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<p>Chad Daybell was sentenced to death Saturday for the murders of his wife and his girlfriend’s two youngest children in Idaho.</p><p>The sentence was handed down after an Idaho jury unanimously agreed that imposing the death penalty would be a just resolution to the triple-murder case. The sentence marks the end of a grim investigation that began with a search for two missing children in 2019. The next year their bodies were found buried in Daybell’s eastern Idaho yard.</p>

PEORIA, Illinois — House Speaker Mike Johnson intensified his defense of Donald Trump before headlining a party fundraiser in Illinois on Saturday, as even this deep blue state’s Republicans seized on a Manhattan jury’s guilty verdict as a rallying cry for the former president. “Terrible,” Frank Hernandez, a retiree from Caterpillar, said of the verdict while waiting for Johnson to speak at the dinner. “The prosecutors, the judge, Biden — they were all in cahoots.” **SNIP** And after an army of online donors poured a staggering $53 million into Trump’s presidential campaign, Johnson said it wasn’t just Trump raising money...

Twice before, this Virginia carpenter had awoken in the predawn to start his work day only to find one of his vans broken into. Tools he depends on for a living had been stolen, and there was little hope of retrieving them. Determined to shut down thieves, he said, he bought a bunch of Apple AirTags and hid the locator devices in some of his larger tools that hadn’t been pilfered. Next time, he figured, he would track them........ The storage unit, stuffed with purloined power tools, led detectives to similar caches in other places in the next four months...

The front page of Friday’s New York Times had a huge, all-caps, single-word headline: “GUILTY.” True enough, but the story that followed was so full of hot-air that I feared the paper in my hands would spontaneously combust. After recounting the verdict of the Manhattan trial, the story suddenly veered into crazy land. It declared that Donald Trump’s “insurgent behavior delights his supporters as he bulldozes the country’s norms,” and went on to claim: “Now, the man who refused to accept his 2020 election loss is already seeking to delegitimize his conviction, attempting to assert the primacy of his raw...

Severe weather will focus across the High Plains into Saturday night before expanding to the Upper Midwest by later Sunday, then reload over the High Plains and Rockies and advance into the Midwest again next week. AccuWeather meteorologists warn that more storms packing tornadoes and big hail will continue to pose risks to lives and property. Areas of severe thunderstorms will shift back and forth from near the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River into next week. May typically brings a strong surge in severe weather across the United States. However, storm activity this past month has propelled the tally...

MALDEN — Asian American seniors play ping pong five times a week at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist church. Another group gathers Monday nights to dance at the Wah Lum Kung Fu & Tai Chi Academy. After years spent fitting in where they can across this city of 65,000, the growing Asian American community has no place to call their own. That’s about to change with $1 million in funding from Congress to jumpstart the process of creating Malden’s first community center for people of Asian descent, who account for 27.5 percent of the city’s population. Malden has the third-highest...

At this point it looks like most of our protein will be sourced from animals for some time to come, whether we like it or not, as it has for the past 100,000 years. Luckily, we can do this in ways that meet our climate goals and boost nutrition and animal welfare, Eurof Uppington writes. 2021 saw a strange and short-lived celebrity phenomenon. Out of nowhere, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr, Katy Perry, Serena Williams and other A-listers announced personal investments in plant-based foodtech startups alongside venture capital funds and philanthropists. They were on a mission to save the planet,...

There was some amusement as well as surprise when somebody walked into Helsinki’s Oodi Central Library on Monday 27 with a book that was overdue. 84 years overdue It’s not unusual to be a little delayed in returning a library book but this one was unusual in as much as it was due back on December 26, 1939 making it just over 84 years late! The person who returned it isn’t the person who first took out the book The Refugees (Pakolaiset in Finnish) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and it is not known whether there was a fine and...

The sale of tobacco products from self-service cigarette and vape vending machines is to be banned next year under measures being introduced by Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly. The machines are often found in bars and nightclubs. […] … Donnelly said the ban was a continuation of Government policy to “de-normalize” the sale of tobacco products. “On ‘World No Tobacco Day’, I am bringing into operation further elements of our overall tobacco control strategy,” he said. […] The Department of Health said the ban was a recommendation of Tobacco Free Ireland and is in line with the Program for Government...

NEW YORK — In May 2019, a senior official at the USDA was told by his then-chief-of-staff that Sen. Bob Menendez would call his personal cell phone in around an hour. The agriculture official, Ted McKinney, had been trying to get Egyptian officials to reverse their decision to grant a new company a monopoly certifying halal meat exported to that country. That decision, he recalled from the witness stand of Menendez’s corruption trial Friday, was “very unusual” and could hurt American beef interests. McKinney said that he would “never forget the words” Menendez told him during the brief call: “Stop...

President Joe Biden brushed off claims by Donald Trump that the New York hush-money trial was politically-motivated and orchestrated by the White House. 'I didn't know I was that powerful,' Biden quipped when asked about it. The president also said he wasn't worried he may end up in court one day like Trump. 'Not at all. I didn't do anything wrong. The system still works,' he said. Republicans have been trying to tie Biden to his son's Hunter business dealings, claiming they were working together to enrich the family. Biden has said repeatedly he wasn't involved in his son's work....

Marian Robinson, the mother of former first lady Michelle Obama, has died, according to a statement from the Obama and Robinson families. She was 86. […] Robinson lived with the Obamas during their time at the White House and was often spotted at events with the first family, including handing out goodie bags to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. […] A native of Chicago — where she returned after the Obamas left the White House — Robinson was married to Fraser Robinson, and the pair had two children, Michelle and Craig. Fraser Robinson died in 1991 after a long struggle with multiple...

Trump lost. So has America. Not that you would know it from most of yesterday's news coverage, so-called reporters and journalists practically levitating over 34 guilty verdicts in a trial that was nothing but a political hit job. You can dislike Donald Trump, as I and so many others do, and still find yourself outraged. This case — which the feds declined to prosecute — was falsely, flimsily predicated on 'election interference'. Want to talk election interference? How about keeping the GOP nominee for president off the campaign trail for nearly two months? Or scheduling his sentencing just four days...

Organizers of a Guinness World Record attempt in Philadelphia are seeking audience members to participate in the world's largest drag story time reading. The event, organized by The Philadelphia Gay News and sponsored by Visit Philly, is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Saturday at the National Constitution Center. Drag performer Brittany Lynn is scheduled to emcee the record attempt and several drag performers from around the Philadelphia region are slated to read aloud from children's books in an attempt to set a world record. A Guinness World Records adjudicator is being brought to the city to supervise the event....

Authorities discovered the remains of a missing woman in the jaws of an alligator this week in Houston, prompting an investigation into her cause of death by the city's Homicide Division Sergeants. “Patrol officers located the remains of a woman in the jaws of an alligator in the Horsepen Bayou, just west of El Dorado Boulevard, while searching the area for a woman reported missing” on Tuesday, Houston police said in a Wednesday release. Police did not name the woman, who they believe to be in her 60s, but they told KHOU-TV that she went for a walk around 7:30...

The Nazi occupying forces massacred civilians in Crete. Credit: Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0 de/Wikipedia Greek scientists have recently identified 18 people who were executed by the Nazis in Crete through DNA analysis. In the Battle of Crete during the World War II occupation of Greece, the German forces faced substantial civilian resistance. The inhabitants of Adele, a prosperous lowland village in the northeastern part of the Rethymnon regional unit, resisted fiercely and had formed an armed resistance group. As a consequence, the German forces surrounded the village on June 2, 1941, and arrested 18 male civilians (including two fathers with...

Israel has degraded Hamas’ military capabilities significantly since October, and the militant group no longer poses a major threat to Israel, President Joe Biden said Friday. Biden offered that analysis while outlining a new three-phase cease-fire proposal Israel has offered Hamas, which would lead to the release of all hostages and a permanent end to fighting. “The people of Israel should know they can make this offer without any further risk to their own security, because they’ve devastated Hamas forces over the past eight months,” Biden said. “At this point, Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another Oct....

A jury has found New Jersey father Christopher Gregor guilty of aggravated manslaughter in the death of his 6-year-old son, who he forced to do abusive treadmill workouts. Gregor, 31, was charged with first-degree murder and endangerment of the welfare of a child stemming from surveillance video from the gym in his apartment complex that showed Gregor forcing his son to run at high speeds on a treadmill. The video shows Gregor continually increasing the speed on the treadmill, which forced his son to fall off the exercise equipment six times. Prosecutors also noted the boy had contusions all over...

Boston's woke Democratic mayor Michelle Wu has been labeled 'tone-deaf' and 'unserious' for her plan to give young children and undocumented citizens the power to vote on the city's budget. During a City Council committee hearing on Tuesday that reviewed her 2025 fiscal budget, Wu announced that the new budgeting voting process is open to the undocumented and children as young as 11 years old. After the meeting, enraged Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn wrote a letter to Renato Castelo, the director of the Office of Participatory Budgeting, and expressed his concern with Wu's decision. 'Allowing children to decide the...