U.S. Army sergeant suspected of shooting, wounding five fellow soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia
All five soldiers struck by gunfire were listed in stable condition following the incident and are expected to recover, though three required surgery for their injuries, according to Brigadier General John Lubas, the base commander.
The suspect was identified as Quornelius Radford, 28, an active-duty logistics sergeant assigned to the Second Armored Brigade at Fort Stewart. Lubas said Radford had not previously been deployed to combat.
Lubas said at an afternoon press conference that the shooting unfolded shortly before 11 a.m. local time at the suspect's place of work on base.
"I don't believe it had anything to do with a training event. Other than that, I can't speak to the motivations of this soldier." He said the firearm used was not a military weapon but a personal handgun.
President Donald Trump has been briefed on the shooting and is monitoring the situation, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X.
Mass shootings are relatively common in the U.S., where guns are widely available, and military bases, which are among the highest-security places in the country, have not been spared.
The deadliest was at the Fort Hood Army base in 2009, when a major fatally shot unarmed soldiers in a medical building with a laser-sighted handgun, killing 13 people and injuring more than 30. Less than five years later, a soldier at the same Texas base fatally shot three service members and injured 16 others before killing himself.
In 2013, an employee of a government defense contractor killed 12 people at Washington's Navy Yard. In 2019, a Saudi Air Force lieutenant shot and killed three people and wounded eight others at a U.S. Navy base in Pensacola, Florida.
Fort Stewart is located in Hinesville, about 225 miles (362 km) southeast of Atlanta and 40 miles (64 km) southwest of Savannah. Nearly 9,000 people live at the base, according to the 2020 Census.
The base supports approximately 15,000 active-duty Army military personnel, as well as thousands of military retirees, family members, and others, according to its website.
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The Guardian
31 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Why did Ghislaine Maxwell do what she did?
Days after Ghislaine Maxwell met with the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, the convicted child sex trafficker and longtime Jeffrey Epstein girlfriend and procurer was moved from a women's federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a so-called 'prison camp' in Texas, a dramatically more comfortable minimum-security environment with dormitory-style housing and fewer guards, sometimes called 'Club Fed'. Maxwell's new camp primarily houses nonviolent offenders, and the inmates there are reportedly livid, and probably not a little bit frightened, to be imprisoned with one of the world's most notorious sex traffickers and alleged rapists. Maxwell, too, was not initially eligible for such a transfer, due to her sex offender status; connections at the Department of Justice had to waive a procedural requirement in order for the move to go through. The transfer appears to be a reward. As Donald Trump struggles to extract himself from the continuing fallout of the Epstein scandal, Maxwell finds herself, now, in the best position that she has been in since her one-time partner Epstein died in a jail cell in 2019. Suddenly, she has something that the president wants: the ability to say, truthfully or no, that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein's sex trafficking. The president, too, has something that Maxwell wants: the ability to issue a pardon. Maxwell has always formed the dark center of the Epstein saga, a woman who appears to have been exceptionally dedicated to arranging Epstein's life, facilitating his travel, luring new victims to his homes, and coordinating his sexual abuse over the course of decades. Alleged victims of Epstein recall being recruited by Maxwell in public places – including at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach – and through friends. They say that she inspected their bodies, brought them to Epstein's homes, talked incessantly about sex, and instructed them in Epstein's sexual preferences. They also say that Epstein and Maxwell sometimes made them available for sexual abuse by their friends. She is widely presumed to know more than she has yet been willing to tell about the extent to which Epstein's large network of powerful businessmen, politicians, and financiers knew about or participated in his rapes and trafficking of children. What is less clear, at least at first, is what motivated her to facilitate the abuse, and what kept her so loyal to Epstein over so many years. Maybe this kind of life – one spent attending to men's lesser desires – was always what Maxwell was destined for. The ninth and youngest child of a British media magnate, Maxwell was doted on by her father, the Hungarian-born Robert Maxwell, and raised in Oxford in a family as obscenely wealthy as it was darkly tragic: one of her older brothers was in a hideous car accident just days after Ghislaine's birth, and the boy lingered in a coma for years before dying before her 10th birthday. Her father financed her life as a high-class party girl – first in London, and then in New York – where she spent much of her time accompanying famous and wealthy men to the kind of rich people's social functions that have a pretext of raising money for charity. She does not seem to have had aims beyond that: despite her ample resources and encouragement, Ghislaine never showed much sign of intellectual ambition, or political interest, or business acumen, or general curiosity. (A short-lived 'ocean protection' charity that she founded accomplished little, and shut down after her arrest on sex trafficking charges.) It was not merely that Ghislaine was a product of an elite unburdened by principle, who often reduce their daughters to mere ornaments. It is that an ornament, it seems, is all that Ghislaine Maxwell ever aspired to be. It was not her charity, or her father's publishing, that were Maxwell's great passions. Her great passion appears to have been for the romantic attention of men – and specifically, her life's greatest animating goal seems to have been to achieve, and keep, the attention of Jeffrey Epstein. From those accounts we have of their relationship – and admittedly, these are not always reliable, given how intense, widespread, and prurient the attention on their activities has been – it appears that Maxwell's devotion to Epstein was intense. At her trial in 2021, prosecutors entered into evidence a photo of a cleavage-bearing Maxwell with Epstein, massaging his foot. This seems to have been her posture toward Epstein for the entire time she knew him: slavish, nearly worshipful. The pair met sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Maxwell's father, Robert, died in an apparent suicide in the ocean off the coast of the Canary Islands – aboard his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine – in late 1991. Soon thereafter, it was discovered that millions of dollars were missing from pension funds that he managed; two of Maxwell's brothers were charged for their alleged role in the fraud. (They were later acquitted.) It was during this moment of rupture and imperiled status that Maxwell was romantically involved with Epstein. Her boyfriend would have served as a meal ticket as well as a source of validation: Maxwell is alleged to have received payments from Epstein totaling more than $30m; she told one of her victims that he bought her her New York City townhouse, just a few blocks from his own. By 1994, she was recruiting and grooming teenagers for his sexual abuse. Maybe Maxwell justified what she did for Epstein as kink – a kind of sexual libertinism that shrugged off the regressive, prurient mores of the lower classes. The 90s were the peak of a kind of reductive heterosexual sex-positivity: lots of women were telling themselves, and being told, that sexual submission was a mark of sophistication – that the more liberated they were, the more of men's desires they would grant. But this is all speculation: trying to provide a rationalization for Ghislaine Maxwell's actions evades the true terror of her, which is her seemingly profound and horrifying vacancy. To such a person, obedience does not require a justification. Unequal desire in love – particularly when the suffering lover is a woman – tends to elicit a kind of pity. Feminists, too, often depict women's outsized desire for men as a form of gendered victimization. Generally, it is not seen as serious – women's limerence, romantic obsession, and striving for men's attention is broadly relegated to the realm of the adolescent and the vulgar, the embarrassing and the silly. But Maxwell's case suggests such desire can breed not just frustrated vanity but also a kind of monstrousness. Untempered by principle or self-respect, it can contain in it the seed of the grotesque. In her efforts to please Epstein, and to make herself useful to him, Maxwell became something hideous and unforgivable. In her deficient, warped soul, it seems she lacked something that every woman must have: a morality that she valued more than male approval. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Epstein sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell banned from training service puppies at ‘Club Fed': report
Ghislaine Maxwell, the Jeffrey Epstein accomplice and convicted sex trafficker, has been banned from training service puppies at the prison camp in Texas where she was transferred last week, according to a report. Maxwell, 63, was sentenced to 20 years behind bars in 2022 for helping Epstein, her former boyfriend, groom underage girls for sex but has recently returned to the spotlight amid the furore over Donald Trump 's administration's failure to release all federal files on the late pedophile, despite intense pressure from the president's supporters to do so. The disgraced British socialite was previously being held in Tallahassee, Florida, but, shortly after sitting for two days of interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, was quietly transferred to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in southeastern Texas on Friday. While her minimum-security new home is known for its comparatively peaceful atmosphere and has been dubbed 'Club Fed,' Maxwell will not be allowed to join the institution's other inmates in helping to train puppies during her stay. Paige Mazzoni, the chief executive officer of Canine Companions, the organization that runs programs at Bryan, told NBC News that Maxwell would not be invited to participate. 'We do not allow anyone whose crime involves abuse towards minors or animals – including any crime of a sexual nature,' Mazzoni said. 'That's a hard policy we have, so she will not be able to.' She added that the restriction was in place to protect the young dogs involved, explaining: 'Those are crimes against the vulnerable, and you're putting them with a puppy who is vulnerable.' ABC News reported on Wednesday that Maxwell told Blanche during their meetings last month that she never saw President Trump do anything that would provide cause for concern during the years in which he knew Epstein socially in New York and Florida. Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing over his past association with Epstein and is currently suing The Wall Street Journal for reporting that he once sent the sex offender a 'bawdy' doodle for his birthday. However, he has been under intense pressure for the last month after his Justice Department and FBI ruled that the deceased sex trafficker left behind no 'client list' and died by suicide in his New York jail cell in August 2019, a verdict that did not satisfy Trump's supporters, who continue to demand answers and suspect a 'coverup' to protect influential people. Trump has denied knowing about Maxwell's prison transfer in advance but has not definitively ruled out pardoning her in exchange for her cooperation. His administration is reportedly considering whether to release the transcript of Blanche's meetings with Maxwell, with the recording of their conversations currently in the process of being digitized. Another avenue the administration has taken in its efforts to quell the uproar over Epstein is to seek the release of grand jury testimony from Maxwell's criminal case, with Trump asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to do so but Maxwell's legal team opposing the move, warning it could adversely influence her chances of appealing her conviction before the Supreme Court. She had been due to give testimony before the House Oversight Committee about her activities with Epstein on August 11. Still, the panel's chair, Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, moved on Friday to postpone her appearance until after the country's top court has decided whether to act on her appeal. That will not happen until the justices return from their summer recess on September 29. Comer has, however, subpoenaed former president Bill Clinton, ex-first lady Hillary Clinton, and some former attorneys general and FBI directors to appear before his committee this month to give evidence on the disgraced billionaire and the more than 20 years of investigations into his crimes.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
British man charged with attempting to drown daughter-in-law during US holiday
A British man has been charged by US police with the attempted murder of his daughter-in-law after allegedly trying to drown her in a swimming pool while on holiday, local authorities said. Mark Raymond Gibbon, 62, of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, allegedly tried to drown the 33-year-old woman after they argued about his grandchildren in their rental home at the Solterra Resort in Davenport, Florida, on Sunday, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said on X. Officers had responded to reports of a disturbance in a back-yard swimming pool at around 5.20pm local time. Gibbon allegedly pushed and held the victim's head under water multiple times which prevented her from breathing, Mr Judd said. He allegedly only stopped after holidaymakers next door said they had called the sheriff's office, while the victim's nine-year-old daughter jumped into the pool to try to stop the incident, the sheriff said. Gibbon was arrested and taken to Polk County Jail before he was charged with attempted second-degree murder and battery, Mr Judd said. The sheriff said in a statement: 'It's great that Polk County draws visitors from all across the world, but we expect vacationers to behave while they visit with us, just as we expect our lifelong residents to do the same. 'Because Mr Gibbon couldn't control his anger, he may find himself spending a lot more time in Florida than he had anticipated.'
