Latest news with #prosecutors
The Independent
7 hours ago
- The Independent
US teen pilot stranded in Antarctica after landing without permission
American teen influencer Ethan Guo's ambitious cancer research fundraising flight has taken a disastrous turn, leaving him stranded in a remote location in Antarctica since June. Authorities say Guo landed his small plane illegally in Chilean territory after providing false flight plan information, prompting an official investigation. Last year, the then-19-year-old made headlines attempting to become the youngest person to fly solo to all seven continents, while collecting donations for childhood cancer research. As part of his trip, he planned to go to the Antarctic, but according to the authorities, he lied to officials by providing authorities with 'false flight plan data.' Prosecutors said he had been authorized to only fly over Punta Arenas, but that he kept going south, heading for Antarctica in his Cessna 182Q — a single-engine light aircraft known for its versatility. Guo was charged on June 29 with handing false information to ground control and landing without authorization, but on Monday, a judge dropped the charges as part of an agreement with his lawyers and Chile's prosecutors. It requires the teen to give a $30,000 donation to a children's cancer foundation within 30 days to avoid a trial. He must also leave the country as soon as conditions allow and is prohibited from reentering Chilean territory for three years. On Monday, after the judge's ruling, Guo said in a text message that he was 'relieved by the outcome.' For the past six weeks, since being charged, he has stayed at a military base. He was not forced to stay there, only to remain in Chilean territory, but because of the severe winter in that part of the southern hemisphere, there haven't been any available flights he could take. And he has been unable to fly his Cessna. Chilean prosecutor Cristián Crisoto on Monday told reporters that Guo's plane 'does not have the capabilities to make a flight,' without providing details. But the American teen influencer said he is talking with this lawyer to see if there's a way he can fly it. 'I remain in Antarctica awaiting approval for my departure flight,' Guo told AP. 'I sincerely hope they give it to me soon so that I and my plane can continue with my original mission.' The prosecutor's office said Guo must also pay all costs for his 'aircraft security and personal maintenance' during his stay at the military facility. He also needs to cover all expenses for his return.
Telegraph
20 hours ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Woman threatened with jail over ‘Allah is lesbian' T-shirt
An activist has been arrested in Morocco after posting a photo of herself wearing a T-shirt with the slogan 'Allah is a lesbian'. Ibtissame Lachgar, an LGBT rights campaigner, was detained over accusations of blasphemy and could now face several years in prison. Prosecutors in the north African country confirmed the 50-year-old had been taken into custody while they investigated the photograph, 'which depicts her wearing a shirt with phrases offensive to the divine, along with a caption insulting Islam'. The activist posted the photograph in late July with a caption saying: 'You tire us with your sanctimoniousness, your accusations. Yes, Islam, like any religious ideology, is FASCIST. PHALLOCRATIC AND MISOGYNISTIC.' She later said that her post had earned her 'thousands of sexist insults, rape and death threats, calls for murder, stoning etc'. The T-shirt caused outrage when the photograph was first posted and Ms Lachgar quoted some of her critics. 'Her freedom is an insult to all Moroccans,' said one. 'She alone is an insult to all the martyrs, our ancestors who proudly fought in the path of Allah to make this country what it is today.' Under the Moroccan penal code, anyone convicted of 'causing harm' to Islam can be imprisoned for up to two years, or given a fine of up to £16,500. Ms Lachgar is co-founder of the Alternative Movement for Individual Freedoms and has repeatedly been arrested during protests. In Morocco, she is known for organising events such as a 2013 'kiss-in', in support of three teenagers arrested for posting pictures on Facebook of two of them kissing. A boy and girl, aged 15 and 14, alongside their 15-year-old male friend, had been charged with 'violating public decency' and held in a juvenile centre after posting the photo outside their school in the northern town of Nador. At the demonstration against creeping conservatism in Moroccan society, activists kissed outside the parliament building in the capital city.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Bryan Kohberger ‘prepared' for quadruple Idaho murders, expert was set to testify: ‘He didn't just Google these cases'
At 2:54 a.m. on November 13, 2022, Bryan Kohberger's phone went dark. The battery hadn't died, and it wasn't randomly powered off — it was silenced with precision. WiFi and cellular data were disabled. No location tracking on. And no background activity. A deliberate blackout during the exact window prosecutors say four University of Idaho students were brutally murdered at their off-campus home. Two hours later, at 4:48 a.m., the phone turned back on. It would be months before investigators fully understood what that gap in activity meant. But to the digital forensic experts tasked by prosecutors with retracing Kohberger's steps for evidence to be used against him in his trial, the silence spoke volumes. 'What we learned is, he prepared,' Heather Barnhart, Senior Director of Forensic Research at Cellebrite, told The Independent. Barnhart and her colleague Jared Barnhart, Head of CX Strategy and Advocacy at Cellebrite, also a digital forensics expert on the case, were slated to testify at Kohberger's trial before he unexpectedly accepted a plea deal, admitting to the November 2022 quadruple murders and receiving life without parole in July. Kohberger was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, who were found stabbed to death on November 13, 2022, in the small town of Moscow, Idaho. Digital silence – a red flag? Now, as more details began to trickle out through previously sealed police reports and court documents, the team is revealing to The Independent what they learned about the killer through his digital footprint. The Cellebrite team had uncovered files scrubbed from devices, searches routed through VPNs, and deep downloads about serial killers — all of which, they say, painted a chilling picture of obsession and planning. While DNA from the knife sheath ultimately tied Kohberger to the crime scene, it was the voids in his otherwise trackable life that revealed how the killings were premeditated, the experts say. Forensic analysis revealed that Kohberger's phone had only four periods of total inactivity, dating back to June 2022. One of those silent moments occurred on the night of the murders. 'He didn't just lose signal or run out of battery,' Jared explained. 'This was an actual button press, power off, on purpose, and then a power back two hours later. And in the middle of that, four people were killed.' Kohberger was no stranger to killings – in theory As a criminology PhD student at Washington State University, Kohberger had long been immersed in the study of crime. But according to the digital forensics team, his interest crossed a line, from academic to obsessive. 'He didn't just Google these cases,' Heather said. 'He downloaded full PDFs of case files. Not once, but repeatedly. He was downloading detailed reports on serial killers,' including Danny Rolling, who also murdered college students using a similar knife. 'This wasn't casual browsing. This was meticulous research,' she added. To determine exactly what happened during that two-hour window on the night of the murders, the Cellebrite team re-created the digital environment and studied call logs. 'Turning off your phone isn't enough,' Heather said. 'You have to disable Wi-Fi, disable cellular, then power down. And that's what he did.' They discovered that in the days right before and right after the murders, Kohberger disabled WiFi access on his devices and routed his traffic through NordVPN, a tool designed to anonymize online activity. While the act is not criminal, it is abnormal, Jared noted. 'He was diligent in prep and cleanup and he made our job really hard,' Jared said. 'This is someone who tried really hard to not be detected.' His phone had joined the WiFi at the restaurant two of the victims worked at But Kohberger failed to do a full cleanup of his phone. Details of what the team found – including scrubbed files, private browsing, VPN activity, and obsessive downloads about other serial killers – were found hidden deep in his phone, not in a visible gallery or standard folder, but in buried file directories that required forensic tools to uncover. He had also downloaded reports on the Idaho murders and extensive searches of his victims. The team pointed out that despite law enforcement's hard work, 'there was a period of time from the time that the crime happened until identifying an arrest, the phone seizure and then the phone extraction,' so some of the best information was most likely wiped. 'But with time and attention, we were able to paint a picture of what he did on this night,' Jared added. 'Even though some of the best stuff wasn't there. He certainly didn't cover all his tracks. ' Kohberger's digital footprint also included a passive log of WiFi networks his phone sought out. On the night of the murders, before he phone was turned off, his phone was searching for WiFi signal — 'and he wasn't at home,' Jared said. And while motive and any connection between Kohberger and the victims remains completely unknown, to the frustration of the victims' families, there is some digital evidence that showed Kohberger may have encountered at least one of the victims previously at their workplace. Madison Mogen and Xana Kernodle worked at local restaurant The Mad Greek as servers before Kohberger murdered them. After the killings, a fellow employee said they remembered Kohberger visiting it twice and eating vegan pizza. So one WiFi log caught Heather's attention when she was searching his digital footprint: the network name for The Mad Greek. Though nothing concrete tied him to the location at the time of the murders, the WiFi log suggested he had been there before, possibly more than once. 'There it was,' Heather confirmed. 'His device had passively logged that network.' No 'smoking gun' Unlike the DNA on the knife sheath found at the scene, the digital evidence didn't deliver one big 'aha' moment, the team said. Instead, it emerged slowly, through fractured call logs, gaps in data, and strange behavioral shifts. 'There wasn't a single smoking gun,' Jared said. 'But we found that the digital evidence told the story of preparation.' 'DNA can tell you who did it,' he added. 'But the digital evidence showed us intent. And that's what we were going to testify to.' Heather emphasized that proving intent required building a baseline of 'normal' digital behavior – and then watching how it drastically changed leading up to the crime. 'If you can prove normal behavior, and then go: 'Whoa—this is completely abnormal,' and that moment aligns with the crime… well, that's not an accident.' And that's what the periods of silence showed. His relationship with 'Mother' While much of Kohberger's activity pointed to calculated isolation, one relationship remained steady — his connection to his parents. 'Starting at 6:13 a.m. the morning after the murders, he's calling and texting his mom and dad nonstop,' Heather said. 'It was incessant. But it was also one of the only things he did that matched his normal behavior.' Even in the weeks leading up to the killings, Kohberger's digital communications showed few signs of friends or peer connections. Jared recalled seeing only one other contact — a classmate, briefly engaged in a group chat. All other correspondence was to who Kohberger called mother, father, and sister. 'The moment we started to look at the messaging, it made me think of Bates Motel,' Jared said, referencing the horror movie Psycho. 'I mean, it was like 'mother,' and the label 'mother'… the constant contact with his mom. It was wild.' On December 29, a day before his arrest, Kohberger began calling and texting his parents obsessively, just as he had on the morning of the murders. If his mom didn't answer, he'd call his dad, they said. That same day, Kohberger searched terms like 'paranoid' 'psychopath' and 'wiretapping.' 'It was obviously weighing on him,' Heather noted. The contact with his mother continued after his arrest with inmates at Ada County Jail reporting that he while he was locked up waiting to hear his fate, he spent hours on the phone with his mother. Described by other prisoners as a 'f****** weirdo,' inmates said he 'would wash his hands dozens of times each day and would spend 45 minutes to an hour in the shower,' court documents stated. Kohberger's mother and sister were present during his sentencing . At one point during the victim impact statements his mother broke down in tears. The only time Kohberger spoke at the hearing was to 'respectfully decline' the opportunity to address the court or reveal why he committed the gruesome crimes. 'We didn't find the why – but we found the how' Despite their exhaustive efforts, the forensic team never found a true 'why.' 'We didn't find the why,' Heather admitted. 'We wanted to, for the families. And that was frustrating. But we found the how.' And the how, they say, suggests it wasn't spontaneous. 'This wasn't someone who just snapped,' Heather added. 'This was someone who planned. He didn't accidentally stumble into this house and commit this heinous crime. It was intentional.'
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Bloomberg
AI Doesn't Just Lie — It Can Make You Believe It
One of the more subtle and insidious threats posed by artificial intelligence and related technology is its ability to tamper with memories. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has spent the last 50 years demonstrating how easily humans can be manipulated into remembering things that never happened — especially in the hands of prosecutors and police questioning witnesses.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Jeanine Pirro Blasts Staff Shortages After Attorneys Axed in Jan. 6 Purge
Jeanine Pirro complained that the U.S. Attorney's Office for Washington D.C. is facing a major staffing shortage—but she left out that the administration purged the department when Donald Trump returned to office. The top D.C. prosecutor returned to Fox News, where up until recently she was a host, and she was asked about staffing shortages. 'We're down like two-thirds staff. What's going on?' asked host Laura Ingraham. 'Yeah, I'm down 90 prosecutors, 60 investigators and paralegals,' Pirro said. Asked why, Pirro claimed" 'Because nobody cared.' 'I'm telling you right now. Nobody cared enough to make sure that office was running,' she claimed. 'I'm going to have that office running.' The former TV personality didn't stop there. She used her TV appearance to beg people to join the team. 'If you want a job in the nation's, in the premier office, the largest U.S. attorney's office, contact me,' Pirro said directly to the camera. But Pirro could find it challenging to find candidates with the right experience after the Trump administration fired a series of career prosecutors. Over the past six months, there has been a slow drip of reports about purges at the U.S. attorney's office. At the end of January, more than a dozen federal prosecutors at the U.S. attorney's office in Washington were fired, according to the New York Times. It included those hired to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, who had been moved into different permanent roles after the president retook office. By mid-February, the chief of the criminal division at the office abruptly quit. In late February, the Washington Post reported that seven leaders at the U.S. attorney's office in DC were demoted to misdemeanor or entry-level intake positions as the Trump administration continued to purge career prosecutors in a targeted retribution against those who handled politically sensitive cases, including investigating the president's role in the January 6 insurrection. In June, the Justice Department ousted another three prosecutors involved in the January 6 riot investigation. The purge continued as recently as last month when the department fired additional lawyers and support staff who worked on special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of Trump, although the total number in the latest round was not clear, according to the AP.
