Today in History: Francis becomes first non-European pope in over 1,250 years
Today is Thursday, March 13, the 72nd day of 2025. There are 293 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On March 13, 2013, Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was elected pope, choosing the papal name Francis. He was the first pontiff from the Americas, and the first from outside Europe since Pope Gregory III's death in the year 741.
Also on this date:
In 1781, the seventh planet of the solar system, Uranus, was discovered by astronomer William Herschel.
In 1925, the Tennessee General Assembly approved the Butler Act, which prohibited public schools from teaching of the theory of evolution. (Gov. Austin Peay signed the measure on March 21; the bill was challenged in court later that year in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Tennessee ultimately repealed the law in 1967.)
In 1946, U.S. Army Pfc. Sadao Munemori was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for sacrificing himself to save fellow soldiers from a grenade explosion in Seravezza, Italy; he was the only Japanese American service member so recognized in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
In 1954, the pivotal Battle of Dien Bien Phu began during the First Indochina War as Viet Minh forces attacked French troops, who were defeated nearly two months later.
In 1996, a gunman entered an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and opened fire, killing 16 children and one teacher before killing himself; it remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history.
In 2020, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was fatally shot in her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, during a botched raid by plainclothes narcotics detectives searching for a suspected drug dealer; no drugs were found, and the 'no-knock' warrant used to enter by force was later found to be based on false information.
Today's Birthdays: Songwriter Mike Stoller is 92. Singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka is 86. Actor William H. Macy is 75. Actor Dana Delany is 69. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., is 68. Bassist Adam Clayton (U2) is 65. Jazz musician Terence Blanchard is 63. Actor Annabeth Gish is 54. Rapper-actor Common is 53. Actor Emile Hirsch is 40. Olympic skiing gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin is 30. Rapper Jack Harlow is 27. Tennis star Coco Gauff is 21.
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3 hours ago
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A New Book Might Just Explain Why So Many Serial Killers Came From One Part of the Country
Growing up on Washington state's Mercer Island in the 1960s and '70s, the writer Caroline Fraser got used to hearing people puzzle over why the Pacific Northwest was such a hotbed of infamous serial killers. From Ted Bundy to Gary Ridgway, aka the Green River Killer, these criminals seemed to be a mysterious product of a particular place and time, but why? Fraser—who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder—had her own reasons for discontent with her hometown, foremost among them a domineering Christian Scientist father whom she herself fantasized about eliminating. When, during the pandemic, she finally settled down to investigate this regional anomaly—part of an astonishing boom in serial killers nationwide between 1970 and 1990—she encountered an alternate explanation, one that she learned was especially pertinent to the Seattle and Tacoma area. Fraser's new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, explores this theory of why her girlhood home was so notably rife with strange and extravagant crimes. I spoke with her about what she discovered. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Laura Miller: There's a lot swirling around in You've got the history of Tacoma, Seattle, and the greater Pacific Northwest. There's your personal history, and then there are the stories of these many criminals and murderers. But there is also an argument underlying it that I wasn't familiar with, the lead-crime hypothesis. Could you explain that? Caroline Fraser: I didn't realize when I started this book that crime in the United States was at its worst in this period that I'm talking about—the late '60s, the '70s, the '80s. Violent crime reached heights that had not been seen before. And then there was this abrupt drop-off in the 1990s. One of the theories that recently emerged to explain that drop-off was the lead-crime hypothesis. Lead exposure, especially in childhood, really affects the development of the brain, and in particular, the male brain. What can happen is that if you're exposed to lead as a young child, then you are more likely to exhibit, later, in young adulthood, impulsivity and aggression. You're more likely to commit violent crime. How were people exposed to lead, and how was that exposure diminished later? In the '70s, lead was removed from paint, but the major way that most people were being exposed to lead was through leaded gasoline. It had existed since the 1920s, but when you think about, especially in this country, the rise in commuting and in car ownership that came about after World War II—you had more people driving, and driving longer distance. I mean, virtually everybody from the late 1940s and early 1950s to the 1980s was exposed to a lot of leaded gas. When was it removed? They started talking about removing it in the mid-'70s with the creation of the EPA, but it doesn't really get completely removed until about 1986. And then on top of the leaded gas, in certain parts of the country—you focus mainly on Tacoma—there were these metal smelters emitting lead and all kinds of other chemicals. These are called primary smelters, which were basically factories or plants to produce metal. There used to be so many of these that somebody once said that at one time, everybody in the country lived within 10 miles of a smelter. They were very common in cities. They were taking metal ores, the products of mining, and burning them. The smelter in Tacoma was first a lead smelter, then it changed pretty early on to a copper smelter. The issue with burning these ores is that they contain all these different kinds of metal, some of which are desirable, like silver and gold and copper, and others which are less so, like lead and arsenic. The Tacoma smelter was one of the dirtiest smelters in the country in terms of how much arsenic it produced. It also produced a lot of lead, and it was open and operating for decades, and over those decades, it polluted 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound region. The lead-crime hypothesis connects the general rise in crime with lead exposure, but has it been connected to the rise in the bizarre, unusual crimes that you're writing about in this book? I don't think that anybody has written a general-interest book that makes the connection between serial killers and the lead-crime hypothesis. What we are starting to see, though, are some scientific papers exploring the connection between lead exposure and psychopathy. But while it isn't completely unknown in the scientific record, I wanted to make this connection in a subjective way. I mean, I can't prove, for example, that Ted Bundy committed his crimes because of lead exposure. But what I can do is show you how much lead exposure he got, because there's now this extraordinary map, this Geographic Information System map that was produced by the Washington State Department of Ecology, that maps out the lead exposure, especially in Tacoma, but also the whole plume of it as it goes up into Seattle and Mercer Island and south of Tacoma. Now you can actually see how much lead was in Ted Bundy's front yard and his backyard, and how much arsenic. When did you learn about the lead exposure aspect, both its link to crime and the amount of metals the smelter was dumping in the area? Because you grew up there! You yourself were also exposed to all of that lead. Yeah, and draw whatever conclusion you like about that. I became aware of the smelter because we'd been thinking of possibly moving back to the Northwest and were looking at property. There was a piece of property on Vashon Island, which is right across from Tacoma, and the real estate agent had said that arsenic remediation was necessary, or something like that. I thought, how could there be arsenic on Vashon Island? It's this beautiful little island that was very agricultural. They grew strawberries there. But of course, because of its location right across from Tacoma, it got exposed to emissions from the smelter. So it has had arsenic and also lead. You make it very clear in your book that there's a long history of the danger of lead exposure being minimized by industry. ASARCO, the company that owned and operated the smelter, had this horribly compromised doctor on staff who kept insisting it was just fine. The government at the time seemed so docile in the face of those assertions. It just took forever for them to really recognize what a hazard it was. And by the time they were ready to recognize it, most of the smelters were going out of business anyway, which of course is not accidental timing. I think there are only three lead smelters or primary smelters left operating in the U.S. now. It's so much cheaper to go someplace like Mexico or Peru, countries that don't have the regulations that we have. So now those are the places that are being polluted. That is very disturbing. You make a connection between the whole femicide epidemic in Ciudad Juárez and the smelter emissions down there. The thing that we're still facing here is not the primary smelters like the one they had in Tacoma, but all this recycling. Your car battery has got lead in it. Let's talk more about these serial killers you cover. There's a lot of detail about the crimes in this book, and also there has been a lot written about at least some of these people. I'm not going say that I'm not interested in reading it, because I do love true crime, but a lot of people might complain that it has already been covered extensively. How did you come to the decision to examine the crimes themselves in some depth? One of the things that I was hoping to do by looking at some of these very overfamiliar characters like Ted Bundy, for example, is to put him in a historical context. Because I think that really changes the way we see who he is and what he did. I love true crime too, and Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me was a real gateway drug for me, but the thing that most true crime does is to take just one of these killers—Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, the BTK Killer—and they look just at that one guy. I wanted to do something different, to look at a selection of them over time and how that makes us see what they're doing differently in terms of history. It begins to seem more like a social phenomenon. It's really striking in how much the culture of true crime, especially lurid magazines like True Detective, fascinated killers like Bundy, and then how subsequent killers were obsessed with Bundy in turn—were basically fans who aspired to be like him, after reading about him in books. And they're all learning things from reading about what other serial killers have done. They're learning techniques for how to hide what they're doing and how to evade detection, and how to conceal their victims so that they're not found until there's very little forensic evidence left. Was there anything you found out researching this book that really surprised you? The Tacoma connection was a surprise to me, for starters, because I had always associated Ted Bundy with Seattle, where he committed some of his more notable crimes. And the connection between Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who's not that far from Tacoma. And then when I discovered that Charles Manson had been in the area in the '60s … I was really surprised to learn that the first victim of the D.C. sniper duo was in Tacoma! But then do you worry that you're getting into a certain amount of confirmation bias? Surely you must have come across serial killers with no major lead connection? Sure. I hope I present enough of the tentative quality about this so that people can kind of make up their own mind. There are definitely other serial killers. I looked at Son of Sam pretty closely, trying to find some sort of explanation for his behavior, but couldn't really do again, the whole problem with this era is that everybody was exposed to leaded gas. Everyone was exposed. It's striking that you include your own fairly cold-blooded thoughts about getting rid of your dad as a child. I think we all have moments of … not of wanting to kill somebody, but just frustration and anger and rage, potentially. Those feelings are particularly pronounced when you're a kid, when you feel that you have no autonomy, when you feel powerless. The behavior of the serial killers is just so monstrous that there's always the temptation to think that there's nothing about them that could have ever been normal. They come to seem, I think—especially when you see this whole series of them, and the repetitiveness of their behavior—like automatons. Almost like robots that are in this kind of cycle, and they can't really control it. But I'm not trying to let them off the hook or anything. One of the most striking parts of the book is when you quote from a newspaper story covering the demolition of the smelter. One woman actually says, 'Even if it kills me, I'm still gonna miss it.' There's something so resonant about that now, at a time when a lot of people want to 'bring back' terribly dangerous industries like mining that destroy the health of the people who work in them. The community of Ruston that was right around the smokestack had developed the sense of, Oh, this is a wonderful thing, and the jobs are so well-paying. And the smelter officials had done such a good job of quashing any investigation that would have exposed how deadly it was. People were forced to choose between jobs and health. They just should not have been put in that position.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
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He Killed a Reggae Star's Daughter Feet Away from Her Child. Then Came the Judge's Haunting Words
Brianna McKoy and Derrick Francis were arguing when he fatally shot her in 2023, authorities said McKoy, 23, was the mother of Francis' son Zander, who was 18 months old when his mother was killed A national manhunt was launched for Francis after he fled the sceneA New York man convicted of killing the mother of his son in front of their child when he was just 18 months old has learned his fate. On Thursday, June 5, Derrick Francis, 43, was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the murder of Brianna McKoy, 23, in Bridgeport, Conn., on April 6, 2023, online court records show. On April 25, a three-judge panel of the Connecticut Superior Court convicted Francis of the shooting death of McKoy in the apartment they shared in the city's North End, said Joseph Corradino, the State's Attorney for the Judicial District of Bridgeport, in a release. 'In coming to their verdict, the judges found that Francis had failed to prove his affirmative defense of extreme emotional disturbance,' the State's Attorney said in the release. McKoy was the daughter of Jamaican reggae star Ricky Trooper, who has written about his daughter's murder on Instagram. 'Hate the 6th of April,' he wrote on April 5. 'That day the fassy took my baby away from us.2 years now and the pain only get worst (sic).' McKoy's family has been seeking justice for her since the fatal shooting. "Today we finally got that justice and it's been a long time coming," her mother, Camille Hemmings, told News 12. On the day McKoy was killed, she and Francis were arguing at their apartment when he shot her four times with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, police said, News 12 reports. During closing arguments in Francis's trial, defense attorney Gerald Klein said Francis had "reached a breaking point" during his relationship with McKoy and called the homicide "a crime of passion,' the CT Post argued that Francis had initially said in one of his police interviews that he had to wrest the gun from McKoy, the CT Post reports. Later on, Francis said he found the gun in a drawer while looking for money he thought McKoy had allegedly taken, Corradino argued, according to the CT Post. Their son Zander was only 'a few feet away" when Francis fired the gun at McKoy, police said, according to News 12. "Baby Zander has not spoken a single word since that day,' Hemmings told News 12. 'He goes to therapy on a regular basis now to restore his speech." After the shooting, Francis fled the scene, setting off a national manhunt, according to the State's Attorney. Francis fled to Ohio, but was apprehended two days later when officers stopped a car he was riding in because they had an arrest warrant for the driver, the State's Attorney said. Francis ran from the officers during the traffic stop, but was captured after a short chase. Ohio officers recovered a gun under the vehicle's passenger seat that the Connecticut Forensic Science Laboratory determined was consistent with having fired the cartridge cases recovered from the crime scene, according to the State's Attorney. In a GoFundMe set up for Zander, the organizer wrote, "Camille Prince's daughter lost her life due to domestic violence." Hemmings told News 12 nothing can take away the pain of losing her daughter, but she is glad that her killer will serve out the next five decades behind bars. "He finally got what he deserved — 55 years. He will hopefully die in prison a lonely and miserable death," Hemmings told News 12. If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages. Read the original article on People
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
‘Bring in the troops!': Trump raises the stakes as ICE tactics spark protests in L.A.
For those concerned about Donald Trump and his authoritarian-style agenda, the last few days have been, at a minimum, unsettling. On the East Coast, for example, military vehicles, including tanks, are getting into position to roll down the streets of the nation's capital, for a June 14 military parade to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army — which also happens to coincide with Donald Trump's birthday. And then, of course, there's the West Coast. As The Associated Press summarized: Tensions in Los Angeles escalated Sunday as thousands of protesters took to the streets in response to President Donald Trump's extraordinary deployment of the National Guard, blocking off a major freeway and setting self-driving cars on fire as law enforcement used tear gas, rubber bullets and flash bangs to control the crowd. In recent months, federal officials, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, have engaged in overly aggressive and legally dubious tactics while executing the White House's deportation agenda, sparking a predictable public backlash. As NBC News reported, it was against this backdrop that ICE officers on Friday carried out raids in three locations across the city, where dozens of people were taken into custody. California Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the raids, calling them 'chaotic federal sweeps' that aimed to fill an 'arbitrary arrest quota,' and protests soon followed. It was the next day when Trump announced that he was calling up 2,000 National Guard troops to quell the protests, ignoring the objections of the state's Democratic governor. As The New York Times reported, 'Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states,' and this marked 'the first time since 1965 that a president has activated a state's National Guard force without a request from that state's governor.' (Sixty years ago, it was Lyndon B. Johnson who sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.) Last year, while serving as South Dakota's Republican governor, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that if Joe Biden tried to federalize National Guard troops, it would constitute a 'direct attack on states' rights' and spark a 'war' between Washington and GOP-led state governments. Over the weekend, however, Noem took the opposite position. Around the same time, by way of his social media platform, Trump proceeded to celebrate the 'great job' National Guard troops did in Los Angeles before the troops actually arrived, which was bizarre but consistent with the incumbent president's general approach to reality. For his part, Newsom — whom Trump keeps describing as 'Newscum' because the president has the temperament of an ill-tempered tween — accused Trump of 'inciting and provoking violence,' 'creating mass chaos,' and 'militarizing cities.' The California Democrat added, 'These are the acts of a dictator, not a president.' After Tom Homan, the administration's 'border czar,' raised the prospect of arresting state and local elected officials, Newsom effectively dared Homan to try. There's no reason to believe that conditions will improve quickly. The governor has formally asked Trump to pull Guard troops, an appeal that will likely be ignored. In the meantime, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has suggested he's prepared to deploy U.S. Marines onto American streets — a point that was echoed by U.S. Northern Command. Asked whether Americans might soon see active-duty Marines on the streets of Los Angeles, House Speaker Mike Johnson told ABC News that he doesn't believe such a step would be 'heavy-handed.' Soon after, the president told reporters that he's meeting with U.S. military leaders, and after publishing a statement about Los Angeles having been 'invaded and occupied,' there was renewed speculation about whether the Republican might be preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act. Indeed, Trump also wrote that he was directing Noem, Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi, 'to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.' Shortly after midnight, on Monday morning, Trump also wrote online, 'Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!' He similarly told reporters that he expects to have U.S. troops 'everywhere.' In his latest New York Times column, David French concluded, 'It's too early to declare a constitutional crisis, and in any case, debating the label we attach to any new event can distract us from focusing fully on the event itself. But each new day brings us fresh evidence of a deeply troubling trend: America is no longer a stable country, and it is growing less stable by the day.' A few weeks before Election Day 2024, as he referred to Americans he disagreed with as 'scum,' then-candidate Trump talked about the possible deployment of the National Guard or the U.S. military on American soil to be used against those he labeled 'the enemy from within.' At the time, it led many to wonder whether Trump, if returned to power, might be willing to use — or in this case, abuse — military resources to stifle dissent. Republicans characterized such concerns as hysterical and paranoid. Eight months later, those fears are suddenly relevant anew. This is a developing story. Check back for updates. This article was originally published on
