Diario de Noticias

South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh charged with murder of wife and son – The Guardian US

Former South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh has been indicted for double murder in the killings of his wife, 52-year-old Maggie Murdaugh, and son, 22-year-old Paul Murdaugh, almost 13 months after he made an emergency call saying he had found them dead near a dog kennel at the family’s country home.

The charges mark a milestone in a case that encompasses seven separate investigations in the sprawling saga, each involving the 54-year-old attorney at their center.

Murdaugh was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, after evidence was presented to a grand jury sitting in Colleton county. Court documents released on Thursday allege Murdaugh shot his wife with a rifle and his son with a shotgun.

The civil attorney, who was disbarred earlier this week, had told investigators he went to the property after visiting with his ailing father, and discovered the two bodies.

South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson said in a statement: “All the efforts of our office and the law enforcement agencies involved in this investigation have been focused on seeking justice for the victims’ families.”

Wilson declined to offer more details in the case.

South Carolina state law enforcement division (Sled) chief Mark Keel said: “Today is one more step in a long process for justice for Maggie and Paul.”

On Tuesday, state police told family members that they planned to bring criminal charges against Murdaugh, and did not mention any other suspects in the case.

Murdaugh had reported finding his wife and son shot dead shortly after 10pm on 7 June last year. Investigators released little information on the killings, but word soon surfaced that they had been killed with different guns – an assault rifle and a shotgun. Investigators said no threat existed, prompting speculation that a suspect must already be known to them.

The killings also placed a spotlight on the prominent Murdaugh family, which has for almost a century represented wealth, power and privilege across the lowlands of South Carolina.

For three generations, a member of the Murdaughs has served as the chief prosecutor for the state’s southern tip, and the family law firm had made a fortune from corporate litigation, often against the railroad running through the area.

But interlocking investigations began to produce charges against Alex Murdaugh. Prosecutors accused him of diverting $8.5m in legal settlements from personal injury cases to a bank account he controlled.

Murdaugh is also facing 79 fraud-related charges. Two other people have been indicted in connection with the alleged financial crimes. A federal investigation into the Murdaugh empire is also under way, according to Fits News, a South Carolina news website.

The portfolio of alleged scams include a $3.5m insurance payout due to the family of his late housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, who died after a slip-and-fall accident at the Murdaugh home. Authorities are now preparing to exhume her remains.

Authorities have also opened an investigation into the unsolved death of 19-year-old Stephen Smith, whose body was found with blunt-force head trauma on a nearby county road in July 2015. Smith’s death was initially investigated as a homicide, then blamed on a hit-and-run.

A sign welcomes people to Hampton county, South Carolina, where the Murdaughs have been prominent for generations. Photograph: Jeffrey Collins/AP

But files with the state highway patrol showed that a Murdaugh family member – a personal injury lawyer – called Smith’s family on the day he was found, offering to represent them at no charge. The family told police they thought the offer was “weird”.

Smith had attended high school with Buster Murdaugh, Alex’s surviving son. “I do think it [his death] was because he was gay. I said that from the beginning it was a hate crime,” Smith’s mother, Sandy, said last year in an interview.

Separately, Paul Murdaugh, the son found dead last year, was awaiting trial on charges of boating under the influence. The charges stemmed from a 2019 crash in which 19-year-old Mallory Beach, a passenger in the boat, died after being thrown overboard in a collision with a bridge pier.

Beach family attorney Mark Tinsley told the Guardian last year: “The Beach family are incensed at the way the criminal investigation was conducted while their daughter’s body was missing and believe people were actively trying to cover up what had happened.”

The murder indictments have begun to clarify the chain of events that investigators believe may have led, three months later, to a fake suicide-for-hire plot, in which Alex Murdaugh was allegedly shot in the head by a cousin, Curtis Smith, on a country road, in what may have been a plot to give his surviving son, Buster, a $10m life insurance payout.

The apparent gunshot grazed Murdaugh’s head; a toxicology report found opioids and barbiturates in his blood. Smith claimed he was 1,000% certain Murdaugh was not shot. Ten days later, Murdaugh was arrested in connection with the country-road shooting. Curtis Smith has been charged with assisted suicide, insurance fraud and several other counts. He denies the charges.

Days later, Murdaugh checked into an addiction rehabilitation service to treat a long-standing opioid dependency and was later arrested at a second rehab location in Florida on charges that he diverted millions in wrongful death lawsuit settlement funds from the family of Satterfield, the housekeeper, in what prosecutors described as a scheme “to sue himself in order to seek an insurance settlement”.

At the bond hearing in October, assistant attorney general Creighton Waters said the alleged Satterfield fraud “is the tip of the iceberg”. Outside court, family lawyer Ronnie Richter said that issues of class pervade the case.

“We have a problem in the country with the perception that power and influence, true or not, gets you a second tier of justice from rank-and-file,” he said.

Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/14/alex-murdaugh-south-carolina-charged-double-murder

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Trump says indictment is only driving poll numbers up in Georgia speech – The Hill

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Ken Paxton, Texas attorney general, cleared in impeachment trial – NPR

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For the Anti-Trump Wing of the G.O.P., It All Comes Down to Tuesday – The New York Times

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Biden administration releases alarming reports on climate change challenges – NBC News

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Russia restarts major gas pipeline, expands Ukraine war goals – Reuters.com

July 21 (Reuters) – Russia is resuming supplies of gas via a major pipeline to Europe on Thursday, the pipeline operator said, amid concerns Moscow would use its vast energy exports to push back against Western pressure over its invasion of Ukraine.

The resumption of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline at reduced capacity following a 10-day maintenance break comes after comments from Russia’s foreign minister showed the Kremlin’s goals had expanded during the five-month war.

Sergei Lavrov told state news agency RIA Novosti on Wednesday that Russia’s military “tasks” in Ukraine now go beyond the eastern Donbas region.

Lavrov also said Moscow’s objectives will expand further if the West keeps supplying Kyiv with long-range weapons such as the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

“That means the geographical tasks will extend still further from the current line,” he said, adding peace talks made no sense at the moment. read more

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov later told RIA Moscow is not closing the door on talks with Kyiv despite Lavrov’s comments.

Concern that Russian supplies of gas sent through the biggest pipeline in Europe could be stopped by Moscow prompted the European Union to tell member states on Wednesday to cut gas usage by 15% until March as an emergency step. read more

“Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, describing a full cut-off of Russian gas flows as “a likely scenario” for which “Europe needs to be ready”.

Putin had earlier warned that gas supplies via Nord Stream were at risk of being reduced further.

Russia, the world’s largest gas exporter, has denied Western accusations of using its energy supplies as a tool of coercion, saying it has been a reliable energy supplier.

As for its oil, Russia will not send supplies to the world market if a price cap is imposed below the cost of production, Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak as saying on Wednesday. read more

FIGHTING TOLL MOUNTS

On the battlefront, the Ukrainian military has reported heavy and sometimes fatal Russian shelling amid what they said were largely failed attempts by Russian ground forces to advance.

In the previous 24 hours, Ukrainian forces said they had destroyed 17 vehicles, some of them armoured, as well as killing more than 100 Russian soldiers in the south and east.

The Russian-installed administration in the partially occupied Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia said Ukraine had conducted a drone strike on a nuclear power station there, but the reactor was not damaged. read more

Multiple blasts were also heard in the Russian-controlled southern region of Kherson overnight and into Thursday, Russian news agency TASS reported.

Reuters could not independently verify the reports.

Russia’s invasion has killed thousands, displaced millions and flattened cities, particularly in Russian-speaking areas in the east and southeast of Ukraine. It has also raised global energy and food prices and increased fears of famine in poorer countries as Ukraine and Russia are both major grain producers.

The United States estimates that Russian casualties in Ukraine so far have reached around 15,000 killed and perhaps 45,000 wounded, CIA Director William Burns said on Wednesday.

Russia classifies military deaths as state secrets even in times of peace and has not updated its official casualty figures frequently during the war. read more

US OPPOSES ANNEXATIONS

The United States, which had said on Tuesday that it saw signs Russia was preparing to formally annex territory it has seized in Ukraine, promised that it would oppose annexation.

“Again, we’ve been clear that annexation by force would be a gross violation of the UN Charter, and we would not allow it to go unchallenged. We would not allow it to go unpunished,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said at a regular daily briefing on Wednesday.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supports Russian-speaking breakaway entities – the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) – in those provinces, together known as the Donbas.

Lavrov is the most senior figure to speak openly of Russia’s war goals in territorial terms, nearly five months after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Feb. 24 invasion while denying that Russia intended to occupy its neighbour.

Then, Putin said his aim was to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine – a statement dismissed by Kyiv and the West as a pretext for an imperial-style war of expansion.

Lavrov told RIA Novosti that geographical realities had changed since Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held peace talks in Turkey in late March that failed to produce any breakthrough.

“Now the geography is different, it’s far from being just the DPR and LPR, it’s also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories,” he said, referring to territories well beyond the Donbas that Russian forces have wholly or partly seized.

(Corrects first paragraph to remove reference to Nord Stream running through Ukraine)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-expands-ukraine-war-goals-fighting-toll-mounts-2022-07-21/

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Ukraine war: Zelensky says situation in Bakhmut worsening – BBC

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America’s first second gentleman gets his turn on center stage tonight – NPR

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Top U.S. commander in Afghanistan to step down Monday, marking a symbolic end to 20 years of war – The Washington Post

The costs of the war, launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, have been staggering. About 2,400 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan, with an addition 20,000 wounded, according to Pentagon statistics. Nearly 800,000 service members have rotated through Afghanistan on assignment at least once, with nearly 30,000 of them deploying at least five times each, according to Pentagon data provided by The Washington Post.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/07/12/last-us-general-afghanistan/

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Trump threatened with jail over gag order breaches – hush money trial live coverage – The Independent

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Sarah Palin v. New York Times Spotlights Push to Loosen Libel Law – The New York Times

Lawyers who support the broad free speech protections that Sullivan and other legal precedents guarantee say that the risk to a free and impartial press is not only that it could be held liable for honest mistakes.

If public figures are no longer required to meet a high legal bar for proving harm from an unflattering article, press freedom advocates warn, journalists, especially those without the resources of a large news organization behind them, will self-censor.

“We worry a lot about the risk that public officials and other powerful figures can use threats of defamation suits to deter news gathering and suppress important conversations on matters of public concern,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah who has documented the judiciary’s increasingly dim view of the media. “It’s a trend that press freedom scholars find deeply troubling.”

Ms. Jones said she and many other legal scholars considered Mr. Trump’s insistence in 2016 that libel laws be reopened “deeply improbable, even laughable.” But now she regrets her indifference. And she said she is looking at the Palin case as a test of how harshly a jury — in today’s tribal political climate — will judge media companies for their mistakes.

Ms. Palin’s suit was initially dismissed by the judge, Jed S. Rakoff, soon after it was filed. But a three-judge appeals court panel overturned that decision in 2019 and reinstated the case. Elizabeth Locke, who represented Ms. Palin during the appeal but is no longer involved in the case, has argued on behalf of several high-profile clients in defamation suits against major media outlets and been at the forefront of the conservative effort to make the rethinking of libel laws more mainstream. Ms. Locke said in an interview that while the Sullivan precedent is not worth scrapping entirely, it fails in today’s media culture.

“How do you balance free speech rights with the right to your individual reputation, and in the context of public officials who have volunteered for public service and do need to be held to account?” she said.

“Redrawing that balance does not mean that we lock up journalists or that any falsehood should result in a huge jury verdict,” Ms. Locke added. “But imposing the potential for legal liability, which is virtually nonexistent with the Sullivan standard in place, would create self-restraint.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/business/media/sarah-palin-libel-suit-nyt.html

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Judge halts Biden program offering legal status to undocumented spouses – The Washington Post

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Warning signs for Trump: 5 takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries – POLITICO

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Scot Peterson acquitted of child neglect charges in Parkland shooting trial – The Washington Post

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Nor’easter spurs rescues in New Jersey as areas brace for hurricane-force wind gusts – NBC News

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Live updates: What’s happening on Day 7 of the Israel-Hamas war – PBS NewsHour

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Reducing Climate Pollution Saves Lives, Study Finds – NPR

A wind farm in Wyoming generates electricity for a region that used to be more dependent on coal-fired power plants. A new study finds that millions of lives could be saved this century by rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Matt Young/AP

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Matt Young/AP

A wind farm in Wyoming generates electricity for a region that used to be more dependent on coal-fired power plants. A new study finds that millions of lives could be saved this century by rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Matt Young/AP

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions quickly would save tens of millions of lives worldwide, a new study finds. It’s the latest indication that climate change is deadly to humans, and that the benefits of transitioning to a cleaner economy could be profound.

In recent years, the connection between a hotter planet and human death and disease has become clearer, thanks to a series of research papers. A study published in 2021 found that about a third of heat-related deaths worldwide can be directly attributed to human-caused climate change. A 2020 Lancet report warned that climate change is the biggest global public health threat of the century.

But those findings have not been factored into one of the three major computer models that scientists, economists and the federal government use to calculate the societal costs of carbon emissions. That means economists and policymakers may be underestimating the cost of climate change to human life.

“One key takeaway is that there are a significant number of lives that can be saved by reducing emissions,” says R. Daniel Bressler, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University who is the author of the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications.

When he factored in the latest mortality research, Bressler found that about 74 million lives could be saved this century if humans cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, compared with a scenario in which the Earth experiences a catastrophic 4 degrees Celsius (about 7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century.

He hopes the findings will be helpful to a federal working group currently reassessing how the government calculates the costs and benefits of climate policies. Since 2010, the federal government has calculated the “social cost of carbon” — a dollar amount that represents the cost associated with emitting 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Those costs include changes to agricultural productivity, energy use, species extinction, sea level rise and human health.

The social cost of carbon informs trillions of dollars of federal policy, including regulations about vehicle tailpipe emissions, power plants and appliance efficiency standards.

“There have been over 100 U.S. government regulations where the social cost of carbon was used,” says Maureen Cropper, a climate economist at the University of Maryland, who co-chaired a 2017 National Academies of Sciences committee on the social cost of carbon.

At least 11 states also use the social cost of carbon to inform decisions about their power grids, efficiency regulations and other climate policies, Cropper says, and Canada based its own cost number on the original U.S. calculations.

Having an accurate cost number is especially important at a time when Congress and state governments are considering major infrastructure investments, Bressler says.

“Imagine you’re looking at the cost-benefit analysis of building a new power plant,” Bressler says. “You’re trying to compare a coal plant to a wind farm. And that coal-fired power plant is producing a lot more carbon dioxide emissions. How do we think about the costs associated with that?”

It depends on whom you ask. Under the Obama administration, the cost associated with emitting carbon was calculated to be at least seven times higher than under the Trump administration, mostly because the latter purposely ignored the effects of U.S. emissions on the rest of the world.

President Biden reinstated the Obama-era cost number and directed a federal working group to reexamine the calculation to make sure it includes the most up-to-date research about the costs of climate change. A new cost number is expected in early 2022.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2021/07/29/1021247014/cutting-carbon-pollution-quickly-would-save-millions-of-lives-study-finds

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Justice Department opposes unsealing Trump FBI search warrant affidavit – CBS News

The Justice Department said in court documents Monday that it opposes the release of the FBI affidavit used to justify the search warrant on former President Donald Trump’s primary residence at Mar-a-Lago.

In Monday’s filing, prosecutors indicated that the affidavit contained sensitive information regarding the testimony of witnesses in the investigation, adding later they feared that releasing the requested documents would “chill” the future testimony of other potential witnesses.

While the Justice Department did not oppose the release of the search warrant last week, the department argued Monday in a court filing to the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida that the affidavit should remain sealed “to protect the integrity of an ongoing law enforcement investigation that implicates national security.”

A judge will make the final decision about whether the affidavit should be unsealed.

The search warrant was unsealed on Friday, and it revealed that federal law enforcement officials are investigating the former president for violations of laws governing the removal or destruction of records, obstruction of an investigation, and a provision of the Espionage Act related to gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.

UNITED STATES – JANUARY 22: Aerial view of Mar-a-Lago, the oceanfront estate of billionaire Donald Trump in Palm Beach, Fla.

John Roca/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

The documents unsealed Friday included a property receipt from the Aug. 8 search stating that the FBI had seized 11 sets of classified documents, including four sets that were marked “top secret.” The FBI also seized photos and information about the president of France, among other things.

Several media outlets, including CBS News, filed requests with the court last week to obtain access to all documents — including any underlying affidavits — related to the search warrant. The affidavit is likely to have key details about the government’s investigation into Trump.

But while the Justice Department has “carefully considered whether the affidavit can be released subject to redactions,” it said in Monday’s court filing that “the redactions necessary to mitigate harms to the integrity of the investigation would be so extensive as to render the remaining unsealed text devoid of meaningful content, and the release of such a redacted version would not serve any public interest.”

“Nevertheless, should the Court order partial unsealing of the affidavit, the government respectfully requests an opportunity to provide the Court with proposed redactions,” the Justice Department continued.

The Justice Department said it would be permissible to to unseal other papers connected to the search warrant, the government’s motion to seal the search warrant and cover sheets associated with the search warrant.

In January, officials from the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of presidential records from Mar-a-Lago, some of which contained classified information. In July, a lawyer for Trump certified to investigators that all classified material had been handed over to the National Archives.

Trump claimed last week that he had declassified all the material seized at Mar-a-Lago while he was still in office. While a sitting president does have broad declassification ability, Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the House intelligence committee, said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he has seen no evidence Trump declassified the material while in office. Further, Schiff said that the authority to declassify material does not extend to a former president, and he called it “absurd” for Trump to claim “18 months after the fact” that he had retroactively declassified the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton told CBS News’ Robert Costa that Trump’s handling of classified documents “worried” him.

According to Bolton, intelligence briefers would bring pictures or graphs for the president to see and hand them to him.

“Often, the president would say, ‘Well, can I keep this?’ And in my experience, the intelligence briefers most often would say, ‘Well sir, we’d prefer to take that back,'” Bolton said. “But sometimes they forgot.”

Earlier this year, the National Archives asked the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s handling of records. The National Archives also said then that some of the documents Trump turned over to them had been ripped up and taped back together.

Trump’s allies on the House Judiciary Committee on Monday sent letters to top officials in the Biden administration demanding they send to Congress documents and communications about the FBI search of Trump’s residence.