Joe Biden said Monday that the United States would intervene militarily if China attempts to take Taiwan by force, a warning that appeared to deviate from the deliberate ambiguity traditionally held by Washington.

    The White House quickly downplayed the comments, saying they don’t reflect a change in US policy. It’s the third time in recent months – including during a CNN town hall in October – that Biden has said the US would protect Taiwan from a Chinese attack, only to have the White House walk back those remarks.

    During a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo, Biden was asked if the US would be willing to go further to help Taiwan in the event of an invasion than it did with Ukraine.

    “You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons. Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?” a reporter asked.

    “Yes,” Biden replied. “That’s the commitment we made.”

    “We agree with the One China policy. We signed on to it, and all the attendant agreements made from there, but the idea that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, is (just not) appropriate,” he said.

    Under the “One China” policy, the US acknowledges China’s position that Taiwan is part of China, but has never officially recognized Beijing’s claim to the self-governing island of 23 million. The US provides Taiwan defensive weapons, but has remained intentionally ambiguous on whether it would intervene militarily in the event of a Chinese attack.

    Biden’s strong warning was made right on China’s doorstep during his first trip to Asia as President. The visit is aimed at uniting allies and partners to counter China’s rising influence. It also came a day before Biden is scheduled to attend the second in-person summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) – an informal grouping between the US, Japan, Australia and India that has alarmed Beijing.

    Several of Biden’s top administration officials were caught off-guard by the remarks, several aides told CNN, adding that they were not expecting Biden to be so unequivocal.

    In a statement following Biden’s comments, a White House official said the US’ official position remained unchanged.

    “As the President said, our policy has not changed. He reiterated our One China policy and our commitment to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. He also reiterated our commitment under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the military means to defend itself,” the official said.

    China expresses ‘firm opposition’ to comments

    Within hours, China had expressed its “strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition” to Biden’s comments, saying it will not allow any external force to interfere in its “internal affairs.”

    “On issues concerning China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and other core interests, there is no room for compromise,” said Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

    “We urged the US side to earnestly follow the One China principle … be cautious in words and deeds on the Taiwan issue, and not send any wrong signal to pro-Taiwan independence and separatist forces — so it won’t cause serious damage to the situation across the Taiwan Strait and China-US relations.”

    Taiwan lies fewer than 110 miles (177 kilometers) off the coast of China. For more than 70 years the two sides have been governed separately, but that hasn’t stopped China’s ruling Communist Party from claiming the island as its own — despite having never controlled it.

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said that “reunification” between China and Taiwan is inevitable and refused to rule out the use of force. Tensions between Beijing and Taipei are at the highest they’ve been in recent decades, with the Chinese military sending record numbers of war planes near the island.

    Joanne Ou, a spokesperson for Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told CNN that it “expresses sincere welcome and gratitude to President Biden and the United States government for reiterating its rock solid commitment to Taiwan.”

    Biden compares potential invasion of Taiwan to Ukraine war

    Biden on Monday compared a potential invasion of Taiwan by China to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, warning, “It will dislocate the entire region,” and emphasizing “Russia has to pay a long-term price for its actions.”

    “And the reason I bother to say this, not just about Ukraine – if, in fact, after all (Russian President Vladimir Putin has) done, there’s a rapprochement … between the Ukrainians and Russia, and these sanctions are not continued to be sustained in many ways, then what signal does that send to China about the cost of attempting, attempting to take Taiwan by force?”

    Biden said that China is “already flirting with danger right now by flying so close and all the maneuvers they’re undertaking.”

    “But the United States is committed, we made a commitment, we support the One China policy, we support all we’ve done in the past, but that does not mean, it does not mean that China has the ability, has the, excuse me, jurisdiction to go in and use force to take over Taiwan,” he added.

    At the press conference, Kishida also reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.

    “Attempts to change the status quo by force, like Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, should never be tolerated in the Indo-Pacific, above all, in East Asia,” he said.

    “As the regional security environment becomes increasingly severe, I reaffirmed with President Biden that we need to speedily strengthen the deterrence and response of the Japan-US alliance,” he said, adding that he conveyed his determination to “fundamentally strengthen Japan’s defense capability.”

    This story has been updated with additional reporting and reaction.

    CNN’s Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.

    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/23/politics/biden-taiwan-china-japan-intl-hnk/index.html

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/23/russia-diplomat-resigns-united-nations-ukraine-war/

    Facebook founder Zuckerberg sued over data ‘harvesting’

    Dominic Rushe

    Washington DC’s attorney general has sued Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold the Facebook co-founder personally responsible for his alleged role in allowing the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal data of millions of Americans during the 2016 election cycle.

    The suit, filed in the capital by the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine, alleges that Zuckerberg directly participated in policies that allowed Cambridge Analytica to unknowingly gather the personal data of US voters in an attempt to help Donald Trump’s election campaign.

    “This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct,” Racine said in a news release.

    NEW: We’re suing Mark Zuckerberg for his role in Facebook’s misleading privacy practices and failure to protect millions of users’ data.

    Our investigation shows extensive evidence that Zuckerberg was personally involved in failures that led to the Cambridge Analytica incident.

    — AG Karl A. Racine (@AGKarlRacine) May 23, 2022

    Washington DC’s attorney general has sued Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold the Facebook co-founder personally responsible for his alleged role in allowing the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal data of millions of Americans during the 2016 election cycle.

    The suit, filed in the capital by the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine, alleges that Zuckerberg directly participated in policies that allowed Cambridge Analytica to unknowingly gather the personal data of US voters in an attempt to help Donald Trump’s election campaign.

    “This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct,” Racine said in a news release.

    “This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including chief executives, will be held accountable for their actions.”

    Meta declined to comment.

    Racine has previously sued Facebook’s parent company, Meta, under the District of Columbia’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act. The act makes individuals responsible for violations if they knew about them at the time.

    The suit against Zuckerberg is based on hundreds of thousands of documents, including depositions from employees and whistleblowers, that have been collected as part of its ongoing litigation against Meta.

    “Since filing our landmark lawsuit against Facebook, my office has fought tooth and nail against the company’s characteristic efforts to resist producing documents and otherwise thwart our suit. We continue to persist and have followed the evidence right to Mr Zuckerberg,” said Racine.

    Read the full story:

    Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2022/may/23/joe-biden-inflation-january-6-supreme-court-democrats-republicans-us-politics-live

    Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/05/23/biden-u-s-has-enough-vaccines-deal-monkeypox-outbreak/9889740002/

    Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over almost two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations, according to a scathing 288-page investigative report issued Sunday.

    These survivors, and other concerned Southern Baptists, repeatedly shared allegations with the SBC’s Executive Committee, “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC,” said the report.

    The seven-month investigation was conducted by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm contracted by the Executive Committee after delegates to last year’s national meeting pressed for a probe by outsiders.

    “Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC’s response to these reports of abuse … and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC,” the report said.

    “In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy – even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” the report added.

    The report asserts that an Executive Committee staffer maintained a list of Baptist ministers accused of abuse, but there is no indication anyone “took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.”

    The most recent list includes the names of hundreds of abusers thought to be affiliated at some point with the SBC. Survivors and advocates have long called for a public database of abusers.

    SBC President Ed Litton, in a statement Sunday, said he is “grieved to my core” for the victims and thanked God for their work propelling the SBC to this moment. He called on Southern Baptists to lament and prepare to change the denomination’s culture and implement reforms.

    “I pray Southern Baptists will begin preparing today to take deliberate action to address these failures and chart a new course when we meet together in Anaheim,” Litton said, referring to the California city that will host the SBC’s national meeting on June 14-15.

    Among the report’s key recommendations:

    — Form an independent commission and later establish a permanent administrative entity to oversee comprehensive long-term reforms concerning sexual abuse and related misconduct within the SBC.

    —Create and maintain an Offender Information System to alert the community to known offenders.

    — Provide a comprehensive Resource Toolbox including protocols, training, education, and practical information.

    —Restrict the use of nondisclosure agreements and civil settlements which bind survivors to confidentiality in sexual abuse matters, unless requested by the survivor.

    The interim leaders of the Executive Committee, Willie McLaurin and Rolland Slade, welcomed the recommendations, and pledged an all-out effort to eliminate sex abuse within the SBC.

    “We recognize there are no shortcuts,” they said. “We must all meet this challenge through prudent and prayerful application, and we must do so with Christ-like compassion.”

    The Executive Committee is set to hold a special meeting Tuesday to discuss the report.

    The sex abuse scandal was thrust into the spotlight in 2019 by a landmark report from the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News documenting hundreds of cases in Southern Baptist churches, including several in which alleged perpetrators remained in ministry.

    Last year, thousands of delegates at the national SBC gathering made clear they did not want the Executive Committee to oversee an investigation of its own actions. Instead they voted overwhelmingly to create the task force charged with overseeing the third-party review. Litton, pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, Alabama, appointed the panel.

    The task force had a week to review the report before it was publicly released. The task force’s recommendations based on Guidepost’s findings will be presented at the SBC’s meeting in Anaheim.

    The report offers shocking details on how Johnny Hunt, a Georgia-based pastor and past SBC president, sexually assaulted another pastor’s wife during a beach vacation in 2010. In an interview with investigators, Hunt denied any physical contact with the woman, but did admit he had interactions with her.

    On May 13, Hunt, who was the senior vice president of evangelism and leadership at the North American Mission Board, the SBC’s domestic missions agency, resigned from that post, said Kevin Ezell, the organization’s president and CEO. Ezell said, before May 13, he was “not aware of any alleged misconduct” on Hunt’s part.

    The report details a meeting Hunt arranged a few days after the alleged assault between the woman, her husband, Hunt and a counseling pastor. Hunt admitted to touching the victim inappropriately, but said “thank God I didn’t consummate the relationship.”

    Among those reacting strongly to the Guidepost report was Russell Moore, who formerly headed the SBC’s public policy wing but left the denomination after accusing top Executive Committee leaders of stalling efforts to address the sex abuse crisis.

    “Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse,” Moore wrote for Christianity Today after reading the report. ”As dark a view as I had of the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.”

    According to the report, Guidepost’s investigators, who spoke with survivors of varying ages including children, said the survivors were equally traumatized by the way in which churches responded to their reports of sexual abuse.

    Survivors “spoke of trauma from the initial abuse, but also told us of the debilitating effects that come from the response of the churches and institutions like the SBC that did not believe them, ignored them, mistreated them, and failed to help them,” the report said.

    It cited the case of Dave Pittman, who from 2006 to 2011 made phone calls and sent letters and emails to the SBC and Georgia Baptist Convention Board reporting that he had been abused by Frankie Wiley, a youth pastor at Rehoboth Baptist Church when he was 12 to 15 years old.

    Pittman and several others have come forward publicly to report that Wiley molested and raped them and Wiley has admitted to abusing “numerous victims” at several Georgia Southern Baptist churches.

    According to the report, a Georgia Baptist Convention official told Pittman that the churches were autonomous and there was nothing he could do but pray.

    The report also tells the story of Christa Brown, who says she was sexually abused as a teen by the youth and education minister at her SBC church.

    When she disclosed the abuse to the music minister after months of abuse, she was told not to talk about it, according to the report, which said her abuser also went on to serve in Southern Baptist churches in multiple states.

    Brown, who has been one of the most outspoken survivors, told investigators that during the past 15 years she has received “volumes of hate mail, awful blog comments, and vitriolic phone calls.”

    After reading through the report, Brown told The Associated Press that it “fundamentally confirms what Southern Baptist clergy sex abuse survivors have been saying for decades.”

    “I view this investigative report as a beginning, not an end. The work will continue,” Brown said. “But no one should ever forget the human cost of what it has taken to even get the SBC to approach this starting line of beginning to deal with clergy sex abuse.”

    ___

    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

    Source Article from https://apnews.com/article/baptist-religion-sexual-abuse-by-clergy-southern-convention-bfdbe64389790630488f854c3dae3fd5

    The International Monetary Fund has warned against “geoeconomic fragmentation” as policymakers and business leaders gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    In a blog post ahead of this week’s event, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said the global economy faces its “biggest test since the Second World War,” with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine compounding the residual economic effects of Covid-19 crisis, dragging down growth and driving inflation to multi-decade highs.

    Spiraling food and energy prices are squeezing households around the world, while central banks are tightening monetary policy to rein in inflation, exerting further pressure on indebted nations, companies and families.

    When combined with the spike in volatility in financial markets and persistent threat from climate change, the IMF said the world faces a “potential confluence of calamities.”

    “Yet our ability to respond is hampered by another consequence of the war in Ukraine—the sharply increased risk of geoeconomic fragmentation,” Georgieva said.

    “Tensions over trade, technology standards, and security have been growing for many years, undermining growth—and trust in the current global economic system.”

    She added that uncertainty around trade policies alone cut global GDP by almost 1% in 2019, according to IMF research, and the D.C.-based institution’s monitoring also indicates that around 30 countries have restricted trade in food, energy and other key commodities.

    Georgieva warned that further disintegration would have enormous global costs, harming people across the socio-economic spectrum, and said technological fragmentation alone could lead to losses of 5% of GDP for many countries.

    Carmine Di Sibio, global chairman and CEO of consultancy giant EY, told CNBC on Monday that the economy has “taken center stage” in discussions among big business leaders at Davos.

    “The economy is the top conversation – inflation is a big concern and you do see some leading indicators starting to slow,” he said.

    Although corporate deal volumes have slowed, Di Sibio said EY was still seeing signs of “pretty robust activity” and business leaders were still looking at options to transform their businesses, with pricing in the sector coming down of late amid resolute demand.

    “The transformation that companies are going through – the transformation in terms of technology, in terms of supply chain and location of supply chain, and de-risking of supply chains – that is still going on and we do a lot around that as well,” Di Sibio said.

    Solutions

    In order to address the growing fragmentation, the IMF has firstly called for governments to lower trade barriers to alleviate shortages and reduce the prices of food and other commodities, while diversifying exports to improve economic resilience.

    “Not only countries but also companies need to diversify imports—to secure supply chains and preserve the tremendous benefits to business of global integration,” Georgieva said.

    “While geostrategic considerations will drive some sourcing decisions, this need not lead to disintegration. Business leaders have an important role to play in this regard.”

    Secondly, the IMF urged collaborative efforts to deal with debt, as roughly 60% of low-income countries currently have significant debt vulnerabilities and will need restructuring.

    “Without decisive cooperation to ease their burdens, both they and their creditors will be worse off, but a return to debt sustainability will draw new investment and spur inclusive growth,” Georgieva said.

    “That is why the Group of Twenty’s Common Framework for Debt Treatment must be improved without delay.”

    Thirdly, the IMF called for a modernization of cross-border payments, with inefficient payment systems posing a barrier to inclusive economic growth. The institution estimates that the 6.3% average cost of an international remittance payment means around $45 billion annually is diverted toward intermediaries and away from lower-income households.

    “Countries could work together to develop a global public digital platform—a new piece of payment infrastructure with clear rules—so that everyone can send money at minimal cost and maximum speed and safety. It could also connect various forms of money, including central bank digital currencies,” Georgieva said.

    Finally, the IMF called for an urgent closing of the “gap between ambition and policy” on climate change, arguing for a comprehensive approach to the green transition that combines carbon pricing and renewable energy investment with compensation for those adversely affected by climate change.

    Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook

    Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/imf-economy-faces-confluence-of-calamities-in-biggest-test-since-world-war-ii.html

    Olha Havryliuk’s son and son-in-law, along with a stranger, were shot in the head in the yard of their house. The Russian soldiers smashed the Havryliuks’ fence, parked their armored vehicle in the garden, and moved into the house. They cooked in the neighbor’s garden, killing and plucking chickens and roasting them on a barbecue while the men lay dead yards away across the alley.

    By the time the troops pulled out at the end of March, two brothers, Yuriy and Viktor Pavlenko, who lived at the end of the street, lay dead in a ditch by the railway line. Volodymyr Cherednychenko was found dead in a neighbor’s cellar. Another man, caught by the Russian soldiers as he ran along the train track and taken into a cellar of a house at the end of the street, was also found shot dead.

    The bodies of three civilians in a garden of a house in Bucha on April 4.
    The property of the Shypilo family in Bucha where six people are thought to have been tortured and killed at one end of Ivana Franka Street.

    The story of Bucha and its horrors has unfolded in chapters as new revelations of Russian atrocities emerge, fueling outrage among Ukrainians and across much of the world. But prosecutors and military intelligence officials were investigating early on, collecting evidence to try to identify the perpetrators responsible for the mass killings, torture and rapes in the once tranquil suburb.

    Working with war crimes and forensic experts from around the world, Ukrainian investigators have reached some preliminary conclusions, focusing in particular on the 64th Brigade. They have already identified 10 soldiers from the unit and accused them of war crimes.

    Ukrainian officials say that the brigade was formed after Russia struggled in a 2008 war with Georgia, and that it was awarded an honorary title by President Vladimir V. Putin last month for its performance in Ukraine.

    Yet the brigade took little part in any fighting, coming in after other units had seized control of Bucha and then tasked with “holding” it. The troops established checkpoints throughout the town, parking their armored vehicles in people’s yards and taking over their homes.

    “They imprisoned our people,” said Ruslan Kravchenko, the chief prosecutor for the Bucha district, describing the actions of the accused soldiers. “They tied their hands and legs and taped their eyes. They beat them with fists and feet, and with gun butts in the chest, and imitated executions.”

    The name of the 64th Brigade and a list of 1,600 of its soldiers were found among computer files left behind in the Russian military headquarters in Bucha, providing investigators with an immense resource as they began their investigation. Dmytro Replianchuk at Slidtsvo.info, a Ukrainian investigative news agency, soon found the social media profiles of dozens of the names, including officers.

    Three victims who survived beatings and torture have been able to identify the perpetrators from the photographs, Mr. Kravchenko said.

    Ruslan Kravchenko, left, the chief prosecutor for the Bucha district, leading a search in April of a Russian base set up in a boiler room in the suburb.
    Items left by retreating Russian forces have been collected and cataloged by Mr. Kravchenko and his team.

    One of the victims was Yuriy, 50, a factory worker, who lives near one of the most notorious Russian bases, at 144 Yablunska Street. On March 13, a unit of the 64th Brigade came to search his house. He said that he had identified the soldiers when shown photographs by prosecutors. The soldiers were rough and uncouth, he said. “You could see they were from the Taiga,” he said, referring to the Siberian forest. “They just talk to bears.”

    Yuriy managed to avoid suspicion, but on March 19, the soldiers returned and detained his neighbor Oleksiy. Like several others interviewed for this article, the men asked to be identified by only their first names for their security.

    An investigator identifying empty shell casings in April at a sprawling complex at 144 Yablunska Street, where eight people were executed by Russian forces in early March.
    The entrance of 144 Yablunska Street. The complex was the site of one of the most notorious documented mass killings in Bucha.

    Oleksiy declined to be interviewed but confirmed that he had been detained twice by the Russian unit, interrogated in a basement for several hours and put through a mock execution when the soldiers fired a gun behind him. Still shaken, he said, “I just want to try to forget it all.”

    Created to ‘Scare the Population’

    Based in Russia’s far east, near the border with China, the 64th Brigade belongs to the Eastern Military District, long seen as the part of the Russian Army with the lowest levels of training and equipment.

    The brigade has ethnic Russian commanders but consists largely of soldiers drawn from minority ethnic groups and disadvantaged communities, according to Col. Mykola Krasny, the head of public affairs of Ukrainian military intelligence.

    In radio conversations that were intercepted by Ukrainian forces, some of the Russians expressed surprise that village roads in outlying areas of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, were paved with asphalt, he said.

    “We see it as a deliberate policy to draft soldiers from depressed regions of Russia,” Colonel Krasny said.

    Not a lot is known about the brigade, but Colonel Krasny claimed that it was notable for its lack of morality, for beatings of soldiers and for thieving. Drawn from a regiment that had served in Chechnya, the brigade was established on Jan. 1, 2009, shortly after Russia’s war in Georgia, Colonel Krasny said. The goal was clear, he added: to build up a fearsome army unit that could instill control.

    A neighbor draped a blanket over a dead woman in April after the police had examined the body. She was found with a gunshot wound to the head, naked but for a fur coat, in a cellar outside a house in Bucha.
    An abandoned Russian post on a street in Bucha on April 3.

    “The consequences of these politics was what happened in Bucha,” he said. “Having no discipline, and these aggressive habits, it looks like it was created to scare the population.”

    He claimed that the Russian soldiers’ disadvantaged backgrounds, and the fact that they could act with impunity, prompted them “to do unspeakable things.”

    It was not only the enemy who suffered their brutality. The Russian Army has long had a reputation for hazing its own soldiers, and on a cellphone left behind in Bucha by a member of the 64th, investigators found recent evidence of the practice: a video in which an officer is talking to a subordinate and then suddenly punches him in the side of the head while other soldiers stand around talking.

    The Russian government did not respond to a request for comment on the accusations against the 64th Brigade but has repeatedly claimed that allegations of its forces having committed atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere are false.

    Western analysts who have studied the Russian Army said that the behavior of troops in Bucha was not a surprise.

    A classroom in Bucha ransacked by Russian soldiers. The school was used as a base by the occupying troops.
    A house in Bucha after being occupied by Russian troops. Ukrainian investigators have already identified 10 soldiers from the 64th Brigade and accused them of war crimes.

    “It is consistent with the way they consider responding,” said Nick Reynolds, a researcher of land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London. “Reprisals are part and parcel of how the Russian military does business.”

    The ‘Bad Guys’ Will Come

    Killings occurred in Bucha from the first days that Russian troops appeared. The first units were airborne assault troops, paratroopers and special forces who fired on cars and civilians in the streets and detained men suspected of being in the Ukrainian Army or territorial defense.

    The extent of the killings, and the seeming lack of hesitation among Russian soldiers to carry them out, has led Ukrainian officials to surmise that they were acting under orders.

    “They couldn’t not know,” Bucha’s prosecutor, Mr. Kravchenko, said of senior military commanders. “I think the terror was planned.”

    Many of the documented killings occurred on Yablunska Street, where bodies lay for weeks, visible on satellite images. But not far away, on a corner of Ivana Franka Street, a particular form of hell played out after March 12.

    Volodymyr, 65, was detained and questioned in 144 Yablunska Street. He said that on March 4 he saw eight people with hands bound being led around a corner and that he then heard the gunshots as they were executed.

    Residents had already been warned that things would get worse. A pensioner, Mykola, 67, said that the Russian troops who first came to the neighborhood had advised him to leave while he could. “‘After us, such bad guys will come,’” the commander told him, he recalled. “I think they had radio contact and they knew who was coming, and they had their own opinion of them.”

    Mykola left Bucha before the 64th Brigade arrived.

    The spring flowers are pushing up everywhere in Bucha, fruit trees are in blossom, and city workers have swept the streets and filled in some of the bomb craters. But at the end of Ivana Franka Street, amid smashed cars and destroyed homes, there is an eerie desolation.

    “From this house to the end, no one is left alive,” said Ms. Havryliuk, 65. “Eleven people were killed here. Only we stayed alive.”

    Her son and son-in-law had stayed behind to look after the house and the dogs, and were killed on March 12 or 13, when the 64th Brigade first arrived, she said. The death certificates said that they had been shot in the head.

    Olha Havryliuk, left, stands in front of her home with her daughter, Iryna. Olha’s son, Roman Havryliuk, and Iryna’s husband, Serhiy Duhliy, were both found shot dead, along with a stranger, in the yard.
    The garden of the Havryliuks’ neighbors. Russian troops would use the space to cook on a barbecue, killing and plucking chickens and roasting them while dead bodies lay just yards away across the alley.

    What happened over the next two weeks is hard to fathom. The few residents who stayed were confined to their homes and only occasionally dared to go out to fetch water from a well. Some of them saw people being detained by the Russians.

    Nadezhda Cherednychenko, 50, pleaded with the soldiers to let her son go. He was being held in the yard of a house and his arm had been injured when she last saw him. She found him dead in the cellar of the same house three weeks later, after the Russians withdrew.

    “They should be punished,” she said of his captors. “They brought so much pain to people. Mothers without children, fathers, children without parents. It’s something you cannot forgive.”

    Neighbors who lived next door to the Havryliuks just disappeared. Volodymyr and Tetiana Shypilo, a teacher, and their son Andriy, 39, lived in one part of the house, and Oleh Yarmolenko, 47, lived alone in the other side. “They were all our relatives,” Ms. Havryliuk said.

    Nadezhda Cherednychenko, 50, with a photograph of Volodymyr, her 27-year-old son.
    The cellar where Volodymyr Cherednychenko, who was detained for three weeks by Russian troops, was found shot through the ear.

    Down a side alley lived Lidiya Sydorenko, 62, and her husband Serhiy, 65. Their daughter, Tetiana Naumova, said that she spoke to them by telephone midmorning on March 22.

    “Mother was crying the whole time,” Ms. Naumova said. “She was usually an optimist, but I think she had a bad feeling.”

    Minutes later, Russian soldiers came in and demanded to search their garage. They told a neighbor to leave, shooting at the ground by her feet.

    “By lunchtime they had killed them,” Ms. Naumova said.

    She returned to the house with her husband, Vitaliy, and her son Anton last month after the Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv. Her parents were nowhere to be found, but they found ominous traces — her father’s hat with bullet holes in it, three pools of blood and a piece of her mother’s scalp and hair.

    There was also no sign of the Shypilos or of Mr. Yarmolenko, except trails of blood where bodies had been dragged along the floor of their house.

    Eventually, French forensic investigators solved the mystery.

    They examined six charred bodies found in an empty lot up the street and confirmed that they were the missing civilians: the Sydorenkos, the three Shypilos and Mr. Yarmolenko. Several bore bullet wounds but three of them had had limbs severed, including Ms. Naumova’s mother, the investigators told the families.

    Her father had multiple gunshot wounds to the head and chest, her mother had had an arm and a leg cut off, she said.

    “They tortured them,” Ms. Havryliuk said, “and burned them to cover their tracks.”

    Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Bucha, Ukraine.

    Tetiana Naumova and her husband, Vitaliy, with photographs of her parents, Lidiya and Serhiy Sydorenko.

    Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/22/world/russia-ukraine-war

    When the war in Ukraine broke out in February, Trevor Reed said he believed it meant he likely would never come home.

    The American former Marine by that time had been imprisoned in Russia for nearly three years, held hostage after being convicted on trumped up charges. For 985 days, Reed was held in a series of Russian prisons, thrown in isolation cells as small as a closet for 23 hours a day, placed in a psychiatric ward and sent to a forced labor camp he described as looking and feeling like something “out of medieval times.”

    But within two months, Reed was home in the United States, freed on April 27 as part of a prisoner swap agreed between the Biden administration and the Kremlin. Reed was freed in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot from Russia who was sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the United States.

    Now back in America and with his family for the first time, Reed is trying to adjust to normal life.

    “I’ve been hanging out with the family a lot, been trying to get used to being free again,” the former U.S. Marine told ABC News in one of his first interviews since being released. “That takes a little bit of time, that process. But I feel better every day.”

    For more of the ABC News interview with Trevor Reed, watch “GMA” on Monday, May 23, at 7 a.m. ET. And for the full interview, tune into ABC News Live at 8:30 p.m. ET.

    He said that when he was arrested in Moscow in the summer of 2019, he was a healthy 175-pound student majoring in international security studies. When he was released, he said his weight had dropped to 131 pounds, he was ill, coughing up blood and feared he had contracted tuberculosis.

    “He looked terrible. He looked really thin and he had dark circles under his eyes, and he just didn’t look like the Trevor that left for Russia,” Reed’s mother, Paula Reed, told ABC News. “So, that was hard to see him looking that way.”

    Long ordeal began with 2019 arrest

    The 30-year-old Texas native’s ordeal started in 2019 when he was visiting his Russian girlfriend, a recent law graduate, in Moscow. Reed, who had been studying Russian, was coming to the end of his time in the country and attended a party with his girlfriend’s friends, where plied with vodka shots he became drunk.

    On the drive home, Reed became unmanageable, according to his girlfriend, Alina Tsybulnik, and jumped out of the car. Unable to get him back in and fearing for his safety, Tsybulnik and her friends said they called the police to ask them to take Reed to a drunk tank to sober up.

    Two police officers agreed and after taking Reed to the station told his girlfriend to come pick him up in the morning. Reed, who says the last thing he remembers was being in the park, said when he woke up in the lobby of the police station the next morning initially he was free to leave.

    But as he waited for his girlfriend to arrive to pick him up, a shift change occurred and the police brass on the next shift decided to hold him. Then, he said, agents from Russia’s powerful domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service or FSB, arrived and interrogated him.

    “I pretty much knew as soon as I saw FSB agents where this case was was headed,” said Reed.

    “The main thing that they wanted to know was about my military service,” Reed added. “They didn’t ask me at all, not one question about if I had committed a crime, if I had done something wrong. They did not ask me anything related to that at all. They wanted to know about my military service primarily.”

    After the agents’ arrival, the police abruptly accused Reed of assaulting the police officers who had taken him the night before, charging him with endangering their lives.

    He was arrested on the spot.

    ‘Kangaroo court’

    Reed was put on trial, in what he described as a “kangaroo court” and which the U.S. embassy denounced as absurd. At a hearing attended by ABC News, the two police officers Reed was alleged to have assaulted struggled to remember the incident and repeatedly contradicted themselves, at one point becoming so confused that the judge laughed at them.

    Reed told ABC News that during an interrogation with the two officers, they admitted to him they had been ordered to make the false allegations against him.

    “I asked, you know, one of those officers, I said, ‘Why are you guys doing this? Why did you write this, like, false, you know, accusation against me?’ And he looked around at the door to make sure that there was no one there, and he looked at the other police officer, and he said, “We didn’t want to write this. They told us to write this.'” Reed said.

    Despite believing the trial was predetermined, Reed battled to prove his innocence, repeatedly appealing rulings. He accused Russian authorities of trying to pressure him into dropping his resistance, including, at one point, sending him to a psychiatric treatment facility to “scare me.”

    “That was pretty terrible. You know, blood on the walls. There’s a hole in the floor for the toilet,” said Reed, adding that human feces were all over the floor of a cramped cell he shared with four other prisoners, who suffered from serious psychological conditions.

    “I thought maybe they had sent me there to chemically disable me, to give me sedatives or whatever and make me unable to fight,” Reed said.

    After over a year in a pre-trial detention center that he described as “extremely dirty” and infested with rats, in mid-2020 Reed was convicted and sentenced to nine years in a prison camp. He was transported to a prison in Mordovia, around 300 miles of Moscow, a former Gulag camp built just after World War II.

    But there, Reed said he refused to work or kowtow to prison rules.

    “Ethically, I thought that would be wrong to work for a government who was kidnapping Americans and using them as political hostages,” Reed said. “I couldn’t justify that with myself.”

    As punishment, he said he was placed in solitary confinement for 15-day stretches at a time, sleeping in the cold cell at night on the floor, trying to stay warm by huddling next to a hot-water pipe.

    “I mean, it was difficult, but I wasn’t going to let that change my actions,” Reed said.

    Won prisoners’ respect

    Reed said that even as the guards in the camp “hated him” for not complying with their orders to work, his resistance attracted the admiration of fellow prisoners.

    “I was consistently fighting and resisting the government there,” he said. “The prisoners inside of the Russian prison, the criminal element there, they respected that.”

    He said he survived by maintaining his battle for justice while at the same time refusing to allow himself to hope he would ever go home.

    Watch the ABC News Live special “985 Days: The Trevor Reed Interview” on Monday, May 23, at 8:30 pm ET/9:30 pm PT

    Meanwhile, Reed’s parents continued to battle for his freedom. His father, Joey Reed, flew to Russia, spending over a year alone there to be at his son’s court hearings and lobby U.S. diplomats in Moscow. Stateside, he and his wife and daughter mounted an intensive campaign of government leaders on both sides of the political aisle to take up his cause.

    Joey and Paula Reed took their fight all the way to the White House, eventually obtaining a meeting with President Biden which they credit as being decisive in persuading his administration to finally make the trade.

    “My parents and my girlfriend, Alina, did everything,” Trevor Reed said. “They gave up their whole lives to help me.”

    Prisoner trade

    Reed said on the day he was traded, he was loaded onto a plane by 20 FSB agents but told nothing of the destination. But as the plane headed south and he saw he was flying over water, Reed said he realized it must be the Black Sea and he must be headed for Turkey. The aging Russian government plane was so dilapidated though, Reed said, that he feared they might crash before they made it to any swap.

    On the tarmac in Turkey, he walked past Yaroshenko, he said.

    “I remember looking at him and he looked over at me. I think both of us probably had that same feeling, that same thought of like, ‘that’s what that guy looks like,'” Reed said.

    Treated by doctors on the plane back, Reed said he struggled to shake a new found anxiety around flying.

    “Mostly I was hoping that the plane did not crash at that moment before I saw my family,” he said.

    Wages fight for other hostages

    Reed said that when he initially landed in the United States, his parents were there to meet him, but he said he couldn’t hug or touch them until he underwent a full medical examination to ensure he did not have tuberculosis or any other communicable diseases.

    Since being medically cleared, he said he has tried to adjust to normal life, even having to remember some English, after speaking Russian for the past three years.

    But Reed said he cannot stop thinking about the other former Marine held hostage in Russia, Paul Whelan, who was left behind. Whelan, who was seized in 2018 while attending a wedding in Moscow, is held on espionage charges that the U.S. government says were also fabricated to take him as a bargaining chip. Whelan is in a prison camp also in Mordovia, sentenced to 16 years.

    Russia had previously floated trading Whelan for Yaroshenko and other Russians held in the United States and at one time it had been thought Reed and Whelan might be traded as a pair.

    “I had a really strong feeling of guilt that I was free and that Paul Whelan was still in prison. I thought when I found out that it was an exchange that was happening, that they had probably exchanged Paul Whelan, as well. And I expected him to be coming home with me. And he– he didn’t,” Reed said.

    “I thought that that was wrong, that they got me out and not Paul,” Reed said, choking up. “I knew that as soon as I was able to, that I would fight for him to get out and that I would do everything I could to get him outta there.”

    Reed said he also feared for the WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was seized on drugs smuggling charges in February after Russian authorities alleged they had found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The State Department has designated Griner as wrongfully detained.

    Russia has also floated the idea of trading the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout for Whelan and Griner. Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” is serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States, convicted on narco-terrorism charges.

    Reed said the United States should trade Bout without hesitation to free Whelan and Griner.

    “I think that they need to do that. If that’s for Viktor Bout, I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s 100 Victor Bouts. They have to get our guys out,” Reed said.

    “You’re getting two Americans who are going to have, you know, a huge amount of time left on their sentences for a guy who is getting out soon– who has already been in prison for 15 years,” he said.

    He said if the freedom of the other American hostages means more prisoner exchanges, then the U.S. government shouldn’t balk at taking that path again.

    When told that some have countered that prisoner exchanges only encourage countries to take more hostages, Reed scoffed at that notion.

    “I would like to say that that’s completely inaccurate,” Reed said. “That’s not a concern at all because countries like Russia, China, Venezuela, Rwanda, Iran, Syria and places like that need absolutely no incentive to kidnap Americans.”

    Source Article from https://abcnews.go.com/US/fought-trevor-reed-speaks-survived-years-russian-prison/story?id=84806555

    A manhunt is underway for a Texas woman wanted in connection with the fatal shooting of a professional cyclist who authorities say was once romantically linked to the suspect’s boyfriend.

    Austin police issued a homicide warrant on Tuesday for Kaitlin Marie Armstrong, 35, in the killing of 25-year-old Anna Moriah Wilson, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

    Wilson was in Austin last week for a race when she was found bleeding and unconscious with multiple gunshot wounds at a friend’s home the night of May 11, police said. First responders performed life-saving measures, but she was pronounced dead. An autopsy determined the manner of death to be a homicide. Austin police said at the time that they had a person of interest in the incident and that the “shooting does not appear to be a random act.”

    U.S. Marshals said they are currently seeking Armstrong, of Austin, who they said is a suspect in the fatal shooting.

    “Members of the Lone Star Fugitive Task Force are actively conducting a fugitive investigation and pursuing leads on the whereabouts of Armstrong,” the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement Friday.

    Kaitlin Marie Armstrong

    According to the affidavit in the warrant for Armstrong’s arrest on a first-degree murder charge, Wilson was visiting Austin from San Francisco for a cycling race when her friend came home and found Wilson alone lying on the bathroom floor covered in blood. Armstrong’s 2012 Jeep Cherokee was captured on surveillance footage from a neighboring residence stopping outside the residence the night of the homicide, according to the affidavit.

    Earlier that evening, Wilson had met with Colin Strickland, an Austin professional cyclist, to go swimming, the friend told police, the affidavit stated.

    When interviewed by police on May 12, Strickland, 35, confirmed that he had gone swimming with Wilson, according to the affidavit. Strickland told police that he and Armstrong live together and have been dating for about three years, the affidavit stated. During a brief break in their relationship in October 2021, he had a “romantic relationship” with Wilson, before resuming dating Armstrong, according to the affidavit.

    Since then, Strickland told police he has had to change Wilson’s name in his phone and delete text messages “to prevent Armstrong from finding them,” the affidavit stated. Text messages from the night Wilson was killed showed that Strickland lied to Armstrong about his whereabouts “to hide he was with Wilson throughout the evening,” the affidavit stated.

    A friend of Wilson’s who wanted to remain anonymous told police that Wilson and Strickland had an “on-again, off-again” relationship, according to the affidavit. Another anonymous caller said Armstrong had discovered in January that Strickland and Wilson were having a romantic relationship, at which point Armstrong “became furious and was shaking in anger,” the affidavit stated. “Armstrong told the caller Armstrong was so angry Armstrong wanted to kill Wilson,” the affidavit stated.

    When police interviewed Armstrong on May 12, she was “confronted with video evidence of her vehicle” but “she had no explanation as to why it was in the area and did not make any denials surrounding the statements,” the affidavit stated. After further questioning Armstrong requested to leave, according to the affidavit.

    Anna Moriah Wilson

    Armstrong has since deleted her social media accounts and “has not been seen or heard from since this time,” according to the affidavit. Strickland told police he last saw her on May 13, the affidavit stated.

    Two firearms that Strickland told police he had bought for himself and Armstrong were recovered at his and Armstrong’s home in the wake of the shooting, according to the affidavit. Based on the shell casings found at the scene, the potential that one of the guns was involved in the homicide “is significant,” the affidavit stated.

    In a statement to ABC News Austin affiliate KVUE, Strickland said he has “cooperated fully with investigators” and expressed “torture about my proximity to this horrible crime.”

    He said he had a “brief romantic relationship” with Wilson from late October-early November 2021, and that shortly after he “reconciled and resumed” his relationship with Armstrong while keeping a “platonic and professional” relationship with Wilson.

    Wilson’s death shocked the cycling community. The athlete had won several gravel and mountain bike races in the past two seasons and had recently quit her job to focus on racing, according to VeloNews, who interviewed Wilson days before she was set to compete in the 157-mile Gravel Locos in Hico, Texas on May 14.

    Wilson, known as “Mo” to friends and family, is survived by her parents and brother. Her family said in a statement to ABC News that they are “devastated by the loss of our beautiful daughter and sister.”

    “There are no words that can express the pain and suffering we are experiencing due to this senseless, tragic loss. Moriah was a talented, kind, and caring young woman,” her family said. “Her life was taken from her before she had the opportunity to achieve everything she dreamed of

    Her family also wished to clarify that at the time of her death, Wilson was not involved with anyone romantically.

    Wilson’s family hopes to establish a foundation in her memory to “share Moriah’s life story and legacy to inspire and enrich the lives of others.”

    “With her visibility and presence in the cycling world, she wanted to empower young women athletes, encourage people of all walks of life to find joy and meaning through sport and community, and inspire all to chase their dreams,” they said.

    Source Article from https://abc7.com/texas-manhunt-kaitlin-marie-armstrong-anna-moriah-wilson-professional-cyclist-shooting/11882957/

    Nearly 2,500 global leaders from business, politics and civil society are expected to convene this week in Switzerland’s luxury Alpine ski resort of Davos. 

    On the agenda will be issues including Covid-19, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the climate crisis.

    But critics argue that the annual meeting fails to address rising economic inequality and tax avoidance, while exclusive side events hosted by big corporations can give the impression of a week of networking and partying.

    The World Economic Forum has also been the subject of unfounded conspiracy theories which it is trying to address head on. 

    “We, like many other organizations have been the target of misinformation campaigns. And that is something that we’re very proactively trying to work towards combating,” said Saadia Zahidi, managing director at the World Economic Forum.

    For many of the local residents in Europe’s highest town, however, the return of WEF’s first in-person forum is a welcome sight.

    It’s estimated that the WEF meeting brings in between 50 million euros ($59 million) and 60 million euros to the local economy.

    To see more from Davos as it prepares for the WEF’s annual meeting watch the video.  

    Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/05/23/how-davos-became-the-anti-establishments-punching-bag.html