Kerr took the stage on the first night of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, an arena he is familiar with from his time playing with the Bulls, and addressed a crowd of approximately 26,000-plus attendees and millions watching from home, endorsing current Vice President Kamala Harris for president in the 2024 election while channeling Steph Curry’s viral “night night” celebration in speaking out against former President Donald Trump.

The Warriors coach joined “The Dan Le Batard” show on Tuesday, where he was asked about the opportunity to speak at the convention and his nerves leading up to it.

“Yeah, that was an interesting experience,” Kerr said. “They asked me to do it a couple days before I went on and I really gave it a lot of thought because I knew I was going to take a lot of heat for it. But I wanted to make sure I got the right message across, what was most important to me. After thinking about it I realized ‘Hey, they asked me for a reason. They think it matters that I speak my mind.” And so I decided to do it and it was very nerve-wracking and I’m glad I did it. Met a lot of great people, there’s a lot of great energy in the building. It was a lot of fun to be a part of.”

Kerr received some criticism for his appearance but the feedback overall for his speech was positive as he aimed to convey a message of unity in a divided political climate.

“I got some emails. But generally speaking, the vast majority of people who contacted me were very supportive,” Kerr shared. “I wanted to make sure my message was one of unity, especially coming off the Olympic gold medal performance by the team in Paris.

“I just think the political rhetoric, really the national rhetoric on a lot of platforms is just so ugly these days and divisive and I just wanted to make sure my message was a reminder to people that when we come together in a lot of different ways we can accomplish a lot. I think it applies to sports, it applies to our country too and we need to come together.”

Despite playing in numerous NBA Finals games, including Game 6 of the 1997 series where he hit the game-winning shot to deliver the Bulls their second of three consecutive titles, Kerr felt out of place in a different kind of arena.

“I just felt like a fish out of water because it was such a different realm for me,” Kerr explained. “I’m used to game nerves and those actually feel good. Competing in sports is so much fun because you have to lay it on the line and you do everything you can to win but you kind of know you’re going to lose your fair share.

“There’s going to be nights where you lose sleep because of decisions you made, backfired, all that kind of stuff … but the political spectrum is different, the setting was different. Having teleprompters on either side of me, addressing the crowd, knowing there were millions of people watching on TV. It was definitely nerve-wracking.”

Kerr cherished the opportunity and appreciated the chance to convey his message to such a large audience but certainly is looking forward to returning to the arena he is far more comfortable in.

The Iran-backed militant group blamed Israel for the deadly explosions, which targeted an extraordinary breadth of people and showed signs of being a long-planned operation. How the attack was executed is largely uncertain and investigators have not immediately said how the pagers were detonated. The Israeli military has declined to comment.

Here’s what we know so far.

Why were pagers used in the attack?

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying they could be used by Israel to track the group’s movements. As a result, the organization uses pagers to communicate.

A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the exploded devices were from a new brand the group had not used before. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, did not identify the brand name or supplier.

Nicholas Reese, adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies, explains smart phones carry a higher risk for intercepted communications in contrast to the more simple technology of pagers.

This type of attack will also force Hezbollah to change their communication strategies, said Reese, who previously worked as an intelligence officer, adding that survivors of Tuesday’s explosions are likely to throw away “not just their pagers, but their phones, and leaving their tablets or any other electronic devices.”

How could sabotage cause these pagers to explode?

With little disclosed from investigators so far, multiple theories have emerged Tuesday around how the attack might have been carried out. Several experts who spoke with The Associated Press suggest that the explosions were most likely the result of supply-chain interference.

Very small explosive devices may have been built into the pagers prior to their delivery to Hezbollah, and then all remotely triggered simultaneously, possibly with a radio signal.

By the time of the attack, “the battery was probably half-explosive and half-actual battery,” said Carlos Perez, director of security intelligence at TrustedSec.

A former British Army bomb disposal officer explained that an explosive device has five main components: A container, a battery, a triggering device, a detonator and an explosive charge.

“A pager has three of those already,” explained the ex-officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he now works as a consultant with clients on the Middle East. “You would only need to add the detonator and the charge.”

After security camera footage appeared on social media Tuesday purporting to show one of the pagers explode on a man’s hip in a Lebanese market, two munitions experts also said that the blast appeared to be the result of a tiny explosive device.

“Looking at the video, the size of the detonation is similar to that caused by an electric detonator alone or one that incorporates an extremely small, high-explosive charge,” said Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordinance disposal expert.

This signals involvement of a state actor, Moorhouse said. He adds that Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, is the most obvious suspect to have the resources to carry out such an attack.

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an expert in military arms who is director of the Australian-based Armament Research Services, agreed that the scale and sophistication of the attack “almost certainly points to a state actor,” and that Israel had been accused of carrying out such operations in the past. Last year, AP reported that Iran accused Israel of trying to sabotage its ballistic missile program through faulty foreign parts that could explode, damaging or destroying the weapons before they could be used.

How long was this operation?

It would take a long time to plan an attack of this scale. The exact specifics are still unknown, but experts who spoke with the AP shared estimates ranging anywhere between several months to two years.

The sophistication of the attack suggests that whoever is behind it has been collecting intelligence for a long time, Reese explained. An attack of this caliber requires building the relationships needed to gain physical access to the pagers before they were sold; developing the technology that would be embedded in the devices; and developing sources who can confirm that the targets were carrying the pagers.

And it’s likely the compromised pagers seemed normal to their users for some time before the attack. Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based veteran and a senior political risk analyst with over 37 years experience in the region, said he has had conversations with members of Hezbollah and survivors of Tuesday’s pager attack. He said the pagers were procured more than six months ago.

“The pagers functioned perfectly for six months,” Magnier said. What triggered the explosion, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices.

Based on his conversations with Hezbollah members, Magnier also said that many pagers didn’t go off, allowing the group to inspect them. They came to the conclusion that between 3 to 5 grams of a highly explosive material were concealed or embedded in the circuitry, he said.

What else could have happened?

Another possibility is that malware could have been inserted into the operating system of the pagers — somehow causing the device batteries to all overload at a specific time, causing them to burst into flame.

According to a Hezbollah official and Lebanese security officials, the pagers first heated up and then exploded in the pockets, or the hands, of those carrying them Tuesday afternoon.

These pagers run on lithium ion batteries, the Hezboolah official said, claiming the devices exploded as the result of being targeted from an Israeli “security operation,” without elaborating further.

When overheated, lithium ion batteries can smoke, melt and even catch on fire. Rechargeable lithium batteries are used in consumer products ranging from cellphones and laptops to electric cars. Lithium battery fires can burn up to 590 C (1,100 F).

Still, Moorhouse and others noted that images and video footage seen Tuesday more strongly resembled the detonation of small explosive charge, not an overheating battery.

“A lithium ion battery fire is one thing, but I’ve never seen one explode like that. It looks like a small explosive charge,” said Alex Plitsas, a weapons expert at the Atlantic Council.

Among those pointing to the likelihood of a supply chain attack is Jenzen-Jones, who adds that “such a large-scale operation also raises questions of targeting” — stressing the number of causalities and enormous impact reported so far.

“How can the party initiating the explosive be sure that a target’s child, for example, is not playing with the pager at the time it functions?” he said.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

“It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said during a news conference at City Hall on Tuesday.

NBC News reported on Sunday that Trump planned to visit the city “soon,” according to a source familiar with the former president’s planning, after amplifying during a presidential debate a baseless claim that had circulated in right-wing spheres online for weeks, saying Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs” and cats of local residents.

Officials in Springfield have said the allegations were meritless, with city police issuing a statement that said there were “no credible reports” of pets being harmed by Haitian immigrants.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, had also panned the claims as “garbage” and visited Springfield Tuesday as the city responds to dozens of bomb threats, deemed hoaxes that have led to temporary closures and evacuations of schools and city buildings.

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DeWine said that a campaign visit from a presidential candidate is “generally very, very welcomed,” but acknowledged that it would pose challenges.

“I have to state the reality though that resources are really, really stretched here,” DeWine said.

DeWine said he hasn’t spoken to Trump or Vance and hasn’t heard about the candidates potentially visiting Springfield.

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday afternoon.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee who has also spread the false claims about pets in Springfield, told reporters on Tuesday that he hasn’t made plans to visit the city.

Asked on Tuesday whether he would be joining the former president on the trip or if he had his own travel plans, Vance said a trip had not been formalized, but safety would be a top concern.

“I haven’t made plans to go just in the last few days,” Vance said. “I know the president would like to go but also hasn’t made any explicit plans.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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“It’s a crying shame. Literally,” Harris said in her most extensive remarks to date about her Republican opponent’s baseless claims.

“I know that people are deeply troubled by what is happening to that community in Springfield, Ohio, and it’s got to stop,” she said during a discussion hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists.

Follow live campaign coverage here

The city has been hit with dozens of bomb threats, some at elementary schools, after Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, promoted false rumors that immigrants were eating residents’ pet dogs and cats.

“I mean, my heart breaks for this community. You know there were children, elementary school children,” who had to be evacuated on what was supposed to be school picture day, Harris said.

 “A whole community put in fear,” she added.

During last week’s presidential debate, which was viewed by more than 67 million people, Trump said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Harris said of Trump on Tuesday, “When you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand how much your words have meaning.”

“You say you care about law enforcement? Law enforcement resources being put into this because of these serious threats,” Harris said.

“The American people deserve and, I do believe, want better than this,” she added.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Harris’ remarks.

Vance, speaking at an event in Michigan, said he and Trump are not to blame for the threats to Springfield.

“The governor of Ohio came out yesterday and said every single one of those bomb threats was a hoax, and all of those bomb threats came from foreign countries. So the American media for three days has been lying and saying that Donald Trump and I are inciting bomb threats when, in reality, the American media has been laundering for this information. It is disgusting,” he said Tuesday.

In his statement Monday, Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said that “many of these threats are coming from overseas,” but he did not say all of them originated abroad. He also announced he was deploying dozens of state troopers to help sweep schools.

DeWine was in Springfield on Tuesday and visited elementary school students accompanied by a therapy dog.

In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, DeWine said the immigrants in Springfield are there legally, that there is no evidence that they have been eating pets and that the conspiracy theories were “garbage.”

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, told reporters Tuesday that school attendance is down and that “there’s a high level of fear in our community,” which has been plagued by threats to government offices, as well.

“We did not have threats seven days ago,” Rue said, referring to the Sept. 10 presidential debate, at which Trump amplified the baseless claims.

“We need those on the national stage to stop this and tell the truth,” he said.

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On Sept. 17, Taco Bell and the team at National Day Calendar announced their joint decision to move National Taco Day from Oct. 4 to the first Tuesday in October … annually.

Before the shift, the holiday only fell on a Tuesday roughly once every five or six years, a representative from Taco Bell tells TODAY.com. And that seemed anything but festive.

Even fans on social media have complained about the clear oversight.

“To right this wrong, Taco Bell has worked tirelessly with the powers that be, in this case National Day Calendar, to move the National Taco Day recognition to fall solely on Tuesdays henceforth,” the chain said in a press release.

In honor of the occasion, the fast-food giant is dropping deals each Tuesday throughout October. Representatives from Taco Bell say fans can stay up to date on the drops by signing up for the chain’s rewards program and keeping a close eye on its social media pages.

According to journalist Gustavo Arellano, National Taco Day has a much richer history than just showing up one day among other deal- and discount-centric food holidays.

The columnist and author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America” traced the day back to San Antonio, Texas, in the 1960s. While the initial celebratory season was reportedly in early May, fans saw it shift into October in the late 2000s, the chain wrote in a press release.

This is just the latest update in Taco Bell’s crusade to spread the tastiness of Taco Tuesday.

On Oct. 24, 2023, the day-of-the-week phrase officially became free to use after the chain had worked to petition the reversal of trademarks held by two restaurants — the trademarks made its use a violation for participants across all 50 states.

“When we set out to free Taco Tuesday, we did it for all who make, sell, eat and celebrate tacos,” Taco Bell’s then-incoming CEO, Sean Tresvant, said in a press release at the time.

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Robert Cole Parmalee, 40, posted statements on TikTok and sent emails to University of Connecticut officials that showed an infatuation with Bueckers and included threats, police said.

Parmalee, whose last known addresses were in Grants Pass, Oregon, and Ritzville, Washington, was ordered detained on $100,000 bail Monday after being arraigned on the charges in the courthouse in Rockville, Connecticut. He was also ordered to stay away from a person named in court as “P.B.” and banned from the UConn campus in Storrs.

His public defender did not immediately return an email seeking comment Tuesday.

Parmalee was initially arrested on Aug. 27 while walking along a highway near Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. He told a state trooper that he had just flown in from the Pacific Northwest and was on his way to see Bueckers at UConn, the police reports said, adding he was found with a ring and lingerie.

The trooper took Parmalee into custody when he learned there was an arrest warrant out of Josephine County, Oregon, accusing Parmalee of setting a home on fire with roommates and pets inside, police said.

Parmalee had posted photos, videos and comments about Bueckers on TikTok and other social media platforms and had been emailing UConn officials since June with rambling comments including his desire to marry Bueckers, police said. The postings and emails initially did not warrant criminal charges, but his comments became alarming over time, the reports said.

An arrest warrant affidavit redacts the name of the UConn student at whom Parmalee’s posts were directed and names her only as “V1,” but says Parmalee posted on social media about his desire to marry V1.

“Parmalee has shown a continual, escalating behavior and directed effort to make electronic postings about V1 and threats against those close with V1 which has caused emotional distress over the past two weeks for V1,” a UConn police officer wrote in the affidavit dated Friday.

V1 told police that she discovered that Parmalee had been sending various videos to her Instagram direct messages since February, but they were not threatening. She said she did not respond to the messages. She said she became concerned for the safety of herself, her family and her teammates after learning of Parmalee’s arrest near the airport.

In a TikTok posting reviewed by The Associated Press, Parmalee referred to a photo of Bueckers and an unnamed man, writing, “This is worth it for this guy, huh? … this is just one guy, I’ll sacrifice him, no problems, no questions asked.” The police reports mention that post and refer to V1.

In another post, he talked about bringing V1 flowers and finding her mother’s home, police said. He also wrote in a different post that if he cannot live with the woman of his choosing — referring to V1 — then, “I will choose to die, and I will choose to take all of you that pose me, oppose us, to hell.” He also tells V1 that “if you allow them to touch you, you allow them to die,” according to the police reports.

In a TikTok post before he arrived in Connecticut, Parmalee wrote, “I’m coming to UCONN Paige Madison Bueckers, I’ll be in Hartford tomorrow morning,” and included a photo of himself with airline tickets at an airport.

Parmalee was initially detained on the arson warrant out of Oregon before being charged with felony stalking and misdemeanor harassment and breach of peace by UConn police.

The police reports say Parmalee has a criminal history dating back to 2002 that includes arrests for misdemeanor sexual abuse, harassment, burglary, driving under the influence and possession of methamphetamine. Police officials in Oregon told Connecticut authorities they had no information related to mental health calls associated with Parmalee.

The tax preparation company came in No. 1 for employee wellbeing, according to the 2024 Work Wellbeing 100 from Indeed and the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre.

The index ranks the top 100 publicly traded U.S. companies where employees reported high levels of happiness, purpose, satisfaction, and low stress when prompted to take a survey while leaving a review of their employer on Indeed. And those high marks could be driving better business performance.

Indeed’s ranking found that companies with higher work wellbeing scores also have higher valuations, returns on assets and profits. Collectively, the companies on the list outperform stock market indexes including the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite, according to the report.

The most prevalent industries on the list were retail, which appeared 23 times, and transportation, which was noted 14 times. 

“A lot of these companies tend to prioritize work flexibility,” says Kyle M.K., a talent strategy advisor at Indeed. Those policies allow employees to choose where, how and when they work, “giving them the option to go to doctor’s appointments or soccer games or work from home if that’s easier for them.”

At a time when large firms are changing their policies and pushing workers to come into the office as many as five days per week, the Indeed report suggests that companies refraining from stricter mandates are winning favor among recruits.

“Companies that provide choice are the ones that tend to have a much better reputation among their employees,” M.K. says.

Leading the pack, H&R Block operates a hybrid workplace, with 42% of corporate staff working remotely full-time, the company’s chief people officer told Human Resource Executive recently.

These are the top 20 employers on the list:

1. H&R Block
2. Delta Air Lines
3. L3Harris
4. Accenture
5. Nike
6. Tradesmen International
7. Disney Parks, Experiences and Products
8. Addus HomeCare
9. IBM
10. Amazon Flex
11. Apple
12. The Walt Disney Company
13. Wipro
14. Maximus
15. Vans
16. Cognizant Technology Solutions
17. Google
18. Dutch Bros Coffee
19. Microsoft
20. FedEx Freight

A majority of job seekers want to work for companies that care about their feelings at work, according to M.K., and Indeed’s list spotlights the firms they may want to consider prioritizing in their job search.

“While work wellbeing has faced challenges in recent years, it’s more important than ever for companies to create environments where employees can truly thrive,” LaFawn Davis, Indeed’s chief people and sustainability officer, said in a statement. “By prioritizing work wellbeing, companies cultivate a more resilient, effective and happier workforce which ultimately drives business growth.”

M.K. encourages job applicants to take stock of their values when making decisions about where they will work, adding that it will help them find companies that are aligned with their “intrinsic motivations” and where they can perform well.

“We believe that everyone has the right to thrive at work and deserve[s] a workplace that takes care of them,” he says.

Want to master your money this fall? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course. We’ll teach you practical strategies to hack your budget, reduce your debt, and grow your wealth. Start today to feel more confident and successful. Use code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off, now extended through September 30, 2024, for the back-to-school season.

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Chiles, with the support of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and USA Gymnastics, filed a new appeal Monday with the Swiss Federal Tribunal asking to overturn the controversial ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport that stripped her of her third-place finish in the floor routine at the Paris Games.

As part of the filing, Chiles also submitted new video that was taken by a Netflix documentary team filming Simone Biles inside Bercy Arena during the 2024 Paris Olympics.

In the new filing, Chiles’ lawyers accuse the court violating her “right to be heard” by refusing to consider video evidence that USA Gymnastics says proves the inquiry was submitted on time.

In the new video, Chiles’ coach Cecile Landi can be heard requesting a challenge to her score at a time stamp of 47 seconds after the score was first announced. She then repeats the request again at 55 seconds, both within the one-minute time limit.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport, following a hearing requested by Romanian officials, ruled Landi’s appeal came 4 seconds beyond the 1-minute time limit for scoring inquiries and recommended the initial finishing order be restored. The International Gymnastics Federation complied and the International Olympic Committee ended up awarding bronze to Romanian Ana Barbosu on Aug. 16.

“There’s now video proof, video evidence that shows the inquiry was submitted in time,” USA TODAY sports columnist Nancy Armour said on NBC’s “TODAY” show. “So I don’t know how anyone in good conscience could say ‘sorry, you’re not the bronze medalist.”

The video footage was provided by director Katie Walsh and Religion of Sports, the production company that received special permission to film Biles inside the Olympic arena as part of “Simone Biles: Rising,” USA TODAY reports.

Chiles’ appeal also argues that Hamid G. Gharavi, president of the CAS panel, has a conflict of interest due to past legal ties to Romania.

USA Gymnastics wrote in a statement Monday night that it made a “collective, strategic decision to have Jordan lead the initial filing. USAG is closely coordinating with Jordan and her legal team and will make supportive filings with the court in the continued pursuit of justice for Jordan.”

The appeal is the next step in what could be a months- or years-long legal battle over the gymnastics scores.

Chiles was last among the eight women to compete during the floor exercise finals initially given a score of 13.666 that placed her fifth, right behind Barbosu and fellow Romanian Sabrina Maneca-Voinea. Landi called for an inquiry on Chiles’ score.

“At this point, we had nothing to lose, so I was like ‘We’re just going to try,’” Landi said after the awards ceremony. “I honestly didn’t think it was going to happen, but when I heard her scream, I turned around and was like ‘What?’”

Judges awarded the appeal, leapfrogging Chiles past Barbosu and Maneca-Voinea for the last spot on the podium.

Romanian officials appealed to CAS on several fronts while also asking a bronze medal be awarded to Chiles, Barbosu and Maneca-Voinea. The FIG and the IOC ultimately gave the bronze to Barbosu, who beat her teammate on a tiebreaker because she produced a higher execution score during her routine.

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In her first public interview last week, Chiles became emotional as she shared her thoughts on the controversy.

“The biggest thing that was taken from me was,” Chiles began at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit on Wednesday, “that it was the recognition of who I was. Not just my sport, but the person I am.”

The 23-year-old explained she felt that “everything that has gone on is not about the medal, it’s about my skin color. It’s about the fact that there were things that have led up to this position of being an athlete. And I felt like everything has been stripped.”

And despite knowing she was surrounded by so much love and support, it was hard for the Olympian to appreciate it all in the early days of the decision.

“I can feel it now,” she continued, “but at first it was really hard to really take that in because of how badly my heart was broken.”

This is one of them: Drinking several cups of caffeinated coffee or tea a day may protect against Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, NBC reports.

The findings, published Tuesday in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, add to existing research suggesting that daily coffee drinkers have better heart health than nondrinkers — provided they don’t drink too much caffeine.

“Caffeine intake at different doses could have different health effects,” the study’s co-lead author Chaofu Ke, an associate professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Soochow University in China, wrote in an email. 

Ke and a group of researchers in China and Sweden analyzed the coffee and tea drinking habits of 188,000 people ages 37 to 73 from the U.K. Biobank, a large database that contains anonymous health information, who had completed questionnaires about their beverage intake over the past 24 hours. They also looked at responses from about 172,000 people who specified that they drank caffeinated coffee or tea. None of them had a history of cardiometabolic disease — defined by a diagnosis of at least two of the three conditions: Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease or stroke — when the study began. 

The researchers followed up with the participants after about 12 years.

Drinking two to three cups of coffee or up to three cups of tea a day was the sweet spot, the researchers found.  

People who consumed about 200 to 300 milligrams of caffeine daily had a lower risk of cardiometabolic disease, compared to people who drank less than 100 mg a day. Coffee drinkers, in particular, had the lowest risk — a nearly 50% reduction — while people who got the 200 to 300 milligrams of caffeine from tea or a mix of both beverages were about 40% less likely to develop cardiometabolic disease. For tea drinkers, cardiometabolic risk decreased the most for those who drank up to three cups daily, but the benefits tapered off after that. 

Even for people who consumed more than 400 mg of caffeine a day — just 4% of the study’s caffeine drinkers — the stimulant didn’t appear to have negative consequences for their cardiometabolic health. 

And among those who did eventually develop cardiometabolic disease, drinking moderate amounts of coffee every day was still associated with lower risk of developing another cardiometabolic disease. 

Moderate caffeine intake was also associated with certain metabolites — compounds produced when the body digests foods and drinks — that are linked to better heart health.

“Moderate caffeine intake may regulate levels of these metabolites,” Ke said. 

Dr. Luke Laffin, co-director of the Center for Blood Pressure Disorders at Cleveland Clinic, said that the findings need to be taken in context.

“It can give us an idea, but we can’t draw any conclusions,” said Laffin, who wasn’t involved with the research. “Everything in moderation is probably the best way to do it. If someone is having a couple cups of coffee a day, this suggests that dose might be protective.”

However, some types of heart disease can make caffeine intake more dangerous, he said. 

“Too many cups of coffee can raise blood pressure in someone who already has hypertension,” Laffin said. 

Studies have also shown a link between high caffeine intake and a greater risk of dementia and stroke. Other studies have shown positive links between caffeine and kidney health, Type 2 diabetes and heart failure. 

Dr. Stephen Kopecky, a preventative cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said that, in addition to a person’s underlying health issues, the way a person consumes caffeine likely makes a big difference in how it affects their health. 

“The message I don’t want to get out there is that caffeine is good, so let’s take more of it. We have never found that taking what is good in the diet and putting it in a pill is equally beneficial,” Kopecky said. 

An important caveat of the study is that it only included people who regularly drank coffee or green or black tea, all of which contain hundreds or thousands of chemical compounds, only one of them being caffeine. 

“It’s likely all of these components that have an impact, but they have to be together,” Kopecky said.

Although the researchers did adjust for some heart disease factors, such as smoking, obesity, exercise and diet, a lot remains unknown about what other habits they may have in addition to drinking caffeine, which could affect their risk. 

“It’s hard to do a study that controls for everything,” Laffin said, adding that a daily cup of coffee is just fine for most people. 

Kopecky agreed, adding that consuming caffeine in energy drinks, which often have added sugar, artificial sweeteners and other additives, or caffeine shots, is definitely something to avoid. 

And when it comes to tea and coffee, keep it simple. 

“People need to be scrupulous about what else is in their coffee aside from caffeine,” Laffin said. 

“If you are going to your favorite coffee shop and ordering a coffee with whipped cream and sugary syrup, you’re consuming a lot of calories, which can contribute to cardiometabolic disease.”

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Sean “Diddy” Combs pleaded not guilty in court Tuesday to federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges. An indictment says the music mogul “engaged in a persistent and pervasive pattern of abuse toward women and other individuals.”

Combs was arrested late Monday in Manhattan, roughly six months after federal authorities conducting a sex trafficking investigation raided his luxurious homes in Los Angeles and Miami. Read the indictment.

Over the past year, Combs has been sued by people who say he subjected them to physical or sexual abuse. He has denied many of those allegations, and his lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said outside the courthouse Tuesday morning that Combs, 54, would plead not guilty and that he would “fight like hell” to get his client released from custody.

Here is the latest:

Combs held without bail

After Combs pleaded not guilty to the three federal charges he faces, the judge denied him bail, ordering the entertainment star be sent to jail while awaiting trial.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky announced the decision Tuesday after hearing lengthy arguments from prosecutors and Combs’ lawyers. His attorneys proposed that he be released on a $50 million bond to home detention with electronic monitoring, but the judge sided with prosecutors who argued that Combs not only posed a safety risk to the community, but also that he was a flight risk because of his wealth.

Combs showed few expressions and little emotion during the plea hearing, appearing solemn in a black T-shirt, sweatpants and Air Jordan sneakers. At least three of his sons and eight family members were in the courtroom for the hearing.

Prosecutors argue in court that Combs should remain jailed

Federal prosecutors have asked that Combs be jailed without bail, while his attorneys have proposed he be released on a $50 million bond.

In court Tuesday afternoon, Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson said the government is seeking Combs’ detention on “multiple bases,” including the severity of the charges against him and the potential punishment of life in prison. She argued that he is a flight risk and there is a risk of witness intimidation.

“Mr. Combs physically and sexually abused victims for decades,” Johnson said. “He used the vast resources of his company to facilitate his abuse and cover up his crimes. Simply put, he is a serial abuser and a serial obstructor.”

Combs enters a not guilty plea

Sean “Diddy” Combs has pleaded not guilty to federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges.

Combs stood up to enter his plea in a New York courtroom Tuesday. His hands were not cuffed but he held them behind his back.

An indictment unsealed Tuesday alleges Combs presided over a sordid empire of sexual crimes, coercing and abusing women for years while using blackmail and shocking acts of violence to keep his victims in line.

Comb’s attorneys request Diddy’s release on $50M bond

A motion for bail from Combs’ attorneys proposes he be released on a $50 million bond secured by his home in Miami.

The motion filed Tuesday also proposes his detention at home with GPS monitoring, with his travel restricted to federal districts in south Florida and southern New York.

The motion says Combs will turn over his passport and that he is attempting to sell his private jet. It says he has remained in the country even though there were no restrictions on his travel, and that his attorneys have kept authorities updated on his location.

It adds that “conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn are not fit for pre-trial detention.”

Prosecutors describe Combs’ alleged violence, including kidnapping and arson

Prosecutors say Combs repeatedly engaged in violence towards his employees and others.

In a court filing Tuesday, prosecutors say Combs and an unidentified co-conspirator kidnapped someone at gunpoint a few days before Christmas in 2011 in order to facilitate a break-in at another person’s home. They say multiple witnesses, police reports and other records corroborate the incident.

The detention memo also says that two weeks later, Combs’ allies set fire to a vehicle by slicing open its convertible top and dropping a Molotov cocktail inside.

Prosecutors say police and fire department reports document the arson and that multiple witnesses heard Combs brag about his involvement.

Prosecutors say Combs is a flight risk

Prosecutors say Combs should be denied bail because he is a serious flight risk.

In a detention memo filed in court, prosecutors say Combs has “seemingly limitless resources” to flee, pointing out that his net worth is close to $1 billion, including over $1 million in personal cash on hand as of last December.

They said he has had a personal plane for international travel since 2019, along with multiple vehicles in multiple locations.

The letter says Combs “has the money, manpower, and tools” to flee without detection.

Prosecutors urge court to deny Combs bail

Prosecutors say the violence Combs exacted on his victims was so extreme that he should be denied bail.

In a detention letter written for the federal judge overseeing the music mogul’s case, prosecutors described how Combs would assault women, employees and others “by throwing objects at them, choking them, pushing them, kicking them, and slamming them against walls and on to the ground.”

The letter says the violence was sometimes spontaneous and sometimes premeditated, including “resorting to kidnapping and arson when the defendant’s power and control were threatened.”

Prosecutors say Combs’ “disposition to violence cannot be reasonably prevented through bail conditions.”

The letter also says Combs should be denied bail because he has already reached out to potential witnesses in the case and that further attempts at witness tampering are likely.

Prosecutor says Combs was enabled by staff in his alleged crimes

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams says Combs did not act alone.

During a news conference Tuesday, Williams said Combs’ security and household staff, as well as operators high up in the music industry were complicit. Williams says they cleaned up damaged hotel rooms and “delivered large quantities of cash to Combs to pay for the commercial sex workers.”

Williams says the investigation is ongoing, and is urging “anyone with information about this case to come forward and to do it quickly.”

US Attorney says he wants Diddy detained ahead of trial

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, whose office is bringing the case against Sean “Diddy” Combs, says the music mogul led a criminal organization that carried out kidnapping, forced labor and sex trafficking, among other crimes.

Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Williams said authorities will seek to have Combs detained while he awaits trial.

He spoke before a display board showing images of some of the items recovered in searches of Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and Miami in March, including AR-15s and a drum magazine containing dozens of rounds of ammunition. He says agents also seized electronic devices that contain images and videos of sexual encounters.

Williams says: “Combs led and participated in a racketeering conspiracy that used the business empire he controlled to carry out criminal activity, including sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and the obstruction of justice.”

Combs’ lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, has said he will fight to keep his client free. He says Combs is innocent and will plead not guilty.

Cassie Ventura declines to comment on Combs’ indictment

Comb’s former longtime girlfriend, whom he was seen attacking in a March 2016 security video, has declined to comment on the federal case against him.

Douglas Wigdor, an attorney for the singer Cassie Ventura, said in a statement released before Combs was due to appear in court Tuesday that neither he nor his client have anything to say on the matter.

Wigdor says: “We appreciate your understanding and if that changes, we will certainly let you know.”

Ventura reached a settlement with Combs last November, one day after filing a lawsuit containing allegations of beatings and abuse by the music producer.

Combs’ Lawyer says Diddy is innocent

Outside the Manhattan courthouse early Tuesday, Combs’ lawyer, noted that his client came to New York City voluntarily because they knew the charges were coming.

Marc Agnifilo said: “Not a lot of defendants do that. He came to New York to, to basically engage the court system and start the case.”

Though the indictment was not unsealed at the time of his comments, Agnifilo said they know what the charges will be and that Combs is “innocent of these charges.” He vowed to “fight like hell” to get Combs released from federal custody.

Prosecutors say injuries of Combs’ victims sometimes took weeks to heal

The indictment alleges Combs hit, kicked and threw objects at victims, and sometimes dragged them by their hair, causing injuries that often took days or weeks to heal. It says Combs also threw people around, choked and shoved them.

Prosecutors say his employees and associates witnessed his violence and, rather than intervening, helped him cover it up, including by preventing victims from leaving, and locating and contacting victims who attempted to flee.

Authorities say Combs was the head of a criminal enterprise

The indictment describes Combs as the head of a criminal enterprise that engaged or attempted to engage in activities including sex trafficking, forced labor, interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, drug offenses, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.

He’s accused of striking, punching and dragging women on numerous occasions, throwing objects and kicking them, and enlisting his personal assistants, security and household staff to help him hide it all.

The bill includes a requirement that people registering to vote must provide proof of citizenship, which has become a leading election-year priority for Republicans raising the specter of noncitizens voting in the U.S., even though it’s already illegal to do so and research has shown that such voting is rare.

“I urge all of my colleagues to do what the overwhelming majority of the people of this country rightfully demand and deserve — prevent non-American citizens from voting in American elections,” Johnson said Tuesday.

Johnson told reporters he was not ready to discuss an alternative plan to keep the government funded other than what will come before the House on Wednesday.

“I’m not having any alternative conversations. That’s the play. It’s an important one. And I’m going to work around the clock to try and get it done,” Johnson said.

The legislation faces an uphill climb in the House and has no chance in the Senate. The vast majority of Democrats oppose it, and some Republicans do, too, but for different reasons.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the only way to prevent a government shutdown was for both sides to work together on an agreement. He said the House vote announced by Johnson was doomed to fail.

“The only thing that will accomplish is make clear that he’s running into a dead end,” Schumer said. “We must have a bipartisan plan instead.”

The legislation would fund agencies at current levels while lawmakers work out their differences on a full-year spending agreement.

Democrats, and some Republicans, are pushing for a short extension. A temporary fix would allow the current Congress to hammer out a final bill after the election and get it to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature.

But Johnson and some of the more conservative members of his conference are pushing for a six-month extension in the hopes that Republican nominee Donald Trump will win the election and give them more leverage when crafting the full-year bill.

Schumer said a six-month measure would shortchange the Pentagon and other government agencies that need more certainty about funding levels.

“You simply cannot run the military with six-month stopgaps,” Schumer said.

Johnson said last week that he was not giving up on his proposal just yet and would be working through the weekend to build support. He said ensuring that only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections is “the most pressing issue right now and we’re going to get this job done.”

On Sunday, he traveled to Florida to meet with Trump, who had earlier seemingly encouraged a government shutdown if Republicans “don’t get assurances on Election Security.” Trump said on the social media platform Truth Social that they should not go forward with a stopgap bill without such assurances.

The House approved a bill with the proof of citizenship mandate back in July. Some Republicans who view the issue as popular with their constituents have been pushing for another chance to show their support for the measure. Still, other Republicans are expected to vote no because they view the spending in the bill as excessive.

The lawsuit was filed on Monday in Los Angeles federal court by Tempo Music Investments, which says it owns a portion of the copyright to Mars’ song after acquiring co-writer Philip Lawrence’s music catalog. Mars is not named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Co-writers Gregory Hein and Michael Pollack are also named, and Sony Music Publishing, Apple, Target, Walmart, Amazon, Live Nation and other companies are accused for distributing the song.

According to the lawsuit obtained by NBC News, “‘Flowers’ duplicates numerous melodic, harmonic, and lyrical elements of ‘When I Was Your Man,’ including the melodic pitch design and sequence of the verse, the connecting bass-line, certain bars of the chorus, certain theatrical music elements, lyric elements, and specific chord progressions.”

The lawsuit also states that “the opening vocal line from the chorus of ‘Flowers’ begins and ends on the same chords as the opening vocal line in the verse of ‘When I Was Your Man.’ ”

Among other accusations are a comparison of lyrics of the two songs, which the lawsuit suggests are “no coincidence.”

“It is undeniable based on the combination and number of similarities between the two recordings that ‘Flowers’ would not exist without ‘When I Was Your Man,’” the lawsuit states.

Tempo Music Investments is seeking damages to be determined at trial or “the maximum of $150,000 per infringement,” a number that could be astronomical due to record-breaking number of streams. Its also demanding that the listed defendants stop reproducing, distributing or publicly performing “Flowers.”

Representatives for Cyrus and Mars did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.

Released in 2023, “Flowers” was the breakout hit from Cyrus’ eighth studio album “Endless Summer.” It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent eight non-consecutive weeks leading the charts and 57 weeks atop the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. The song also broke a string of records on streaming services, including the Spotify record for reaching 1 billion streams faster than any other song in Spotify history. “Flowers” also holds the record for the most-streamed song in a single week.

Cyrus also won Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance at the 2024 Grammy Awards for “Flowers.”

Read the lawsuit here:

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The indictment unsealed Tuesday alleges Combs hit and abused women for over a decade and presided over an empire of sexual crimes as he “engaged in a persistent and pervasive pattern of abuse toward women and other individuals.”

The indictment details allegations dating to 2008 that he abused, threatened and coerced women for years “to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct.” He is accused of inducing female victims and male sex workers into drugged-up, sometimes dayslong sexual performances dubbed “Freak Offs” in the indictment, which refers obliquely to an attack on his former girlfriend, the the R&B singer Cassie, that was captured on video.

Combs was arrested late Monday in Manhattan, roughly six months after federal authorities conducting a sex trafficking investigation raided his luxurious homes in Los Angeles and on Miami Beach’s exclusive Star Island.

He appeared in court Tuesday afternoon, where a magistrate ordered him to be held without bail. The music mogul pleaded not guilty during the appearance.

“Not guilty,” Combs told a court, standing to speak after listening to the allegations with his uncuffed hands folded in his lap.

Prosecutors wanted him jailed. His attorneys proposed that he be released on a $50 million bond to home detention with electronic monitoring. U.S. Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky sided with the government.

Combs, 54, took a long swig from a water bottle, then was led out of court without handcuffs. As he walked out, he turned toward family members in the audience.

“Mr. Combs is a fighter. He’s going to fight this to the end. He’s innocent,” his lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said after court. As a start, he said he would appeal the bail decision.

Federal prosecutors called him dangerous.

“Mr. Combs physically and sexually abused victims for decades. He used the vast resources of his company to facilitate his abuse and cover up his crimes. Simply put, he is a serial abuser and a serial obstructor,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson told a court. She also said he had “extensive and exhaustive history of obstruction of justice,” including alleged bribery and witness intimidation.

Combs is accused in the indictment of striking, punching and dragging women on numerous occasions, throwing objects and kicking them — and enlisting his personal assistants, security and household staff to help hide it all.

The indictment describes Combs as the head of a criminal enterprise engaged in or attempting to engage in activities including sex trafficking, forced labor, interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, drug offenses, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.

The “Freak Offs” were “elaborate and produced sex performances” that Combs “arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded,” the indictment said. It said he sometimes arranged to fly the women in and ensured their participation by procuring and providing drugs, controlling their careers, leveraging his financial support, and using intimidation and violence.

The events could last for days, and Combs and victims would often receive IV fluids to recover from the exertion and drug use, the indictment said.

During the searches of Combs’ homes in Miami Beach and Los Angeles this year, law enforcement seized narcotics and more than a thousand bottles of baby oil and lubricant, according to the indictment.

Also found were firearms and ammunition, “including three AR-15s with defaced serial numbers, as well as a drum magazine,” the indictment said.

“On more than one occasion, Combs himself carried or brandished firearms to intimidate and threaten others, including victims of and witnesses to his abuse,” the indictment said.

Combs’ lawyer said his client didn’t own the guns at his house, noting that he employs a security company.

As the threat of criminal charges loomed, Combs and his associates pressured witnesses and victims to stay silent, offering bribes and supplying false narratives of what happened, the indictment says.

In a court filing, prosecutors accused Combs and an unidentified co-conspirator of kidnapping someone at gunpoint a few days before Christmas in 2011 in order to facilitate a break-in at another person’s home. Two weeks later, they wrote, Combs set fire to someone’s vehicle by slicing open its convertible top and dropping in a Molotov cocktail.

All of this, prosecutors allege, was happening behind the facade of Combs’ global music, lifestyle and clothing empire.

Combs, 54, was recognized as one of the most influential figures in hip-hop before a flood of allegations that emerged over the past year turned him into an industry pariah.

In November, Cassie, whose legal name is Casandra Ventura, filed a lawsuit saying he had beaten and raped her for years. She accused Combs of coercing her, and others, into unwanted sex in drug-fueled settings.

The suit was settled in one day, but months later, CNN aired hotel security footage showing Combs punching and kicking Ventura and throwing her on a floor. After the video aired, Combs apologized, saying, “I was disgusted when I did it.”

The indictment refers to the attack, without naming Ventura, and says Combs tried to bribe a hotel security staffer to stay mum about it.

Combs and his attorneys denied similar allegations made by others in a string of lawsuits.

Agnifilo acknowledged Combs was “not a perfect person,” saying he’d used drugs and had been in “toxic relationships” but was getting treatment and therapy.

“The evidence in this case is extremely problematic,” the attorney told the court.

He maintained that the case stemmed from one long-term, consensual relationship that faltered amid infidelity. He didn’t name the woman, but the details matched those of Combs’ decade-long involvement with Cassie.

The “Freak Offs,” Agnifilo contended, were an expansion of that relationship, and not coercive.

“Is it sex trafficking? Not if everybody wants to be there,” Agnifilo said, arguing that authorities were intruding on his client’s private life.

Prosecutors, however, said in court papers that they had interviewed more than 50 victims and witnesses and expect the number to grow. They said they would use financial, travel and billing records, electronic data and communications and videos of the “Freak Offs” to prove their case.

Combs nodded his head at times as his lawyer spoke and occasionally leaned over to converse with them when they were not. The impresario watched other parts of the proceeding expressionlessly, looking straight ahead.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams says Combs did not act alone.

During a news conference Tuesday, Williams said Combs’ security and household staff, as well as operators high up in the music industry were complicit. Williams says they cleaned up damaged hotel rooms and “delivered large quantities of cash to Combs to pay for the commercial sex workers.”

“A year ago, Sean Combs stood in Times Square and was handed a key to New York City. Today, he’s been indicted and will face justice,” Williams said.

Combs returned the key in June after Mayor Eric Adams requested it back.

Williams says the investigation is ongoing, and is urging “anyone with information about this case to come forward and to do it quickly.”

A conviction on every charge in the indictment would require a mandatory 15 years in prison with the possibility of a life sentence.

Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Records, has gotten out of legal trouble before.

In 2001, he was acquitted of charges related to a Manhattan nightclub shooting two years earlier that injured three people. His then-protege, Shyne, was convicted of assault and other charges and served about eight years in prison.

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September’s Harvest Moon coincides with a supermoon and partial lunar eclipse, all rolled into one.

The spectacle will be visible in clear skies across North America and South America on Tuesday night and in Africa and Europe Wednesday morning.

The “Harvest Moon” is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox. The name dates back to a time before electricity, when farmers depended on the moon’s light to harvest their crops late into the evening, according to NASA.

A partial lunar eclipse happens when the Earth passes between the sun and moon, casting a shadow that darkens a sliver of the moon and appears to take a bite out of it.

Since the moon will inch closer to Earth than usual, it’ll appear a bit larger in the sky. The supermoon is one of three remaining this year.

“A little bit of the sun’s light is being blocked so the moon will be slightly dimmer,” said Valerie Rapson, an astronomer at the State University of New York at Oneonta.

The Earth, moon and sun line up to produce a solar or lunar eclipse anywhere from four to seven times a year, according to NASA. This lunar eclipse is the second and final of the year after a slight darkening in March.

In April, a total solar eclipse plunged select cities into darkness across North America.

No special eye protection is needed to view a lunar eclipse. Viewers can stare at the moon with the naked eye or opt for binoculars and telescopes to get a closer look.

To spot the moon’s subtle shrinkage over time, hang outside for a few hours or take multiple peeks over the course of the evening, said KaChun Yu, curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

“From one minute to the next, you might not see much happening,” Yu said.

For a more striking lunar sight, skywatchers can set their calendars for March 13. The moon will be totally eclipsed by the Earth’s shadow and will be painted red by stray bits of sunlight filtering through Earth’s atmosphere.

Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The mysterious explosions came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza.

The pagers that blew up had apparently been acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members in February to stop using cellphones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.

At about 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, as people shopped for groceries, sat in cafes or drove cars and motorcycles in the afternoon traffic, the pagers in their hands or pockets started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and panicking bystanders.

It appeared that many of those hit were members of Hezbollah, but it was not immediately clear if others also carried the pagers.

The blasts were mainly in areas where the group has a strong presence, particularly a southern Beirut suburb and in the Beqaa region of eastern Lebanon, as well as in Damascus, according to Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official. The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

The Israeli military declined to comment. The explosions came hours after Israel’s internal security agency said it had foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to kill a former senior Israeli security official using a planted explosive device that could be remotely detonated.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the United States “was not aware of this incident in advance” and was not involved. “At this point, we’re gathering information,” he said.

Experts said the pager explosions pointed to a long-planned operation, possibly carried out by infiltrating the supply chain and rigging the devices with explosives before they were delivered to Lebanon.

Whatever the means, it targeted an extraordinary breadth of people with hundreds of small explosions — wherever the pager carrier happened to be — that left some maimed.

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One online video showed a man picking through produce at a grocery store when the bag he was carrying at his hip explodes, sending him sprawling to the ground and bystanders running.

At overwhelmed hospitals, wounded were rushed in on stretchers, some with missing hands, faces partly blown away or gaping holes at their hips and legs, according to AP photographers. On a main road in central Beirut, a car door was splattered with blood and the windshield cracked.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firas Abiad, told Qatar’s Al Jazeera network at least nine people were killed, including an 8-year-old girl, and some 2,750 were wounded — 200 of them critically — by the explosions. Most had injuries in the face, hand, or around the abdomen.

It appeared eight of the dead belonged to Hezbollah. The group issued a statement confirming at least two members were killed in the pager bombings. One of them was the son of a Hezbollah member in parliament, according to the Hezbollah official who spoke anonymously. The group later issued announcements that six other members were killed Tuesday, though it did not specify how.

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its just punishment.”

Iranian state-run IRNA news agency said that the country’s ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, was superficially wounded by an exploding pager and was being treated at a hospital.

Previously, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying they could be used by Israel to track and target them.

Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordnance disposal expert, said videos of the blasts suggested a small explosive charge — as small as a pencil eraser — had been placed into the devices. They would have had to have been rigged prior to delivery, very likely by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, he said.

Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. What triggered the blasts, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate, forcing the user to click on the buttons to stop the vibration. The combination detonated a small amount of explosives hidden inside and ensured that the user was present when the blast went off, he said.

Israel has a long history of carrying out deadly operations well beyond its borders. This year, separate Israeli airstrikes in Beirut killed Saleh Arouri, a senior Hamas official, and a top Hezbollah commander. A mysterious explosion in Iran, also blamed on Israel, killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ supreme leader.

Israel has killed Hamas militants in the past with booby-trapped cellphones and it’s widely believed to have been behind the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran’s nuclear program in 2010.

The pager bombings also likely stoke Hezbollah’s worries about vulnerabilities in security and communications, as Israeli officials are threatening to escalate their monthslong conflict. The near daily exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah have killed hundreds in Lebanon and several dozen in Israel, and have displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.

Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, deplored the attack and warned that it marks “an extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context.”

On Tuesday, Israel said that halting Hezbollah’s attacks in the north to allow residents to return to their homes is now an official war goal. Israeli Defense Minister Gallant said this week the focus of the conflict is shifting from Gaza to Israel’s north and that time is running out for a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah, saying “the trajectory is clear.”

Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened to take heavier military action to halt the near-daily attacks, which began shortly after the outbreak of the nearly yearlong Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Israel has regularly launched airstrikes on Lebanon in response and has targeted and killed senior Hezbollah commanders.

As recently as last month it appeared a full-blown war was imminent.

Tuesday’s statement by Israel’s security Cabinet signaled a tougher stance at a time when Israeli leaders have stepped up their warnings. But it also appeared to be largely symbolic and may not herald an immediate change in policy.

The tit-for-tat strikes have displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanon border. Hezbollah has said it would halt the attacks if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, but those talks have repeatedly bogged down.

The United States has pressed for restraint even as it has rushed military aid to Israel, warning its close ally that a wider war would not achieve its goals.

Israeli media have meanwhile reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering firing Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and replacing him with Gideon Saar, the leader of a small right-wing party who is seen as more hawkish. That would be the biggest leadership shakeup in Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack triggered the war in Gaza and set off wider regional tensions.

The announcement on Lebanon came after Israel’s security Cabinet met late into the night. It said the Cabinet has “updated the objectives of the war” to include safely returning the residents of the north to their homes.

“Israel will continue to act to implement this objective,” it said.

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U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, who has made several visits to Lebanon and Israel to try to ease tensions, met with Netanyahu on Monday.

Hochstein told Netanyahu that intensifying the conflict with Hezbollah would not help return Israelis evacuated from the border area to their homes, according to a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks.

According to the official, Hochstein argued that Netanyahu risked sparking a broad and protracted regional conflict if he moved forward with a full-scale war in Lebanon and said the Biden administration remained committed to finding a diplomatic solution in conjunction with a Gaza cease-fire or on its own.

Netanyahu told Hochstein that residents cannot return without “a fundamental change in the security situation in the north,” according to a statement from the prime minister’s office. It said that while Netanyahu “appreciates and respects” U.S. support, Israel will “do what is necessary to safeguard its security.”

Defense Minister Gallant has meanwhile said the focus of the conflict is shifting from Gaza to Israel’s north. He told U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week that time is running out for an agreement with Hezbollah, saying “the trajectory is clear.”

Hezbollah has said that while it does not want a wider war it is prepared for one.

Raed Berro, a member of Hezbollah’s bloc in the Lebanese parliament, said Monday that the militant group “is ready for confrontation and has a lot in its pocket to deter the enemy and protect Lebanon in case Netanyahu thinks of expanding the war.”

Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a close political ally of Hezbollah, largely dismissed the warnings, telling a local newspaper that the Lebanese have grown used to the “increasing Israeli threats … even if their tone has become louder recently.”

The war in Gaza began when Hamas launched a surprise attack into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. Militants are still holding around 100 captives, a third of whom are believed to be dead, after releasing most of the rest during a cease-fire last year.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 41,000 Palestinians in the territory since Oct. 7, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between fighters and civilians in its count but says a little over half of those killed were women and children.

Iran supports Hamas, Hezbollah and other militant groups across the region, which have carried out strikes on Israeli and U.S. targets in solidarity with the Palestinians. A missile launched by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Sunday set off air raid sirens in central Israel without causing casualties. Israel has hinted at a military response.

Israel and Iran traded fire directly for the first time in April, and Iran has threatened to avenge the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in an explosion in Tehran in July. The targeted killing was widely blamed on Israel, which has not said whether it was involved.

The U.S., Qatar and Egypt have spent most of this year trying to broker an agreement in which Hamas would release the hostages in exchange for a lasting cease-fire, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

President Joe Biden endorsed the framework of the agreement in May and the U.N. Security Council backed it days later. But since then, both Israel and Hamas have accused each other of making new and unacceptable demands, and the talks appear to be at an impasse.

___

Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani in Washington, and Abby Sewell and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed to this report.

“Today I maintain that, along with the other men here, I am a rapist,″ Dominique Pélicot told the court. “They knew everything. They can’t say otherwise.”

Dominique Pélicot’s testimony is the most important moment so far in a trial that has shocked and gripped France, and raised new awareness about sexual violence. Many also hope his testimony will shed some light — to try to understand the unthinkable.

While he previously confessed to investigators, the court testimony will be crucial for the panel of judges to decide on the fate of some 50 other men standing trial alongside him. Many deny having raped Gisèle Pélicot, saying they were manipulated by her then-husband or claiming they believed she was consenting.

Gisèle Pélicot has become a symbol of the fight against sexual violence in France for agreeing to waive her anonymity in the case, letting the trial be public, and appearing openly in front of the media. She is expected to speak in court after her ex-husband’s testimony on Tuesday.

Under French law, the proceedings inside the courtroom cannot be filmed or photographed. Dominique Pélicot is brought to the court through a special entrance inaccessible for the media, because he and some other defendants are being held in custody during the trial. Defendants who are not in custody come to the trial wearing surgical masks or hoods to avoid having their faces filmed or photographed.

After days of uncertainty due to his medical state, Dominique Pélicot appeared in court Tuesday and told judges he acknowledged all the charges against him.

His much-awaited testimony was delayed by days after he fell ill, suffering from a kidney stone and urinary infection, his lawyers said.

Seated in a wheelchair, Pélicot spoke to the court for an hour, from his early life to years of abuse against his now ex-wife.

Expressing remorse, his voice trembling and at times barely audible, he sought to explain events that he said scarred his childhood and planted the seed of vice in him.

“One is not born a pervert, one becomes a pervert,” Pélicot told judges, after recounting, sometimes in tears, being raped by a male nurse in hospital when he was 9 years old and then being forced to take part in a gang rape at age 14.

Pélicot also spoke of the trauma endured when his parents took a young girl in the family, and witnessing his father’s inappropriate behavior toward her.

“My father used to do the same thing with the little girl,” he said. “After my father’s death, my brother said that men used to come to our house.”

At 14, he said, he asked his mother if he could leave the house, but “she didn’t let me.”

“I don’t really want to talk about this, I am just ashamed of my father. In the end, I didn’t do any better,” he said.

Asked about his feelings toward his wife, Pélicot said she did not deserve what he did.

“From my youth, I remember only shocks and traumas, forgotten partly thanks to her. She did not deserve this, I acknowledge it,” he said in tears.

At that moment, Gisèle Pélicot, standing across the room, facing him across a group of dozens of defendants sitting in between them, put her sunglasses back on.

Later, Dominique Pélicot said, “I was crazy about her. She replaced everything. I ruined everything.”

A security agent caught Pélicot in 2020 filming videos under women’s skirts in a supermarket, according to court documents. Police searched Pélicot’s house and electronic devices, and found thousands of photos and videos of men engaging in sexual acts with Gisèle Pélicot while she appears to lie unconscious on their bed.

With the recordings, police were able to track down a majority of the 72 suspects they were seeking.

Gisèle Pélicot and her husband of 50 years had three children. When they retired, the couple left the Paris region to move into a house in Mazan, a small town in Provence.

When police officers called her in for questioning in late 2020, she initially told them her husband was “a great guy,″ according to legal documents. They then showed her some photos. She left her husband and they are now divorced.

He faces 20 years in prison if convicted. Besides Pélicot, 50 other men, aged 26 to 74, are standing trial.

Bernadette Tessonière, a 69-year-old retiree who lives a half-hour drive from Avignon, where the trial is taking place, arrived outside the courthouse at 7:15 a.m. to make sure she would secure a seat in the closely watched case.

“How is it possible that in 50 years of communal life, one can live next to someone who hides his life so well? This is scary,” she said, while standing in a line outside the courthouse. “I don’t have much hope that what he did can be explained, but he is at least going to give some elements.”

If you or someone you know is a victim of sexual assault, free, confidential help is available through the National Sexual Violence Resources Center and the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office accused Combs of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, among other counts. Read the full indictment below.

His attorney, Marc Agnifilo, said earlier Monday that they were “disappointed with the decision to pursue what we believe is an unjust prosecution,” calling the entertainment star “an imperfect person but is not criminal.”

The former music executive has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) carried out the arrest in Manhattan on Monday, sources familiar with the matter told NBC New York. Combs was arrested in the lobby of a hotel, a representative told NBC News.

“To his credit Mr. Combs has been nothing but cooperative with this investigation and he voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges. Please reserve your judgment until you have all the facts,” the statement from Agnifilo read. “These are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court.”

Celebrity News Sep 11

Former Danity Kane member sues Sean Combs, alleging he groped and threatened her

Music & Musicians Aug 26

Diddy seeks to have producer's lawsuit tossed, says it's full of ‘blatant falsehoods'

Sean "Diddy" Combs Jul 3

Sean Combs is the subject of a federal criminal investigation

Chloe Melas of NBC News contributed to this report.

Instagram is introducing separate teen accounts for those under 18 as it tries to make the platform safer for children amid a growing backlash against how social media affects young people’s lives.

Beginning Tuesday in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, anyone under under 18 who signs up for Instagram will be placed into a teen account and those with existing accounts will be migrated over the next 60 days. Teens in the European Union will see their accounts adjusted later this year.

Meta acknowledges that teenagers may lie about their age and says it will require them to verify their ages in more instances, like if they try to create a new account with an adult birthday. The Menlo Park, California company also said it is building technology that proactively finds teen accounts that pretend to be grownups and automatically places them into the restricted teen accounts.

The teen accounts will be private by default. Private messages are restricted so teens can only receive them from people they follow or are already connected to. “Sensitive content,” such as videos of people fighting or those promoting cosmetic procedures, will be limited, Meta said. Teens will also get notifications if they are on Instagram for more than 60 minutes and a “sleep mode” will be enabled that turns off notifications and sends auto-replies to direct messages from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m.

While these settings will be turned on for all teens, 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to turn them off. Kids under 16 will need their parents’ permission to do so.

“The three concerns we’re hearing from parents are that their teens are seeing content that they don’t want to see or that they’re getting contacted by people they don’t want to be contacted by or that they’re spending too much on the app,” said Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta. “So teen accounts is really focused on addressing those three concerns.”

The announcement comes as the company faces lawsuits from dozens of U.S. states that accuse it of harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

In the past, Meta’s efforts at addressing teen safety and mental health on its platforms have been met with criticism that the changes don’t go far enough. For instance, while kids will get a notification when they’ve spent 60 minutes on the app, they will be able to bypass it and continue scrolling.

That’s unless the child’s parents turn on “parental supervision” mode, where parents can limit teens’ time on Instagram to a specific amount of time, such as 15 minutes.

With the latest changes, Meta is giving parents more options to oversee their kids’ accounts. Those under 16 will need a parent or guardian’s permission to change their settings to less restrictive ones. They can do this by setting up “parental supervision” on their accounts and connecting them to a parent or guardian.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said last week that parents don’t use the parental controls the company has introduced in recent years.

Gleit said she thinks teen accounts will create a “big incentive for parents and teens to set up parental supervision.”

“Parents will be able to see, via the family center, who is messaging their teen and hopefully have a conversation with their teen,” she said. “If there is bullying or harassment happening, parents will have visibility into who their teen’s following, who’s following their teen, who their teen has messaged in the past seven days and hopefully have some of these conversations and help them navigate these really difficult situations online.”

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said last year that tech companies put too much on parents when it comes to keeping children safe on social media.

“We’re asking parents to manage a technology that’s rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage,” Murthy said in May 2023.

Sean “Diddy” Combs, a hip-hop kingmaker and three-time Grammy winner who was arrested in New York City on Monday, has been indicted on federal sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges, according to court papers unsealed in the Southern District of New York on Tuesday. 

According to the indictment, Diddy “abused, threatened and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation and conceal his conduct.”

He allegedly used his media empire as a criminal enterprise, “whose members and associates engaged in and attempted to engage in, among other crimes, sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.”

Combs engaged in a pattern of abuse toward women and other individuals, the indictment alleges. At times, he allegedly manipulated women to participate in highly orchestrated sex performances with male commercial sex workers. He also allegedly made arrangements for women and commercial sex workers to fly to him.

“As alleged, Combs used force, threats of force, and coercion to cause victims to engage in extended sexual performances with male commercial sex workers — some of whom he transported or caused to be transported over state lines,” Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said during a Tuesday press conference. “Combs allegedly planned and controlled the sexual performances which he called ‘freak offs’ and he often electronically recorded them. The ‘freak offs’ sometimes lasted days at a time, involved multiple commercial sex workers and often involved a variety of narcotics, such as ketamine, ecstasy and GHB, which Combs distributed to the victims to keep them obedient and compliant.”

Celebrity News Sep 11

Former Danity Kane member sues Sean Combs, alleging he groped and threatened her

Music & Musicians Aug 26

Diddy seeks to have producer's lawsuit tossed, says it's full of ‘blatant falsehoods'

Sean "Diddy" Combs Jul 3

Sean Combs is the subject of a federal criminal investigation

According to Williams, Combs would threaten and coerce his victims to participate in the “freak offs” and then “used the embarrassing and sensitive recordings he made of the ‘freak offs’ as collateral against the victims.”

Physical abuse also allegedly was rampant, with Williams saying when Diddy didn’t get his way “he was violent.”

“He subjected victims to physical, emotional and verbal abuse so that they would participate in the freak offs. Combs hit, kicked, threw objects at and dragged victims, at times by their hair,” Williams said, adding that the injuries sustained by the victims would last days and sometimes weeks to heal.

Outside court Tuesday, Combs’ attorney Marc Agnifilo said Combs’ team “knew this was coming” and that’s why Diddy was in New York, to surrender to authorities at a time agreeable to the U.S. attorney’s office. He says he anticipates a long legal battle, but he also anticipates a good outcome for Combs. Read the full indictment here.

Agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) carried out the arrest in Manhattan on Monday, sources familiar with the matter told NBC New York. Combs was arrested in the lobby of a hotel, a representative told NBC News.

In a statement released late Monday, Agnifilo said they were “disappointed with the decision to pursue what we believe is an unjust prosecution,” calling the entertainment star “an imperfect person but is not criminal.”

“To his credit, Mr. Combs has been nothing but cooperative with this investigation and he voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges. Please reserve your judgment until you have all the facts,” the statement from Agnifilo read. “These are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court.”

Combs is expected to be arraigned in Lower Manhattan later Tuesday.

Spokespersons from Homeland Security Investigations declined to comment. Williams confirmed in a post on X Monday that “earlier this evening, federal agents arrested Sean Combs, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY.”

Combs, 54, has been under federal investigation since at least March 2024 when HSI executed search warrants at Combs’ properties. At the time of those searches, NBC News reported that three women and a man had been interviewed by federal officials in Manhattan in relation to the aforementioned allegations against Combs.

Those search warrants had also been part of an investigation led by the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

HSI officials seized phones from Combs in Miami before he was scheduled to depart for a trip to the Bahamas, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the warrants. Combs was in the Miami area when federal authorities executed the searches, sources said.

In May, Combs apologized after a video, obtained by CNN, showed him beating his then girlfriend Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.

In a video apology posted to his Instagram, Combs admitted to the incident and said he took “full responsibility.”

“It’s so difficult to reflect on the darkest times in your life, but sometimes you got to do that,” Combs said. “I was f—ed up — I mean, I hit rock bottom — but I make no excuses.”

Combs initially denied Ventura’s allegations of assault and sex trafficking which she described in a federal lawsuit filed in November. The two settled for an undisclosed amount the following day.

At the time of Combs’ admission of the assault, an attorney for Ventura, Meredith Firetog, said, “When Cassie and multiple other women came forward, he denied everything and suggested that his victims were looking for a payday.”

Firetog added, “That he was only compelled to ‘apologize’ once his repeated denials were proven false shows his pathetic desperation.”

Ventura’s representatives declined comment on his latest arrest.

The former music executive has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime. The district attorney is seeking pre-trial detention for Combs and has filed a letter of intention indicating the reasons, although Williams did not provide further details.

Although, the SDNY alleges that Combs used his media empire and workers as part of a criminal enterprise, it is unclear if anyone else will be charged as co-conspirators in connection to the investigation. However, the district attorney leading this case said it is possible given that the investigation continues.

“We are not done. This investigation is ongoing,” Williams said during the press conference Tuesday. “I encourage anyone with information about this case to come forward and to do it quickly. Anyone with information can call 1-877-4HSI-TIP.”

Chloe Melas of NBC News contributed to this report.

Wastewater samples have detected a significant escalation in an enterovirus called D68, which, in rare cases, has been linked to acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. The illness affects the nervous system and causes severe weakness in the arms and legs. This most often occurs in young children. 

“We are detecting EV-D68 nucleic acids in wastewater across the country now, and the levels are increasing,” said Alexandria Boehm, program director of WastewaterSCAN, a nonprofit monitoring network and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

That’s the first clue to suggest that the nation might see an increase in AFM this year, said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and author of “Crisis Averted: The Hidden Science of Fighting Outbreaks.”

“The second clue,” she said, “is that the time of year is right.”

Historically, September has been the biggest month for AFM cases.

Anyone who’s ever had the sniffles probably had an enterovirus; they’re that common. Most of the time, the viruses cause mild symptoms, such as a runny nose, cough, headache and generalized feelings of “meh.”

The D68 enterovirus strain started causing more serious problems in 2014, when the U.S. saw, for the first time, a spike in pediatric AFM. That year, 120 kids were diagnosed.

There’s no cure or specific treatment for the paralysis. Even with years of intensive physical therapy, many are left with life-altering disabilities.

A viral mystery

Though a few dozen cases have been reported every year since then, larger waves of AFM have followed an every-other-year pattern, spiking again in 2016 (with 153 cases) and in 2018 (with 238 cases).

The pattern stopped in 2020 when the nation went into lockdown because of the Covid pandemic, drastically reducing viral spread. That year, just 32 cases were logged. The spread of D68 picked up again in 2022 as lockdowns were lifted.

Curiously, a rise in AFM cases didn’t follow.

“We saw the virus that was previously driving the AFM cases, but we didn’t see the AFM cases associated with it,” said Dr. Kevin Messacar, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, who treated some of the earliest AFM cases in 2014.

It’s a mystery that any virologist would appreciate. While experts try to predict how viruses will behave, the bugs are always working to stay a few steps ahead.

It could be that the virus itself has changed, or that more people in the U.S. have been exposed and now have a level of immunity to D68. “We’re still trying to figure it out,” Messacar said.

So far in 2024, 13 AFM cases have been confirmed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 2014, 758 cases have been logged.

The implication is that hundreds of families and their children have been left with lasting, life-altering paralysis because of a virus.

Some recovery after years of physical therapy

The Kagolanu family in Los Altos, California, was in a heated game of Monopoly one Friday night in November 2014 when 7-year-old Vishnu’s head began, inexplicably, to tilt to one side. Vishnu admits that even though he was losing the game, this wasn’t attention-seeking behavior.

“My dad was like, ‘Hey, what are you doing? Move your head back straight,'” Vishnu, now 17, said. “I just thought, I can’t do that.”

Within an hour, Vishnu lost all ability to move his arms and legs. “I couldn’t get myself off the floor,” he said.

Vishnu was one of the first to be diagnosed with AFM in 2014. At that time, no one had connected the dots between D68 and the “mystery illness.”

“We didn’t understand what was going on. Even the doctors couldn’t find out what was going on,” said Saila Kagolanu, Vishnu’s mother. “That was the worst experience of my life.”

Doctors warned Vishnu’s family that he might never regain function of his arms and legs. The poor prognosis crushed Vishnu. He’d always thrived as “king of the playground” when it came to sports and other physical activities.

“Seeing my legs go progressively smaller every day” was devastating, he said. “I couldn’t move.”

Vishnu spent years undergoing physical therapy to regain the ability to walk. That was successful. Otherwise, there’s not much doctors can do. His right shoulder remains limp.

Testing a possible treatment

“We all get really frustrated every time we get to this point, and we don’t have antiviral medicines that are readily available,” said Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. “We don’t have much to offer these kids.”

Creech and his colleagues are working toward a solution. They’ve begun safety studies of a monoclonal antibody that would, ideally, stop D68 in its tracks.

“In mouse studies, it prevented infection that would lead to AFM,” Creech said. The study is expected to take years before the treatment is considered safe and effective.

Meanwhile, young people like Vishnu Kagolanu are attempting to move on and even inspire others with AFM. In recent years, he started a nonprofit called Neurostronger, which works to raise funds for and increase awareness of kids with neurologic conditions.

“Growing up with AFM is hard,” Kagolanu said. “But at the same time, there are ways to get around some of those obstacles. There are ways to find joy.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Judge denies Mark Meadows’ effort to move 2020 election case in Arizona to federal court
• More than 30 bomb threats made in Springfield, Ohio, after false pets claims
• Brazilian mayoral candidate hits opponent with a chair during live debate

The appeal came from an adviser to the campaign of Edmundo González Urrutia, who represented the Unitary Platform coalition in the July 28 election, and his main backer, opposition leader María Corina Machado. González and Machado claim their campaign won the vote by a wide margin, contradicting the decision of national electoral authorities to declare Maduro the winner.

“We want them canceled … this is a lifeline to the regime,” adviser Rafael de la Cruz said in reference to the licenses during a panel discussion hosted by the New York-based Council of the Americas business organization. “We want all the oil companies to go to Venezuela. So, it’s not about the companies. It’s about the situation that is impoverishing the country so badly that practically the whole population wants this regime gone.”

California-based Chevron is the largest company to have received an individual permission from the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to do business with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., better known as PDVSA. The Treasury Department sanctioned PDVSA in 2019 as part of a policy punishing Maduro’s government for corrupt, anti-democratic and criminal activities.

Venezuela Sep 14

Venezuela says it arrested 6 foreigners allegedly involved in a plot to kill Maduro

Venezuela Sep 8

Venezuela says opposition presidential candidate González has left the country for asylum in Spain

Chevron’s license was issued in 2022 after Maduro and the opposition coalition jumpstarted a negotiation process. In October, the Treasury Department granted Venezuela a broad reprieve from sanctions after Maduro and the opposition agreed to work to improve electoral conditions ahead of the 2024 presidential contest. But as hopes for a democratic opening faded, the Biden administration clawed back the relief.

The White House left open the possibility for companies to apply for licenses exempting them from the restrictions, which could attract additional investment to the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves. European companies have benefited from individual licenses.

De la Cruz said the González-Machado campaign wants “to find common ground” with oil companies. But, he said, their presence in Venezuela at the moment give Maduro the ability to try to “normalize … de facto dictatorship that he is trying to set up in Venezuela.”

“We remain committed to conducting our business in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, both in the U.S. and the countries where we operate,” Chevron spokesman Bill Turenne said in a statement.

The White House did not immediately comment on the call by the opposition coalition to cancel the licenses. Chevron’s license renews automatically. It was last renewed Sept. 1 and is valid until March 2025.

Venezuela’s electoral authorities declared Maduro the victor hours after polls closed on July 28 but unlike previous presidential elections they never released detailed vote tallies to back up their claim, arguing that the National Electoral Council’s website was hacked. To the surprise of supporters and opponents, González and Machado shortly afterward announced not only that their campaign had obtained vote tallies from over two-thirds of the electronic voting machines used in the election but also that they had published them online to show the world that Maduro had lost.

Global condemnation over the lack of transparency prompted Maduro to ask Venezuela’s high court, stacked with ruling party loyalists, to audit the results. The court reaffirmed his victory.

After the disputed election, legislation was introduced in the U.S. Congress to prohibit American investments in Venezuela’s oil sector and to impose visa restrictions on current and former Maduro government officials. Resolutions recognizing a González victory were also introduced in the House and Senate.

González, a former diplomat, earlier this month departed for exile in Spain after a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with an investigation into the publishing of the vote tally sheets.

Last week, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions against 16 allies of Maduro, accusing them of obstructing the vote and carrying out human rights abuses. Those targeted included the head of the country’s high court, leaders of state security forces and prosecutors.

___

Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report from Washington.

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former operations director, said he felt let down by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s decision not to follow through on the complaint.

“I believe that if OSHA had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised on multiple occasions, this tragedy may have been prevented,” he said while speaking before a commission trying to determine what caused the Titan to implode en route to the wreckage of the Titanic last year, killing all five on board. “As a seafarer, I feel deeply disappointed by the system that is meant to protect not only seafarers but the general public as well.”

Lochridge said during testimony that eight months after he filed an OSHA complaint, a caseworker told him the agency had not begun investigating it yet and there were 11 cases ahead of his. By then, OceanGate was suing Lochridge and he had filed a countersuit.

About 10 months after he filed the complaint, he decided to walk away. The case was closed and both lawsuits were dropped.

“I gave them nothing, they gave me nothing,” he said of OceanGate.

OSHA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Atlantic Ocean Sep 16

‘All good here' was 1 of the final texts sent from the doomed Titan submersible

Earlier in the day, Lochridge said he frequently clashed with the company’s co-founder and felt the company was committed only to making money.

Lochridge was one of the most anticipated witnesses to appear before a commission. His testimony echoed that of other former employees Monday, one of whom described OceanGate head Stockton Rush as volatile and difficult to work with.

“The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” Lochridge said. “There was very little in the way of science.”

Rush was among the five people who died in the implosion. OceanGate owned the Titan and brought it on several dives to the Titanic going back to 2021.

Lochridge’s testimony began a day after other witnesses painted a picture of a troubled company that was impatient to get its unconventionally designed craft into the water. The accident set off a worldwide debate about the future of private undersea exploration.

Lochridge joined the company in the mid-2010s as a veteran engineer and submersible pilot and said he quickly came to feel he was being used to lend the company scientific credibility. He said he felt the company was selling him as part of the project “for people to come up and pay money,” and that did not sit well with him.

“I was, I felt, a show pony,” he said. “I was made by the company to stand up there and do talks. It was difficult. I had to go up and do presentations. All of it.”

Lochridge referenced a 2018 report in which he raised safety issues about OceanGate operations. He said with all of the safety issues he saw “there was no way I was signing off on this.”

Asked whether he had confidence in the way the Titan was being built, he said: “No confidence whatsoever.”

Employee turnover was very high at the time, said Lochridge, and leadership dismissed his concerns because they were more focused on “bad engineering decisions” and a desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as possible and start making money. He eventually was fired after raising the safety concerns, he said.

“I didn’t want to lose my job. I wanted to do the Titanic. But to dive it safely. It was on my bucket list, too,” he said.

OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after the implosion.

OceanGate’s former engineering director, Tony Nissen, kicked off Monday’s testimony, telling investigators he felt pressured to get the vessel ready to dive and refused to pilot it for a journey several years before Titan’s last trip. Nissen worked on a prototype hull that predated the Titanic expeditions.

“‘I’m not getting in it,’” Nissen said he told Rush.

OceanGate’s former finance and human resources director, Bonnie Carl, testified Monday that Lochridge had characterized the Titan as “unsafe.”

Coast Guard officials noted at the start of the hearing that the submersible had not been independently reviewed, as is standard practice. That and Titan’s unusual design subjected it to scrutiny in the undersea exploration community.

During the submersible’s final dive on June 18, 2023, the crew lost contact after an exchange of texts about the Titan’s depth and weight as it descended. The support ship Polar Prince then sent repeated messages asking if the Titan could still see the ship on its onboard display.

One of the last messages from Titan’s crew to Polar Prince before the submersible imploded stated, “all good here,” according to a visual re-creation presented earlier in the hearing.

When the submersible was reported overdue, rescuers rushed ships, planes and other equipment to an area about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Wreckage of the Titan was subsequently found on the ocean floor about 330 yards (300 meters) off the bow of the Titanic, Coast Guard officials said.

Scheduled to appear later in the hearing are OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein and former scientific director, Steven Ross, according to a list compiled by the Coast Guard. Numerous guard officials, scientists, and government and industry officials are also expected to testify. The U.S. Coast Guard subpoenaed witnesses who were not government employees, said Coast Guard spokesperson Melissa Leake.

Among those not on the hearing witness list is Rush’s widow, Wendy Rush, the company’s communications director. Lochridge said Wendy Rush had an active role in the company when he was there.

Asked about Wendy Rush’s absence, Leake said the Coast Guard does not comment on the reasons for not calling specific individuals to a particular hearing during ongoing investigations. She said it’s common for a Marine Board of Investigation to “hold multiple hearing sessions or conduct additional witness depositions for complex cases.”

OceanGate has no full-time employees at this time but will be represented by an attorney during the hearing, the company said in a statement. The company said it has been fully cooperating with the Coast Guard and NTSB investigations since they began.

The ongoing Marine Board of Investigation is the highest level of marine casualty investigation conducted by the Coast Guard. When the hearing concludes, recommendations will be submitted to the Coast Guard’s commandant. The National Transportation Safety Board is also conducting an investigation.

The Senate vote was Democrats’ latest attempt to force Republicans into a defensive stance on women’s health issues and highlight policy differences between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in the presidential race, especially as Trump has called himself a “leader on IVF.”

The 51-44 vote was short of the 60 votes needed to move forward on the bill, with only two Republicans voting in favor. Democrats say Republicans who insist they support IVF are being hypocritical because they won’t support legislation guaranteeing a right to it.

“They say they support IVF — here you go, vote on this,” said Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the bill’s lead sponsor and a military veteran who has used the fertility treatment to have her two children.

The Democratic push started earlier this year after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law. Several clinics in the state suspended IVF treatments until the GOP-led legislature rushed to enact a law to provide legal protections for the clinics.

Democrats quickly capitalized, holding a vote in June on Duckworth’s bill and warning that the U.S. Supreme Court could go after the procedure next after it overturned the right to an abortion in 2022.

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The bill would establish a nationwide right for patients to access IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies and a right for doctors and insurance companies to provide it, an effort to pre-empt state efforts to limit the services. It would also require more health insurers to cover it and expand coverage for military service members and veterans.

Republicans argued that the federal government shouldn’t tell states what to do and that the bill was an unserious effort. Only Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted with Democrats to move forward on the bill both times.

Meanwhile, Republicans have scrambled to counter Democrats on the issue, with many making clear that they support IVF treatments. Trump last month announced plans, without additional details, to require health insurance companies or the federal government to pay for the fertility treatment.

In his debate with Harris earlier this month, Trump said he was a “leader” on the issue and talked about the “very negative” decision by the Alabama court that was later reversed by the legislature.

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said that Democrats are trying to create a political issue “where there isn’t one.”

“Let me remind everybody that Republicans support IVF, full stop,” Thune said just before the vote.

The issue has threatened to become a vulnerability for Republicans as some state laws passed by their party grant legal personhood not only to fetuses but to any embryos that are destroyed in the IVF process. Ahead of the its convention this summer, the Republican Party adopted a policy platform that supports states establishing fetal personhood through the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which grants equal protection under the law to all American citizens. The platform also encourages supporting IVF but does not explain how the party plans to do so.

Republicans have tried to push alternatives on the issue, including legislation that would discourage states from enacting explicit bans on the treatment, but those bills have been blocked by Democrats who say they are not enough.

Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, said in a floor speech then that his daughter was currently receiving IVF treatment and proposed to expand the flexibility of health savings accounts. Republican Sens. Katie Britt of Alabama and Ted Cruz of Texas have tried to pass a bill that would threaten to withhold Medicaid funding for states where IVF is banned.

Cruz, who is running for reelection in Texas, said Democrats were holding the vote to “stoke baseless fears about IVF and push their broader political agenda.”

According to a Bedford Police Department service report obtained by TODAY.com, officers responded to a 911 call on Sept. 15 just before 9 a.m. after the family discovered the girl was missing.

They reported that the 8-year-old was last seen by the family nearly two hours earlier.

A neighbor gave the family and responding officers their Ring camera footage of the young girl getting into a 2020 Nissan Rogue by herself and driving off around 7 a.m.

Police in the area searched for the missing child before officers in neighboring Bainbridge spotted the car in a Target parking lot.

The Bainbridge Target is just over 11 miles southwest of the child’s home, according to the police report. Google Maps estimates the fastest route — following the average speed limit — would take an adult driver around 25 minutes.

Officers found the girl inside of the Target and her family came to pick her and the car up.

According to the report, the child said that she hit a mailbox on her way to the store.

On Facebook, the Bedford Police Department joked about the incident.

“Not sure what she bought or if she was even able to use her Target app to save 5%,” Bedford Police Dept. wrote in the post. “We did let her finish he Frappuccino. We’re not mean.”

Many commenters noted how impressed they were that a child that young could make the journey behind the wheel.

“This is the best out of all the kids driving stories,” wrote one commenter. “Long distance and she got everything correctly.”

“Not gonna lie. That sounds like something my 8-year-old self would have done,” wrote another.

This article first appeared on TODAY.com. Read more from TODAY here:

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The author, who was raised in Chile, is one of the most widely read writers in the world and has been very vocal about her exile from a military coup in her home country.

Allende, now 82, has written more than 25 books that have been translated into more than 40 languages.

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Her first novel and international bestseller, “The House of the Spirits”, was published in 1982.

“I have been telling stories since I was a child. Stories have incredible power, they challenge our minds and touch our hearts, they connect us to other people and teach us that we are not alone in the journey of life”, said Allende in a Barbie Podcast that can be heard on Sept. 19. 

Allende’s doll features her beloved pup Perla and a miniature replica of her first novel. The Barbie design team dressed the author in a bold red dress with a gathered cap that drapes over her shoulder. It also includes gold statement earrings, black heels, and bright red lips, according to Mattel.

In 2014, former president Barack Obama honored Allende with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, alongside 18 other distinguished figures in the arts, sciences, and public service.

“I want young kids to dream big. Everything is possible”, said Allende.

“As the first internationally acclaimed Latin American female author, Allende is both a storyteller and a trailblazer. Through her writing and social activism, Allende has worked tirelessly to give a voice to the voiceless and inspire hope worldwide”, said a Mattel press release.

Other women who are also part of the elite list of Barbie Inspiring Women Series include Dr. Maya Angelou, Celia Cruz, Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks, Billie Jean King and Kristi Yamaguchi among others.

Allende’s dolls are available at participating Target and Walmart locations, as well as Amazon.com, for the price of $35.

Trump did not discuss specifics about World Liberty Financial or how it would work, pivoting from questions about cryptocurrency to talking about artificial intelligence or other topics. Instead, he recounted his experience Sunday, saying he and a friend playing golf “heard shots being fired in the air, and I guess probably four or five.”

“I would have loved to have sank that last putt,” Trump said. He credited the Secret Service agent who spotted the barrel of a rifle and began firing toward it as well as law enforcement and a civilian who he said helped track down the suspect.

World Liberty Financial is expected to be a borrowing and lending service used to trade cryptocurrencies, which are forms of digital money that can be traded over the internet without relying on the global banking system. Exchanges often charge fees for withdrawals of Bitcoin and other currencies.

Other speakers after Trump, including his eldest son, Don Jr., talked about embracing cryptocurrency as an alternative to what they allege is a banking system tilted against conservatives.

Experts have said a presidential candidate launching a business venture in the midst of a campaign could create ethical conflicts.

“Taking a pro-crypto stance is not necessarily troubling; the troubling aspect is doing it while starting a way to personally benefit from it,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said earlier this month.

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During his time in the White House, Trump said he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrency and tweeted in 2019, “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” However, during this election cycle, he has reversed himself and taken on a favorable view of cryptocurrencies.

He announced in May that his campaign would begin accepting donations in cryptocurrency as part of an effort to build what it calls a “crypto army” leading up to Election Day. He attended a bitcoin conference in Nashville this year, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” and create a bitcoin “strategic reserve” using the currency that the government currently holds.

Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who has done research on cryptocurrencies, said she was skeptical of Trump’s change of heart on crypto.

“I think it’s fair to say that that reversal has been motivated in part by financial interests,” she said.

Crypto enthusiasts welcomed the shift, viewing the launch as a positive sign for investors if Trump retakes the White House.

Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has not offered policy proposals on how it would regulate digital assets like cryptocurrencies.

In an effort to appeal to crypto investors, a group of Democrats, including Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, participated in an online “Crypto 4 Harris” event in August.

Neither Harris nor members of her campaign staff attended the event.

____

Gomez Licon contributed from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) carried out the arrest in Manhattan on Monday, sources familiar with the matter told NBC New York. Combs was arrested in the lobby of a hotel, a representative told NBC News.

In a statement released late Monday night, Combs’ attorney Marc Agnifilo said they were “disappointed with the decision to pursue what we believe is an unjust prosecution,” calling the entertainment star “an imperfect person but is not criminal.”

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It was not immediately clear what charges Combs would face, but Agnifilo said that the charges were coming from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, indicating federal charges would be filed.

“To his credit Mr. Combs has been nothing but cooperative with this investigation and he voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges. Please reserve your judgment until you have all the facts,” the statement from Agnifilo read. “These are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court.”

Spokespersons from Homeland Security Investigations declined to comment. Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, confirmed in a post on X that “earlier this evening, federal agents arrested Sean Combs, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY.” Williams added that they expect to unseal the indictment Tuesday morning.

Williams is expected to hold a press conference at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Combs is scheduled to appear in court in lower Manhattan on charges that appear to be in relation to allegations of sex trafficking, sexual assault and the solicitation and distribution of illegal narcotics and firearms

Combs, 54, has been under federal investigation since at least March 2024 when HSI executed search warrants at Combs’ properties. At the time of those searches, NBC News reported that three women and a man had been interviewed by federal officials in Manhattan in relation to the aforementioned allegations against Combs.

Those search warrants had also been part of an investigation led by the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

HSI officials seized phones from Combs in Miami before he was scheduled to depart for a trip to the Bahamas, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the warrants. Combs was in the Miami area when federal authorities executed the searches, sources said.

In May, Combs apologized after a video, obtained by CNN, showed him beating his then girlfriend Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.

In a video apology posted to his Instagram, Combs admitted to the incident and said he took “full responsibility.”

“It’s so difficult to reflect on the darkest times in your life, but sometimes you got to do that,” Combs said. “I was f—ed up — I mean, I hit rock bottom — but I make no excuses.”

Combs initially denied Ventura’s allegations of assault and sex trafficking which she described in a federal lawsuit filed in November. The two settled for an undisclosed amount the following day.

At the time of Combs’ admission of the assault, an attorney for Ventura, Meredith Firetog, said, “When Cassie and multiple other women came forward, he denied everything and suggested that his victims were looking for a payday.”

Firetog added, “That he was only compelled to ‘apologize’ once his repeated denials were proven false shows his pathetic desperation.”

The former music executive has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime.

Chloe Melas of NBC News contributed to this report.

Socks, rocks and a toy were found inside the stomach of Brooklyn when the 8-year-old Cane Corso arrived at the Ventura County Animal Services.

As the doctors were concerned about Brooklyn’s emaciation, they took an X-ray image and learned eight socks, several rocks and a toy the dog had somehow swallowed were preventing her from absorbing nutrients from food. 

“Although it’s unclear why she consumed these items, we are excited to share the 3-hour surgery to remove these items went well,” the Ventura County Animal Services said. “While under anesthesia Brooklyn also had an ulcer repaired and was spayed.”

Within just days after the surgery, Brooklyn gained nearly 4 pounds.

Brooklyn is now recovering at the West Coast Cane Corso Rescue in Northern California as the nonprofit provides ongoing care and treatment, preparing for her eventual adoption.

“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” a spokesperson at Meta said in a statement.

The move comes after the Biden administration on Friday announced new sanctions and a State Department official called the media outlet “a fully fledged member of the intelligence apparatus and operation of the Russian government” for the war in Ukraine.

U.S. officials then accused RT of carrying out covert information warfare operations around the world on behalf of Russia’s spy agencies.

James Rubin, coordinator for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, said that RT is “where propaganda, disinformation and lies are spread to millions, if not billions of people around the world.”

Some of RT’s operations are kept hidden, U.S. officials said.

In Africa, RT allegedly is behind an online platform called “African Stream” but hides its role; in Germany RT secretly runs a Berlin-based English-language site known as “Red”; and in France, RT hired a journalist in Paris to carry out “influence projects” aimed at a French-speaking audience, according to U.S. officials.

The Biden administration is imposing sanctions on a state-funded broadcaster that oversees the RT outlet, TV-Novosti, another state media company, Rossiya Segodnya, and its director Dmitry Kiselyov, officials said.

The U.S. has previously accused Russia of attempting to interfere in U.S. elections by sowing discord and division, and in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department announced indictments against 12 Russian nationals for cyber crimes intended to interfere with the 2016 election — including hacking Democratic National Committee computers and stealing emails.

Russia has previously denied running information operations to interfere in America’s elections or in other country’s politics. 

Meta started limiting Russian state-controlled media two years ago. Enforcement of the ban announced Monday is expected to roll out in the next several days.

Meta’s apps include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. 

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“Coming out of Butler, I have ordered a paradigm shift,” Ronald Rowe said at a news conference Monday, referring to the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. “The Secret Service’s protective methodologies work and they are sound, and we saw that yesterday.”

But, he added, “we need to get out of a reactive model, and get to a readiness model.”

Rowe did not go into detail about his vision for the nearly 160-year-old agency. His comments come at a pivotal moment for the Secret Service.

The agency has been under heavy scrutiny since a gunman managed to fire several rounds at Trump at the rally in Pennsylvania, striking his ear, in what was the Secret Service’s biggest security failure since President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded in 1981. One person was killed at the July 13 rally, and two others were injured.

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The incident on Sunday, which the FBI called an apparent attempted assassination of Trump, unfolded at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, after a Secret Service agent spotted a rifle poking out of the bushes outside the course, according to officials. The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, had been in the vicinity for nearly 12 hours, according to a criminal complaint.

Routh was taken into custody later Sunday and charged with federal gun crimes.

The Trump campaign asked the Secret Service for increased security on Monday morning, two sources familiar with the request told NBC News. It’s not clear how the Secret Service has responded to that request.

When asked about it, Rowe sidestepped the question.

“I’ve had a conversation with the former president,” he said. “The president is aware that he has the highest levels of protection that the Secret Service provides.”

“We constantly evaluate based on threat,” he added. “If we need to ratchet it up additionally, we will.”

The Secret Service has dramatically increased Trump’s security since the shooting on July 13, according to two sources familiar with the agency’s response. The increased security includes more people and more technology.

One source said the Secret Service is doing all it can to protect Trump while also preparing for the United Nations General Assembly next week and protecting President Joe Biden, Sen. J.D. Vance, Vice President Kamala Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and others. That source said that additional resources would require additional funding from Congress.

Rowe conceded as much at the news conference.

“The Secret Service operates under a paradox of zero fail mission but also that we have done more with less for decades,” he said. “And this goes back many, many decades. What I can tell you is we have immediate needs right now.”

Protecting the former president at an outdoor venue like a golf course poses particular challenges, especially when Trump makes an impromptu decision to play a few holes. But multiple former FBI agents questioned how a man was able to take a position so close to the former president and stay hidden there for so long.

“That to me is really unsettling,” said Evy Poumpouras, a former Secret Service agent who protected multiple presidents, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, during her 12 years with the agency.

“How did he get there, take that position for 12 hours and nobody saw that? Nobody did a perimeter sweep?” she added in an interview on MSNBC.

The Secret Service is chronically understaffed: The arm of the agency that protects presidents, vice presidents and their families is nearly 10% smaller than it was a decade ago. Yet while the requests for extra personnel and equipment from Trump’s agents have been repeatedly declined over the past two years, no resource requests were denied for the Pennsylvania rally where Trump was shot, a Secret Service official told NBC News in July.

The problem does not appear to be a financial issue: government filings show the Secret Service’s budget nearly doubled over the last decade while staffing agencywide rose by nearly 25%.

Anthony Cangelosi, a former Secret Service agent who has worked on protective details for presidential candidates, including Sen. John Kerry in 2004, said it was “pretty clear at this point that we need extra personnel for President Trump.”

“If this had been President Biden and he was golfing on the golf course, there would be a several-block security buffer around that golf course,” he said on Monday. “Yes, former presidents don’t get that same level of protection, but that level of protection adjusts based on known threat level.”

“Why, at this point, seven weeks out from an election, a major presidential candidate doesn’t have additional security personnel to secure the perimeter of his golf course?” Cangelosi added. “That’s the question that should be asked at this point.”

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In the presidential debate and in recent TV interviews, Trump and Sen. Vance, R-Ohio, have depicted the former president as selflessly choosing to protect the ACA, or “Obamacare,” during his four years in office as a way to put country over politics.

“Obamacare was lousy health care. Always was. It’s not very good today. … I had a choice to make when I was president: Do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? And I felt I had an obligation, even though politically it would have been good to just let it rot and let it go away,” Trump said at the recent ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. “And I saved it. I did the right thing.”

On NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Vance echoed his remarks by saying Trump “actually protected those 20 million Americans from losing their health coverage” and “chose to build upon” the ACA when he “could’ve destroyed” it. Vance added: “It illustrates Donald Trump’s entire approach to governing, which is to fix problems.”

Both Trump and Vance are misrepresenting the facts.

As president, Trump fought to repeal and undo the ACA using executive action, legislation and lawsuits.

“Trump was not successful as president in undoing the ACA, but it was not for lack of trying,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan research group. “Trump encouraged congressional efforts to repeal and replace the ACA, and then took administrative steps to try to weaken it when the legislative route failed.”

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order proclaiming: “It is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

He ordered agencies to “exercise all authority and discretion available to them to waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation” of provisions they deemed burdensome.

Trump made good on his promise to pursue repeal. It was the first major item on the Republican-led Congress’ agenda in 2017. In May, the House passed the American Health Care Act, a bill to undo ACA subsidies and regulations, which was projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to lead to 23 million fewer people with insurance. Trump celebrated its passage in a triumphant Rose Garden ceremony alongside House Republicans.

“Make no mistake: This is a repeal and replace of Obamacare,” Trump said at the time.

The effort fell one vote short in the Senate as three Republicans — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and John McCain of Arizona — joined Democrats to vote it down. Trump has since repeatedly criticized McCain for his now-iconic thumbs down on the Senate floor.

The legislative push was never revived, with one exception: Trump and Republicans succeeded at zeroing out the ACA’s tax penalty for most Americans who failed to buy insurance.

But Trump persisted in seeking other ways to take aim at the ACA.

He leaned on his executive power and his administration slashed funding for programs to advertise and promote ACA sign-ups. Enrollment dipped the following year, in 2018, with some blaming the cuts in funding.

“He cut outreach by 90% and funding for community-based navigators by 84%, making it harder for people to sign up,” Levitt said, referring to individuals who helped Americans sign up for Obamacare plans. “He expanded short-term insurance plans that do not have to follow the ACA’s rules, including coverage of pre-existing conditions.”

That fall, Democrats put a dagger in the legislative efforts to undo President Barack Obama’s signature achievement when they won control of the House, in part by campaigning on protecting the ACA.

But even as other Republicans sought to abandon what they came to see as a losing political fight, Trump was undeterred.

In 2020, he endorsed a lawsuit that would have wiped out the ACA entirely. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration formally asked the justices to rule for the challengers and terminate the law, despite the political risks as he sought re-election.

The court upheld the ACA the following year. By then, Trump had lost the election and Joe Biden was president.

Now, as he seeks a comeback in 2024, Trump has occasionally brought up his desire to revisit the ACA battle, calling for replacing the law last fall and declaring that “Obamacare Sucks.” This year, Trump’s campaign has softened its rhetoric against the ACA while still calling for alternatives.

Trump admitted he doesn’t have a replacement plan.

“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump said at last week’s debate, adding that there are “concepts and options” for a better and cheaper system that he’ll outline “in the not-too-distant future.”

Asked when Trump will roll out his plan, campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt did not provide a timeline. “As President Trump said, he will release more details but his overall position on health care remains the same: bring down costs and increase the quality of care by improving competition in the market place,” Leavitt said. “This is a stark contrast to Kamala Harris’ support for a socialist government takeover of our health care system which would force people off their private plans and result in lower quality care.”

Harris is running on a platform of preserving the ACA, without offering specifics on how she would make good on her call for expanding coverage. She has abandoned her 2019 position of putting all Americans in Medicare. On the campaign trail, the Democratic nominee is seizing on Trump’s debate remarks.

“He has ‘concepts of a plan.’ Concepts of a plan,” she said Thursday at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Which means no actual plan.”

“And 45 million Americans are insured through the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “So, understand what that means. He’s going to end it based on a concept and take us back when folks were suffering.”

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The latest packages were sent to elections officials in Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York and Rhode Island. Mississippi authorities reported a package was delivered there Monday, and the Connecticut Secretary of State’s office said the FBI alerted it of a package that was intercepted.

The FBI is collecting the packages, some of which contained “an unknown substance,” agency spokesperson Kristen Setera in Boston said in a statement.

“We are also working with our partners to determine how many letters were sent, the individual or individuals responsible for the letters, and the motive behind the letters,” she said. “As this is an ongoing matter we will not be commenting further on the investigation, but the public can be assured safety is our top priority.”

It’s the second time in the past year that suspicious packages were mailed to election officials in multiple states.

The latest scare comes as early voting has begun in several states ahead of the high-stakes elections for president, Senate, Congress and key statehouse offices, causing disruption in an already tense voting season. Local election directors are beefing up security to keep workers and polling places safe while also ensuring that ballots and voting procedures won’t be tampered with.

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The National Association of Secretaries of State condemned what it described as a “disturbing trend” of threats to election workers leading up to Nov. 5, as well as the second apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

“This must stop, period,” the group said. “Our democracy has no place for political violence, threats or intimidation of any kind.”

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said a package containing white powder and with the sender listed as “U.S. Traitor Elimination Army” was intercepted at a mail facility. It said the package was similar to those sent to other states and that early indications suggest the powder was harmless.

On Tuesday, the FBI notified the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office that postal service investigators had identified a suspicious envelope delivered to a building housing state offices. The package was intercepted.

Packages also were sent to secretaries of state and election offices in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming this week. The packages forced evacuations in Iowa, Oklahoma and Wyoming. Hazmat crews quickly determined the material was harmless.

The Mississippi Secretary of State’s Elections Division said it received a package similar to those sent to other states and that the state Department of Homeland Security was testing it. The division said it has notified county election officials to be on the lookout.

Oklahoma officials said the material sent to the election office there contained flour.

“We have specific protocols in place for situations such as this,” Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate said in a statement after the evacuation of the six-story Lucas State Office Building in Des Moines.

A state office building in Topeka, Kansas, was evacuated due to suspicious mail sent to both the secretary of state and attorney general, Kansas Highway Patrol spokesperson April M. McCollum said in a statement.

Topeka Fire Department crews found several pieces of mail with an unknown substance on them, though a field test found no hazardous materials, spokesperson Rosie Nichols said. Several employees were exposed to it and were being monitored.

In Oklahoma, the State Election Board received a suspicious envelope in the mail containing a multi-page document and a white, powdery substance, agency spokesperson Misha Mohr said. Testing determined the substance was flour.

State workers in an office building next to the Wyoming Capitol in Cheyenne were sent home Monday pending testing of a white substance mailed to the secretary of state’s office.

Suspicious letters were sent to election offices and government buildings in at least six states last November, including the same building in Kansas that received suspicious mail Monday. While some of the letters contained fentanyl, even the suspicious mail that was not toxic delayed the counting of ballots in some local elections.

One of the targeted offices was in Fulton County, Georgia, the largest voting jurisdiction in one of the nation’s most important swing states. Four county election offices in Washington state had to be evacuated as election workers were processing ballots cast, delaying vote-counting.

The letters caused election workers around the country to stock up the overdose reversal medication naloxone.

Election offices across the United States have taken steps to increase security amid an onslaught of harassment and threats following the 2020 election and the false claims that it was rigged.

Christina Almeida Cassidy in Atlanta; Anthony Izaguirre in Albany, New York; Susan Haigh in Norwich, Connecticut; Jim Salter in O’Fallon, Missouri; Isabella Volmert in Lansing, Michigan; Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee; Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.

“I’m not sure that people are aware of this,” said Dr. Thomas Sollecito, chief of oral medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hormonal changes — mainly a sharp drop in estrogen — can reduce bone density and saliva production and harm your gums. All of that can affect your teeth.

Oral care experts say there are ways to counteract these effects and keep your menopausal mouth healthy.

Menopause, perimenopause and dental symptoms

Menopause happens when a woman goes 12 consecutive months without a menstrual period. But some of the hormone-related dental problems may begin during perimenopause, when the ovaries gradually make less estrogen, said Dr. Maiara Hister-Cockrell, a dentist with the University of Texas Health San Antonio.

One of the biggest concerns is less saliva, which Sollecito called “one of the most important fluids in our body.”

When the saliva flow slows, it can cause dry mouth, which brings a greater risk of mouth soreness, oral yeast infections and cavities. Those risks are even higher when people take medicines for high blood pressure or diabetes that can also cause dry mouth, Hister-Cockrell said.

Less saliva also means less of its bacteria-killing enzymes and tooth-strengthening minerals, said Dr. Sally Cram, a periodontist in Washington, D.C.

When your mouth is dry, she said, “those bacteria are proliferating and you’re more prone to get tooth decay.” And if decay festers, tooth loss is possible.

Decreasing bone density and receding gums exacerbate these problems. If the socket that holds the tooth is less dense, Sollecito said, it’s more vulnerable to bone loss. And gum recession can leave some tooth surfaces without the enamel that protects them from cavities.

Women in this phase of life are also more likely to develop periodontal disease, when plaque and bacteria collect under gums and around teeth.

“Gum tissue starts to get red and swollen,” said Cram, a spokesperson for the American Dental Association. “It bleeds and it starts pulling away from the teeth, creating deeper crevices around the teeth that are clearly harder to keep clean.”

Some people experience “burning mouth syndrome.” Hister-Cockrell said a burning sensation can extend to the tongue, palate and lips.

“As you could well imagine,” Sollecito added, “this could all really spiral out of control.”

What can you do?

The first line of defense, experts said, is good oral hygiene and nutrition. Eat a balanced diet low on sweets and high on calcium-rich foods. Brush carefully with fluoride toothpaste at least twice a day and floss regularly.

“An electric toothbrush can be more helpful than manual toothbrushing,” Cram said. “See your dentist regularly and ask them: Am I doing a good job? And if I’m not, what could help me do a better job?”

Patients should also ask their dentists whether they should be seen more than twice a year, as well as consider in-office fluoride treatments to strengthen the surface of their teeth and prescription high-fluoride toothpaste.

At home, experts said, treating dry mouth is a priority. So stay hydrated.

“None of us really probably drink enough water throughout the day,” Cram said.

People can also use over-the-counter dry mouth sprays, lozenges or rinses. In severe cases, Sollecito said they can ask their dentist about prescription medications that increase the amount of saliva in the mouth but come with side effects. There are also prescription medications for burning mouth syndrome.

“The bottom line,” Cram said, “is most oral conditions and problems during menopause are totally preventable” by paying attention, taking good care of your teeth at home and regularly going to the dentist.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Springfield’s two-day CultureFest, which highlights diversity, arts and culture, had been scheduled to begin Sept. 27 but was canceled “in light of recent threats and safety concerns,” the city announced.

“We deeply regret having to cancel CultureFest, as we know it is a beloved event for our community,” City Manager Bryan Heck said in a statement. “However, the safety of our residents and visitors must come first.”

Springfield has been the focus of intense attention in recent days after former President Donald Trump, his running mate JD Vance, and the Republican presidential campaign have amplified debunked claims about Haitian immigrants eating domestic pets and waterfowl.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, has denounced the false rumors, saying there is no evidence of it. DeWine planned to hold a news conference in Springfield later Monday.

President Joe Biden, appearing in Philadelphia at the National HBCU Week Conference on Monday, addressed the situation in Springfield, condemning what he called the “lies and hate.”

“It’s wrong. It’s simply wrong. And it must stop,” he said.

Two colleges in Springfield held classes virtually on Monday. Wittenberg University said it received two threats over the weekend, “both of which were targeted toward members of the Haitian Community.” Clark State College said it would operate virtually through Friday “due to recent events in Springfield.”

Springfield City Hall, several schools, and state motor vehicle offices in Springfield were forced to evacuate last week after receiving bomb threats.

Thousands of Haitian immigrants have settled in recent years in the predominantly white, blue-collar city of about 60,000, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from the state capital of Columbus, where they have found work in factories and warehouses that had been struggling to fill job openings. The sudden influx has strained schools, health care facilities and city services and driven up the cost of housing.

But the 2-month-old’s meteoric rise to online stardom has also prompted caretakers to urge visitors to show restraint and to limit her visit hours at Khao Kheow Open Zoo.

Moo Deng, also known as the “bouncing pig,” was named after a vote from more than 20,000 children and tourists on the Facebook page of the zoo in Chonburi, a city in eastern Thailand, where she was born in July. 

The hippo has become an internet sensation since her caretakers began uploading videos of her going about her day, which mostly includes napping, walking around her enclosure and chewing her caretakers’ knees while being hosed down for a shower.

And just like any human celebrity, Moo Deng has dozens of fan pages on social media with pictures and videos capturing her every moment in public.

The Thai Embassy in Tokyo also posted pictures of Moo Deng on X, inviting visitors to the zoo in Japanese.

The cosmetic brand Sephora is promoting its blush products in Thailand to achieve the same “pink & peachy tone” of Moo Deng’s cheeks. A bakery in Bangkok said Sunday on Facebook that it would have to limit orders for its Moo Deng look-alike cakes because demand was so high.

Moo Deng is also starring in an endless flurry of internet memes and fan art. 

A video on TikTok showing Moo Deng’s caretaker playing with the hippo has been viewed more than 33 million times, with more than 2 million likes. “That baby hippo looks like he was just hatched,” one comment reads.

Other videos of Moo Deng on the TikTok account also have millions of views. Another 29-second video posted on X showing Moo Deng chomping away on her daily veggies has been viewed more than 15 million times. 

But her caretakers are increasingly concerned for her safety, as some fans have thrown water and other objects at Moo Deng. The zoo’s director has threatened legal action.

Officials said Sunday that the zoo had limited visits to the hippo to just Saturday and Sunday, with each viewing round limited to five minutes.

“These behaviors are not only cruel but also dangerous,” zoo director Narongwit Chodchoi was quoted as saying by local media. “We must protect these animals and ensure that they have a safe and comfortable environment,” he said. 

Pygmy hippos have been classified as an endangered species, with their numbers dwindling from poaching; just 2,000 of them are believed to be alive in the wild, according to the Pygmy Hippo Foundation.

An adult pygmy hippo can live up to 50 years and reach half the height of a full-size hippo. They mostly eat grass, leaves, shoots and fallen fruits when in the wild.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Suspect was by the Trump golf course for nearly 12 hours, phone records show
• Trump dispenses with unity and blames Democrats after apparent second assassination attempt
• Suspect in assassination attempt charged with possessing firearm as felon, erasing its serial number

In a message posted to multiple social media platforms Monday, Trump accused his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden of taking “politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred.” He said their rhetoric is responsible for threats and violence against him, even though they routinely denounce political violence and did so on Sunday.

Trump’s most powerful ally, billionaire Elon Musk, wondered in a tweet why “no one is even trying to assassinate” Biden and Harris — a post that Musk later said was a joke and deleted.

But it was clear by midday Monday that Trump and his brain trust have no intention of dialing back on hot rhetoric, with less than two months left before Election Day. In turning so fast to Biden and Harris, Trump skipped past appeals for sympathy and even a perfunctory call for calm or unity.

The Republican presidential nominee was playing golf at his West Palm Beach course Sunday afternoon when a Secret Service agent noticed the muzzle of a gun protruding from the bushes several hundred yards from him, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said at a news conference later that day.

The Secret Service fired at a suspect, who fled and was quickly apprehended by police. Trump was forced to shelter at the golf club for more than an hour before being transported to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort, a source familiar with the matter said.

From Mar-a-Lago, where guests included House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Trump took phone calls from friends expressing their relief, listened in when acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe phoned Johnson to deliver a briefing on the incident, and told golf-related jokes, according to people familiar with his activities. The scare is unlikely to interfere with his schedule or campaign plans, according to a Trump adviser who has spoken with him since Sunday’s incident.

“There won’t be many noticeable changes or anything too major,” the adviser said. “He is not frazzled or shaken by this, and, considering what he has been through, relatively relaxed.”

But, as Trump avoided a brush with death that could have come as close as the sniper’s bullet that clipped his ear at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in July, he once again had a decision to make about his own response: try to seize political advantage from the threats to his life or play them down in order to discourage future violence. It took less than 24 hours for him to choose the former, though there are signs of division within his ranks about his approach.

Some Trump allies believe that the campaign squandered an opportunity for unity following the first assassination attempt. Instead, Trump ramped up his anti-Harris rhetoric, which coincided with him losing traction in polls over the summer.

“Even independents were like, ‘This can’t stand, you can’t assassinate a political candidate,'” said one former Trump adviser. “And then all of a sudden it’s back to the clown show.”

While his campaign’s top advisers focused on his security — and that of his aides — in a message sent to staff Sunday night, his fundraising team pressed donors to give money in the immediate aftermath of the incident. On Monday, he repeated an assertion he made in an ABC News debate last week that Biden and Harris are responsible for him being targeted.

“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,” he said in an interview with Fox News Digital, “when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside out.”

On Sunday, Harris took a much different tack.

“As we gather the facts, I will be clear: I condemn political violence. We all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more violence,” she said in a statement. “I am thankful that former President Trump is safe.”

Trump has not rebuked Musk for musing about assassinations of the sitting president and vice president.

For a brief moment after he survived being shot in July, Trump aides told the media that he was interested in unifying the country and would attempt to do so in his speech at the Republican National Convention. But he quickly pivoted from that stance and took off running in the other direction. The reversal was evident even within the four corners of that address, delivered July 18 in Milwaukee.

“The discord and division in our society must be healed,” he said in the opening minutes. But later, he accused the Democratic Party of “weaponizing the justice system” because he has been convicted of felonies in New York and charged with crimes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in federal court.

“We must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement,” he said. “In that spirit, the Democrat Party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy.”

Since then, he has regularly threatened to jail his political opponents.

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Trump aides say that he will be his own spokesman on the aborted assassination attempt.

“We follow his lead,” said one aide. “We’re not going to get ahead of his truth.”

So far, that truth has been an attack on his political rival, Harris, and her boss, Biden, despite their disavowal of violence as a political tool.

Throughout nearly a decade in national politics, Trump has glorified violence — at least when it is not aimed at him.

“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump wrote in a social media post during the protests following George Floyd’s 2020 murder by Minneapolis police. He has suggested that the nation’s top general be executed; made light of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband being attacked with a hammer in a gruesome assault; and praised the Jan. 6 rioters who pummeled cops, stormed the Capitol and tried to stop the counting of 2020 electoral votes by force.

It is not immediately clear whether the apparent second attempt on Trump’s life will have an effect on the outcome of the campaign. He was facing a different candidate — Biden — at the time of the Pennsylvania shooting.

Since Harris replaced Biden as the Democrats’ standard-bearer eight days after the first attempt, polls show Democrats to be in a stronger position to win in November. But most surveys reveal an extremely close race in which the two candidates are within the margin of error in pivotal swing states.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Suspect was by the Trump golf course for nearly 12 hours, phone records show
• Trump dispenses with unity and blames Democrats after apparent second assassination attempt
• Suspect in assassination attempt charged with possessing firearm as felon, erasing its serial number

After what officials called the second assassination attempt on Trump in three months, a man named Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was taken into custody and charged.

Routh had already been extensively profiled in the Western media as an ardent supporter of Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s ongoing invasion. He had traveled to Ukraine wanting to fight but had said in media interviews that he had turned to recruitment after being rejected by its military because he was too old and had no battlefield experience.

Ukraine sought Monday to distance itself from Routh, with the country’s international legion — the military unit that includes foreign volunteers — saying it had nothing to do with him. Meanwhile, officials in the United States were yet to lay out any possible motive.

Follow NBC News’ live coverage here

Russia quickly sought to weaponize his support for Ukraine, an unwelcome development for Kyiv right at the moment both American support and the fight on the battlefield appear to hang in the balance.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, says she will continue President Joe Biden’s backing of Kyiv, Trump, the GOP nominee, has been more ambiguous — twice refusing to say whether he wanted the U.S. ally to win the war at last week’s debate. 

Many Ukrainians had already feared an election win for him would spell disaster for their war effort, which is heavily reliant on Washington.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted to X early Monday that he was “glad to hear that @realDonaldTrump is safe and unharmed. My best wishes to him and his family.”

“It’s good that the suspect in the assassination attempt was apprehended quickly,” he wrote. “This is our principle: The rule of law is paramount and political violence has no place anywhere in the world. We sincerely hope that everyone remains safe.”

But Moscow was already stirring the pot.

“I wonder what would happen if it turned out that the failed new Trump shooter Routh, who recruited mercenaries for the Ukrainian army, was himself hired by the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev for this assassination attempt?” Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s ex-president and current deputy chairman of the Security Council, wrote on X. There has been no evidence for that suggestion.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that “it is not us who should think about it, it is the U.S. special services who should think about it. In any case, playing with fire has its consequences. Therefore, first of all, this should be a great concern and a headache for the U.S. special services.”

Legion rejects links

Routh was the self-appointed director of an unofficial group called the International Volunteer Center, and was also using his Facebook to try to conscript Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban in 2021 to fight for Kyiv against Moscow, encouraging would-be recruits who speak English to send him their details via WhatsApp.

“Volunteering in Ukraine is the most honorable and noble sacrifice, and every human on the planet should be here for freedom and human rights,” Routh’s military recruitment website read. “If you do not have military experience, you must sell yourself that you are capable.”

In May 2022, a GoFundMe page was set up on his behalf by Kathleen Shaffer, who said she was his fiancée. The page, which had raised more than $1,800 when it was removed Sunday, was aimed at helping his volunteer and recruitment drive in Ukraine.

However none of these efforts were linked to the Ukrainian military, which had rejected his advances and appears to have treated his enthusiasm with suspicion. In interviews, Routh bemoaned what he called Ukraine’s attitude toward his overtures.Oleksandr Shahuri, a spokesman for Ukraine’s International Legion, told NBC News that Routh never served in the legion and that it had no other record of any interaction with him. 

“We would like to clarify that Ryan Wesley Routh has never been part of, associated with, or linked to the International Legion in any capacity. Any claims or suggestions indicating otherwise are entirely inaccurate,” the legion said in a separate email statement.

“It is important to note that military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine should refrain from engaging in discussions regarding U.S. domestic politics or its international implications. We fully respect and welcome the decisions made by the American people in choosing their elected officials,” it added. 

The Ukrainian government and military did not immediately respond to NBC News’ requests for comment.

Routh said on social media that he supported Trump in 2016 but by 2020 had soured on the Republican, writing “I will be glad when you gone [sic]” in June that year. Around the same time, he also tweeted in support of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and then-Democrat-turned-independent Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, while saying that Biden “stands for nothing.”

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Far beyond simply repelling Russia’s invasion, he said in 2022 that “we do not stop until Putin is dead and Moscow is a pile of rubble,” in a post on X, calling for the United States to bolster its nuclear arsenal.

He also extended an open invite to North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un in 2020 to come “to Hawaii for vacation,” saying that “it would be an honor to have you at our beaches. I an a leader here and can arrange the whole trip. Please come.”

There are other aspects of his online profile that have not yet been explained. On his WhatsApp bio, it says, “We each need to help the Chinese,” without further explanation.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, he was a vocal presence both on social media and in Kyiv’s Maidan Square, where he pitched a tent and erected billboards attempting to rally volunteers. Photos online showed him with dyed blue and blond hair — the colors of Ukraine’s flag — swaddled in a Star Spangled Banner neckerchief and a bulletproof vest.

That summer, NBC News spoke briefly with Routh, who said in a message that the West’s “limited response” to Ukraine’s war was “an indictment of the entire human race” and “extremely disappointing.” There was never any formal interview, nor inclusion of Routh’s comments in NBC News’ coverage of the war.

This is a highly charged issue.

Ukraine would not have been able to put up such a staunch defense against Russia without tens of billions of dollars in aid from the United States and other Western powers.

But it has been pushing its backers to do more, and there is deep uncertainty and anxiety about the path Trump would take should he win — concerns in Kyiv that will only have been fueled by Sunday’s events.

Daryna Mayer reported from Kyiv, and Alex Smith and Caroline Radnofsky from London.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Suspect was by the Trump golf course for nearly 12 hours, phone records show
• Trump dispenses with unity and blames Democrats after apparent second assassination attempt
• Suspect in assassination attempt charged with possessing firearm as felon, erasing its serial number

The trips intended as enrichment for students living in shelters and other temporary housing also included excursions to Washington, D.C., Boston and Broadway shows, said Anastasia Coleman, the special commissioner of investigation for New York City schools.

According to the report released this month, Linda Wilson, the Queens regional manager for the office that supports students in temporary housing, took her own children on trips that were paid for through grants for homeless students and encouraged employees she supervised to do the same but to keep quiet about it.

“What happens here stays with us,” one staffer quoted Wilson as saying.

Contacted by the New York Post, Wilson denied bringing her two daughters on trips or encouraging staff members to bring their children. Wilson called the special commissioner’s probe “a witch hunt.”

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The investigation began after a whistleblower brought a complaint in March 2019. The special commissioner’s report, which concerned trips that took place between 2016 and 2019, was completed in January 2023 but only made public on Sept. 9.

The special commissioner’s office did not explain the lag in releasing the report and did not respond to requests for clarification.

According to the report, Wilson forged permission slips to bring family members on trips and evaded city Department of Education oversight by using an outside agency to book travel arrangements.

Some of the trips were intended as college tours, but the students and chaperones never actually visited the campuses, witnesses told the investigators.

A group including Wilson and one of her daughters as well as other staff members and their children ate lunch at Syracuse University during a June 2018 trip but never toured the school, witnesses said. They left and went to Niagara Falls instead, according to the investigation.

The special commissioner’s office recommended that Wilson and the other staff members faulted in the report be fired and that they be required to reimburse the school system for their family members’ trips.

Wilson told the Post that she retired and was not fired.

Department of Education spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in a statement, “All staff identified in this report are no longer employed by New York City Public Schools.”

U.S. Secret Service agents opened fire Sunday afternoon on a man who was spotted pointing an AK-style rifle through a fence while hiding in the bushes as Trump golfed at his club in West Palm Beach. The FBI described it as an apparent attempted assassination on the GOP nominee.

At a Pennsylvania rally in July, Trump was grazed in the ear by a bullet when a gunman was able to gain access to an unsecured roof, unleashing a hail of bullets that left one of Trump’s supporters dead and two others badly injured.

While the Secret Service has grappled with how to keep Trump safe as he campaigns across the country, holding rallies that often draw thousands, less attention has focused on his protection when he is off the trail, often at his own clubs and properties.

The fact that there are places along the perimeter of the property where golfers — including Trump — are visible to those standing behind the fence has long been known to law enforcement. While Trump was president, news photographers were often able to capture images of him on the greens by finding gaps in the shrubbery.

Retired FBI Agent Nelson Barbosa told NBC Miami that shooter was likely “waiting for a clear shot at the president, so if he did not have it yet, he wasn’t able to shoot it, but if he would have had that clear shot with the scope and everything he would have been able to shoot the president and this would be a completely different story.”

Former Secret Service agent Evy Poumpouras explained the agent that spotted that rifle was part of the lead assets that moved ahead of Trump to clear the area as he played. Another team of agents surrounded Trump in a closer perimeter.

“For that agent to spot somebody in the bushes, to notice a rifle, and then also to take aim because that individual was outside the fence,” Poumpouras said on NBC’s “TODAY” show, adding law enforcement was fortunate that a witness saw the suspect getting in a waiting car and captured his license plate number.

Poumpouras said the Secret Service needs more help when it comes to perimeter security: “We’re looking about 300 to 500 yards — that’s about like three football fields at minimum, it’s a far distance.”

“I think at this point it’s really all hands on deck. Secret Service has maxed out their people. They have finite resources at this moment. Long term can they get more agents? Absolutely. But right now, they should be talking and probably are talking to law enforcement partners, asking for more assets,” she said.

While Trump’s plans to golf Sunday were not part of any public schedule, on days he is not campaigning, he can often be found golfing at one of his courses. Trump International Golf Club, West Palm Beach, about a 10-minute drive from his Mar-a-Lago residence, is a favorite. One of three golf clubs he owns in Florida, it boasts 27 holes of championship golf, as well as event spaces. Trump often eats lunch and holds meetings in the clubhouse between rounds.

Trump had just returned from a West Coast swing that included stops in Las Vegas and Utah, and had announced on social media that he would be delivering remarks Monday from Mar-a-Lago about cryptocurrency as he launches a new crypto platform.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw noted at a briefing that because Trump is no longer in office, security protocols around the course had loosened.

“He’s not the sitting president. If he was, we would have had this entire golf course surrounded. But because he’s not, his security is limited to the areas that the Secret Service deems possible,” he told reporters.

Law enforcement officials praised the work of the agents assigned to protect Trump. One agent, tasked with jumping one hole ahead of the former president to scope out potential threats, managed to spot the gunman’s rifle barrel sticking out of the fence that surrounds the golf club and “immediately engaged that individual,” Bradshaw said.

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In an email to campaign staff Sunday night, senior campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles credited the Secret Service for saving Trump, who has praised the agents in his own protective detail for their bravery as they rushed on stage to protect him in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“President Trump and everyone accompanying him are safe thanks to the great work of the United States Secret Service,” they wrote.

Unlike other past presidents and typical VIPs who live in private residences with tall fences or in gated communities, Trump has his official residence at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. The club is open to dues-paying members, who mingle with the former president at meals and at events and can invite their own guests to the property.

Many nights, Trump holds court on the club’s patio, playing DJ with his iPad. While president, he once plotted a response to a North Korean missile launch from the candlelit terrace, the meeting captured and posted on social media by a club member.

The club is also a popular Palm Beach venue and hosts a constant stream of fundraisers, weddings and other events that sometimes see Trump drop by unannounced.

Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said in a social media post that the agency is working closely with the FBI, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and other law enforcement to investigate what happened.

We are working closely with the @FBIHQ, @PBCountySheriff, and other law enforcement partners to investigate the details of today's protective incident in Florida. You can access our formal statement from this evening's press conference here: https://t.co/sYjP5drJ1G pic.twitter.com/pduCSH3pca

— Anthony Guglielmi (@SecretSvcSpox) September 16, 2024

Trump will be briefed in person Monday by acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe about the investigation, according to a person familiar with the plan who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The incident sparked immediate finger-pointing and calls for answers on Capitol Hill.

New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the House Republican Conference chair and a close ally of the former president, said she was grateful Trump was safe. “However, we must ask ourselves how an assassin was allowed to get this close to President Trump again?” she asked in a statement.

The leaders of the bipartisan task force that has been investigating the security failures in Pennsylvania said they were monitoring the situation and had requested a briefing from the Secret Service.

“We are thankful that the former President was not harmed, but remain deeply concerned about political violence and condemn it in all of its forms,” said Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., and Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., in a joint statement.

Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of Trump’s rivals in the GOP primary, said his state will conduct its own investigation.

“The people deserve the truth about the would be assassin and how he was able to get within 500 yards of the former president and current GOP nominee,” he wrote in a social media post.

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna echoed that message. “Two assassination attempts in 60 days on a former President & the Republican nominee is unacceptable,” he wrote. “The Secret Service must come to Congress tomorrow, tell us what resources are needed to expand the protective perimeter, & lets allocate it in a bipartisan vote the same day.”

President Joe Biden said in a statement that he was “relieved” that Trump was unharmed and said “there is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country.” He said he had directed his staff “to continue to ensure that Secret Service has every resource, capability and protective measure necessary to ensure the former President’s continued safety.”

Former FBI special agent Clint Watts told NBC’s “TODAY” there’s a “worry really now of copycats.”

 “We’re in this period that known as stochastic terrorism,” he said. “Essentially, you know what the target’s going to be but you don’t know who the attacker is going to be and you don’t have a lot of threat intelligence on him.”

Attorneys for the two sides will appear before a panel of judges at the federal appeals court in Washington. TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance, are challenging a U.S. law that requires them to break ties or face a ban in the U.S. by mid-January. The legal battle is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was a culmination of a years-long saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China. But TikTok argues the law runs afoul of the First Amendment while other opponents claim it mirrors crackdowns sometimes seen in authoritarian countries abroad.

In court documents submitted over the summer, the Justice Department emphasized the government’s two primary concerns. First, TikTok collects vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Second, the U.S. says the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.

TikTok has repeatedly said it does not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government and that concerns the government has raised have never been substantiated. In court documents, attorneys for both TikTok and its parent company have argued that members of Congress sought to punish the platform based on propaganda they perceived to be on TikTok. The companies also claimed divestment is not possible and that the app would have to shut down by Jan. 19 if the courts don’t step in to block the law.

“Even if divestiture were feasible, TikTok in the United States would still be reduced to a shell of its former self, stripped of the innovative and expressive technology that tailors content to each user,” the companies said in a legal brief filed in June. “It would also become an island, preventing Americans from exchanging views with the global TikTok community.”

Opponents of the law stress a ban would also cause disruptions in the world of marketing, retail and in the lives of many different content creators, some of whom also sued the government in May. TikTok is covering the legal costs for that lawsuit, which the court has consolidated with the company’s complaint and another filed on behalf of conservative creators who work with a nonprofit called BASED Politics Inc.

Though the government’s primary reasoning for the law is public, significant portions of its court filings include classified information that has been redacted and hidden from public view. The companies have asked the court to reject the secret filings or appoint a district judge who can ferret through the material, which the government has opposed because it will cause a delay in the case. If admitted into the court, legal experts say those secret filings could make it nearly impossible to know some of the factors that could play a part in the eventual ruling.

In one of the redacted statements submitted in late July, the Justice Department claimed TikTok took direction from the Chinese government about content on its platform, without disclosing additional details about when or why those incidents occurred. Casey Blackburn, a senior U.S. intelligence official, wrote in a legal statement that ByteDance and TikTok “have taken action in response” to Chinese government demands “to censor content outside of China.” Though the intelligence community had “no information” that this has happened on the platform operated by TikTok in the U.S., Blackburn said there is a risk it “may” occur.

In a separate document submitted to court, the DOJ said the U.S. is “not required to wait until its foreign adversary takes specific detrimental actions before responding to such a threat.”

The companies, however, argue the government could have taken a more tailored approach to resolve its concerns.

During high-stakes negotiations with the Biden administration more than two years ago, TikTok presented the government with a draft 90-page agreement that allows a third party to monitor the platform’s algorithm, content moderation practices and other programming. TikTok says it has spent more than $2 billion to voluntarily implement some of these measures, which include storing U.S. user data on servers controlled by the tech giant Oracle. But it said a deal was not reached because government officials essentially walked away from the negotiating table in August 2022.

Justice officials have argued complying with the draft agreement is impossible, or would require extensive resources, due to the size and the technical complexity of TikTok. The Justice Department also said the only thing that would resolve the government’s concerns is severing the ties between TikTok and ByteDance given the porous relationship between the Chinese government and Chinese companies.

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news Apr 24

TikTok creators fear for their livelihoods after U.S. lawmakers pass bill that could lead to ban

But some observers have wondered whether such a move would accelerate the so-called “decoupling” between the U.S. and its strategic rival at a time when other China-founded companies, such as Shein and Temu, are also making a big splash in the West. Last week, the Biden administration proposed rules that would crack down on duty-free products being shipped directly from China.

For its part, ByteDance has publicly said TikTok is not up for sale. But that has not stopped some investors, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire Frank McCourt, from announcing bids to purchase the platform. However, even if such a sale would occur, it would most likely be devoid of TikTok’s coveted algorithm, leaving a big question mark on whether the platform would be capable of serving up the type of personally tailored videos that users have come to expect.

The political alignments on the issue are playing out in unconventional ways.

The law, which passed with bipartisan approval in Congress, had encountered resistance from some progressive and Republican lawmakers who voiced concerns about giving the government the power to ban a platform used by 170 million Americans. Former President Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok while in office, is now opposing a ban because that would help its rival, Facebook, a platform Trump continues to criticize over his 2020 election loss.

In court, free speech and social justice groups have submitted amicus briefs in support of TikTok, arguing it restricts the First Amendment rights of users and suppresses the speech of minority communities by disrupting a tool many of them use to advocate for causes online. Some libertarian groups with ties to ByteDance investor Jeff Yass have also filed briefs supporting the company.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has received the backing of more than 20 Republican attorneys general, former national security officials and China-focused human rights groups who are asking the court to uphold the law.

Instead, without his consent or his family’s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country.

A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.

In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.

Honey, who died in September 2022, is one of about 2,350 people whose unclaimed bodies have been given to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. Among these, more than 830 bodies were selected by the center for dissection and study. After the medical school and other groups were finished, the bodies were cremated and, in most cases, interred at area cemeteries or scattered at sea. Some had families who were looking for them.

For months as NBC News reported this article, Health Science Center officials defended their practices, arguing that using unclaimed bodies was essential for training future doctors. But on Friday, after reporters shared detailed findings of this investigation, the center announced it was immediately suspending its body donation program and firing the officials who led it. The center said it was also hiring a consulting firm to investigate the program’s operations.

“As a result of the information brought to light through your inquiries, it has become clear that failures existed in the management and oversight of The University of North Texas Health Science Center’s Willed Body Program,” the statement said. “The program has fallen short of the standards of respect, care and professionalism that we demand.”

For more on this story, watch NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT. 

Last year, NBC News revealed in its “Lost Rites” investigation that coroners and medical examiners in Mississippi and nationally had repeatedly failed to notify families of their loved ones’ deaths before burying them in pauper’s graveyards. That investigation led reporters to North Texas, where officials had come to view the unclaimed dead not as a costly burden, but as a free resource.

Before its sudden shuttering last week, the Health Science Center’s body business flourished. 

On paper, the arrangements with Dallas and Tarrant counties offered a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem: Local medical examiners and coroners nationwide bear the considerable costs of burying or cremating tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies each year. Disproportionately Black, male, mentally ill and homeless, these are individuals whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot or will not pay for cremation or burial.

The University of North Texas Health Science Center used some of these bodies to teach medical students. Others, like Honey’s, were parceled out to for-profit medical training and technology companies — including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and Medtronic — that rely on human remains to develop products and teach doctors how to use them. The Health Science Center advertised the bodies as being of “the highest quality found anywhere in the U.S.”

Do you have a story to share about the use of unclaimed bodies for research? Contact us.

Proponents say using unclaimed bodies transforms a tragic situation into one of hope and service, providing a steady supply of human specimens needed to educate doctors and advance medical research. But for families who later discover their missing relatives were dissected and studied, the news is haunting, compounding their grief and depriving them of the opportunity to mourn.

“The county and the medical school are doing this because it saves them money, but that doesn’t make it right,” said Thomas Champney, an anatomy professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who researches the ethical use of human bodies. “Since these individuals did not consent, they should not be used in any form or fashion.”

A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it — part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.

The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.

Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.

An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties — and by the center — to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.

Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.

In one case, a man learned of his stepmother’s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man’s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.

Before the Health Science Center announced it was suspending the program, officials in the two counties had already told NBC News they were reconsidering their unclaimed body agreements in light of the reporters’ findings. 

Commissioners in Dallas County recently postponed a vote on whether to extend their contract. The top elected official in Tarrant County, Judge Tim O’Hare — who voted to renew the county’s agreement with the center in January — said he planned to explore legal options “to end any and all immoral, unethical, and irresponsible practices stemming from this program.”

“No individual’s remains should be used for medical research, nor sold for profit, without their pre-death consent, or the consent of their next of kin,” O’Hare’s office said. “The idea that families may be unaware that their loved ones’ remains are being used for research without consent is disturbing, to say the least.” 

NBC News also shared its findings with dozens of companies, teaching hospitals and medical schools that have relied on the Health Science Center to supply human specimens. Ten said they did not know the center had provided them with unclaimed bodies. Some, including Medtronic, said they had internal policies requiring consent from the deceased or their legal surrogate.

DePuy Synthes, a Johnson & Johnson company, said it had paused its relationship with the center after learning from a reporter that it had received body parts from four unclaimed people. And Boston Scientific, whose company Relievant Medsystems used the torsos of more than two dozen unclaimed bodies for training on a surgical tool, said it was reviewing its transactions with the center, adding that it had believed the program obtained consent from donors or families.

“We empathize with the families who were not reached as part of this process,” the company said.

The Army said it, too, was examining its reliance on the center and planned to review and clarify internal policies on the use of unclaimed bodies. Under federal contracts totaling about $345,000, the center has provided the Army with dozens of whole bodies, heads and skull bones since 2021 — including at least 21 unclaimed bodies. An Army spokesperson said officials had not considered the possibility that the program hadn’t gotten consent from donors or their families.

The Texas Funeral Service Commission, which regulates body donation programs in the state, is conducting a review of its own. In April, the agency issued a moratorium on out-of-state shipments while it studies a range of issues, including the use of unclaimed bodies by the Health Science Center.

In the case of Victor Honey, it shouldn’t have been hard for Dallas County investigators to find survivors: His son shares his father’s first and last name and lives in the Dallas area. Family members are outraged that no one from the county or the Health Science Center informed them of Honey’s death, much less sought permission to dissect his body and distribute it for training.

It wasn’t until a year and a half after he died that his relatives finally learned that news — from a chance encounter with a stranger struck by the similarity of the father’s and son’s names, followed by a phone call from NBC News.

“It’s like a hole in your soul that can never be filled,” said Brenda Cloud, one of Honey’s sisters. “We feel violated.”

Two years before Honey’s death, Oscar Fitzgerald died of a drug overdose outside a Fort Worth convenience store. County officials failed to reach his siblings or adult children, so they had no voice in deciding whether to donate his body. It was taken to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, pumped with preservatives and assigned to a first-year medical student to study over the coming year.

Five months passed before his family learned from a friend in September 2020 that he was dead. ​​When his brother rushed to Fort Worth to claim the remains, he said he was told by the Health Science Center that he’d have to wait — the program was not done using the body.

Patrick Fitzgerald, who had last seen his 57-year-old brother the previous Thanksgiving, was aghast.

“Now that the family has come forward,” he said, “you mean to tell me we can’t have him?”

Instead, Fitzgerald said he was told his family must fill out donation consent forms to eventually receive his brother’s ashes. A year and a half later — after the body had been leased out a second time, to a Texas dental school — the center billed the family $54.50 in shipping costs for the box that arrived at Fitzgerald’s Arkansas home containing his brother’s remains. He also received a letter from Claudia Yellott, then the manager of UNT’s body donation program.

“UNT Health Science Center and our students value the selfless sacrifice made by your family,” Yellott wrote.

As of Friday, Yellott’s photo and bio were missing from the Health Science Center website, along with those of Rustin Reeves, the longtime director of the center’s anatomy program. Yellott confirmed to NBC News that she had been terminated and declined to comment further. Reeves did not respond to messages. The center declined to specify who was fired. 

The Fitzgeralds’ ordeal was the scenario one Tarrant County commissioner had feared in 2018, when Yellott and Reeves pitched their plan to receive the county’s unclaimed dead.

They described it as a win for everyone: The county would save on burial costs and the center would, as Yellott phrased it, obtain “valuable material” needed to educate future physicians.

The commissioners were elated at the prospect of saving up to a half-million dollars a year. But one, Andy Nguyen, questioned the morality of dissecting bodies of people with no family to consent and raised the possibility of survivors coming forward later, horrified to learn how their relatives were treated.

“Just because they don’t have any next of kin doesn’t mean they have no voice,” Nguyen said.

After the Health Science Center pledged to handle each body with dignity, all five commissioners voted to approve the agreement. A little over a year later, Dallas County struck a similar deal, with one major difference: While Tarrant County families who couldn’t afford to make funeral arrangements were given an option to donate their relatives’ bodies to the center, Dallas County gave survivors no choice.

Soon, a steady stream of bodies began to flow to the center. The program went from receiving 439 bodies in the 2019 fiscal year to nearly 1,400 in 2021 — about a third of them unclaimed dead from Dallas and Tarrant counties. This coincided with a multimillion-dollar expansion and renovation of the Health Science Center’s body storage facilities and laboratories.

The supply of unclaimed dead helped bring in about $2.5 million a year from outside groups, according to financial records. Many of those payments came from medical device makers that spent tens of thousands of dollars to use the center-run laboratory space, BioSkills of North Texas, to train clinicians on how to use their products — a revenue stream made possible by the school’s robust supply of “cadaveric specimens.”

That economic engine has now stalled; the center announced it was permanently closing the BioSkills lab in response to NBC News’ findings. In its statement, the center said it “is committed to addressing all issues and taking corrective actions to maintain public trust.”

The partnerships with Dallas and Tarrant counties, which drew little attention when they were adopted, quietly rippled through the community of professionals who work with the dead and dying in North Texas.

Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington, was volunteering with a Tarrant County hospice provider in late 2021 when a chaplain made a comment that rocked her.

“Oh, poor Mr. Smith,” Shupe recalled the chaplain saying. “He doesn’t have long, and then it’s off to the medical school.”

Her shock led Shupe to spend months studying the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas. As she investigated, she pondered a philosophical question: People have the right to make decisions about their bodies while they’re alive, but should that right die with them?

No, she ultimately concluded, it should not.

Shupe herself has signed up to give her body to the Health Science Center when she dies, in part to underscore that she doesn’t oppose body donation. But she emphasized that it was her choice.

“What they’re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,” she said.

Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to “resurrectionists,” or “body snatchers,” who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.

Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that “programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.”

Experts said the Health Science Center appeared to be an outlier in terms of the number of unclaimed bodies it used. No national data exists on this issue, so NBC News surveyed more than 50 major U.S. medical schools. Each of the 44 that answered said they don’t use unclaimed bodies — and some condemned doing so.

Joy Balta, an anatomist who runs a body donation program at Point Loma Nazarene University, chaired the committee that wrote the anatomy association’s new guidelines. He said using unclaimed bodies violates basic principles of dignity and consent now embraced by most experts in his field.

One reason that bodies should come only from consenting donors, Balta and others note: Some religions have strict views about how the dead should be treated.

“We don’t know if the individual is completely against their body being donated, and we can’t just disregard that,” Balta said.

Since 2021, dozens of entities have received unclaimed bodies from the Health Science Center — including some, like the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, that explicitly prohibit the practice on ethical grounds. 

The Little Rock-based school received shipments of skull bones and heads in 2023 and 2024 that included parts harvested from unclaimed bodies, records show. Leslie Taylor, a University of Arkansas medical school spokesperson, said because the UNT office that provided specimens is called the Willed Body Program, officials “believed they came from donors who willed their remains for education and study.”

Taylor said the school would adopt procedures to ensure it receives bodies only from people who have given explicit permission.

Before abruptly suspending the program last week, the Health Science Center had vigorously defended its practices. 

“An unclaimed individual is incapable of consenting to any process after death, which includes burial, donation, cremation, eco-burials or any other use of the body,” the center had said in a statement on Aug. 16. “If a relative is not located or does not claim the remains, a decision must still be made.”

Shupe argued that it’s problematic for a public medical school to benefit from the deaths of the “very poor” in its community. She has now embarked on a campaign to end the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas and nationally.

After publishing a newspaper essay criticizing the practice, she brought her concerns directly to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court at a meeting last year, asking officials to consider the message being sent to marginalized residents and people of color. 

“How does it look,” she said, “when a Black body is dissected with nobody’s permission at all, simply because they died poor?”

All Victor Honey’s family has to go by are faded memories, a handful of keepsakes, online snapshots and a trail of court records spanning eight states and Washington, D.C. These clues tell a disjointed story of an Army veteran tormented by paranoid delusions who repeatedly rejected help as he slid into homelessness and whose body went unclaimed, despite having a family who cared deeply for him.

His two sisters remember Honey teaching them math, making them laugh, shielding them from bullies and helping raise them when their parents divorced and moved the family from Mississippi to Cleveland in the 1970s. He was meticulous, hardworking, well-dressed — and in search of a calling.

After starting college, Honey joined the Army in late 1984 and reported to Texas’ Fort Hood, where he trained as a medic and, at a military club, danced with a soon-to-be Air Force enlistee named Kimberly. They married not long after and had a daughter. A son followed.

The young family lived at the base until 1988, when Honey’s enlistment ended. He then joined the Army Reserves in Dallas and was called up to support the first Gulf War. Though he didn’t want to go, he spent four months in Germany, so upset about the deployment that he rarely left his base. He remained angry after he returned home.

Kimberly Patman said Honey had multiple affairs, leading them to separate in 1992, which threw him into a deep depression. He sought mental health services from a local Department of Veterans Affairs facility and was given antipsychotic medication that he quit after a month, saying he was allergic.

From there, his life unraveled.

In 1995, Honey was arrested in Dallas for trespassing. A doctor at the jail called Patman and said he’d had some kind of breakdown. She called his father in Cleveland, who brought him home.

He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but refused to take the medication that eased his delusional thoughts. He was convinced people were coming after him, barricaded himself in his room and became a compulsive hoarder, filing papers in a leather satchel.

He was off his medications in early 1997 when he stole a car from a dealership and robbed three banks in three states — each time handing a teller a note demanding money. He had no weapon. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison.

After he was released, Honey tried living in Cleveland, but abruptly left.

“He just disappeared,” Patman said. “They didn’t know where he was. We didn’t know where he was. And it was like that for years.”

He eventually drifted to Washington, where he wound up on the streets. He filed more than a dozen lawsuits, claiming an array of grievances. He posted a video to YouTube in which he showed his broken teeth and suggested the police were responsible. “This is a horrendous, horrendous life here in Washington,” he told the camera.

He landed in Dallas again in late 2018. He was arrested multiple times for fare evasion and filing a false police report, and appeared at city council meetings claiming he’d been wrongfully charged. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting an emergency room nurse who was attempting to provide him care.

And then came the phone call that brought the family together again.

In early 2022, a caseworker at a Dallas-area hospital contacted Honey’s daughter, Victoria, in Montgomery, Alabama, to say he was in intensive care and might not survive, the family said. Patman and Victoria rushed to his side and were told his kidneys were failing.

“We’re here, the kids are here, we love you,” Patman told Honey. In response, he opened his eyes and asked, “Why did you divorce me?” They ended up laughing about it.

Brenda Cloud, his sister, called from Cleveland. “I would just talk to him and remind him of growing up and of his children, and he had a lot to fight for,” she said.

Honey’s condition improved, but he ignored advice to go to a nursing home and instead checked himself out. Several weeks later, he got on the phone with his namesake son. They’d often gone years without talking, but the son said he knew his father loved him.

That was Victor Carl Honey’s last contact with his family.

On Sept. 19, 2022, Honey was discovered semiconscious in a wheelchair at a downtown Dallas light rail station and taken to Baylor University Medical Center. He died early the next morning. He was 58.

After a Baylor social worker was unable to find his family, Honey’s body was transported to the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, where an investigator was assigned to find next of kin.

The county investigator sought information from police and area hospitals but was unable to locate relatives. She then turned to the internet, where she found numbers for Patman, Honey’s brother in Ohio, his stepmother and his late father, but she reported they were disconnected. On Oct. 17, 2022, the investigator wrote that her search was complete and no family was found. The medical examiner’s office deemed Honey’s body unclaimed.

That same day, Honey was delivered to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, where he was placed in a freezer, awaiting assignment.

One of the most solemn duties of local government is notifying families when someone dies. Though the world, in so many ways, has never been more connected, finding survivors still can be difficult in an era of growing homelessness and increasingly fractured families. 

Death investigators at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office follow a detailed checklist: They reach out to area hospitals to seek emergency contact information, search missing person reports, and comb public records databases for possible phone numbers. They also call neighbors and homeless shelters. If no family is found, they must sign an affidavit stating they did all they could.

In Tarrant County, officials delegated the primary responsibility for contacting next of kin to the Health Science Center, which said it takes similar steps.

But these efforts repeatedly fell short.

For two and a half years, Fran Moore of Lodi, New York, didn’t know what happened to her 79-year-old father, Carl Yenner. She cried when an NBC News reporter notified her in February that he had died at a Dallas hospital in May 2021 and his body had been sent to the Health Science Center.

Moore said she and her brother had struggled to stay in touch with their father across the miles. After not hearing from him, her brother filed a missing person report in Wichita Falls, about two hours from Dallas, where Yenner had lived. They still don’t know how he wound up in Dallas, how he died or why nobody contacted them. A Dallas County worker signed a form in June 2021 stating she had completed an exhaustive search for possible relatives.

But after spotting Yenner’s name on a list of unclaimed bodies provided by Dallas County, NBC News quickly identified Moore and her brother as Yenner’s children and found working phone numbers for each of them.

“If you could find us,” Moore said, “why didn’t they?”

Another question left unanswered: Given that Yenner was an Army veteran and entitled to federal burial benefits, what was the economic argument for Dallas County to send his body to the Health Science Center? At least 32 unclaimed veterans, including Honey, have been given to the program since 2020, records show.

After the center was done with Yenner’s body, it was cremated and interred among fellow service members at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery. Moore said she’s heartbroken she couldn’t bury him with the rest of his family in New Jersey.

“To not have any kind of funeral for him,” she said, “for his family to come see him to say goodbye?”

Without commenting on specific cases, Dallas County Administrator Darryl Martin offered condolences to families whose relatives were used by the program. He said his staff works hard to locate family members and treats bodies with dignity. He didn’t address the use of unclaimed veterans.

In January, in an attempt to improve its efforts to find survivors in Tarrant County, the Health Science Center hired a company called The Voice After Life, whose mission is to help governments locate families of the unclaimed. The center said it has found families in about 80% of cases since then; officials did not know the previous success rate.

In a statement issued weeks before announcing it was suspending the program, the center said it “seeks to understand and honor the wishes of the family and deceased.”

It did not, however, honor the wishes of Michael Dewayne Coleman’s relatives. 

Coleman, 43, died alone on Oct. 21, 2023, in a Dallas hospital after possibly being hit by a car. An investigator for the medical examiner signed off on his case file, saying “all reasonable efforts” had been made to find next of kin.

But his relatives should have been easy to reach. More than a week before his death, his fiancée, Louisa Harvey, had filed a missing person report with the Dallas Police Department after he failed to return from a night out with friends, not knowing he was already languishing in a hospital. She spent months searching for him, alongside two of Coleman’s sisters. She printed missing person posters and canvassed neighborhoods near their home.

She said she called the detective assigned to the missing person case almost every day, eventually suspecting that finding Coleman wasn’t a priority because of his criminal record, which included illegal drug use and two domestic violence convictions.

Harvey finally learned of his death in March, after the Dallas County medical examiner listed him as an unclaimed body in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, a free federal database meant to connect missing person reports with reports of unclaimed bodies. By the time Harvey found the posting online, the medical examiner had sent Coleman’s body to the Health Science Center.

His family could have learned of his death months earlier if the police detective assigned to find Coleman had listed him as a missing person in NamUs, but records show he never did. In response to questions from NBC News, a Dallas Police spokesperson said the department had opened an internal investigation into the detective’s handling of the case and would implement a policy change to prevent similar mistakes. 

Harvey couldn’t believe Coleman’s body had been donated without the family’s consent — or his. Last year, while filling out an application for a state ID, she said, Coleman had made clear he didn’t want his organs donated because of his distrust of the medical system; she doubts he would have wanted to donate his whole body.

But when Harvey and one of Coleman’s sisters, Shea Coleman, repeatedly asked the medical examiner and the Health Science Center to release his body — or at least to let them view it — they were told no. In June, a worker at the medical examiner’s office wrote in case notes that she spoke to Yellott, the manager of UNT’s body donation program, who told her Coleman was slated to be used in a longer-term course and that his family could receive his remains when the center was finished with him.

In 12 to 24 months.

In August, after NBC News inquired about his case, a Health Science Center official told reporters that Coleman’s body would be cremated and returned to the family much sooner — an abrupt reversal that the center attributed to the Texas Funeral Service Commission’s temporary ban on out-of-state body shipments. Ten days later, the medical examiner called Harvey to let her know Coleman’s ashes were ready to be picked up.

The center’s refusal to let her see her fiancé’s body has made it harder to grieve, Harvey said.

“I’m lying awake every night thinking, ‘Is that my Michael?’” she said. “‘Did he actually die?’”

After Victor Honey’s body arrived at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, the harvesting began.

Depending on how they were to be used, bodies were either frozen or embalmed. Some were left whole and set aside to train students. Others, like Honey’s, were dissected with scalpels and bone saws, to be distributed on the open market.

In November 2022, Honey’s right leg was used in a training at the center paid for by Getinge, a Swedish medical technology company that makes instruments for use in a surgical procedure called endoscopic vein harvest.

In January 2023, a week after the medical examiner’s office reported that Honey was eligible for a veteran’s burial, bones from his skull were shipped to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston — where Honey had been ordered to report before his Gulf War deployment more than three decades earlier.

In May 2023, the Health Science Center shipped Honey’s torso to Pittsburgh, where the training company National Bioskills Laboratories provided it to a medical product company renting its facilities to teach doctors a pain-relief procedure called spinal cord stimulation.

NBC News informed Getinge, the Army and National Bioskills about the center’s regular use of unclaimed bodies and Honey’s family not providing consent.

Dr. Douglas Hampers, National Bioskills’ CEO and an orthopedic surgeon, said he was disturbed to learn his company has received unclaimed bodies and expressed sympathy for Honey’s family.

While human specimens are crucial for medical advances, Hampers said bodies should not be used without consent. He said his company would ensure that it no longer accepted unclaimed bodies and would adopt policies to make certain future specimens were donated with families’ permission.

“I don’t think you have to violate a family’s rights in order to train physicians,” he said.

A Getinge spokesperson emailed a statement saying only that the company regularly reviews its policies and operations, “including what we expect from our suppliers.”

In a statement, the Army said that if Honey’s remains were procured legally, the use of his body complied with the service’s current policies.

In July 2023, after Honey’s torso had been returned to the Health Science Center, his remains were cremated and later his ashes were brought to the Dallas County medical examiner.

And there they sat, with no one to claim them. Months passed.

In late April, Honey’s son, Victor, was boxing cans at the Dallas food bank where he volunteered when a woman approached him. She’d overheard someone calling out his name. “Do you know someone else named Victor Honey?” she asked him.

The woman said she knew his father when they both stayed at a downtown homeless shelter and had heard he died. Victor didn’t want to believe it. He tried to put it out of his mind. But the next morning, he called his mother and told her what he’d heard. She cried out and burst into tears.

An internet search led Victor to the medical examiner’s office, which confirmed the details of his father’s death and later told him the remains were available to be picked up.

About the same time, NBC News had found Honey’s name on a list of people whose unclaimed bodies were obtained by the Health Science Center. Using public records, a reporter tracked down Patman, Honey’s ex-wife, and sent her a message on Facebook. She responded immediately.

On a call, the reporter broke the news of how Honey’s body was used.

His family was appalled. Patman said she would have argued against Honey being cut apart and studied, noting that he once told her that he didn’t want to be an organ donor. Victor, though, said he might have been open to donating his father’s body for medical research.

“But y’all should have asked us about it,” he said. “They just sent his body parts away.”

When the family gathered in early June to finally lay Honey to rest, many expressed remorse about not being able to help him. They were frustrated to have no say in what happened to his body. And they said they hoped sharing his story would help spare others from similar anguish.

“Victor had a big, strong family,” Patman told family members. “And now we are going to speak for him.”

On a muggy Monday morning, a couple dozen of Honey’s relatives — nieces and nephews, siblings and cousins, Patman and their children — gathered in a pavilion at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery for the farewell they had long been denied.

A recording of taps played. A soldier knelt in front of Honey’s daughter, Victoria, and handed her a folded U.S. flag “as a symbol of our appreciation of your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

After the funeral, Honey’s relatives made their way to Section 40, Grave No. 464, where a crew dug a hole and placed the urn in the ground. They installed a temporary marker that soon would be replaced by a white granite headstone standing among rows of thousands.

Brenda Cloud, Honey’s sister, is furious over what transpired in the 622 days between her brother’s death and his burial. And she wants answers for the others whose bodies were cut up and studied without consent.

“Whether they had family or not,” she said, “every person deserves to have that dignity.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. From 2023, NBC News’ “Lost Rites” investigation:

• After a mother in Jackson, Mississippi, reported her son missing, police kept the truth from her for months.
• ‘They just threw him away’: Another Mississippi man was buried without his family’s knowledge.
• America’s patchwork death notification system routinely leaves families in the dark.
• The Department of Justice took action after a Mississippi coroner buried men without notifying their families.
• The Jackson Police Department adopted a next-of-kin notification policy following NBC News’ reporting.

More recently, Consumer Reports found a concerning amount of the toxic metal in a third of cinnamon powders purchased from more than a dozen grocery stores in the Northeast.

There is no safe limit of lead to consume. At the same time, completely eliminating the heavy metal in food isn’t feasible, because lead is a naturally occurring element in the Earth’s crust. Trace amounts can infiltrate the food supply in various ways, including in places where foods are grown, raised or processed, experts say.

However, the recent findings raise questions about why the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t already proposed limits on lead in foods meant for young children.

“This issue with the cinnamon and the lead and other issues with heavy metals in baby and children’s food is all emblematic of a larger problem that I think the FDA is trying to get a handle on,” said Laurie Beyranevand, director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “I’m not sure if the FDA is doing it as quickly as people would feel comfortable with.”

After a major FDA investigation late last year into lead-contaminated apple cinnamon fruit puree, the FDA began screening cinnamon imports, followed by several warnings and recalls of some brands for elevated lead levels.

That prompted Consumer Reports to test brands across 17 mainstream and niche grocery stores.

It found high levels of lead in 12 products, with levels reaching 3.5 parts per million.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has a proposed international safety standard of 2.5 ppm for spices that include cinnamon.

Anything above 1 ppm would trigger a recall in New York — the only state in the U.S. that regulates heavy metals in spices — Consumer Reports noted.

“There are some products in here that are up to three times that, which is concerning,” said Dr. Adam Keating, a pediatrician with Cleveland Clinic Children’s.

Keating’s primary concern is with children and pregnant women who ingested the cinnamon on a regular basis as opposed to just a single instance.

“A single sprinkle of cinnamon in a dose in one dish would be different than if they were eating the product every day,” said Keating, who was not involved in the Consumer Reports testing. “Regular ingestion of lead is the main concern that we have, particularly with children and pregnant women, because the most profound effect of lead is developmental delays and learning problems.”

The FDA currently does not set limits for heavy metals in spices, including cinnamon, although it does set limits for certain foods, such as candy made with sugar.

Last year, the agency proposed limits on lead levels in processed baby food that it says could reduce exposure to the contaminant by as much as 27%. Those guidelines are not expected to be finalized until next year, however.

“I’m not totally sure why they have not done that yet,” Beyranevand said. “Maybe it’s difficult to do in a number of different products, but it feels like at least with cinnamon, given the prevalence of the findings and the fact that there’s been so much lead, it feels like it would move the agency to set some sort of action level.”

The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lead exposure can be harmful to people of all ages, Keating said, but it is particularly dangerous for children. High levels of lead can lead to serious health problems in kids, including learning and behavior issues, reduced IQ and damage to the brain and nervous system, according to the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Additionally, lead exposure can cause hearing and speech problems.

Many children may not have any obvious symptoms, Keating said. He recommended that parents get their children in for routine lead screening at 1 and 2 years of age.

Consumer Reports advised people to check their homes for the products and throw them out.

The consumer product testing group also said that people might consider sticking with mainstream brands.

Of the 12 products that contained high levels of lead, 10 of them were from relatively unfamiliar brands sold mainly in small markets specializing in international foods, according to the report’s findings.

The FDA has wound down some of its response efforts to its cinnamon applesauce investigation but will continue to monitor other products in stores for high lead levels.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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• Cut up and leased out, the bodies of the poor suffer a final indignity in Texas

The blaze involving a 20-inch pipeline carrying natural gas liquids must burn itself out, according to its operator, Dallas-based Energy Transfer. The company said the flow was shut off but local officials said it could take hours, if not into Tuesday, for the residual material to burn off.

Local authorities would not speculate at an afternoon news conference about what caused the fire and what role a burned car near the source of the flame may have had. Energy Transfer said in its statement that it was “aware of early reports” that a car had struck some valve equipment but did not offer more details, including the origin of those reports.

Firefighters were dispatched at 9:55 a.m. after an explosion that rattled adjacent homes and businesses in Deer Park and La Porte, about 25 miles southeast of downtown Houston, long the energy capital of the U.S. The plume of smoke could be seen from at least 10 miles away.

The only injury reported so far was to a firefighter who sustained a minor injury, officials said.

Geselle Melina Guerra said she and her boyfriend heard an explosion at around 9:30 a.m. as they were having breakfast in their mobile home. “All of a sudden, we hear this loud bang, and then I see something bright, like orange, coming from our back door that’s outside,” said Guerra, 25, who lives within the evacuation area.

Her boyfriend woke up his brother and they ran to their car.

“I was just freaking out, pacing around the living room, not really knowing what to do or what was happening,” Guerra said. “I thought maybe it was an airplane that had crashed down by our house.”

La Porte city spokesperson Lee Woodward told KTRK-TV that people in nearby schools were told to shelter in place as law enforcement blocked off a wide area.

Energy Transfer said in a statement that air monitoring equipment was being set up in the area.

At nearby San Jacinto College, which closed its campus after the explosion, people who gathered included Evan Wyman, who had gotten word after calling police that her dog, Baxter, and had been rescued from her home, which is in the evacuated neighborhood.

“I just know that my dog is rescued,” Wyman said.

Houston is the nation’s petrochemical heartland and is home to a cluster of refineries, plants and thousands of miles of pipelines. Explosions and fires are a familiar sight to residents in Texas’ largest city, including some that have been deadly. The blasts have raised recurring questions about the adequacy of the industry’s plans to protect the public and the impacts of environmental damage.

Video images from KTRK showed a park near the fire had been damaged and firefighters pouring water on adjacent homes. By noon, at least a couple of homes appeared to have caught fire, with smoke pouring from their roofs. There are also several businesses nearby, including a Walmart.

Sanchez said they’re used to evacuations because they live close to other plants near the highway, but he hadn’t seen an explosion before in his 10 years living there.

“We just drove as far as we could because we didn’t know what was happening,” Sanchez said from a parked car at a gas station near his college.

Officials have ordered residents in the Brookglen neighborhood area near the fire to evacuate, Woodward said in an email.

“Please avoid the area and follow law enforcement directions. Further details will be released as available,” Woodward said.

The fire burned through high-voltage power lines, and the website PowerOutage.us said several thousand customers were without power in Harris County.

Editor’s Note: A previous AP update erroneously reported that the pipeline was carrying liquified natural gas. It is actually carrying natural gas liquids.

“The band have made the difficult decision to take some time away as a group. As such, they will be cancelling the remainder of the tour,” the band said in a brief statement Monday.

The move comes after videos captured Farrell lunging at Navarro at a Friday concert in Boston, bumping Navarro with his shoulder before taking a swing at the guitarist with his right arm. Navarro is seen holding his right arm out to keep Farrell away before Farrell is dragged away by others on stage. The show ended shortly after and the band apologized.

The band is known for edgy, punk-inspired hits “Jane Says,” “Been Caught Stealing” and “Just Because” in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the alternative rock and grunge music movements were growing. It has three top five hits on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart.

“Perry’s frustration had been mounting, night after night, he felt that the stage volume had been extremely loud and his voice was being drowned out by the band,” Etty Lau Farrell, Farrell’s wife, wrote in an Instagram post Saturday morning.

She said her husband had been suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat and “by the end of the song, he wasn’t singing, he was screaming just to be heard.” She said her husband later broke down “and cried and cried.”

The band’s “Imminent Redemption” tour — with opening act English rock band Love and Rockets — started in early August and was to end on Oct. 16 at the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles.

The North American shows marked the first time since 2010 that the original Jane’s Addiction lineup — Farrell, Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins and bassist Eric Avery — played an extended run of shows together.

Elaine DePrince of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, died on Sept. 11, 2024, during a routine procedure in preparation for a surgery, according to family spokesperson Jessica Volinski. Her death occurred the day after her adopted daughter Michaela died at the age of 29.

“Michaela died before Elaine and Elaine did not know of Michaela’s passing at the time of her procedure. As unbelievable as it may seem, the two deaths were completely unrelated,” Volinski wrote. “The only way we can make sense of the senseless is that Elaine, who had already lost three children many years ago, was by the grace of God spared the pain of experiencing the loss of a fourth child.”

While Michaela’s death was publicly announced on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024, Volinski stated that she passed away on Sept. 10, 2024. The family has not released a cause of death.

“What the family is going through right now is truly unimaginably painful,” Volinski wrote. “Grieving two family members who died within a 24 hour period is tragic and devastating. We continue to ask for privacy and appreciate you directing anyone sharing incorrect information and speculation to this post.”

The life of Michaela DePrince

Michaela DePrince was born Mabinty Bangura in Sierra Leone, Africa. After her father was killed by rebels and her mother died from disease and starvation, she was dropped off at an orphanage in Sierra Leone at the age of 3. While at the orphanage, DePrince spotted an image from a magazine that showed an American ballet dancer.

“All I remember is she looked really, really happy,” Michaela told The Associated Press back in 2012. DePrince said she wished “to become this exact person.”

Michaela also dealt with malnourishment, mistreatment and the skin disorder vitiligo.

“I lost both my parents, so I was there (the orphanage) for about a year and I wasn’t treated very well because I had vitiligo,” she told The Associated Press back in 2012. “We were ranked as numbers and number 27 was the least favorite and that was my number, so I got the least amount of food, the least amount of clothes and what not.”

Michaela told The Associated Press that she then walked shoeless for miles to reach a refugee camp after receiving word that her orphanage would be bombed. She, along with two other girls, were then adopted by Elaine DePrince and her husband, both of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, at the age of 4.

“They came to me sick and traumatized by the war,” Elaine DePrince told The Associated Press in 2012. “Michaela arrived with the worst case of tonsillitis, fever, mononucleosis and joints that were swollen.”

Michaela said her time in the orphanage impacted her for years. However, remembering how inspired she was by the ballerina image from the magazine, she soon found comfort and inspiration through dance.

Michaela began training in various competitions before attending the Rock School for Dance Education, a prestigious ballet school located in Philadelphia.

“I’m a little bit in disbelief. I have not really processed the enormity of the loss, not even to myself, but the entire field of classical ballet and certainly to the Rock School,” Director of the Rock School Peter Stark told NBC10. “Michaela’s story is really a remarkable tale of human perseverance and you almost have to wonder if there wasn’t divine intervention.”

During her dance journey, Michaela said she experienced racial discrimination.

“When I was 8 years old this teacher said, ‘You know, we don’t put a lot of effort into the Black ballerinas because they all end up getting fat and having big boobs,’” Michaela told NBC News back in 2017.

Michaela was undeterred however and continued to rise in the world of ballet. At the age of 17 she was featured in a documentary film and performed on the TV series “Dancing With the Stars.” She graduated from high school and the American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School and worked at Dance Theatre of Harlem where she was the youngest principal dancer in the theatre’s history.

She also performed in her first professional full ballet back in July 2012 in South Africa.

In 2013, she joined the junior company of the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam and joined the Dutch National Ballet as a student in 2014. She continued to rise through the ranks and break new ground while inspiring a generation of Black and brown girls.

Her celebrity continued to grow when she performed in Beyoncé’s 2016 musical film “Lemonade.” Pop superstar Madonna was also in talks to direct a biopic based on DePrince’s memoir back in 2018.

Michaela later joined the Boston Ballet in 2021 as a second soloist and danced the leading role in the 2021 ballet film “Coppelia.”

In addition to dance, DePrince was also a humanitarian who advocated for children impacted by conflict and violence. She also served as the ambassador for War Child Holland, an independent non-governmental organization that works to ensure children have access to protection, education and psychosocial support.

“The survival of classical ballet is dependent on diversification. It’s dancers like Michaela DePrince that are literally paving the path forward for the continuation of this artform,” Stark said. “We cannot survive without trailblazers and courageous women like Michaela and her loss is a devastating blow.”

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Tesla CEO and X majority owner Elon Musk wrote and then deleted a Sunday post on social media platform X that appeared to question why there weren’t more assassination threats made against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Musk, who has 197.8 million listed followers on X, posted the message shortly after a second apparent assassination attempt against Republican former President Donald Trump.

The post was prompted by an X user who asked, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”

Musk replied, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” punctuating his sentence with a thinking face emoji.

Both Biden and Harris have received assassination threats while in office.

Musk immediately faced backlash for the post, but he stood by it and defended it for roughly 9 hours before he deleted it.

Within an hour, Musk’s tweet had been viewed by at least 1.3 million users, while more than 3,000 users had reposted it and at least 18,000 users had liked it.

Hours after the initial post was deleted, Musk penned two other X posts in which he claimed the original one was an ill-received joke.

“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X,” Musk posted at 2:58 a.m. E.T. on Monday.

He followed up that post two minutes later: “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Musk has come under fire for controversial X posts before, but this latest episode was a rare instance of the billionaire deleting a post in response to criticism.

For example, in March 2021, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Tesla to have Musk delete a social media post that it saw as a threat to union organizers. As of Monday, the tweet remains posted on the site.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Musk’s post.

Spokespeople for X press relations did not reply to a request for comment from CNBC on Sunday, nor did Musk himself.

The White House denounced Musk’s language in a statement Monday.

“As President Biden and Vice President Harris said after yesterday’s disturbing news, ‘there is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country,’ and ‘we all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more violence,'” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said. “Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about. This rhetoric is irresponsible.”

On Sunday, Trump was unharmed after what the FBI said appeared to have been an assassination attempt.

Shortly before 2 p.m. E.T., while Trump was playing golf at his West Palm Beach club, the former president was rushed to a safe location, moments after the Secret Service opened fire at a gunman with a rifle who was 300 yards to 500 yards away from Trump.

The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, made his first court appearance on Monday.

Musk, also the CEO of major aerospace and defense contractor SpaceX, publicly endorsed Trump in July, just hours after the Republican presidential nominee survived his first assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally.

Tom Nichols, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, raised the question of Musk’s Pentagon contracts on Sunday, after Musk’s post about Biden and Harris. “I had a security clearance for most of my adult life. If I had said something like this, I would’ve lost it instantly. And yet this guy is still a major government contractor,” wrote Nichols.

Musk has emerged this election cycle as one of Trump’s most visible allies, a stark reversal from their public feuding just two years ago.

Musk said he helped to create and fund a pro-Trump political action committee, America PAC.

In turn, Trump recently endorsed some of Musk’s policy ideas, including a proposal to create a government efficiency commission to rein in federal spending. Musk has repeatedly volunteered to helm such a commission, which Trump has so far not ruled out.

Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, faces charges of possessing a firearm despite a prior felony conviction and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number. Additional and more serious charges are possible as the investigation continues and Justice Department prosecutors seek an indictment from a grand jury.

Routh appeared briefly in federal court in West Palm Beach, where he answered perfunctory questions about his work status and income. Shackled and wearing a blue jumpsuit, he smiled as he spoke with a public defender and reviewed documents ahead of the initial appearance. The lawyer declined to comment after the hearing ended.

Routh was arrested Sunday afternoon after authorities spotted a firearm poking out of shrubbery on the West Palm Beach golf course where Trump was playing. Prosecutors asked that he remain locked up as a flight risk. A federal magistrate set additional hearings for later this month.

Routh had been camped outside the golf course with food and a rifle for nearly 12 hours before a Secret Service agent confronted him and opened fire, according to court documents filed Monday.

An FBI affidavit accompanying a criminal complaint shows how law enforcement officials, during their investigation, used his cellphone information to place him at the golf course from 1:59 a.m. Sunday until about 1:31 p.m. A digital camera, a loaded rifle with scope and a plastic bag containing food was recovered from the area where Routh had positioned himself, according to the affidavit.

According to the court documents, Routh was stopped by officers about 45 minutes after he fled the golf course.

Officials said that Routh answered in the affirmative when officers asked him if he knew why he was being stopped. The vehicle was stopped at about 2:14 p.m. on northbound Interstate 95 in Martin County, which neighbors Palm Beach County.

Body camera footage released by the Martin County Sheriff’s Office on Monday showed Routh being taken into custody.

When he was detained had a calm, flat demeanor and showed little emotion when he was stopped, according Martin County Sheriff William Snyder.

“He never asked, ‘What is this about?’ Obviously, law enforcement with long rifles, blue lights, a lot going on. He never questioned it,” Snyder said.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office hosted a news conference with the Secret Service and FBI Monday afternoon. Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said the road around the golf club would remain closed until at least Tuesday and said the security level at Mar-a-Lago was “as high as it can be.”

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Markenzy Lapointe confirmed that a loaded SKS-style rifle with a scope was found at the course with its serial number “obliterated.” He added that Routh was prohibited from possessing a firearm based on his previous convictions.

Lapointe said the federal investigation into the apparent assassination attempt remains in its “early stages.”

“Together we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure accountability,” he told reporters.

Acting Director Ronald Rowe Jr. of the U.S. Secret Service added that Routh “did not have a line of sight to the former president” and did not fire at Secret Service agents before he fled the scene.

FBI Special Agent in Charge in Miami Jeff Veltri said Routh wouldn’t speak with investigators and invoked his right to an attorney.

Veltri said authorities requested search warrants seeking access to a video recording device, cell phones, a vehicle and electronics at Routh’s previous addresses.

Investigators also collected DNA that was sent to the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, and agents in the FBI’s Charlotte and Honolulu field offices are conducting interviews.

Routh was the subject of a closed investigation in 2019 when someone reported he was in possession of a firearm despite a prior felony conviction, but Veltri says the tipster would not confirm making the report.

The authorities did not immediately reveal any other details about Routh or allege a particular motive. But he left an online footprint that reveals shifting political views and intense outrage about world events.

“You are free to assassinate Trump,” Routh wrote of Iran in an apparently self-published 2023 book titled “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War,” which described the former president as a “fool” and “buffoon” for both the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots and the “tremendous blunder” of leaving the Iran nuclear deal.

Routh wrote that he once voted for Trump and must take part of the blame for the “child that we elected for our next president that ended up being brainless.”

He also tried to recruit fighters for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia, and he had a website seeking to raise money and recruit volunteers to fight for Kyiv.

Court records obtained by The Associated Press and NBC News show Routh was convicted of multiple felony offenses, including two charges of possessing stolen goods in 2002 in North Carolina.

Speaking in a soft voice in court, he said that he was working and making around $3,000 a month, but has zero savings.

Routh said that he has no real estate or assets, aside from two trucks worth about $1,000, both located in Hawaii. He also said that he has a 25-year-old son, whom he sometimes supports.

He is being represented by a public defender and is due back in court for a bond hearing next Monday, Sept. 23.

The court documents also detail the charges and possible penalties Routh could face if convicted.

The charge of a convicted felon in possession of a firearm carries a possible 15-year sentence, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release.

A second charge of possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number carries a possible five-year prison sentence, a $250,000 fine and also three years supervised release.

Secret Service agents stationed a few holes up from where Trump was playing golf noticed the muzzle of an AK-style rifle sticking through the shrubbery that lines the course, roughly 400 yards away.

An agent fired and Routh dropped the rifle and fled in an SUV, leaving the firearm behind along with two backpacks, an aiming scope and a GoPro camera, authorities said. Routh was later stopped by law enforcement in a neighboring county.

It was the second apparent assassination attempt targeting Trump in as many months.

On July 13, a bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Eight days later, Democratic President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, giving way for Vice President Kamala Harris to become the party’s nominee.

The clinic had worked hard to explain the limits of the law, which was part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ of tighter immigration policies. The clinic posted signs and counseled patients: They could decline to answer the question and still receive care. Individual, identifying information wouldn’t be reported to the state.

“We tried to explain this again and again and again, but the fear was real,” Grace Medical Home CEO Stephanie Garris said, adding the woman finally did go to an emergency room for treatment.

Texas will be the next to try a similar law for hospitals enrolled in state health plans, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. It takes effect Nov. 1 — just before the end of a presidential election in which immigration is a key topic.

“Texans should not have to shoulder the burden of financially supporting medical care for illegal immigrants,” Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement announcing his mandate, which differs from Florida’s in that providers don’t have to tell patients their status won’t be shared with authorities.

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Both states have high numbers of immigrants, ranging from people who are in the U.S. without legal permission to people who have pending asylum cases or are part of mixed-status families. And while the medically uninsured rate in these two states — neither of which have expanded Medicaid — are higher than the national average, research has shown immigrants tend to use less and spend less on health care.

Texas and Florida have a long history of challenging the federal government’s immigration policies by passing their own. And their Republican leaders say the hospital laws counter what they see as lax enforcement at the border by the Biden administration — though Florida’s early data is, by its own admission, limited.

Florida GOP state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, who sponsored the hospital bill, said in a written statement that the law is “the strongest, and most comprehensive state-led, anti-ILLEGAL immigration law,” but did not respond to The Associated Press’ questions about the impact of the law on the immigrant community or on hospital patients.

Luis Isea, an internal medicine doctor with patients in hospitals and clinics in central Florida, said the law “is creating that extra barrier” for patients who are already exposed to many disparities.

Immigrant advocate groups in Florida said they sent thousands of text messages and emails and held clinics to help people understand the limitations of the law — including that law enforcement agencies wouldn’t know an individual’s status because the data would be reported in aggregate.

But many outreach calls from health workers went unanswered. Some patients said they were leaving Florida, as a result of the law’s impact on getting health care and on employment; the DeSantis’ administration tied the hospital mandate to other initiatives that invalidated some driver’s licenses, criminalized transportation of migrants lacking permanent status and changed employment verification policies.

Others, advocates say, languished in pain or needed to be persuaded. Verónica Robleto, program director at the Rural Women’s Health Project in north central Florida, fielded a call before the law took effect in July 2023 from a young woman who didn’t have legal permission to be in the U.S. and was afraid she would be separated from her child if she gave birth at the hospital.

“She was very afraid (but) she did end up going after speaking with me,” Robleto said.

Whatever data Florida and Texas do collect likely will be unreliable for several reasons, researchers suggested. Health economist Paul Keckley said the report released by Florida state officials could have “incomplete or inaccurate or misleading” data.

For one, it’s self-reported. Anyone can decline to answer, an option chosen by nearly 8% of people admitted to the hospital and about 7% of people who went to the emergency room from June to December 2023, the Florida state report said. Fewer than 1% of people who went to the emergency room or were admitted to the hospital reported being in the U.S. “illegally.”

The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration acknowledged large limitations in their analysis, saying it didn’t know how much of the care provided to “illegal aliens” went unpaid. It also said it was unable to link high levels of uncompensated care with the level of “illegal aliens” coming to a hospital, saying it’s “more associated with rural county status than illegal immigration percentages.”

The agency didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment and more information. Its report noted that for much of the last decade, the amount of unpaid bills and uncollected debts held by Florida hospitals has declined.

In Florida and in Texas, people who aren’t in the U.S. legally can’t enroll in Medicaid, which provides health insurance for low-income people — except in the case of a medical emergency.

Multiple factors can affect the cost of care for people who are in the U.S. without legal permission, experts said, especially the lack of preventive care. That’s especially true for people who have progressive diseases like cancer, said Dr. James W. Castillo II, the health authority for Cameron County, Texas, which has about 22% of the population uninsured compared to the state average of 16.6%.

At that point, he said, “it’s usually much harder to treat, much more expensive to treat.”

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Texas community groups, policymakers and immigration attorneys are partnering with Every Texan, a nonprofit focusing on public policy and health care access, to encourage people to not answer the status question, said Lynn Cowles with Every Texan.

And in Florida, the deportation fears are subsiding but questions about the purpose of the law remain.

“How much of this is substantive policy and good policy versus how that fared, I leave that for others to speculate,” said Garris with the Orlando clinic. “But I know the practical effect of the law was egregious and demeaning to patients who are living here, working here. It’s just insulting.”

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Salomon reported from Miami, and Shastri reported from Milwaukee.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.