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Video New Orleans terror attack suspect made videos before the deadly rampage: Sources
New Orleans terror attack suspect made videos before the deadly rampage: Sources
Sources tell ABC News that around 1 a.m. on New Year’s Day, suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar made multiple videos in the rented pickup truck before the deadly terror attack in New Orleans.
January 5, 2025
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Live news: Death toll from Tibet earthquake rises to 53
Indonesia has been accepted as a full member of the Brics group of emerging economies, according to a statement from Brazil, the bloc’s presiding nation.
The statement said Indonesia “shares with other . . . members the support for the reform of the global governance institutions and contributes significantly to the deepening of Global South cooperation”.
Brics leaders endorsed Indonesia’s candidacy in August 2023, but Jakarta formally notified its interest in joining the group only after President Prabowo Subianto came to power in October.
The bloc was initially made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but has expanded in recent years.
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Rudy Giuliani is held in contempt of court in $148 million defamation case
NEW YORK — Rudy Giuliani was found in contempt of court Monday for failing to properly respond to requests for information as he turned over assets to satisfy a $148 million defamation judgment granted to two Georgia election workers.
Judge Lewis J. Liman ruled after hearing Giuliani testify for a second day at a contempt hearing called after lawyers for the election workers said the former New York City mayor had failed to properly comply with requests for evidence over the last few months.
Liman said Giuliani “willfully violated a clear and unambiguous order of this court” when he “blew past” a Dec. 20 deadline to turn over evidence that would help the judge decide at a trial later this month whether Giuliani can keep a Palm Beach, Florida, condominium as his residence or must turn it over because it is deemed a vacation home.
Because Giuliani failed to reveal the full names of his doctors, a complete list of them, or of his other professional services providers, the judge said he will conclude at trial that none of them were in Florida or had been changed after Jan. 1, 2024. That was the date Giuliani says he established Palm Beach as his permanent residence.
Liman also excluded Giuliani from offering testimony about emails or text messages to establish that his homestead was in Florida.
The judge said Giuliani produced only a dozen and a half “cherry picked” documents and no phone records, emails or texts related to his homestead. He said he can also make inferences during the trial about “gaps” in evidence that resulted from Giuliani’s failure to turn over materials.
Liman said he would withhold judgment on other possible sanctions.
On Friday, Giuliani testified for about three hours in Liman’s Manhattan courtroom, but the judge permitted him to finish testifying remotely on Monday for over two hours from his Palm Beach condominium. By the time the judge issued his oral ruling, Giuliani was no longer present at all.
Joseph Cammarata, Giuliani’s attorney, noted in an email afterward that the election workers were not in the courtroom either and he called the outcome “no surprise.”
“This case is about lawfare and the weaponization of the legal system in New York City,” he said.
Cammarata said the state criminal case against President-elect Donald Trump and the civil litigation against Giuliani were “very similar. It’s the left wing Democrats trying to use liberal Judges in New York to win when they should lose on the merits.”
At the start of the hearing, Giuliani appeared before an American flag backdrop, which he said he uses for a program he conducts over the internet, but the judge told him to change it to a plain background. He also at one point held up his grandfather’s heirloom pocket watch and said he was ready to relinquish.
Giuliani conceded that he sometimes did not turn over everything requested in the case because he believed what was being sought was overly broad, inappropriate or even a “trap” set by lawyers for the plaintiffs.
He also said he sometimes had trouble turning over information regarding his assets because of numerous criminal and civil court cases requiring him to produce factual information.
Liman labeled one of Giuliani’s claims “preposterous” and said that being suspicious of the intent of lawyers for the election workers was “not an excuse for violating court orders.”
Giuliani, 80, said the demands made it “impossible to function in an official way” about 30% to 40% of the time.
After the ruling, the former mayor issued a statement through his publicist saying it was “tragic to watch as our justice system has been turned into a total mockery, where we have charades instead of actual hearings and trials.”
The election workers’ lawyers say Giuliani has displayed a “consistent pattern of willful defiance” of Liman’s October order to give up assets after he was found liable in 2023 for defaming their clients by falsely accusing them of tampering with ballots during the 2020 presidential election.
They said in court papers that Giuliani has turned over a Mercedes-Benz and his New York apartment, but not the paperwork necessary to monetize the assets. And they said he has failed to surrender watches and sports memorabilia, including a Joe DiMaggio jersey, and has not turned over “a single dollar from his nonexempt cash accounts.”
Giuliani said Monday that he was investigating what happened to the DiMaggio jersey and that he currently doesn’t know where it is or who has it.
Aaron Nathan, a lawyer for the election workers, declined to comment after Monday’s ruling.
The trial over whether Giuliani must surrender his Florida condominium and World Series rings is set for Jan. 16.
His lawyers have predicted that he will eventually win back custody of his personal items on appeal.
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Minneapolis Promises Police Overhaul in Deal With Justice Department
The Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted on Monday to overhaul its police department to address a pattern of systemic abuses, as part of an agreement with the Department of Justice.
Lawyers from the Department of Justice and the city, where George Floyd was killed in 2020 by a police officer, have raced in recent weeks to finalize terms of the deal, known as a consent decree, before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office. The previous Trump administration opposed the use of consent decrees, and the fate of nearly a dozen other federal investigations into American police departments is uncertain.
Under the deal approved on Monday, the Minneapolis department promised to closely track and investigate allegations of police misconduct, rein in the use of force, and improve officer training.
“This agreement reflects what our community has asked for and what we know is necessary: real accountability and meaningful change,” Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said in a statement.
Federal oversight, the strongest tool available to overhaul police departments with histories of abuse, begins with an exhaustive civil rights investigation and a report of findings. Cities then usually agree to negotiate a consent decree, a court-enforced oversight agreement, in order to avoid a federal lawsuit.
The Minneapolis decree was set in motion in the summer of 2023 after the Department of Justice issued a report accusing the city’s police department of routinely discriminating against Black and Native American residents, of needlessly using deadly force and of violating the First Amendment rights of protesters and journalists. The Minneapolis police union did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
City officials and lawyers from the Justice Department said they intended to present the deal to a federal judge, who will be responsible for overseeing its implementation.
During Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House, the Justice Department rejected such decrees, coming out in opposition to deals in Chicago and Baltimore and refraining from entering new ones. More recently, during a campaign rally last year, Mr. Trump said that in order to crack down on crime, the police should be allowed to be “extraordinarily rough,” and he spoke about the possibility of letting officers loose from constraints during “one really violent day.”
Officials in Minneapolis said they would remain committed to lasting change in the city’s police department, even if the Trump administration were to walk away from federal consent decrees. Several months before the Department of Justice report was issued, the city agreed to a policing overhaul as part of an agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.
Minneapolis set aside $27 million in its 2024 and 2025 budgets to pay for changes in response to the state and federal investigations. The city also paid $27 million to Mr. Floyd’s family in 2021 to settle their wrongful death lawsuit.
Consent decrees were pursued aggressively under President Barack Obama, whose administration entered into 15 of the decrees in a time of a growing public outcry over police abuses.
After Mr. Trump’s administration steered away from such decrees, the Justice Department under the Biden administration sought to bring them back, launching a dozen civil rights investigations into police departments.
But the Biden administration has been slow to bring those efforts to a resolution, in some cases letting years elapse. The Justice Department’s civil rights division has released a flurry of investigative findings in recent weeks, covering cities like Memphis, where the department found excessive force and racial discrimination; Mount Vernon, N.Y., where it found illegal arrests and strip searches; and Oklahoma City, where it found chronic mistreatment of people with behavioral disabilities by the police.
Some cities, like Memphis and Phoenix, which was the subject of an investigation after an extraordinarily high number of shootings by the police, have balked at entering into oversight agreements. The agreements usually call for changes in a number of aspects of a police department’s operations, training, policies and discipline, and can take a decade to complete.
The Biden administration is currently enforcing 15 consent decrees reached under previous administrations, but has completed only one other new one besides Minneapolis, in Louisville, Ky.
Those agreements and the department’s remaining investigations will be handed over to the Trump administration.
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
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