Saturday, Feb 28th
Last update01:00:16 PM GMT
A narrowly divided U.S. Senate moved closer to passing a $95.34 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan on Sunday, showing undiminished bipartisanship despite opposition from Republican hardliners and Donald Trump.
Just before 8:30 p.m. Thursday, the TBI reported, deputies with the Blount County Sheriff’s Office pulled an SUV over in the city of Maryville on U.S. Route 411.
It was not immediately known why deputies pulled the vehicle over along the two-lane highway about 16 miles south of Knoxville. The shooting scene was about 35 miles north of the Great Smoky Mountains."
This the hardest thing I've ever done," Blount County Sheriff James L. Berrong said through tears during a press conference Thursday night after the shooting.
Berrong, whose held the title of sheriff since 1989, identified the slain deputy as Greg McCowan.
According to a post on the sheriff’s department's Facebook page, McCowan graduated from the police academy in October 2020.
Saturday in another wave of assaults meant to further disable Iran-backed groups that have attacked US and international interests in response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Ships and fighter jets on Saturday launched strikes against the Houthis. It followed an air assault in Iraq and Syria on Friday targeting other Iran-backed militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in retaliation for the drone strike that killed three US troops – William Jerome Rivers, Kennedy Ladon Sanders and Breonna Alexsondria Moffett – in Jordan last weekend.
The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said the military action “sends a clear message to the Houthis that they will continue to bear further consequences if they do not end their illegal attacks on international shipping and naval vessels.”
The Supreme Court ruled the U.S. Military Academy at West Point may continue using race as a factor in admissions, leaving intact the slim remains of affirmative action in higher education.
At the end of its last term, the high court in a landmark decision gutted race-conscious admissions policies at universities nationwide, except at military academies.
Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the conservative legal group behind last year’s blockbuster cases, has since looked to demolish the exception.
In an emergency decision Friday, the justices declined the SFFA’s request to immediately prevent West Point from using race as a factor in its upcoming admissions cycle, as the group’s constitutional challenge continues in a lower court.
Melinda Ledbetter, Brian Wilson’s second wife, died Tuesday morning, Wilson announced on social media. Ledbetter was 77.
“My heart is broken,” the Beach Boys co-founder wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Melinda, my beloved wife of 28 years, passed away this morning. Our five children and I are just in tears. We are lost. Melinda was more than my wife. She was my savior. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career.”
“She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart. She was my anchor. She was everything for us. Please say a prayer for her,” he said in another post.
Wilson married Ledbetter in 1995 after they met while she was working at a car dealership. They went on to adopt five children while they were together.
The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.
A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.
Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
Officials said court and other systems in Georgia’s most populous county were hacked over the weekend, interrupting routine operations, but the district attorney’s office said the racketeering case against former president Donald Trump is unaffected.
Fulton county, which includes most of Atlanta, was experiencing a “widespread system outage” from a “cybersecurity incident”, the chair of the county commission, Robb Pitts, said on Monday in a video posted on social media. Notably, he said, the outage is affecting the county’s phone, court and tax systems.
But the office of the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, said the racketeering case against Trump and others is not affected.
“All material related to the election case is kept in a separate, highly secure system that was not hacked and is designed to make any unauthorized access extremely difficult if not impossible,” Willis’s office said in a statement.
Israeli forces disguised as civilian women and medical workers stormed a hospital Tuesday in the occupied West Bank, killing three Palestinian militants in a dramatic raid that underscored how deadly violence has spilled into the territory from the war in Gaza.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces opened fire inside the wards of the Ibn Sina Hospital in the town of Jenin. The ministry condemned the raid and called on the international community to pressure Israel’s military to halt such operations in hospitals. A hospital spokesperson said there was no exchange of fire, indicating that it was a targeted killing.
The military said the militants were using the hospital as a hideout, without providing evidence. It alleged that one of those targeted in the raid had transferred weapons and ammunition to others for a planned attack, purportedly inspired by the Hamas assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that triggered the war in Gaza.
A South Carolina judge denied Alex Murdaugh's bid for a new double-murder trial on Monday after his defense team accused a clerk of court with tampering with a jury.
Judge Jean Toal ruled that even if Colleton County Clerk Becky Hill did tell jurors to watch Murdaugh's actions and body language on the stand, the defense failed to prove that such comments directly influenced their decision to find him guilty.
Toal said after reviewing the full transcript of the six-week trial, she couldn't overturn the verdict based "on the strength of some fleeting and foolish comments by a publicity-seeking clerk of court."
One member of the jury that convicted Murdaugh of murdering his wife and son testified that Hill made the comments and it indicated to her she thought Murdaugh was guilty. But the 11 other jurors said they based their guilty verdicts only on the testimony, evidence and law presented at trial, and just one of them mentioned hearing anything similar.
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