Moments after Luigi Mangione was handcuffed at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, a police officer searching his backpack found a loaded gun magazine wrapped in a pair of underwear.

The discovery, recounted in court on Monday as Mangione fights to keep evidence out of his New York murder case, convinced police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that he was the man wanted in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan five days earlier.

“It’s him, dude. It’s him, 100%,” an officer was heard saying on body-worn camera video from Mangione’s arrest on 9 December last year, punctuating the remark with expletives as the officer combing the bag, Christy Wasser, held up the magazine.

Wasser, a 19-year Altoona police veteran, testified on the fourth day of a pre-trial hearing as Mangione sought to bar prosecutors from using the magazine and other evidence against him, including a 9mm handgun and a notebook found during a subsequent bag search.

The testimony shed light on the critical minutes after Mangione was spotted at the McDonald’s and the sometimes unusual steps police officers took in collecting evidence critical to tying him to the crime.

Mangione’s lawyers argue the items should be excluded because police did not have a search warrant and lacked the grounds to justify a warrantless search. Prosecutors contend the search was legal and that police eventually obtained a warrant.

Wasser, testifying in full uniform, said Altoona police protocols require promptly searching a suspect’s property at the time of an arrest, in part for dangerous items.

On body-worn camera video played in court, Wasser was heard saying she wanted to check the bag for bombs before removing it from the McDonald’s. Despite that concern, she acknowledged in her testimony Monday that police never cleared the restaurant of customers or employees.

Mangione, 27, has pleaded not guilty to state and federal murder charges. He appeared in good health on Monday, pumping his fist for photographers and chatting with his lawyers as testimony resumed.

The hearing, which was postponed on Friday because of Mangione’s apparent illness, applies only to the state case. His lawyers are making a similar push to exclude the evidence from his federal case, where prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Prosecutors have said the handgun found in the backpack matches the firearm used in the killing and that writings in the notebook showed Mangione’s disdain for health insurers and ideas about killing a CEO at an investor conference.

Thompson, 50, was killed as he walked to a Manhattan hotel for his company’s investor conference. Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting him from behind. Police have said “delay,” “deny” and “depose” were written on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase used to describe how insurers avoid paying claims.

Mangione was arrested in Altoona, about 230 miles from Manhattan, after police there received a 911 call.

Wasser testified that she went to the McDonald’s on her own to assist another officer, Joseph Detwiler. Before that, she said, she had seen some coverage of Thompson’s killing on Fox News.

Wasser began searching Mangione’s bag as officers took him into custody on initial charges of forgery and false identification, after he acknowledged giving them a bogus driving license, police said. The same fake name was used by the alleged gunman used at a Manhattan hostel days before the shooting.

By then, a handcuffed Mangione had been informed of his right to remain silent – and invoked it – when asked if there was anything officers should be concerned about.

Wasser told another officer she wanted to check the bag for a bomb before leaving the McDonald’s because she didn’t want to repeat an incident in which another Altoona officer had inadvertently brought a bomb to the police station.

“Did you call the bomb squad?” Mangione lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo asked.

“No. I didn’t find a bomb yet,” Wasser said.

According to body-worn camera video, the first few items Wasser found were innocuous: a hoagie, a loaf of bread and a smaller bag containing a passport, cellphone and computer chip.

Then she pulled out a gray pair of underwear, unwrapping them to reveal the magazine.

Satisfied there was no bomb, she suspended her search and placed some of the items back in the bag. Some evidence, including Mangione’s laptop, was transported to the police station in a brown paper bag, body-worn camera video showed.

Wasser resumed her search after an 11-minute drive to the police station and almost immediately found the gun and silencer — the latter discovery prompting her to laugh and exclaim “nice”, according to footage. Wasser said the gun was in a side pocket that she had not searched at McDonald’s. Later, while cataloging everything in the bag, she found the notebook.

“Isn’t it awesome?” Wasser said at one point during the search.

Asked to explain, she told Friedman Agnifilo that she was proud of her police department’s work in helping to capture Thompson’s suspected killer.

A Blair county, Pennsylvania, prosecutor testified that a judge later signed off on a search warrant for the bag, a few hours after the searches were completed. The warrant, she said, provided a legal mechanism for Altoona police to turn the evidence over to New York detectives.

As he has throughout the case, assistant district attorney Joel Seidemann described Thompson’s killing as an “execution” and referred to his notebook as a “manifesto” – terms that Mangione’s lawyers said were prejudicial and inappropriate.

Judge Gregory Carro said the wording had “no bearing” on him, but warned Seidemann that he’s “certainly not going to do that at trial” when jurors are present.

Many utility companies are pinning their short-term hopes on “demand response” solutions that require companies to curtail activity at peak times.

AI model builders typically run data centres at full capacity during “training runs” — where they feed LLMs with vast amounts of data to improve accuracy. These rises in activity can clash with consumption from other customers — including households — during peak usage, increasing the risk of blackouts.

Companies including OpenAI have also asked US regulators to speed up interconnection requests for flexible data centres, arguing that it will help “reduce costs” for all users.

“We have to get smarter about using unused capacity on the grid,” said Daniel Eggers, executive vice-president at Constellation, a power company that supplies 2mn US homes and businesses.

Researchers at Duke University said earlier this year that if data centre operators could restrict their consumption 0.25 per cent of the time, the grid could accommodate about 76GW of additional demand. They cautioned that this would not replace the need to build new capacity.

Brandon Oyer, head of energy and water for the Americas at Amazon Web Services, said the company could tolerate some curtailment on a temporary basis, but did not consider it a “smart investment” to do so for a prolonged period of time. “Some customers might be able to tolerate that. Some customers might not. It’s going to be a very nuanced decision.”

A white-knuckle ride

The concern for hyperscalers is that this patchwork of measures will not be enough to power data centres coming online over the next few years.

In this scenario, a raft of projects will no longer be viable because they cannot meet contractual commitments. Others will have to simply wait for upgrades to the electricity grid and the construction of new generation capacity to be completed.

In a race between global superpowers, AI could be slowed down by decades old grid infrastructure and a failure to provide adequate capacity.

For some, the power crunch eases concerns of overbuild. For tech companies and the Trump administration, it may undermine billions of dollars in investment.

“We may not get all this done in the timeframe that hyperscalers would like . . . and they won’t be able to interconnect until we’ve got the resources to meet them,” said Nerc’s Robb. “It’s going to be a white-knuckle ride.”

US House member Ilhan Omar on Sunday defended the Somali community in her Minnesota congressional district, saying it was “completely disgusting” when Donald Trump recently referred to them as garbage.

“These are Americans that he is calling ‘garbage,’” Omar, a Somalia-born Democrat, said while responding to the president’s remarks on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I think it is also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric – and this level of dehumanizing – can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president.”

Those comments from Omar – who also spent some of her CBS interview discussing fraud cases involving Minnesota Somalis in recent years – served as replies to insults from Trump during a cabinet meeting. Beside calling them “garbage”, the president said Minnesota’s Somali community should be sent back to Somalia.

“Look at their nation,” Trump also said. “Look how bad their nation is. It’s not even a nation. It’s just people walking around killing each other.

“Look, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country – billions and billions.”

The Trump administration restricted all immigration cases for Somalis already in the US, along with people from 18 other countries. Community members expected the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area, where most Somalis in the state reside, to see increased immigration enforcement operations. And, as a consequence, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey recently signed an executive order prohibiting federal, state and local officials from using city-owned parking lots, ramps, garages and lots for immigration enforcement operations.

On Thursday, Omar penned an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that Trump was resorting to racist attacks because various campaign promises – including a better US economy – have been failing.

“While the president wastes his time attacking my community … the promises of economic prosperity he made in his run for president [in 2024] have not come to fruition,” Omar wrote in the Times. “The president knows he is failing, and so he is reverting to what he knows best: trying to divert attention by stoking bigotry.”

Attention on Minnesota’s Somali community ramped up in recent weeks as the right wing has seized on fraud cases in the state. Dozens of Somali residents were convicted in a scheme that involved lying to the state to receive reimbursements for meal disbursements, medical care and other services. The investigations into the series of fraud schemes spanned years – one of the most significant cases had charges filed three years ago.

One of the cases revolves around an organization called Feeding Our Future, which partnered with state agencies to distribute meals to kids. Federal prosecutors alleged that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the organization submitted fake documents to trick government officials into thinking they served food to thousands of children. The group’s founder was convicted in March. US House Republicans have since launched an investigation aimed at how fraud cases were handled by Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor who was his party’s vice-presidential candidate in the 2024 presidential election won by Trump.

Omar on Sunday said she was among the first members of Congress who called on the fraud in question to be investigated. She also said the fraud was “reprehensible”.

Furthermore, Omar denied Trump administration allegations that taxpayer money involved in fraud investigations in Minnesota was siphoned to a terrorist organization in Somalia.

The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said his department was investigating whether the taxpayer money was going to al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization in Somalia. House Republicans have also echoed those claims.

“There are people who have been prosecuted and who have been sentenced,” Omar said. “If there was a linkage in that – the money that they had stolen going to terrorism – then that is a failure of the FBI and our court system in not figuring that out and basically charging them with these charges.”

Bessent also said those involved in the fraud donated to Omar’s campaign. Omar said Sunday: “We sent that money back a couple years ago.”