A 57-year-old man drove his car into a crowd of parade-goers during a Lao New Year Festival celebration in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, on Saturday afternoon, striking multiple pedestrians and sending victims to area hospitals with injuries that officials described as critical.
Todd Landry was arrested and booked into the Iberia Parish jail after Louisiana State Police troopers determined he was impaired. His breath sample registered a blood alcohol concentration of 0.137g%, well above Louisiana's legal limit. He now faces charges of Driving While Impaired (first offense), First-Degree Negligent Injuring on 18 counts, Careless Operation, and Open Container.
Eighteen counts. That means at least 18 people were struck by a man who allegedly got behind the wheel drunk, in broad daylight, and aimed his vehicle into a festive crowd.
The parade was underway near Savannaket Street and Melancon Road in Broussard when Landry's vehicle approached. A young man who witnessed the crash described the moments before impact, according to Breitbart:
"I just simply thought that he was coming to join the parade because the car was kind of nice. He inched closer and closer, revs his engine again, and just plows through everybody. In that moment, my brain just stopped. I just thought, 'Is this actually happening?'"
That account is harrowing. A community gathered to celebrate a cultural tradition, families lining a parade route on a Saturday afternoon, and a man with a BAC nearly twice the legal limit drove straight into them.
The Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office is leading the investigation into the crash and has moved quickly to address public concern about the motive. In a social media post, the office stated that "based on the preliminary investigation, this does not appear to be an intentional act." The investigation remains active, and officials said further information would be released as it becomes available.
Louisiana State Police confirmed the details in a news release, noting that Landry "showed signs of impairment" during the investigation and that troopers ultimately processed the arrest. LSP also asked anyone with photos or videos of the crash to share them with officials.
The distinction between intentional and negligent matters legally, but it offers cold comfort to the families now sitting in hospital waiting rooms. A man too drunk to operate a vehicle killed no one's intention but destroyed an afternoon, and possibly lives, all the same.
The Louisiana Lao New Year Festival released a statement expressing grief over the incident:
"We are profoundly saddened by the news of the incident near the festival grounds."
The organization canceled its music programs Saturday evening. It indicated that if security resources were restored, it would reopen Sunday for religious services only, with vendors remaining open. The festival's cautious, measured response reflects a community trying to hold something together after a senseless act tore through it.
These are the kinds of events that bind communities. Families attend. Children watch parades. Elders gather. The Lao New Year celebration is a cultural and religious tradition, and 18 people paid the price for one man's decision to drink and drive.
There is no policy debate here. No partisan angle to spin. Drunk driving is one of the clearest moral failures a person can commit: a conscious choice to endanger everyone around you. Todd Landry allegedly made that choice on a Saturday afternoon in a parish full of families.
The charges he faces, 18 counts of First-Degree Negligent Injuring among them, suggest the scope of damage was enormous. Some of those struck had critical injuries. The full toll remains unknown as the investigation continues.
Conservatives have long argued that the foundation of a functioning society is personal responsibility. Not government programs. Not awareness campaigns. The individual decision to do the right thing, or the catastrophic consequences when someone refuses. This is what refusal looks like: 18 people on the ground, a festival silenced, and a community asking how a celebration turned into a crime scene.
Landry is charged with DWI as a first offense. Whether that means he has never driven impaired before or simply never been caught before is a question worth asking. The justice system will determine what comes next. But the people of Iberia Parish already know what happened: a man chose a bottle over basic human decency, and 18 of their neighbors are paying for it.
A federal judge in Massachusetts granted a preliminary injunction Friday blocking the Department of Education from requiring public colleges and universities in 17 states to turn over seven years of detailed race-based admissions data. U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor ruled the administration's data collection effort violated the Administrative Procedure Act, not because the government lacked the authority to collect it, but because of how fast it tried to move.
The distinction matters. The judge explicitly found that the Department of Education likely does have the authority to "collect, analyze, and make use of the data." The legal defeat here isn't about the goal. It's about the timeline.
According to The Hill, an executive order issued in August directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "expand the scope of required reporting to provide adequate transparency into admissions" within 120 days. The objective was straightforward: determine whether colleges and universities were still using race as a factor in admissions decisions after the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling striking down affirmative action.
That ruling was supposed to end racial preferences in college admissions. The question the administration was trying to answer is whether schools actually complied or simply found quieter ways to keep doing what they were doing. Anyone who has watched higher education's response to the 2023 decision knows the question is not paranoid. University administrators spent the months after the ruling openly discussing how to preserve "diversity" outcomes through alternative means. The data collection was designed to find out if those discussions became policy.
Seventeen Democratic-led states sued to stop it.
Judge Saylor focused on the 120-day window the executive order imposed on the National Center for Education Statistics. The judge noted that NCES data collection efforts typically involve "a lengthy gestation period" and a formal review process. The compressed timeline, he found, bypassed those requirements.
"That deadline was not driven by any exigency, by the complexity of the subject matter, or the burden imposed on the institutions; it was set in response to a presidential decree. Indeed, NCES expressly acknowledged that the only reason it did not use the TRP process was because of the President's deadline."
Saylor described the overall approach as a "rushed and chaotic manner" of implementing a policy that had a legitimate legal foundation. He characterized the agency's conduct as "arbitrary and capricious," the standard legal language for APA violations.
The judge also pointed to what he saw as a compounding factor: a separate May executive order directing McMahon to take "all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States." Saylor found that the simultaneous push to dismantle the department while expanding its data collection created additional procedural problems.
Strip away the procedural fight, and you're left with a simple question: Are colleges obeying the law?
The Supreme Court told them to stop discriminating by race in admissions. The administration tried to verify compliance. Democratic attorneys general sued to prevent the verification. Think about what that sequence communicates.
New York Attorney General Letitia James applauded the ruling and called the administration's efforts a "crusade" that she deemed "dangerous." She added:
"Students should not have to live in fear that their personal data will be handed over to the federal government, just as schools should not have to scramble to produce years of sensitive information to satisfy an arbitrary and unlawful demand."
The framing is revealing. James characterizes the collection of admissions data as something students should "live in fear" of. But if schools aren't considering race, the data would simply confirm that. The only scenario in which transparency is threatening is one where the data might show noncompliance.
Sean Robins, director of advocacy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, offered a more practical objection during a March 26 hearing:
"The challenge is not a lack of willingness — it's that institutions are being asked to reconstruct datasets that, in many cases, were never collected in this format to begin with or no longer exist."
This is a more honest argument, and it points to a real logistical challenge. But it also raises its own uncomfortable question: if institutions never collected the data in a format that would reveal whether race influenced decisions, how would anyone ever know if they violated the Supreme Court's ruling?
The injunction blocks the data collection for now, but it does not close the door permanently. The judge affirmed the underlying authority. The administration could pursue the same goal through the proper APA notice-and-comment process. That takes longer, but it removes the procedural vulnerability that sank this attempt.
The broader dynamic remains unchanged. The Supreme Court ruled that racial preferences in admissions are unconstitutional. Enforcement requires data. The states that sued to block the data collection are, functionally, suing to make enforcement impossible. They are not arguing that schools are complying with the law. They are arguing that nobody should be allowed to check.
Procedural compliance matters. The administration should follow the proper channels. But the 17 states celebrating this ruling should be asked a simple question: if your universities have nothing to hide, why are you fighting so hard to keep the lights off?
A 43-year-old Southern California woman who slashed her boyfriend's throat and buried his body in what police called a "makeshift tomb" in her backyard has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. The corpse stayed there for eight years before anyone found it.
Trista Spicer was sentenced Friday in San Bernardino Superior Court after a jury late last year found her guilty of second-degree murder in the October 2014 killing of her boyfriend, Eric Mercado, 42. The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department is holding Spicer in the county jail until her expected transfer to a California state prison.
According to news outlets, the killing began after Mercado complained about the dinner Spicer served him. What followed was not a momentary act of panic.
Spicer testified during the trial that she struck Mercado in the head several times with a cast-iron skillet. She then stabbed him in the neck with a kitchen knife he had dropped after she struck him with the skillet. The sequence matters. This was not a single blow in a struggle. It was repeated blunt force trauma followed by a fatal stabbing.
What came next reveals something colder than the killing itself. Spicer enlisted a friend to help her wrap the corpse in a deflated air mattress. She then concealed the body in her backyard, where it remained undiscovered while Mercado's family searched for answers. His family had reported him missing since 2014, as Breitbart reports.
For eight years, a family grieved a disappearance that was never a disappearance at all.
The case broke open in 2022, and the circumstances of its unraveling are as jarring as the crime itself. According to the San Bernardino Sun, Spicer told her boyfriend at the time that she needed to remove Mercado's corpse because her family wanted to sell the house. Not guilt. Not confession. Real estate logistics.
Police acted on a search warrant of the property and discovered what they described as a makeshift tomb on the grounds. After eight years buried in a backyard, Mercado's remains finally told the story his family had been desperate to hear.
Mercado's sister, Mahira Torres, addressed the court during Friday's proceedings and called Spicer "evil." Her victim impact statement carried the weight of nearly a decade of not knowing.
"You took my brother's life, and you shattered ours."
There is no rebuttal to that. There is no mitigating context that erases what Torres and her family endured: years of searching, years of wondering, while the woman responsible for their brother's death walked free and lived in the same house where she had buried him.
Spicer testified that Mercado had a history of physically and verbally abusing her, and that he often made her sit naked for long periods as part of his punishing and controlling behavior. This was her defense. The jury weighed it.
They returned a verdict of second-degree murder.
Domestic abuse is real, and its toll on victims is serious. But a jury heard the full testimony, evaluated the evidence, and concluded that what happened in October 2014 was murder. The post-killing conduct tells its own story. A person acting in genuine self-defense does not typically enlist help to wrap a body in a deflated air mattress, bury it in the backyard, and maintain silence for eight years while the victim's family files missing persons reports.
Concealment is not the behavior of someone who believes they had no other choice. It is the behavior of someone who believes they could avoid consequences.
Fifteen years for taking a life and hiding it for nearly a decade. Torres called Spicer evil. The justice system called it second-degree murder. Whether 15 years adequately accounts for the killing itself, plus the calculated concealment, plus the years of anguish inflicted on a family left searching, is a question the sentence invites but does not answer.
Eric Mercado's family spent eight years looking for a man who was buried a few feet from where his killer slept. They deserve better than closure. They deserved the truth in 2014. They got it in 2022 because someone wanted to sell a house.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, days into his new role atop the Justice Department, poured cold water on one of the most persistent theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein: that the late financier operated as an intelligence asset. In a Fox News interview on Friday, Blanche was direct.
"All I know is that we don't have any evidence in the Epstein files that the FBI collected over 15 years that suggests that."
Fifteen years of federal file collection. No evidence of espionage. That is the current position of the United States Department of Justice.
Blanche added that he personally has "no idea" whether Epstein was a spy, and noted that neither he nor former Attorney General Pam Bondi was part of the original prosecution team. The candor is notable. He did not claim omniscience. He stated what the files show and what they don't.
Speculation that Epstein worked for the CIA or another intelligence agency has circulated for years, fueled by the sheer implausibility of his financial empire and the breadth of his elite connections. Some voices on the right, including Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, have suggested the Israeli government used Epstein as an intelligence asset, as Washington Examiner reports, as Washington Examiner reports.
The theory has always carried a certain gravitational pull. Epstein's life genuinely did not add up. A 2002 profile in New York Magazine quoted a prominent investor who seemed to sense it even then:
"It's like looking at the Wizard of Oz – there may be less there than meets the eye."
Media accounts from the early 2000s described Epstein as a highly regarded "international moneyman of mystery." He mingled with former President Bill Clinton and former President Barack Obama's White House counsel. He was friendly with Donald Trump before that relationship ended in the early 2000s. The man held close connections to the world's elite, and no one could quite explain how he got there or what he actually did.
That gap between biography and plausibility is what feeds spy theories. But a theory without evidence, even an interesting one, remains a theory.
Blanche ascended to the top of the Justice Department this week after President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday. Her exit came amid intense criticism from Democrats and a few Republicans, including Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, surrounding the government's investigation into Epstein's life and the release of millions of federal files.
The Epstein file saga has been a source of bipartisan frustration, though the frustrations point in very different directions. For many on the right, the core question has never been whether Epstein was a spy. It's been simpler and more damning: Who did he enable, who protected him, and why did the system look away for so long?
Those questions remain open regardless of the espionage angle.
Epstein died in a prison cell in 2019. His death was ruled a suicide by authorities. The circumstances surrounding that ruling have never satisfied large portions of the public, and the details that have emerged since do little to inspire confidence.
Consider the conduct of the people responsible for keeping Epstein alive. One of his two prison guards, Tova Noel, Googled "latest on Epstein in jail" twice, just minutes before he was discovered dead in his cell. She was later fired after admitting to falsifying records to say she had checked on Epstein throughout the night before his death, according to prosecutors.
A guard who falsified check-in records. A Google search minutes before the discovery. A death that conveniently silenced the most dangerous witness in a generation. You don't need a spy theory to find this deeply troubling. The institutional failures are damning on their own terms.
The House Oversight Committee requested last month that one of Epstein's two prison guards deliver testimony to lawmakers surrounding his death. Whether that testimony materializes, and what it reveals, could matter far more than the espionage question.
Blanche's statement narrows one line of inquiry but opens the broader conversation about what the files actually do contain. Millions of federal documents spanning fifteen years of FBI work represent an enormous body of material. If the spy angle is a dead end, the public's attention should shift to the substance that is there, not the theory that isn't.
The Epstein case has always been less about one man and more about the system that surrounded him. The financier who moved among presidents and power brokers, whose wealth no one could trace, whose crimes were known, and whose punishment was deferred. The intelligence question is seductive because it offers a tidy explanation for the inexplicable. But the real scandal may be worse than espionage. It may simply be that powerful people protected a predator because he was useful to them, and no spy agency was required to make that happen.
Sometimes the system doesn't need a conspiracy. It just needs indifference at the right levels.
A seven-month-old girl is dead because a man on the back of a moped opened fire on a Brooklyn street in broad daylight. Kaori Patterson-Moore was fatally struck by a stray bullet on Wednesday at Humboldt Street and Moore Street in Bushwick. A second bullet grazed her two-year-old brother's back.
By Saturday afternoon, about 50 mourners had gathered for a community vigil. And Kaori's father, Jamari Patterson, released a letter to the media that no parent should ever have to write.
"I was literally taking her outside to get her ears pierced, new clothes and shoes for her and her brother. I just taught my baby how to take a step. She took her first step to me, her only step. I can no longer sing to my baby, or nothing."
Police believe Patterson was the intended target. Detectives say the gunman was aiming for him, and cops say he has ties to the Money Over Everything gang in Bushwick Houses. The bullet found his infant daughter instead, as New York Post reports.
Patterson's letter painted the picture of a father trying to hold a life together. He described the moment he first saw his daughter, born premature, placed in an incubator.
"Upon graduating, I ended up having my beautiful baby girl, seeing her for the first time I knew she was special."
He wrote about trying to distance himself from the street. "The life I live, even getting different jobs to stay away from negativity, I begin to change things up. Which is facts," he wrote. The letter ended where grief always does, in the place where words stop working: "I miss her so much. I want my baby back."
Great-grandmother Arlene Poitier spoke at the vigil and described a family that can no longer function in its own home.
"We have anger. My family is broken. I am broken. I don't have her to sleep with me at night."
She described a nightly routine: the parents would bring Kaori to her room to sleep, and once they closed the door, the baby would open her eyes and look at her grandmother. "She's not there," Poitier said. "I still have her diapers, her pajamas, and stuff on my pillow. She was Nana's baby. She's Nana's baby."
Then she said something that should echo far beyond a Brooklyn sidewalk vigil.
"I have to hear my grandson say, 'What did she do that someone would do this?'"
"What am I supposed to say?" she asked. "What am I supposed to say when children ask you stuff like this?"
Alleged triggerman Amuri Greene, 21, was taken to a hospital for a possible broken leg suffered when the moped crashed after the shooting. He has been charged with murder, attempted murder, assault, and other counts. His alleged accomplice, 18-year-old Matthew Rodriguez, who police say drove the moped, was arrested in Pennsylvania on Friday. Charges against Rodriguez were pending.
Two suspects. A moped. A handgun. And a dead baby on a Brooklyn sidewalk. This is the reality of violent crime in New York City, stripped of every euphemism city leaders love to hide behind.
Kaori's grandmother, Christine Poitier, did not mince words at the vigil. She described her granddaughter as "an angel, always smiling, always a beautiful individual." Then she turned her grief outward.
"Somewhere through the generation we failed. A lot of these young kids, they don't know, they don't know. They don't have the morals, they don't have the principles. Some of them don't have their grandmother outside telling them, 'You can't do this.'"
That is not a policy paper. It's a grandmother standing over a casket-sized hole in her family and saying what every honest person in these communities already knows. The collapse is not primarily about funding or programs or "root causes" as politicians define them. It is about the disintegration of family structure, moral formation, and adult accountability in communities where young men grow up without anyone telling them no.
New York Attorney General Letitia James attended the vigil and thanked the NYPD detectives who tracked down the suspects.
"I want to thank them in particular for hunting down these two individuals who are responsible for the murder of a 7-month-old child."
James also sent a message to the Brooklyn District Attorney asking that "these two individuals be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. No excuses." The sentiment is welcome. But the question for New York's political class has never been what they say at vigils. It is what they do in the months between them. The policies that treat enforcement as an afterthought, that empty jails in the name of equity, that view policing as the problem rather than the thin line between order and the chaos that killed Kaori Patterson-Moore.
There will be flowers on the sidewalk for a week. Local news will move on. Politicians will move on. And somewhere in Bushwick Houses, another young man with no moral guardrails and easy access to violence will calculate whether the consequences are real.
Christine Poitier already gave the diagnosis. The generation failed. Not because of insufficient government spending, but because the basic institutions that civilize young men, families, churches, and communities willing to enforce standards, have been hollowed out while New York's leaders chased every ideological fashion that made the problem worse.
A 21-year-old fired a gun from the back of a moped into a crowd that included an infant. An 18-year-old drove the getaway vehicle. A seven-month-old girl who had just learned to take her first step will never take another.
Kaori Patterson-Moore's first step was to her father. It was her only one.
Syed Hammad Hussain, a 40-year-old Pakistani finance and IT professional, was beaten, strangled, and left dead inside his first-floor apartment at The Zenith, an upscale condominium in Washington, D.C.'s Logan Circle neighborhood. Police say he made the fatal mistake of holding the door open for his killers, believing they were fellow residents.
Two men have been charged with first-degree murder. The building's surveillance cameras captured nearly everything. And one of the suspects was already in police custody on unrelated charges when authorities came to arrest him.
That last detail tells you most of what you need to know.
The timeline, reconstructed from surveillance footage and court documents, is straightforward and brutal. In the early hours of February 11, Hussain left his building to get food. Rico Rashaad Barnes, 36, and another man allegedly followed him for several blocks on his way back. Surveillance footage shows Hussain entering The Zenith around 1:35 a.m.
Moments later, one of the suspects banged on the building's glass door. Hussain let him inside. A second suspect and a third man then entered as well. An argument broke out in the hallway and spilled outside, where Hussain was punched and collapsed. The third man left at that point.
The two remaining suspects allegedly carried Hussain back into the building and into his apartment. By about 2:40 a.m., surveillance video captured both men leaving. Less than an hour later, emergency crews responding to reports of smoke found Hussain's body face down in his living room, his hands and feet loosely tied with neckties. Court records describe multiple skull fractures and signs that he had been strangled and burned. Two 25-pound metal dumbbells were found near his body. The apartment had been ransacked, with items missing, as The Independent reports.
Interim Metropolitan Police Department Chief Jeffrey W. Carroll described Hussain plainly:
"He was going out to get food and going back home."
That's it. That was the entirety of what Hussain did to cross paths with his killers. Carroll added that there is no known relationship between Hussain and the men who took his life.
"They just took advantage of him."
Barnes has been charged with first-degree murder. Authorities later also charged Alphonso Walker, 39, of Northwest Washington, with first-degree murder. A third man who was present during part of the encounter later cooperated with investigators.
Walker was already in police custody on unrelated charges at the time of his arrest for Hussain's murder. The source material does not elaborate on what those charges were, but the fact sits there, heavy and familiar. A man already in the system's grip, already known to law enforcement, allegedly participated in the savage killing of a stranger whose only crime was holding a door open.
This is the pattern that drives ordinary Americans to fury, not because they lack compassion, but because they can see what's happening. Repeat offenders cycle through a justice system that treats public safety as a secondary concern. Prosecutors defer. Judges release. And someone like Syed Hammad Hussain pays the price.
The Zenith sits in Logan Circle, described as a typically low-crime neighborhood. Hussain lived in an upscale building with surveillance cameras and secured entry points. He did everything a person is supposed to do: live in a safe area, choose a secure building, and go about their business.
None of it mattered.
The locked glass door, the cameras, the neighborhood reputation: all of it dissolved the moment a predator banged on the glass, and a decent man assumed the best about a stranger. Americans are told constantly that the answer to crime is better infrastructure, more cameras, and smarter design. But no amount of architecture compensates for a justice system that fails to keep dangerous people off the streets.
Carroll called Hussain "an innocent person." That phrase should be unremarkable. It isn't. In a city where political leaders routinely redirect sympathy away from victims and toward systemic explanations for criminal behavior, the simple act of naming innocence matters.
A family member, Syed K. Hussain, spoke about the man they lost:
"He lived his life. He was happy."
The family has vowed to follow the trial. They shouldn't have to. A man should be able to walk home from getting food at 1:30 in the morning in the nation's capital without being stalked, beaten, strangled, and set on fire in his own apartment.
Washington, D.C., has spent years debating policing, incarceration, and criminal justice reform in the abstract. Syed Hammad Hussain is what the concrete looks like. A 40-year-old professional, dead on his living room floor, hands tied with his own neckties, was killed by men who followed him home because he looked like an easy target.
The cameras caught everything. The question is whether the system will do anything with it.
Samuel Ramirez Jr. lasted one hour and thirteen minutes on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. That's it. The 33-year-old, wanted for his alleged involvement in the murders of two women at a bar in Federal Way, Washington, was captured without incident in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico, just moments after the Bureau placed him on the list and raised his reward to up to $1 million.
It is the fastest arrest in the history of the list, shattering a record that had stood for over 55 years. The previous mark, set in 1969, was two hours.
Ramirez was deported from Mexico to the U.S. on Wednesday night, returned to Washington state, and taken into custody by Federal Way Police. He will be booked into jail in King County and is expected to appear in court for arraignment in about two weeks.
The underlying crime dates back to May 21, 2023, when two women were killed and a third person injured at a bar in Federal Way, Washington. Federal Way Police Chief Andy Hwang identified the victims as Jessyca Hohn and Katie Duhnke. An arrest warrant was issued charging Ramirez with the crimes, but he was believed to have fled the country after the killings.
For more than two years, Ramirez evaded American law enforcement. In November 2025, he was charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, and a federal arrest warrant was issued. On December 10, 2025, the FBI announced a reward of up to $25,000 for his arrest and conviction, as CBS News reports.
Then came Tuesday. The FBI increased the reward to up to $1 million and added Ramirez to the Ten Most Wanted list. Seventy-three minutes later, he was in custody in Sinaloa.
The capture involved the FBI, its Legal Attaché office in Mexico City, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington, and Mexican authorities. Mexico's government released a statement affirming its:
"commitment to work in a coordinated manner with international authorities to detain individuals wanted in other countries."
The FBI's Seattle field office confirmed the apprehension on March 12, 2026:
"CAPTURED: #FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitive Samuel Ramirez, Jr., has been apprehended in Sinaloa, Mexico. He was returned to the United States and taken into custody by Federal Way Police in Washington state where he will face justice."
This is what cross-border law enforcement looks like when both sides actually cooperate. The speed of the capture suggests that intelligence on Ramirez's location was already solid before the formal designation. Adding him to the list and raising the reward to a million dollars may have been the final lever that triggered action from Mexican authorities who already knew where he was.
Ramirez's capture comes just weeks after another high-profile fugitive arrest in Mexico. Ryan Wedding, a former Olympic snowboarder who had been on the FBI's most wanted list and on the run for over a year, was also arrested in Mexico. Wedding pleaded not guilty in January to 17 felony charges alleging that he operated a Mexican drug cartel.
Two FBI most wanted fugitives, both captured in Mexico, in rapid succession. That's not a coincidence. That's pressure producing results.
For years, the conventional wisdom held that fleeing to Mexico was practically a get-out-of-jail-free card for American fugitives. Extradition was slow when it happened at all. Coordination was spotty. Cartel-controlled regions like Sinaloa were essentially no-go zones for international law enforcement cooperation.
Something has shifted. Whether it's increased diplomatic leverage, better intelligence sharing, or Mexican authorities simply calculating that harboring American fugitives carries costs they'd rather not pay, the results speak clearly. Fugitives who once would have vanished into the sprawl of Mexican cities are now being picked up and sent back.
Jessyca Hohn and Katie Duhnke were killed nearly three years ago. A third person was injured in the same incident. For almost three years, the man allegedly responsible lived freely across an international border while the families of two murdered women waited.
That wait is over. Ramirez sits in a King County jail cell tonight. The arraignment clock is ticking. And the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list just proved it still means something. Seventy-three minutes of something.
ActBlue, the Democratic Party's fundraising backbone, may have given Congress a misleading account of how it screens out illegal foreign donations, and its own attorneys knew it, according to internal legal memos now surfacing through a New York Times investigation published Thursday.
The memos, drafted by ActBlue's outside law firm Covington & Burling, warned that CEO Regina Wallace-Jones' 2023 letter to congressional investigators described safeguards that were not consistently followed. One memo went further, raising the prospect of a criminal investigation if prosecutors concluded ActBlue had tried to conceal the truth about foreign contributions flowing through its platform.
For a nonprofit that functions as the central clearinghouse for Democratic campaign cash, the implications are serious. Federal election law bars foreign nationals from donating to American political campaigns. When Wallace-Jones told Congress in 2023 that ActBlue had a "multi-layered vetting framework" to catch illegal foreign money, she was speaking under the kind of scrutiny where accuracy is not optional, it is a legal obligation.
Wallace-Jones wrote to Congress in 2023 in response to concerns about ActBlue's ability to vet donors overseas. She told lawmakers the platform processed contributions with foreign mailing addresses only when the donor supplied a U.S. passport number. She also said ActBlue would contact donors to request passport information and return any money when the donor could not be reached.
That account painted a picture of tight controls. But Fox News Digital reported that the New York Times reviewed internal memos, resignation letters, and other communications showing those procedures were not fully accurate, and not consistently happening.
Covington & Burling's attorneys flagged the gap between what Wallace-Jones told Congress and what was actually occurring inside the organization. The Washington Examiner reported that donors using third-party payment platforms such as Apple Pay, PayPal, and Venmo were not required by ActBlue to provide documentation showing they were legally permitted to donate to U.S. political committees.
That is not a minor technical oversight. It is a hole in the vetting system large enough to let foreign money walk through.
The internal memos from Covington & Burling did not mince words. One memo, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon, stated plainly:
"It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections."
The same memo warned that because ActBlue's staff knew the system was not as robust as necessary, any violations could be characterized as "knowing and willful", a legal standard that increases the penalties the Federal Election Commission might seek and gives the Justice Department jurisdiction for a potential criminal investigation.
Another passage addressed the November 2023 letter to Congress directly:
"An aggressive prosecutor may view the November 2023 letter not just as a false statement but as an effort to conceal the foreign contributions."
That language, "effort to conceal", is the kind of framing that separates a sloppy mistake from potential obstruction. It came not from Republican investigators or conservative critics, but from the law firm ActBlue had hired to protect it.
The pattern of officials making claims to Congress that later prove questionable has become a recurring theme in Washington. Democrats have been eager to push criminal referrals over alleged false congressional testimony when the target is a Republican. Whether they apply the same standard to their own fundraising apparatus remains to be seen.
A spokesperson for Covington & Burling told Fox News Digital: "We have complete confidence in the legal advice our lawyers provided to ActBlue." That statement is carefully worded. It expresses confidence in the advice given, not in ActBlue's compliance with it.
The New York Times reported that Covington's relationship with ActBlue was ultimately severed. The Times also reviewed resignation letters and interviewed ActBlue employees on the basis of anonymity, suggesting internal turmoil that went beyond a routine legal disagreement.
When your own law firm warns you that your statements to Congress may be viewed as concealment, and then the firm walks away, the situation has moved well past "misunderstanding."
ActBlue was already the target of several congressional probes led by Republican House committees before the Times report landed. Newsmax reported that several former ActBlue officials invoked their Fifth Amendment rights during closed-door testimony before those committees, a legal right, but one that rarely inspires public confidence.
The New York Times reported that three investigations by GOP-led House committees remain ongoing. Trump called on the Justice Department last year to investigate ActBlue over concerns the platform was allowing straw donations and foreign contributions barred by federal election law. Early in his term, he directed the DOJ to return a report within 180 days on the status of its findings.
That report, the Times noted, has never been made public.
House Republican committee chairmen Bryan Steil, James Comer, and Jim Jordan responded to the Times findings directly. The New York Post reported their joint statement:
"The New York Times' bombshell report raises serious questions about whether ActBlue's CEO intentionally misled Congress."
GOP investigators also said ActBlue relaxed its fraud-prevention policies twice during the 2024 campaign cycle and did not require CVV entry for card transactions until January 2024. Internal documents reportedly indicated some overseas prepaid-card transactions were flagged.
The question of what officials tell Congress under oath, and what happens when those statements prove false, has generated intense debate in recent months. Democrats have called for special counsel investigations over testimony disputes involving Republican officials. The standard they set should apply here, too.
In May, ActBlue issued a press release addressing the scrutiny. The organization called it a "myth" that its platform allows foreign nationals to illegally contribute donations and described its new measures:
"While ActBlue has always had strong measures in place that have successfully prevented illegal foreign donations, beginning in 2025 we have gone even further. We now require that Americans living abroad be physically present in the United States to make a contribution on our platform, despite campaign finance laws allowing citizens to contribute to campaigns while living abroad."
Read that carefully. ActBlue says it has "always had strong measures." Its own attorneys said those measures were not robust enough and that staff knew it. ActBlue says it went "even further" in 2025. But the congressional letter in question was sent in November 2023, and the vetting gaps existed during the 2024 election cycle, the most expensive in American history.
The timing matters. If ActBlue's safeguards were inadequate during the very cycle when billions of dollars flowed through its platform, the 2025 reforms do not retroactively fix the problem. They confirm one existed.
ActBlue did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment in time for publication.
Federal prosecutors have shown increasing willingness to pursue evidence from congressional proceedings when they suspect misconduct tied to major political controversies. Whether that appetite extends to the Democratic Party's fundraising machine is a test of institutional evenhandedness.
Several questions hang over this story. The DOJ report Trump requested within 180 days has not surfaced publicly. The specific findings of the three ongoing House investigations have not been disclosed. And the full scope of foreign money that may have entered Democratic coffers through ActBlue's platform remains unknown.
The Breitbart report on the Times findings noted that Covington & Burling concluded Wallace-Jones' 2023 letter described screening steps that were not always followed in practice, and that one memo raised the possibility of a criminal investigation if prosecutors believed facts had been concealed.
Congressional testimony carries weight precisely because it carries consequences. When officials volunteer to testify before House committees, they do so knowing that false statements can trigger real legal exposure. Wallace-Jones did not volunteer; she responded to an investigation. The bar for accuracy was no lower.
ActBlue processed donations for virtually every major Democratic candidate and cause in the country. If its vetting system had holes, and its own lawyers said it did, then the integrity of an entire fundraising ecosystem is in question. The people who deserve answers are not partisan operatives. They are American voters and donors who trusted that the system was lawful.
When your own attorneys warn you in writing that prosecutors could view your letter to Congress as concealment, the word "myth" stops being a defense. It starts sounding like a habit.
A seven-month-old baby girl named Kaori Patterson-Moore was shot and killed on a Brooklyn street Wednesday afternoon when a gunman on a moped opened fire in what investigators described as a suspected gang-related incident. Within hours, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani responded publicly, and the words he chose set off a firestorm.
Mamdani did not focus on the suspected gang members who pulled the trigger. He did not call for tougher enforcement or longer sentences. Instead, he spoke about "gun violence" and pledged "more work" to combat it, language that critics say deliberately avoids naming the criminals responsible and instead treats the weapon as the problem.
The mayor's framing drew immediate condemnation from elected officials, policy experts, and commentators who accused him of using a dead infant as a prop for gun-control talking points while shielding the city's revolving-door criminal justice system from scrutiny. Fox News Digital reported on the breadth of that backlash, which stretched from City Hall to conservative media to Mamdani's own mayoral rival.
In his public remarks after the shooting, Mamdani offered condolences but pivoted quickly to a familiar progressive script. He said:
"This is not our first family to know this pain. Too many children have never grown up into becoming adults. To parents who've had to bury those they love most. We cannot accept it as normal in our city. We cannot grow numb to this pain, and today is a devastating reminder of just how much more work there is to be done... to combat gun violence across the city."
He also posted on X thanking the NYPD, the same department whose budget he proposed slashing in February and whose officers he had spent years criticizing during his political career. That contradiction did not go unnoticed.
What was absent from Mamdani's statement mattered as much as what was in it. No mention of gangs. No mention of the suspects. No call for accountability within a system that, as one critic put it, "releases" repeat offenders "onto our streets repeatedly, over and over again, with no consequences."
NYC Republican Councilwoman Vickie Paladino captured the anger in blunt terms. She posted on X:
"Literally anything but blaming the criminals who our system releases onto our streets repeatedly, over and over again, with no consequences. Absolute disgrace."
Daniel Turner, executive director of Power the Future and a New York City native, offered pointed sarcasm. "If only New York had strict gun laws," he wrote on X, a jab at the fact that New York already has some of the most restrictive firearms laws in the country, yet a baby was gunned down on a Brooklyn sidewalk in broad daylight.
Mamdani is hardly the only progressive leader whose rhetoric has drawn fire in recent months. The broader Democratic leadership crisis has exposed a party struggling to reconcile its ideological commitments with the real-world consequences those commitments produce.
Manhattan Institute fellow Rafael A. Mangual offered the most detailed critique. He told Fox News Digital that Mamdani's language revealed a deeper discomfort, not just with enforcement, but with naming the kind of people who commit these acts.
"References to the means by which this heinous crime was committed suggests that he is uncomfortable with acknowledging that the murder of Kaori Patterson-Moore was committed by two evil thugs whose callous disregard for the value of human life should disqualify them from ever experiencing freedom."
Mangual went further, diagnosing the political incentive structure behind the mayor's word choice. He argued that Mamdani's progressive base is "simultaneously (if dissonantly) committed to the cause of 'gun control' as well as efforts to reorient the criminal justice system to be more lenient toward the offenders who pull triggers." Framing the killing as a "gun problem" rather than a criminal problem, Mangual said, lets Mamdani satisfy both camps without confronting either.
Several critics drew a sharp contrast between the mayor's swift comments on the Brooklyn shooting and his silence on another recent killing in the city. Richard Williams, an 83-year-old Air Force veteran, was recently allegedly shoved onto subway tracks in New York City and later died from his injuries.
Media Research Center Managing Editor Brittany Hughes connected the two cases directly. "An 83-year old veteran was killed in New York City last month after being randomly pushed onto the subway tracks by an illegal alien," she wrote on X. "Mamdani didn't say a word because trains aren't a good political prop, and he won't condemn criminal aliens."
The contrast is hard to dismiss. When the weapon is a gun, Mamdani finds his voice. When the weapon is a pair of hands and the suspect is an illegal immigrant, silence. That selective outrage tells voters everything about which political narratives the mayor is willing to serve, and which victims he is willing to overlook.
Mamdani's willingness to condemn U.S. policy abroad while going quiet on criminal violence at home is not new. He was among the prominent progressives who rushed to condemn U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, demonstrating no shortage of moral urgency when the subject suits his political coalition.
Mangual underscored the point by referencing the Williams case directly. "As the recent killing of Richard Williams illustrates clearly, criminals can and do take lives without any weapons at all," he said. The problem is not the tool. The problem is the person wielding it, and the system that failed to keep that person off the street.
Perhaps the sharpest criticism came from Jim Walden, an attorney who ran against Mamdani for mayor. Walden acknowledged the family's grief but refused to let the mayor's post-shooting thank-you to the NYPD pass without challenge.
"We should focus on the family's loss today. But every time you now 'thank NYPD' it burns my blood after you spent your career attacking them and coddling criminals. You really should be ashamed of yourself, @NYCMayor. But we all know you still hate police and policing and would dine with this vile criminal if you could get away with it, politically."
Walden's charge cuts to a real record. Mamdani built his political career in part on calls to defund the police. Fox News Digital reported that he proposed slashing the NYPD's budget as recently as February. Now, standing over the body of a seven-month-old, he thanks the officers whose resources he tried to cut.
That kind of contradiction has become a recurring pattern among progressive leaders. The same internal fractures that have plagued figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, torn between a radical base and political reality, now define Mamdani's tenure in Gracie Mansion.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani's office for comment on the criticism. The report did not indicate a response.
The open questions surrounding the Brooklyn shooting remain significant. No arrests or suspect identifications were reported. The basis for calling the incident "suspected gang-related" was not detailed. The specific location in Brooklyn where Kaori Patterson-Moore died has not been publicly specified beyond "a Brooklyn street."
Those gaps matter. If this was indeed a gang shooting, then the relevant policy failure is not the existence of guns in a city that already bans most of them. It is the failure to keep known gang members off the streets, the failure to prosecute them aggressively, and the failure of a criminal justice philosophy that treats leniency as enlightenment.
Critics like Michael Rapaport have previously called out Mamdani and his progressive allies for their selective moral outrage, loud on the issues that energize their base, silent on the ones that embarrass it.
Mamdani chose to make this about guns. His critics, and the facts, suggest it is about something far harder for a progressive mayor to confront: the human cost of a system that treats violent criminals as victims of circumstance rather than predators who forfeit their place in civil society.
Kaori Patterson-Moore was seven months old. She never got to walk, or talk, or start school. She was killed on a Brooklyn sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. The least her city's mayor could do is name the people responsible, not the object they used.
Los Angeles police arrested a 12-year-old on suspicion of murder Thursday in connection with the death of Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa, a classmate who was struck in the head with a metal water bottle during an alleged bullying incident at a Reseda school campus in February. The arrest came more than five weeks after Khimberly died, and her family says the tragedy was preventable.
LAPD Officer Charles Miller confirmed the arrest but said he could not release additional information because both the victim and the suspect are juveniles, the Associated Press reported. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said Friday that the case remains under investigation. No formal charges had been announced at the time of the report.
The family's account, laid out in a wrongful-death claim filed last month against the Los Angeles Unified School District, paints a grim picture of institutional failure. Khimberly was walking in a hallway at Reseda Charter High School, which also houses a middle school, on Feb. 17 when she stepped in to defend her older sister, Sharon Zavaleta, from a group of students who had been bullying her. Another student struck Khimberly in the head with a metal water bottle.
What followed was an eight-day ordeal that ended with a child's death.
The family said Khimberly was taken to Valley Presbyterian Hospital after the Feb. 17 attack, where she was evaluated and released the same day. Three days later, her condition deteriorated sharply. She was rushed to UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital, where doctors discovered a severe brain hemorrhage. Khimberly was placed in a medically induced coma and underwent emergency brain surgery.
She did not recover. Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa died on Feb. 25. She was 12 years old.
Her mother, Elma Chuquipa, described the final hours in an interview with a local television station. Fox News reported that Chuquipa told KABC: "My daughter goes and pulls her away, so they don't hit her sister, and that's when [Khimberly] gets hit in the head." She also told the station: "We took her to the emergency room, where she arrived with no vitals."
The family has also raised questions about whether Valley Presbyterian Hospital missed warning signs during the initial evaluation. Robert Glassman, the family's attorney, said the family has not ruled out legal action against the hospital.
The arrest of a single student does not close the book on this case, and the family's attorney has made clear he intends to keep it open. Glassman said in an email Friday that the sisters had been "bullied, harassed and physically attacked for months" at the school and that their mother had reported the incidents to school officials, who he says failed to stop the abuse.
That claim sits at the center of the wrongful-death filing against LAUSD. The district, for its part, offered no defense and no explanation. A spokesperson said only that the district does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.
Glassman framed the arrest as necessary but insufficient. As AP News reported, he stated:
"This arrest is an important step toward accountability, but an arrest alone does not equal justice and does not answer the larger question of how this was allowed to happen in the first place."
He followed that with a pointed demand directed at the adults who were supposed to be in charge of these children's safety:
"The focus cannot stop with one student, there must be a hard look at what the adults in charge knew, when they knew it, and why meaningful action wasn't taken sooner."
Those are questions that deserve answers. A mother says she warned the school. The school apparently did nothing effective. A child is dead. And the district's only public response is a boilerplate refusal to comment.
The Zavaleta Chuquipa family set up a GoFundMe page to help cover expenses. Just The News reported that the family wrote on the page: "As the baby of our family, she brought a special light and joy into our lives."
Khimberly's mother told NBC Los Angeles, as the New York Post reported: "I'm devastated. I'm full of pain, thinking about how I will never see my daughter again."
Meanwhile, the DA's office has said only that the case is under investigation. Whether formal murder charges will be filed against the juvenile suspect, and what form those charges might take given the suspect's age, remains unclear. The Washington Times confirmed the arrest occurred on April 2.
Cases involving children accused of killing other children are mercifully rare, but they raise some of the hardest questions the justice system faces. An eleven-year-old in Pennsylvania was recently charged as an adult in the shooting death of his adoptive father, illustrating just how varied and difficult the legal responses can be when the accused is barely old enough for middle school.
In this case, the family is pursuing accountability on multiple fronts. The wrongful-death claim targets LAUSD directly. Glassman has signaled that Valley Presbyterian Hospital could face legal action as well. And the criminal case against the juvenile suspect is just beginning.
The core failure here is not complicated. A family says it reported months of bullying, harassment, and physical attacks to school officials. Those officials, by the family's account, did not stop it. The earlier reporting on Khimberly's death laid out the same pattern: warnings ignored, a child left vulnerable, and a preventable tragedy.
LAUSD is the second-largest school district in the country. It has layers of administrators, counselors, and safety staff. Yet a 12-year-old girl walked into a school hallway, tried to protect her sister from known bullies, and ended up dead eight days later.
Fox News reported that the family is also pushing for new pediatric head-injury protocols through a proposed measure they call "Khimberly's Act." The details of that proposal were not fully described, but the impulse behind it is clear: the family believes the medical system, like the school system, failed their daughter.
Across the country, communities are grappling with youth violence that seems to outpace the institutions meant to prevent it. In Washington, D.C., the mayor has pushed for a permanent youth curfew in response to rising juvenile crime. The approaches differ, but the underlying problem is the same: adults in positions of authority failing to keep children safe.
The AP noted a separate recent case in Georgia, where a sixth grader named Jada West died after a fight with another student from Mason Creek Middle School broke out at an intersection near her home. The details differ, but the pattern is familiar, school-age children, unresolved conflict, and a fatal outcome.
In Los Angeles, the open questions remain stark. What did Reseda Charter High School officials know about the bullying of the Zavaleta sisters? When did they learn about it? What, if anything, did they do? And why wasn't it enough?
LAUSD has chosen silence. The DA's office has chosen caution. The family has chosen to fight. And Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa, the 12-year-old girl who stepped into a hallway to protect her sister, is gone.
When officials in other states have faced similar failures to protect children, the political consequences have been swift and direct. Whether anyone in Los Angeles faces real accountability, beyond a single juvenile arrest, will say a great deal about how seriously this city's leaders take the safety of the children in their care.
A child tried to defend her sister. The adults who should have prevented that moment failed before it ever arrived. An arrest is a start. It is not an answer.