The grandson of the late Robert F. Kennedy was arrested in Colorado Thursday following an early morning bar fight.
John Conor Kennedy, 22, who goes by Conor, was detained briefly by police in the resort town of Aspen, the Aspen Times reported.
Officers responded around 1:40 a.m. to reports of people refusing to leave the bar. But when they arrived, they saw a fight break out in front of the establishment.
Aspen police Sgt. Rick Magnuson told the newspaper that’s when Officer Andy Atkinson saw Kennedy grab another man by the shirt, pull him down and hit him in the back of the head at least four times.
Atkinson and at least one other officer tried to break up the scuffle but were unsuccessful.
“Kennedy and I fell back onto the snow bank on the south side of [the street] where Kennedy attempted to pull away from me and stand up,” Atkinson wrote in the police report. “I held onto Kennedy’s arms and rolled him over with assistance from a bystander on to his stomach.”
Kennedy was taken into custody, but later released. He faces at least one charge of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor that carries a sentence of up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,650, USA Today reported.
Police are still investigating exactly what happened, but Kennedy’s father, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., says his son was merely standing up for a friend who was called “the f-word.” Multiple media outlets have reported the “f-word” allegedly used against Kennedy’s friend was a gay slur.
“Conor has always reacted against bullying. I’m happy he stood up for his friend,” Robert Kennedy Jr. told the Times.
It’s not the first time Kennedy has had a run-in with the law. USA Today noted Kennedy was arrested outside the White House in 2013, along with 47 other environmental activists, who were protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.
The Washington Post caused a mild social media stir Friday when they posted a story alleging that the Russians had hacked the U.S. power grid via a utility company in Vermont.
In a story boasting the ominous headline, “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say,” the Post said the following:
A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials.
While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a security matter, the discovery underscores the vulnerabilities of the nation’s electrical grid. And it raises fears in the U.S. government that Russian government hackers are actively trying to penetrate the grid to carry out potential attacks.
However, by late Friday night, after The Burlington Electric Department was finally contacted and could release a statement — something the Post didn’t obtain before publishing their piece — the headline had changed to something less ominous due to the utility company’s statement.
“Last night, U.S. utilities were alerted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of a malware code used in Grizzly Steppe, the name DHS has applied to a Russian campaign linked to recent hacks,” a spokesman for the Burlington Electric Department said. “We acted quickly to scan all computers in our system for the malware signature. We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems.”
The Vermont Public Service Commissioner Christopher Recchia told The Burlington Free Press, “The grid is not in danger.”
The Post has since changed the headline of their piece to read, “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say.”
Charges of “fake news” have been leveled throughout the 2016 election season as being responsible for inflating or lying about both candidates depending on the source of the report. Concerns about it became so pervasive that media giants such as Facebook and Google vowed to research and begin addressing how news is shared on their platforms with the intent of controlling the spread of false reports.
WALLINGFORD — Police say two people are dead after a shooting outside Oakdale Theatre late Friday night following a concert. Two other people were shot and are being treated at area hospitals.
About 11:15 p.m., police responded to the Oakdale, 95 S. Turnpike Road, for reports of shots fired. Two people were killed, Lt. Cheryl Bradley said. Two others were also shot, but were expected to survive, she said. One person was taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital, while another was taken to Hartford Hospital. The names and ages of the four victims have not been released.
No one is in custody, Bradley said shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday, though multiple agencies, including the state police major crime squad, are investigating. Descriptions of suspects or vehicles weren’t immediately available.
Asked to describe the scene when police arrived, Bradley said, “it was chaotic, as you can imagine.” Police provided no update when contacted this morning.
Rapper Meek Mill was scheduled to perform in the dome at Oakdale Theatre Friday night, according to the Oakdale’s website. Doors opened at 7 p.m. and the show was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Bradley said the show had just ended and the Oakdale was closing when the shooting occurred. A security guard told the Record-Journal that vehicles had already begun lining up to exit the parking lot and Meek Mill just got into his vehicle when he heard gunshots.
Jim Bozzi, Connecticut marketing vice president for Live Nation, said this morning there are no plans to postpone or cancel any upcoming shows at Oakdale Theater, but otherwise deferred comment to Wallingford police. Oakdale Theater’s next show is not scheduled until Jan. 18, according to the venue’s website.
Wallingford police called in all available officers, locked down the Oakdale and shut down nearby roads during the initial response. Cheshire, Meriden and North Haven police were also called in as backup as officers searched the area. The entrance to nearby Route 15 was closed. Bradley said police are investigating at least one hit-and-run crash following the shooting in which a vehicle fled after striking another vehicle outside the venue.
Video taken outside the concert venue captures at least one shot being fired. A voice can be heard saying “look there’s Meek” as the camera points toward the front of the venue when a shot can be heard. A gasp erupts from the crowd and people begin running. A security guard approaches the person capturing the video and advises the individual to stay down before they flee the area.
Oakdale Theatre is a popular concert venue in New Haven County that attracts a variety of artists and touring shows. There have been no reports of gun violence at the venue in recent memory, according to Record-Journal archives.
Check back for more information as it becomes available.
STOCKTON -- Forget the caramel sauce or whipped cream, this is something no one wants in their coffee.
The “Stockton Police Department, Corruption Reporting Page” on Facebook posted a picture of a man and his family with a message that reads, “We are happy to report that today this officer from the Stockton Police Department got to have coffee at Starbucks...served with a side of spit,” adding, "They even gave it to him with a smile and a nice comment.”
The Stockton Police Department tells FOX40 they were called out to investigate the incident at the Starbucks on Waterloo Road on Wednesday night. They wouldn’t go on camera but a police spokesperson said they found no evidence that an employee spit in the officer’s coffee.
Starbucks also denies the allegation, saying in a statement, “We are proud of our relationship with the Stockton Police Department, who initially notified us of this rumor. We can confirm there is absolutely no truth to this post, and we are disappointed with the suggestion.”
Despite all of this, the Black Lives Matter Stockton chapter claims the post is 100 percent true. They told FOX40 off camera that a barista who wants to remain anonymous spit in the officer’s coffee because they were upset. They said a family member had a problem with the officer in the post and they also mentioned that their complaints regarding race related issues to the department are not being taken seriously.
The Police Department said they cannot comment on complaints related to their officers.
But Black Lives Matter is adamant, claiming there was spit in the coffee writing to us, “It really happened...we gave you all the proof we could without throwing someone under the bus.”
The official Black Lives Matter website does not list a Stockton chapter.
The group also claimed that there’s a diner in Stockton that does the same thing when officers visit. They would not tell us which diner and they added that some media members should also be cautious of where we buy our food.
Ronald Gray leaves a courtroom at Fort Bragg in 1988. AP
The sister of a woman murdered more than 30 years ago in North Carolina says she and her family fully support the military’s planned execution of the woman’s killer, a former soldier.
The execution would be the first by the US military in more than a half-century. A Kansas federal judge earlier this month lifted the stay of execution for the former Fort Bragg soldier, Ronald A. Gray, who is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Gray was convicted in military and civilian courts of raping several women and killing four, including 18-year-old Tammy Cofer Wilson. He was sentenced to death in a Fort Bragg court-martial in 1988.
Wilson’s sister, Honey Rosalie Schlehuber of Chickasha, Oklahoma, told the Fayetteville Observershe would like to witness Gray’s execution and that her entire family has struggled since the murder.
US District Judge J. Thomas Marten last week sided with the US government in denying Gray’s bid to block the military from pressing ahead with the execution by lethal injection.
The military carried out its last execution at Fort Leavenworth in 1961 when it hanged Army Pvt. John Bennett for raping and trying to kill an 11-year-old Austrian girl.
No known execution date has been set for Gray. Though Gray’s attorneys have said in recent court filings that they planned to ask military courts to intervene, the status of those appeals was unclear. A message left by the Associated Press with Gray’s capital public defender, Tim Kane, was not immediately returned.
Gray was convicted and ordered condemned in military court in 1988 for two murders and three rapes in the Fayetteville, North Carolina, area while stationed at Fort Bragg, where he reached the rank of specialist and was a cook. He pleaded guilty in civilian courts to two other killings and five rapes and was sentenced to eight life terms, three of them consecutive.
Gray, 51, is among six people on the US military’s death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research group that opposes capital punishment. Those inmates, whose appeals are pending, include Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people in a 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas.
Nidal HasanAP
The president has the power to commute a military death sentence, and no service member can be put to death unless the president signs off on it, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The commandant of Fort Leavenworth’s disciplinary barracks where Gray is held is the one who would schedule the date and time of the execution, according to the federal government’s court filings.
The federal appeal was filed in 2008 for Gray, whose attorneys claimed he had an ineffective lawyer in his earlier case and lacked the mental capacity to stand trial. Gray’s appellate attorneys also have questioned the military’s jurisdiction over the case.
In November 2008, another Kansas federal judge, Richard Rogers, issued a stay for Gray two weeks before his scheduled execution.
In successfully pressing for Marten to lift the stay, federal prosecutors argued in a court filing Dec. 9 that Gray “seems to believe that he is entitled to an indefinite federal stay of execution while he exhausts his remedies in the military courts. This is not the law.”
Various factors help explain the absence of military executions in recent decades. Condemned inmates may appeal their death sentences to military and civilian courts, potentially delaying an execution for decades, as in Gray’s case.
In 1983, the armed services’ highest court ruled that the military death penalty law was constitutionally flawed because it did not include “aggravating” factors to help jurors decide which cases deserve capital punishment. That ruling resulted in a number of death sentences being converted to life terms.
But the next year, President Ronald Reagan reinstated the military’s capital punishment, defining who is subject to the death penalty in the armed forces through an executive order. The US Supreme Court in 1996 upheld Reagan’s action as constitutional.
In 1997, the Uniform Code of Military Justice — the military’s modern-day legal system — was amended to add a life sentence without the possibility of parole as an alternative to the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
In October, the US Supreme Court said it would not hear a challenge to the death penalty for military members, rejecting an appeal from a former soldier sentenced to death for killing two fellow soldiers and injuring 14 others in an attack in Kuwait in 2003.
Thomas McClellan, 25, and Luna Younger, 5 Ingham County Sheriff’s Office; Facebook
A Michigan man “snapped” when his 5-year-old stepdaughter said she wanted something to eat — stabbing the little girl to death, and then setting her body on fire, a court heard this week.
Thomas McClellan, 25, of Holt, admitted that he knocked Luna Michelle Younger to the ground, sat on her hips and stabbed her in the chest on Nov. 1 after she wouldn’t leave his room, Detective Chuck Buckland of the Ingham County Sheriff’s Office testified in a preliminary hearing Thursday, according to reports.
McClellan then wrapped the girl’s lifeless body in blankets, dumped alcohol on it and lit it on fire, Buckland said, according to the Lansing State Journal.
During the hearing in the 55th District Court, a medical examiner said Luna was stabbed at least five times.
McClellan is charged with murder, first-degree child abuse and first-degree arson in the gruesome death of his stepdaughter at the family’s Keller Road home. He faces up to life in prison if convicted of the crime.
First responder Delhi Township firefighter Corey Drolett said that when he entered the apartment, he did not initially see Luna under the blankets.
When he finally found her body, “I knew the victim had expired,” Drolett testified.
Although he knew she was already dead, Drolett passed her body through the window and instructed another firefighter to “very lightly” perform CPR, he said.
“Based on the situation [I] felt that would show [the mother] that we were attempting some effort,” he said during testimony, the newspaper reported.
As McClellan was brutally murdering his stepdaughter, the girl’s mother, Victoria McClellan, was at work, and she and her husband had been “bickering” earlier in the day, she told officials.
She convinced McClellan to surrender to police and he was taken into custody about four hours after the initial 911 call.
Supposed retaliation measure is not actually happening
CNN, one of the media outfits that regularly complains about “fake news,” ran a fake news story of its own when it claimed that Russia was closing an Anglo-American school in Moscow as retaliation for President Obama’s sanctions.
“Russian authorities ordered the closure of the Anglo-American School of Moscow, a US official briefed on the matter said. The order from the Russian government closes the school, which serves children of US, British and Canadian embassy personnel, to US and foreign nationals,” reported CNN.
However, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova responded swiftly by denying that the school had been closed.
“US officials ‘anonymously informed’ their media that Russia closed the Anglo-American School in Moscow as a retaliatory measure,” Zakharova wrote on her official Facebook page. “That’s a lie. Apparently, the White House has completely lost its senses and began inventing sanctions against its own children.”
Zakharova accused CNN of spreading “false information citing official American sources”.
The misreported story is an embarrassment for the network, which has run a series of articles over the past month complaining about so-called fake news.
Russia’s actual response to the sanctions was to propose that Vladimir Putin declare “31 employees of the US Embassy in Moscow and four diplomats from the US Consulate service in St. Petersburg as persons ‘non-grata.’” However, Putin later rejected this measure.
Meanwhile, in a related story, a senior U.S. official told Reuters that President-elect Donald Trump could reverse Obama’s executive order once he takes office and allow the 35 expelled Russian officials to return to America.
This undated photo provided by the Geary County Detention Center In Junction City, Kan., shows Tomas Martinez-Maldonado. Records obtained by The Associated Press show that Martinez-Maldonado a Mexican national accused of raping a 13-year-old girl on a Greyhound bus that traveled through Kansas had been deported 10 times and voluntarily removed from the U.S. nine times since 2003. Geary County Detention Center via AP
A Mexican man accused of raping a 13-year-old girl on a Greyhound bus that traveled through Kansas had been deported 10 times and voluntarily removed from the U.S. another nine times since 2003, records obtained by The Associated Press show.
Three U.S. Republican senators — including Kansas' Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts — demanded this month that the Department of Homeland Security provide immigration records for 38-year-old Tomas Martinez-Maldonado, who is charged with a felony in the alleged Sept. 27 attack aboard a bus in Geary County. He is being held in the Geary County jail in Junction City, which is about 120 miles west of Kansas City.
U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, from Iowa and chairman of the judiciary committee, co-signed a Dec. 9 letter with Moran and Roberts to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, calling it "an extremely disturbing case" and questioning how Martinez-Maldonado was able to re-enter and remain in the country.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has placed a detainer — a request to turn Martinez-Maldonado over to ICE custody before he is released — with Geary County. ICE declined to discuss his specific case beyond its October statement regarding the 10 deportations.
Court filings show Martinez-Maldonado has two misdemeanor convictions for entering without legal permission in cases prosecuted in 2013 and 2015 in U.S. District Court of Arizona, where he was sentenced to serve 60 days and 165 days respectively.
A status hearing in the rape case is scheduled for Jan. 10. Defense attorney Lisa Hamer declined to comment on the charge, but said, "criminal law and immigration definitely intersect and nowadays it should be the responsibility of every criminal defense attorney to know the possible ramifications in the immigration courts."
Nationwide, 52 percent of all federal prosecutions in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 were for entry or re-entry without legal permission and similar immigration violations, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
It's not unusual to see immigrants with multiple entries without legal permission, said David Trevino, a Topeka immigration attorney also representing Martinez-Maldonado. Most of Martinez-Maldonado's family lives in Mexico, but he also has family in the United States, and the family is "devastated," Trevino said.
"(President-elect Donald Trump) can build a wall 100 feet high and 50 feet deep, but it is not going to keep family members separated. So if someone is deported and they have family members here ... they will find a way back — whether it is through the air, under a wall, through the coast of the United States," Trevino said.
He declined to comment on his client's criminal history and pending charge.
Records obtained by AP show Martinez-Maldonado had eight voluntary removals before his first deportation in 2010, which was followed by another voluntary removal that same year. He was deported five more times between 2011 and 2013.
In 2013, Martinez-Maldonado was charged with entering without legal permission, a misdemeanor, and subsequently deported in early 2014 after serving his sentence. He was deported again a few months later, as well as twice in 2015 — including the last one in October 2015 after he had served his second sentence, the records show.
ICE said in an emailed statement when it encounters a person who's been deported multiple times or has a significant criminal history and was removed, it routinely presents those cases to the U.S. attorney's office for possible criminal charges.
Cosme Lopez, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office for the District of Arizona, declined comment on why prosecutors twice dismissed felony re-entry after deportation charges against Martinez-Maldonado in 2013 and 2015 in exchange for guilty pleas on misdemeanor entry charges.
Arizona ranks third in the nation — behind only the Southern District of Texas and the Western District of Texas — for the number of immigration prosecutions among the nation's 94 federal judicial districts for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, TRAC records show.
Moran told the AP in an emailed statement that the immigration system is "broken."
"There must be serious legislative efforts to address U.S. immigration policy, and we must have the ability to identify, prosecute and deport illegal aliens who display violent tendencies before they have an opportunity to perpetrate these crimes in the United States," he said.
Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/nation-world/article123768739.html#storylink=cpy
A&E has canceled its KKK documentary series after it was discovered that show participants received payment.
On Friday, the network stated that it would change the name from “Generation KKK” to “Escaping the KKK,” and partnered with the ADL and racial justice organization Color of Change to create town hall meetings after initial controversy.
By Saturday, A&E announced it would not air the program because it “learned last night from the third-party producers … that cash payments — which we currently understand to be nominal — were made in the field to some participants in order to facilitate access … these payments are a direct violation of A&E’s policies and practices.”
The show was to be a documentary on so-called “anti-hate extractors.”
The Twitterverse immediately slammed Sheen for his tweet, calling the actor a “scumbag” and a “useless cockroach.”
Sheen has yet to respond to the backlash. His tweet is pinned to the top of his Twitter profile.
A rep for Sheen did not immediately return FOX411’s request for comment.
Sheen is by far not the first celebrity to face heat for taking aim at Trump. Alec Baldwincalled him “the most reviled candidate in our history” and Madonna likened Trump’s win to the feeling one gets when someone dies.
Former “House” star Lisa Edelstein came under fire when she tweeted, “RIP Alan Thicke. Seems like everyone is checking out before the Trumpacolypse.”
Robert De Niro called Trump “stupid” and a “punk” and said he would like “to punch him in the face,” but he has since softened his tone.
After receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, De Niro said: “I would only say that we’re all hoping, waiting and hoping, that [Trump] will lead the country in a way that’ll benefit everyone and benefit our neighbors around the world.”
Three months after CBS aired its true-crime docuseries The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, the slain girl’s older brother is suing the network for $750M over the program that laid blame for the killing on him.
Burke Ramsey, who was 10 when his 6-year-old beauty queen sister was found dead in the family’s Boulder, CO, home at Christmastime in 1996, also is suing production company Critical Content and a number of consultants involved with the program. Saying his reputation was destroyed by the three-part program, he is seeking $250M in compensatory damages and twice that in punitive damages.
When contacted by Deadline, CBS had no comment on the suit, which was filed today in a Michigan court.
The lawsuit claims CBS and its team of experts planned to conduct a “sham reinvestigation” of JonBenet’s death with “the preconceived the story line” that Ramsey killed the girl and conspired with his parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, to cover it up.
“The accusation that Burke Ramsey killed his sister was based on a compilation of lies, half-truths, manufactured information, and the intentional omission and avoidance of truthful information about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey,” the lawsuit says.
In October, Burke Ramsey filed a separate $150M suit against Dr. Werner Spitz, who appeared on The Case Of giving an interview to CBS Detroit in which he said of Burke’s involvement in the killing, “If you really, really use your free time to think about this case, you cannot come to a different conclusion.”
The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey reunited the original investigators in one of the highest-profile unsolved murders in recent history to re-examine the tragic case 20 years later. The docuseries was among multiple TV projects this year about the infamous case, including Lifetime’s original movie Who Killed JonBenet? and Investigation Discovery’s JonBenét: An American Murder Mystery. There also is a feature in the works titled Casting JonBenet, directed by Kitty Green and produced by James Schamus’ Symbolic Exchange.
