New social media trend ‘a good way to end up dead'
Authorities and online safety experts are warning that the challenge is 'a good way to end up dead,' as homeowners may resort to force to protect their property.
Incidents have been reported in multiple US states, with examples including two Florida teenagers facing felony burglary charges and a Las Vegas homeowner suffering US$5,000 of damage.
Experts suggest that social media platforms incentivize dangerous content for 'clout,' which normalizes violent and extreme behaviour among teenagers.
Parents are advised to have open conversations with their children about online trends and to monitor their digital activity to prevent participation in these risky challenges.
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Safety fears at Florida nuclear plant as bombshell report says 'staff too scared to speak out about dangers'
Alarming new revelations from a federal inspection report have exposed a deep-rooted culture of fear at one of Florida 's nuclear power plants where employees say they are too terrified to report safety hazards, even anonymously. The disturbing findings, obtained by The Tampa Bay Times, center on the St. Lucie nuclear plant, operated by Florida Power & Light, the state's largest utility firm. According to federal investigators, staff at the plant described a workplace where retaliation for raising concerns was so pervasive that workers avoided official complaint channels altogether, fearing they'd be traced and punished. The report, quietly completed last fall, detailed a disturbing portrait of suppression, intimidation, and operational neglect at the aging facility, located on a barrier island just north of West Palm Beach. It means there has been silence among workers inside one of Florida's most critical energy facilities, even as mechanical failures and shutdowns mount. 'Senior management's reactions to individuals raising nuclear safety concerns could be perceived as retaliation,' the inspection report states. The report follows a record-breaking surge in anonymous complaints from the plant, which outpaced all other nuclear facilities in the US last year, raising fresh concerns about operational integrity of the complex on Florida's east coast. The timing couldn't be more controversial as Florida Power & Light is currently seeking approval for what watchdogs call the largest electric rate hike in US history - a nearly $10 billion increase over four years. After interviewing more than 75 workers, federal inspectors concluded that a pervasive fear of retaliation has silenced employees and put public safety in jeopardy. 'Senior management's reactions to individuals raising nuclear safety concerns could be perceived as retaliation,' the report states. At the heart of the crisis is a breakdown in trust between workers and leadership. According to the inspection, employees were so spooked by prior incidents of retaliation that they avoided even anonymous reporting systems, fearing their IP addresses might be traced. Instead, many turned to union representatives - or just stayed silent. Whistleblower complaints have exploded. In 2024, the St. Lucie plant logged 20 anonymous allegations, the most of any of the nation's 54 nuclear facilities, and five times the number it received just a year prior. 'Without [a healthy safety culture], it's a toxic environment that contributes to potential for a more serious event to occur,' warned Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Federal regulators confirmed they launched the inspection specifically because of the spike in these complaints. Despite the alarming findings, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued no formal violations, allowing FPL to claim the issue is under control. A spokesperson for the utility, Ellen Meyers, insisted that the nuclear fleet remains 'safe, reliable and emissions-free'. She added that the plants, including Turkey Point near Miami, hold the NRC's top 'green' rating - but experts have called that label misleading. 'There has been grade inflation,' Lyman said. 'Green findings are less meaningful when inspectors are discouraged from escalating serious concerns.' Lyman, a physicist and director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he found the issues uncovered at the plant to be troubling. 'The reason why these inspections were initiated in the first place is the recognition of how important good safety culture is,' he said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times. 'Without that, it's a toxic environment that contributes to potential for a more serious event to occur.' The problems at St. Lucie are neither isolated nor new. Records show years of safety violations, internal scandals, and worsening shutdowns at both of Florida's active nuclear plants, St. Lucie and Turkey Point. In 2019, federal regulators fined FPL $150,000 after employees at Turkey Point falsified safety records and failed to notify supervisors of serious errors during maintenance. In 2017, a contract worker at St. Lucie was terminated after raising radiation concerns - another incident that triggered a federal penalty. An internal review by Florida regulators later revealed that FPL's own executives admitted their nuclear operations were in crisis. One plant manager even concluded St. Lucie had 'the worst operational focus in the industry.' Since then, the company cut a quarter of its nuclear workforce, according to testimony from utility consultant Richard Polich, who warned that fewer staff, coupled with a fear-driven culture, heightens the risk of costly or dangerous mistakes. 'Mistakes can occur, tasks may not be performed in accordance with company procedures, and projects are rushed... leading to avoidable outages and imprudent fuel costs,' Polich told regulators. FPL dismissed Polich's warnings as 'conjecture', but state investigators are once again raising red flags. After a brief period of improvement, plant shutdowns at St. Lucie and Turkey Point spiked again last year. A new review from the state Public Service Commission suggested that the same dysfunction regulators identified in past audits has returned. 'Issues related to Florida Power & Light's philosophy with regard to receiving concerns … may have come up again,' wrote Commission attorney Suzanne Brownless in a 2024 filing. The situation has attracted scrutiny from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Tallahassee. 'A 'chilled work environment' where employees fear speaking up about safety concerns is not just a red flag - it's a siren,' said Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-Orlando). 'This points to a systemic failure in oversight and serious public safety concerns.' Sen. Don Gaetz (R-Niceville), a long-time FPL critic, added that the state utility commission 'should consider these issues' in any rate hike decision. According to testimony from Polich, each nuclear shutdown can cost ratepayers over $1 million in replacement power. In a 2023 settlement, FPL agreed to refund $5 million to customers after regulators determined multiple shutdowns from 2020–2022 were avoidable. But with a new $10 billion rate hike request pending, watchdogs say the company's nuclear operations deserve a full airing. 'This is not about isolated incidents,' Eskamani said. 'This is about public accountability.' So far, FPL has insisted that it is not seeking reimbursement for any nuclear outages as part of its current rate case, but internal documents are now subject to subpoena by the state's public advocate, meaning more damaging revelations could emerge in the months ahead.
The Independent
3 hours ago
- The Independent
Brutal arrest of Black student in Florida shows benefits of recording police from new vantage point
A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles. William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a unique view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can't clearly be seen in officer body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Since McNeil had the foresight to record the encounter from inside the vehicle, 'we got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context what driving while Black is in America,' said civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of several lawyers advising McNeil. 'All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement," Crump said. Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don't record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.' McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver's seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states. The incident reports don't describe the officer punching McNeil in the head. The officer, who pulled McNeil over and then struck him, described the force this way in his report: 'Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.' But after McNeil posted his video online last month and it went viral, the sheriff's office launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing. A sheriff's office spokesperson declined to comment about the case this week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest. McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and several stiches in his lip. His attorneys accused the sheriff's office of trying to cover up what really happened. 'On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is,' said another of McNeil's lawyers, Harry Daniels. 'We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.' The traffic stop, he said, was not only racially motivated but 'it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful." McNeil is hardly the first Black motorist to record video during a traffic stop that turned violent — Philando Castile 's girlfriend livestreamed the bloody aftermath of his death during a 2016 traffic stop near Minneapolis. But McNeil's arrest serves as a reminder of how cellphone video can show a different version of events than what is described in police reports, his lawyers said. Christopher Mercado, who retired as a lieutenant from the New York Police Department, agreed with McNeil's legal team's suggestion that drivers should record their police interactions and that a camera mounted inside a driver's car could offer a unique point of view. "Use technology to your advantage," said Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. 'There's nothing nefarious about it. It's actually a smart thing in my opinion.' Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it's a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so doesn't make the situation worse. 'I think that's a form of protection — it's safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etc.,' Brunson said. Although the sheriff's office declined to speak to The Associated Press this week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil's arrest since video of the encounter went viral. He pushed back against some of the allegations made by McNeil's lawyers, noting that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle. At a news conference last month, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil's car. The officer who punched him claimed in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife. Crump, though, said McNeil's video shows that he 'never reaches for anything,' and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window. A camera inside a motorist's vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police bodycams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado said. However, after the police murder of Floyd, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian's recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet (7.6 meters) of a police officer in certain situations. Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference last year, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a football game last year between the universities of Georgia and Florida. The sheriff showed the officers' bodycam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the bodycam footage didn't capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away. In McNeil's case, the bodycam video didn't clearly capture the punches thrown. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said. For the past 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement. When he first began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn't believe the men's stories of being brutalized by officers. ' People who live in a civil society don't expect to be treated this way by the police. For them, their police interactions are mostly pleasant, mostly cordial," Brunson said. 'So it's hard for people who don't have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens,' he said. "And that's where video does play a big part because people can't deny what they see.'
The Independent
6 hours ago
- The Independent
Jeffrey Epstein's former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, is transferred to a prison camp in Texas
Jeffrey Epstein 's former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas as her criminal case generates renewed public attention. The federal Bureau of Prisons said Friday that Maxwell had been transferred to Bryan, Texas, but did not explain the circumstances. Her attorney, David Oscar Markus, also confirmed the move but declined to discuss the reasons for it. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by the disgraced financier, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She had been held at a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, until her transfer to the prison camp in Texas, where other inmates include Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Jen Shah of 'The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.' Minimum-security federal prison camps house inmates the Bureau of Prisons considers to be the lowest security risk. Some don't even have fences. The prison camps were originally designed with low security to make operations easier and to allow inmates tasked with performing work at the prison, like landscaping and maintenance, to avoid repeatedly checking in and out of a main prison facility. Prosecutors have said Epstein's sex crimes could not have been done without Maxwell, but her lawyers have maintained that she was wrongly prosecuted and denied a fair trial, and have floated the idea of a pardon from President Donald Trump. They have also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up her case. Trump said Friday night that no one has asked him about a clemency for Maxwell. 'I'm allowed to do it but nobody's asked me to do it," he told Newsmax in an interview broadcast Friday night. "I know nothing about it. I don't know anything about the case, but I know I have the right to do it. I have the right to give pardons, I've given pardons to people before, but nobody's even asked me to do it.' Maxwell's case has been the subject of heightened public focus since an outcry over the Justice Department's statement last month saying that it would not be releasing any additional documents from the Epstein sex trafficking investigation. The decision infuriated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and elements of Trump's base who had hoped to see proof of a government cover-up. Since then, administration officials have tried to cast themselves as promoting transparency in the case, including by requesting from courts the unsealing of grand jury transcripts. Maxwell, meanwhile, was interviewed at a Florida courthouse over two days last week by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and the House Oversight Committee had also said that it wanted to speak with Maxwell. Her lawyers said this week that they would be open to an interview but only if the panel were to ensure immunity from prosecution. In the Newsmax interview, Trump said he did not know when Blanche would disclose to the public what he and Maxwell discussed during the interviews. 'I think he just wants to make sure that innocent people aren't hurt, but you'd have to speak to him about it,' Trump said. In a letter Friday to Maxwell's lawyers, Rep. James Comer, the committee chair, wrote that the committee was willing to delay the deposition until after the resolution of Maxwell's appeal to the Supreme Court. That appeal is expected to be resolved in late September. Comer wrote that while Maxwell's testimony was 'vital' to the Republican-led investigation into Epstein, the committee would not provide immunity or any questions in advance of her testimony, as was requested by her team. ___ Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo, Matt Brown and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
