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A body found in a Memphis neighborhood Monday was confirmed to be a Tennessee woman who was abducted late last week, police said Tuesday. Eliza Fletcher, 34, was seen on surveillance video being forced into an SUV while she was jogging near the University of Memphis early Friday morning.

The suspect arrested in the case, 38-year-old Cleotha Abston, is being charged with first-degree murder and first-degree murder in perpetration of kidnapping, police said. Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis told reporters it was possible others would be charged in the case but as of Tuesday morning no one else has.

Davis said it was too early for investigators to determine how and where Fletcher died. Abston hasn’t provided much information to investigators, Davis said.

Steven Mulroy, the district attorney for Shelby County, which includes Memphis, said Abston would be arraigned on the murder charges Wednesday.

“We have no reason to think this was anything other than an isolated attack by a stranger,” Mulroy told reporters.

Abston appeared before a judge earlier Tuesday on charges of kidnapping, tampering with evidence, theft, identity theft and fraudulent use of a credit card. Relatives of Fletcher and more than 20 media members were in the courtroom.

Abston was issued a $510,000 bond. Abston said he could not afford bond and he could not afford a lawyer. General Sessions Judge Louis Montesi appointed a public defender to represent Abston.

U.S. marshals arrested Abston Saturday after police detected his DNA on a pair of sandals found near where Fletcher was last seen, according to an arrest affidavit.

Police also linked the vehicle they believe was used in the kidnapping to a person at a home where Abston was staying.

Late Monday, police tweeted that a body had been found but that the identity of that person and the cause of death was unconfirmed. A large police presence was reported in the area where authorities reported finding the body just after 5 p.m. Memphis police had searched several locations with dogs, ATVs and a helicopter throughout the long Labor Day weekend.

Fletcher, a school teacher, is the granddaughter of the late Joseph Orgill III, a Memphis hardware businessman and philanthropist. The family has released a video statement asking for help in finding Fletcher and offered a $50,000 reward for information in the case.

Abston previously kidnapped a prominent Memphis attorney in 2000, the Commercial Appeal reported. When he was just 16 years old, Abston forced Kemper Durand into the trunk of his own car at gunpoint. After several hours, Abston took Durand out and forced him to drive to a Mapco gas station to withdraw money from an ATM.

At the station, an armed Memphis Housing Authority guard walked in and Durand yelled for help. Abston ran away but was found and arrested. He pleaded guilty in 2001 to especially aggravated kidnapping and aggravated robbery, according to court records. He received a 24-year sentence.

Durand, in a victim impact statement, wrote, “I was extremely lucky that I was able to escape from the custody of Cleotha Abston. … It is quite likely that I would have been killed had I not escaped,” the Commercial Appeal reported.

Durand died in 2013, seven years before Abston would be released in November 2020 at age 36. In the two years since his release, there were no further documented charges against Abston in Shelby County prior to his Saturday arrest, the Commercial Appeal reported.

During Tuesday morning’s press conference, Mulroy seemed to refer to Abston’s criminal history, saying, “Any kind of violence, of course, is unacceptable, but repeat violent offenders particularly deserve a strong response, and that’s what they’ll get from this district attorney’s office.”


Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eliza-fletcher-body-identified-memphis-abducted-jogger/

Joe Biden’s administration renewed its assault on social media companies spreading Covid-19 misinformation on Sunday, as new infections continued to surge across the entire US.

Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general who has accused companies including Facebook of “poisoning information” about coronavirus vaccines, said they were not doing enough to check the online proliferation of false claims.

“The reality is that misinformation is still spreading like wildfire in our country aided and abetted by technology platforms,” he said on Fox News Sunday.

“I’m worried about what is to come because we are seeing increasing cases among the unvaccinated in particular. It’s so important people have the information they need about the vaccine … it is our fastest, most effective way out of this pandemic.”

New cases of Covid-19 in the US, fueled by the highly transmissible Delta variant, have surged by 70% in a week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday, to more than 26,300 a day.

Cases were rising in 48 states and stagnant in the other two, the CDC said. Four states, California, Florida, Missouri and Texas, were responsible for 46% of the new cases, with one in five coming in Florida.

“This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the CDC’s director, Dr Rochelle Walensky, said on Friday, noting that only 48.5% of US adults were fully vaccinated, and that 99.5% of new hospitalizations from Covid-19 were people who had not received a shot.

Murthy’s comments on Sunday came after a spat between the government and Facebook, sparked by Biden’s statement last week that the company was “killing people” by failing to curb the spread of misinformation over vaccines. Meanwhile, prominent Republican politicians and rightwing TV personalities have been publicly skeptical about vaccinations, leading to a reluctance among their supporters to receive them.

Facebook hit back on Saturday with a blog post highlighting the steps it has taken, including the removal of more than 18m pieces of “misinformation”.

In interviews, company officials have accused the administration of “seeking scapegoats” for its own failure to reach Biden’s target of having 70% of US adults at least partially vaccinated by the 4 July holiday, and say that, privately at least, Murthy had praised the company’s efforts.

On Sunday, however, the surgeon general said his view of social media companies was unchanged.

“Some have worked to try to up-promote accurate sources, like the CDC and other medical sources. Others have tried to reduce the prevalence of false sources in search results. But what I have also said to them, publicly and privately, is that it’s not enough, that we’re still seeing a proliferation of misinformation online,” he told CNN’s State of the Union.

“And we know that health misinformation harms people’s health. It costs them their lives. Health misinformation takes away our freedom and our power to make decisions for us and for our families. The platforms have to recognize they have played a major role in the increase in speed and scale with which misinformation is spreading.”

Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic US senator for Minnesota, said on Sunday that she believed Facebook should face consequences, and referred to a so-called “dirty dozen” online personalities that a study said was responsible for 65% of Covid-19 misinformation generally, and 73% on Facebook.

“Look at the numbers from the Kaiser Foundation, two-thirds of people who have not gotten vaccinated say [it’s] because they have got something off of social media,” she told CNN.

“For months I have been taking on the dirty dozen, some have been taken off of their accounts. But there’s more to do. We also should look at changing the liability standards when it comes to vaccine misinformation. There’s absolutely no reason they shouldn’t be able to monitor this better and take this crap off of their platforms.”

A CBS news poll published Sunday showed growing hesitancy to receive a vaccine. 53% of respondents said they worried about side effects, up from 43% in June, and 45% said they “don’t trust the science” behind the vaccines, a rise of 12% from the previous month.

In Missouri, one of the states with the lowest vaccination rates, a spike in cases has led to hospital officials taking to Twitter to urge residents to get a shot.

Ken McClure, the mayor of Springfield, said circulating misinformation was at least partly responsible for the rise.

“People are talking about health related fears, what it might do to them later on in their lives, what might be contained in the vaccinations,” he told CBS’ Face the Nation.

“That information is just incorrect. And I think we as a society and certainly in our community are being hurt by it. The surge is coming, the Delta variant will be there, it’s going to spread, it’s already spreading throughout Missouri. Hopefully people can learn what we’ve been experiencing here in Springfield.”

Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/18/us-surgeon-general-covid-misinformation-spreading-like-wildfire-social-media

The governors of New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Rhode Island and Virginia declared states of emergency, telling residents to stay off the roads for their own safety.

Source Article from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60177979

WASHINGTON, Sept 13 (Reuters) – A congressional panel on Tuesday sought an urgent review by the U.S. National Archives after agency staff members acknowledged that they did not know if all presidential records from Donald Trump’s administration had been turned over.

House of Representatives Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney also asked the Archives, the federal agency charged with preserving government records, to seek a written certification from the Republican former president that he has handed over all presidential records and classified materials.

Maloney, a Democrat, also wants him to confirm he has not made copies or transferred them anywhere other than to that agency or the Justice Department.

Trump is facing a criminal investigation by the Justice Department for retaining government records – some marked as highly classified, including “top secret” – at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office in January 2021.

The FBI seized more than 11,000 records, including about 100 documents marked as classified, in a court-approved Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago. A federal judge is weighing how the documents should be handled as the investigation continues. read more

Maloney in a letter outlined attempts by the National Archives over many months, joined later by the Justice Department, to retrieve government property that Trump removed from the White House and transferred to Mar-a-Lago.

National Archives staff “recently informed the committee that the agency is not certain whether all presidential records are in its custody,” Maloney wrote, adding that she was deeply concerned that sensitive records are out of U.S. government custody.

“The Committee requests that NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) conduct an urgent review of presidential records from the Trump Administration to identify any presidential records or categories of presidential records, whether textual or electronic, that NARA has reason to believe may still be outside of the agency’s custody and control,” Maloney said in her letter to Debra Wall, acting archivist of the United States.

The National Archives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s removal of documents from the White House was a clear violation of a federal law called the Presidential Records Act, Maloney said. The committee is concerned that Trump delayed their return for months and that his representative misled investigators over the summer about whether any remained at Mar-a-Lago, Maloney added.

Maloney asked the Archives for an initial assessment of its findings by Sept. 27.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-lawmakers-ask-national-archives-accounting-trump-records-2022-09-13/

NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s excess deaths during the pandemic could be a staggering 10 times the official COVID-19 toll, likely making it modern India’s worst human tragedy, according to the most comprehensive research yet on the ravages of the virus in the South Asian country.

Most experts believe India’s official toll of more than 414,000 dead is a vast undercount, but the government has dismissed those concerns as exaggerated and misleading.

The report released Tuesday estimated excess deaths — the gap between those recorded and those that would have been expected — to be 3 million to 4.7 million between January 2020 and June 2021. It said an accurate figure may “prove elusive” but the true death toll “is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count.”

The report was published by Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s former chief economic adviser, and two other researchers at the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, and Harvard University.

It said the count could have missed deaths that occurred in overwhelmed hospitals or while health care was disrupted, particularly during the devastating virus surge earlier this year.

“True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy since Partition and independence,” the report said.

The Partition of the British-ruled Indian subcontinent into independent India and Pakistan in 1947 led to the killing of up to 1 million people as gangs of Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other.

The report on India’s virus toll used three calculation methods: data from the civil registration system that records births and deaths across seven states, blood tests showing the prevalence of the virus in India alongside global COVID-19 fatality rates, and an economic survey of nearly 900,000 people done thrice a year.

Researchers cautioned that each method had weaknesses, such as the economic survey omitting the causes of death.

Instead, researchers looked at deaths from all causes and compared that data to mortality in previous years — a method widely considered an accurate metric.

Researchers also cautioned that virus prevalence and COVID-19 deaths in the seven states they studied may not translate to all of India, since the virus could have spread more in urban versus rural states and since health care quality varies greatly around India.

Other nations are also believed to have undercounted deaths in the pandemic. But India is thought to have a greater gap due to having the world’s second highest population of 1.4 billion and because not all deaths were recorded even before the pandemic.

The health ministry did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment on the report.

Dr. Jacob John, who studies viruses at the Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India and was not part of the research, reviewed the report for the AP and said it underscores the devastating impact COVID-19 had on the country’s underprepared health system.

“This analysis reiterates the observations of other fearless investigative journalists that have highlighted the massive undercounting of deaths,” Jacob said.

The report also estimated that nearly 2 million Indians died during the first surge in infections last year and said not “grasping the scale of the tragedy in real time” may have “bred collective complacency that led to the horrors” of the surge earlier this year.

Over the last few months, some Indian states have increased their COVID-19 death toll after finding thousands of previously unreported cases, raising concerns that many more fatalities were not officially recorded.

Several Indian journalists have also published higher numbers from some states using government data. Scientists say this new information is helping them better understand how COVID-19 spread in India.

Murad Banaji, who studies mathematics at Middlesex University and has been looking at India’s COVID-19 mortality figures, said the recent data has confirmed some of the suspicions about undercounting. Banaji said the new data also shows the virus wasn’t restricted to urban centers, as contemporary reports had indicated, and that India’s villages were also badly impacted.

“A question we should ask is if some of those deaths were avoidable,” he said.

Source Article from https://apnews.com/334c326d86efa73a0631bf7cb6e3f92e

Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/19/hurricane-fiona-puerto-rico-dominican-republic-updates/10424046002/

WASHINGTON, June 9 (Reuters) – The congressional committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat presented testimony on Thursday showing that close allies – even his daughter – rejected his false claims of voting fraud.

The U.S. House of Representatives select committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, assault also showed graphic footage of thousands of rioters attacking police and smashing their way into the Capitol. It was the first of six planned hearings intended to show that the Republican former president conspired to unlawfully hold onto power.

The Democratic-led committee presented video of testimony from notable Trump administration figures including his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, Attorney General William Barr, campaign spokesperson Jason Miller and General Mark Milley.

It also showed part of Trump’s incendiary speech before the attack in which he repeated false election fraud claims and directed his supporters’ anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who was at the Capitol overseeing congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election win – a process the riot failed to prevent.

Some congressional Republicans in the days after the attack condemned Trump, but most have since changed their tune, supporting him and downplaying the day’s violence. Trump himself has gone after Republicans who voted to impeach him for his actions, backing primary challengers to them ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress for the following two years. read more

Democratic committee chair Bennie Thompson said Trump was at the center of a conspiracy to thwart American democracy and block the peaceful transfer of power.

“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one writer put it shortly after Jan. 6, to overthrow the government,” Thompson said. “The violence was no accident. It was Trump’s last stand.”

Barr in videotaped testimony said: “I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I call the bullshit. And, you know, I didn’t want to be a part of it.”

Barr’s view convinced Trump’s daughter.

“I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying,” Ivanka Trump said in videotaped testimony.

Trump, who is publicly flirting with another White House run in 2024, issued a statement before the hearing calling the committee “political Thugs.”

“Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Well, maybe our supporters have the right idea,'” said Representative Liz Cheney, one of the two Republicans on the nine-member panel and its vice chairperson.

Since leaving office last year, Trump has kept up his false claims that his 2020 election loss to Biden was the result of widespread fraud, an assertion rejected by numerous courts, state election officials and members of his own administration.

“We can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence, that there was fraud in the election,” Barr, who resigned about two weeks before the Capitol attack, said in the video.

Kushner was shown on video dismissing threats by some Trump aides to resign after the riot as “whining.”

The hearing also featured two witnesses who testified in person: U.S. Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, who sustained a brain injury in the attack, and Nick Quested, a filmmaker who captured footage of the far-right Proud Boys group, accused of helping to plan the attack.

Edwards described insults hurled by rioters at her during the melee but said she was proud of fighting them off even after being injured.

“I was slipping in people’s blood,” Edwards said. “It was carnage. It was chaos.”

“What I saw was just a war scene,” Edwards added.

‘SUMMONED THE MOB’

The mob attacked police, sent lawmakers and Pence fleeing for their safety and caused millions of dollars in damage. Four people died that day, one fatally shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, and one died the next day. Four officers later died by suicide.

“Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them: That the election was stolen and that he was the rightful president,” Cheney said. “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”

To her fellow Republicans – who voted to remove her from her House leadership position – Cheney offered a warning: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Cheney noted that multiple Republican congressmen contacted the White House after Jan. 6 to seek pardons for what she said was their role in trying to overturn the election.

Biden on Thursday described the attack as “a clear, flagrant violation of the Constitution.”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday underscored the partisan lens through which many Americans view the assault. It found that among Republicans about 55% believed the false claim that left-wing protesters led the attack and 58% believed most of the protesters were law-abiding.

Two Republican Georgia state election officials who Trump tried to pressure to “find” votes that would overturn his election defeat will testify at hearings later this month, a source familiar with the matter said. read more

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-aides-words-take-center-stage-us-capitol-riot-hearings-open-2022-06-09/