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Alex Murdaugh ‘destroyed’ by fatal shootings of wife and son, surviving son testifies at double murder trial | CNN

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Alex Murdaugh ‘destroyed’ by fatal shootings of wife and son, surviving son testifies at double murder trial | CNN



CNN
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Alex Murdaugh was “destroyed” by the deadly shootings of his spouse and son, his surviving son testified in his father’s double homicide trial Tuesday, because the protection labored to counter prosecutors’ allegations that Murdaugh is answerable for the killings.

“He was heartbroken. I walked within the door and noticed him, gave him a hug,” Buster Murdaugh stated of seeing his father within the hours after he discovered his mom, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, and youthful brother, 22-year-old Paul Murdaugh, had been fatally shot. Alex Murdaugh was “simply damaged down,” Buster stated, including his father was crying and couldn’t actually communicate.

Buster Murdaugh was the third witness referred to as by the protection, which started its case Friday after prosecutors referred to as greater than 60 witnesses to bolster their argument Alex Murdaugh, 54, killed his spouse and son on the household’s Islandton property on June 7, 2021, in an try to distract from his alleged monetary crimes, which had been being quickly uncovered and for which he now faces 99 prices individually from the murders.

Alex Murdaugh has pleaded not responsible to 2 counts of homicide and two weapons prices within the killings, and the protection has painted Murdaugh as a loving father and husband being wrongfully accused after what it says has been a poorly dealt with investigation.

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Within the final three weeks of the trial, prosecutors have tried to beat the shortage of any direct proof – similar to an eyewitness – tying Murdaugh to the killings. As a substitute, their case has relied closely on circumstantial proof that they are saying reveals Murdaugh lied to investigators and was on the scene simply minutes earlier than the killings.

His protection attorneys have criticized the prosecutors’ case as speculative and waved off their deal with his alleged monetary schemes as irrelevant.

The protection used Buster Murdaugh on Tuesday to undermine the testimony of a state witness who informed the court docket late final month he believed Alex Murdaugh inadvertently confessed to finishing up the murders whereas talking to investigators.

The witness, South Carolina Regulation Enforcement Division Particular Agent Jeff Croft, stated he believed Murdaugh stated “I did him so unhealthy” in reference to Paul’s physique throughout an emotional interview with investigators on June 10, 2021.

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Croft didn’t observe up concerning the assertion, nevertheless, and the protection maintained Murdaugh as an alternative stated, “They did him so unhealthy” – a declare Buster backed up Tuesday.

The tape of the June 10, 2021, interview was not the primary time he’d heard his father say, “They did him so unhealthy,” Buster stated.

“The primary time I heard him say that was the evening that I went all the way down to Moselle,” he stated, referring to the Islandton property, “the evening of June the seventh.”

“Did he say that multiple time?” protection legal professional Jim Griffin requested.

“He did,” Buster stated.

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The protection additionally sought to counter the testimony of a caretaker for Murdaugh’s mom, who testified for the state that Murdaugh visited his mom’s dwelling in Almeda the evening of the killings between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. The caretaker, Mushell “Shelly” Smith, cared for Murdaugh’s mom from 8 p.m. to eight a.m. and testified late evening visits had been uncommon.

However the household adopted no set schedule when visiting his grandparents, which his father did typically.

“It might have been any time. We went over at lunch a number of instances, went over within the evenings so much, simply no actual set schedule,” Buster stated. “Simply form of mosey on over there.”

Earlier than his loss of life, Paul Murdaugh was being bullied on social media and in public for his alleged involvement in a February 2019 boat crash that killed 19-year-old Mallory Seaside, Buster Murdaugh testified, describing social media messages his brother obtained and confrontations in bars.

Paul had pleaded not responsible to prices in connection to the accident, and court docket information present the costs had been dropped after his loss of life.

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Folks had been sending Paul messages concerning the crash, Buster stated, and “a number of instances he’d be strolling down the sidewalk and, you realize, a automotive comes by and they’d yell some stuff at him.”

“I knew he would exit at a bar and there’s anyone that wishes to speak about it, make a scuff about it,” Buster stated.

The accident and the following backlash from the neighborhood “form of consumed” his 52-year-old mom, Buster stated.

“She (was) massive on studying all of it. And when she learn the unfavorable stuff, you realize, (it) made her really feel upset and whatnot, and it in the end form of induced her to distance herself from Hampton,” the place the household had lengthy lived, he stated. Maggie felt folks on the town had been “looking at her and speaking about her,” Buster stated, and she or he stopped going to the grocery shops and pharmacy there.

Alex Murdaugh was sued by Seaside’s household after the boat crash, and prosecutors pointed to the lawsuit as a possible catalyst for the killings: Witnesses who testified for the state described a listening to in that case, set to happen three days after the deadly shootings, which might have revealed the state of Murdaugh’s funds and his alleged misdeeds. The listening to was canceled after the killings.

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However Alex Murdaugh by no means appeared “overly anxious” concerning the civil case, Buster stated Tuesday. The felony case towards Paul was the precedence, he stated, as a result of “none of us thought that he was driving the boat” on the time of the accident.

The protection appeared to recommend final week that the killings may very well be associated to a monetary dispute with a drug gang, saying Murdaugh was shopping for $50,000 price of medicine every week from a person who was in important debt to a gang.

Alex Murdaugh cries while listening to his son, Buster Murdaugh, testify during his trial Tuesday.

Murdaugh’s legal professionals have beforehand acknowledged he struggles with an opioid habit and prosecutors offered proof Friday displaying Paul confronted his father a few stash of tablets a month earlier than he and his mom had been killed.

Buster testified Tuesday he “knew a little bit bit about” his father’s drug use, saying he was conscious that his brother and mom had discovered tablets. He described a number of efforts by his father to deal with his habit, together with going to a detox facility round Christmas in 2018.

Buster “thought that that dealt with it,” however there have been “a pair extra instances” his brother and mom would discover extra tablets.

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Buster wasn’t current when his father was confronted about his drug use, he testified, however believed his response was largely “apologetic and sorry.”

Buster Murdaugh’s testimony Tuesday was adopted by that of Mike Sutton, a forensic engineer who labored to recreate the scene of the killings and testified that Alex Murdaugh couldn’t be the shooter as a result of he’s too tall.

Sutton analyzed bullet holes discovered on the scene, notably one left in a quail pen, in addition to the placement of shell casings discovered by Maggie’s physique to find out the trajectory bullets adopted after they had been fired. Based mostly on his evaluation, Sutton stated, the trajectory of the bullet would make sense if the shooter was between 5 ft 2 inches and 5 ft 4 inches tall.

If the gunman was taller, it could have required the shooter to carry the weapon in a low place – from the hip, for instance. Sutton indicated it could be even much less lifelike if the shooter had been as tall as Alex Murdaugh, who stands at about 6 ft 4 inches, requiring the killer to fireside whereas crouching over and holding the gun as little as his knees.

“It places the shooter or whoever fired the weapon, in the event that they had been that tall, it places them in an unrealistic capturing place,” Sutton stated. “It’s not an aiming place, it’s not a capturing place. … It will be very troublesome. You would need to be bending over and have your capturing hand down at or beneath your kneecap.”

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“It simply makes it impossible {that a} tall particular person made that shot,” Sutton stated.

Sutton additionally analyzed the acoustics of gunfire on the scene, telling the court docket it was attainable for somebody to be inside the home and never hear a gun – just like the .300 Blackout rifle believed to have killed Maggie – fired on the property’s canine kennels, the place the our bodies had been discovered.

“You wouldn’t be capable of hear it,” Sutton stated.

“And the shotgun, I assume, was quieter, so I assume even much less of a chance to listen to that,” protection legal professional Dick Harpootlian stated.

“There have been instances we fired the shotgun, and in a quiet home you couldn’t hear it in any respect,” Sutton stated.

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Prosecutor David Fernandez sought to undercut Sutton’s testimony throughout cross-examination, establishing that whereas his major experience is in accident reconstruction, he has no certification or coaching in reconstructing capturing incidents. Sutton has carried out unpublished research and assessments on bullet trajectories, he stated.

Fernandez questioned Sutton on his findings {that a} 5-feet-two-inch tall particular person was answerable for firing the weapon, asking Sutton if it was attainable that the cartridge casings from the fired bullets had been moved on the scene or ricocheted, which might affect his calculations. Sutton acknowledged it was attainable.

Sutton additionally acknowledged that the ammunition he used within the acoustics check was, whereas related, not the precise buckshot utilized in Paul Murdaugh’s homicide.

Moreover, Sutton testified he was employed by protection legal professional Jim Griffin to research the 2019 boat crash that killed Mallory Seaside previous to the murders.

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Meta plans to invest $15bn in Scale AI in bid to catch up to rivals

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Meta plans to invest bn in Scale AI in bid to catch up to rivals

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Meta plans to invest about $15bn in data-labelling start-up Scale AI and hire the group’s co-founder and top researchers, in one of the biggest deals of its kind as the Big Tech company seeks to catch up with rivals.

The deal, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, would give Meta a 49 per cent stake in Scale AI and value the start-up at roughly $28bn, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It would mark the second consecutive year that Scale AI has doubled its valuation.

The investment in Scale AI and attempt to poach its top talent was part of Meta’s plan to build a “superintelligence” lab that would outperform OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which are also developing models they claim will exceed human intelligence, according to one of the people.

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Scale AI declined to comment, and Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

The launch of Meta’s latest large language model, Llama 4, underwhelmed critics after it underperformed on independent reasoning and coding benchmarks.

Meanwhile, competitors such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic have each unveiled a new generation of powerful “reasoning” models, which solve problems by breaking them down step by step. Meta is also facing pressure from open source competitors such as China’s DeepSeek that have built powerful models for a fraction of the cost.

Meta, with a market capitalisation of nearly $2tn, has invested heavily in generative artificial intelligence. But progress has been halting and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has reorganised the efforts multiple times. Meta announced in April the departure of Joelle Pineau, vice-president of AI research.

Alexandr Wang, a 28-year-old paper billionaire who co-founded Scale AI in 2016, is set to join Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, the details of which were first reported by The New York Times. Details of Meta’s investment were first reported by Bloomberg and The Information.

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Scale AI’s core business involves manually labelling the data that is used to train advanced AI models to ensure it is accurate.

Wang has forged relationships with Silicon Valley’s biggest investors and technologists, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and has positioned Scale AI to serve companies developing autonomous vehicles and more recently those building generative AI models.

But his talents lie in promoting the company rather than managing its staff or furthering AI research, according to multiple people who have worked with him.

Jason Droege, who joined Scale AI from Uber Eats less than a year ago, was expected to step up from chief strategy officer to chief executive, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The fate of Scale AI’s remaining employees is less clear. Wang recently spoke about his desire to take the start-up public, but the potential deal with Meta casts uncertainty over that goal.

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Scale AI had been attempting to broaden its revenue sources following investor concerns about its concentrated services, according to one person with knowledge of the matter. The group has increasingly focused on building custom applications for enterprises and bidding for government contracts.

Last year, Microsoft paid $650mn to hire Inflection boss Mustafa Suleyman and his top lieutenants, and to license the start-up’s technology. Google also paid $2.7bn for a similar arrangement with Character AI.

The bespoke structures used by the Big Tech groups were partly designed to avoid probes from regulators, according to people with knowledge of the deals. But Google and Microsoft have nonetheless faced scrutiny from antitrust enforcers.

Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy

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Misinformation about LA Ice protests swirls online: ‘Catnip for rightwing agitators’

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Misinformation about LA Ice protests swirls online: ‘Catnip for rightwing agitators’

Since protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles began, false and misleading claims about the ongoing demonstrations have spread on text-based social networks. Outright lies posted directly to social media mixed with misinformation spread through established channels by the White House as Donald Trump dramatically escalated federal intervention. The stream of undifferentiated real and fake information has painted a picture of the city that forks from reality.

Parts of Los Angeles have seen major protests over the past four days against intensified immigration raids by the US president’s administration. On Saturday, dramatic photos from downtown Los Angeles showed cars set aflame amid confrontations with law enforcement. Many posts promoted the perception that mayhem and violence had overtaken the entirety of Los Angeles, even though confrontations with law enforcement and vandalism remained confined to a small part of the sprawling city. Trump has deployed 2,000 members of the national guard to the city without requesting consent from California’s governor Gavin Newsom, which provoked the state to sue for an alleged violation of sovereignty. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has also ordered the US military to deploy approximately 700 Marines to the city.

Amid the street-level and legal conflicts, misinformation is proliferating. Though lies have long played a part in civil and military conflicts, social media often acts as an accelerant, with facts failing to spread as quickly as their counterparts, a dynamic that has played out with the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, a devastating hurricane in North Carolina and the coronavirus pandemic.

Among the most egregious examples were conservative and pro-Russian accounts circulating a video of Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, from before the protests with the claim that she incited and supported the protests, which have featured Mexican flags, according to the misinformation watchdog Newsguard. The misleading posts – made on Twitter/X by conservative commentator Benny Johnson on pro-Trump sites such as WLTReport.com or Russian state-owned sites such as Rg.ru – have received millions of views, according to the organization. Sheinbaum in fact told reporters on 9 June: “We do not agree with violent actions as a form of protest … We call on the Mexican community to act pacifically.”

A post about bricks stirs a mixture of real and fake news

Conspiratorial conservatives are grasping at familiar bogeymen. A post to X on Saturday claiming that “Soros-funded organizations” had dropped off pallets of bricks near Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities received more than 9,500 retweets and was viewed more than 800,000 times. Democratic megadonor George Soros appears as a consistent specter in rightwing conspiracy theories, and the post likewise attributed the supply drop to LA mayor, Karen Bass, and California governor, Gavin Newsom.

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“It’s Civil War!!” the post read.

The photo of stacked bricks originates from a Malaysian construction supply company, and the hoax about bricks being supplied to protesters has spread repeatedly since the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the US. X users appended a “community note” fact-checking the tweet. X’s native AI chatbot, Grok, also provided fact-checks when prompted to evaluate the veracity of the post.

In response to the hoax photo, some X users replied with links to real footage from the protests that showed protesters hammering at concrete bollards, mixing false and true and reducing clarity around what was happening in reality. The independent journalist who posted the footage claimed the protesters were using the material as projectiles against police, though the footage did not show such actions.

The Social Media Lab, a research unit out of Toronto Metropolitan University, posted on Bluesky: “These days, it feels like every time there’s a protest, the old clickbaity ‘pallets of bricks’ hoax shows up right on cue. You know the one, photos or videos of bricks supposedly left out to encourage rioting. It’s catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters.”

Trump and the White House muddy the waters

Trump himself has fed the narrative that the protests are inauthentic and larger than they really are, fueled by outside agitators without legitimate interest in local matters.

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“These are not protesters, they are troublemakers and insurrectionists,” Trump posted to Truth Social, which was screenshotted and reposted to X by Elon Musk. Others in the administration have made similar points on social media.

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times pointed out that the White House put out a statement about a particular Mexican national being arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer “during the riots”. In fact, Customs and Border Protection agents stopped him before the protests began.

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Sowing misleading information, reaping distrust

Trump has increased the number of Ice raids across the country, which has stoked fears of deportations across Los Angeles, heavily populated with immigrants to the US. Per the Social Media Lab, anti-Ice posts also spread misinformation. One post on Bluesky, marked “Breaking”, claimed that federal agents had just arrived at an LA elementary school and tried to question first graders. In fact, the event occurred two months ago. Researchers called the post “rage-farming to push merch”.

The conspiratorial website InfoWars put out a broadcast on X titled: Watch Live: LA ICE Riots Spread To Major Cities Nationwide As Democrat Summer Of Rage Arrives, which attracted more than 40,000 simultaneous listeners when viewed by the Guardian on Tuesday morning. Though protests against deportations have occurred in other cities, the same level of chaos as seen in Los Angeles has not. A broadcast on X by the news outlet Reuters, Los Angeles after fourth night of immigration protests, had drawn just 13,000 viewers at the same time.

The proliferation of misinformation degrades X’s utility as a news source, though Musk continually tweets that it is the top news app in this country or that, most recently Qatar, a minor distinction. Old photos and videos mix with new and sow doubt in legitimate reporting. Since purchasing Twitter and renaming it X in late 2022, Musk has dismantled many of the company’s own initiatives for combatting the proliferation of lies, though he has promoted the user-generated fact-checking feature, “community notes”. During the 2024 US presidential election in particular, the X CEO himself became a hub for the spread of false information, say researchers. In his dozens of posts per day, he posted and reposted incorrect or misleading claims that reached about 2bn views, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

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Read California’s Lawsuit Challenging Trump’s Mobilization of the National Guard

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Read California’s Lawsuit Challenging Trump’s Mobilization of the National Guard

Case 3:25-cv-04870 Document 1 Filed 06/09/25

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INTRODUCTION

1. The Governor of the State of California and the State of California bring this action to

protect the State against the illegal actions of the President, Secretary of Defense, and Department
of Defense to deploy members of the California National Guard, without lawful authority, and in violation of the Constitution.
2. One of the cornerstones of our Nation and our democracy is that our people are

governed by civil, not military, rule. The Founders enshrined these principles in our

Constitution-

that a government should be accountable to its people, guided by the rule of law,

and one of civil authority, not military rule.

3. President Trump has repeatedly invoked emergency powers to exceed the bounds of lawful executive authority. On Saturday, June 7, he used a protest that local authorities had under control to make another unprecedented power grab, this time at the cost of the sovereignty of the State of California and in disregard of the authority and role of the Governor as commander-in- chief of the State’s National Guard.
4. The vehicle the President has sought to invoke for this unprecedented usurpation of state authority and resources is a statute, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, that has been invoked on its own only once before and for highly unusual circumstances not presented here. Invoking this statute, the President issued a Memorandum on June 7, 2025 (Trump Memo), “call[ing] into Federal service members and units of the National Guard.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth, in turn, issued a Memorandum (DOD Order) that same day to the Adjutant General of California, ordering 2,000 California National Guard members into federal service. And on June 9, 2025, Secretary Hegseth 22 issued another Memorandum (June 9 DOD Order) ordering an additional 2,000 California

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National Guard members into federal service.

5. These orders were issued despite the text of section 12406, which, among other things, requires that when the President calls members of a State National Guard into federal
service pursuant to that statute, those orders “shall be issued through the governors of the States.” 10 U.S.C. § 12406. Instead, Secretary Hegseth unlawfully bypassed the Governor of California, issuing an order that by statute must go through him.

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COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF

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