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Police became convinced they were investigating a crime in the disappearance of University of Mississippi student Jimmie “Jay” Lee when they interviewed the man now on trial in his death, a top officer testified Tuesday. Lee had been missing for two weeks when officers arrested Sheldon “Timothy” Herrington Jr. on July 22, 2022, said Oxford Police Chief Jeff McCutchen. Authorities interviewed Herington twice that day, and he gave conflicting information about the hours before Lee vanished, the chief said. “From the moment that we gave Tim Herrington the opportunity to tell the truth and he couldn’t and he lied and we backed that up, we knew then,” McCutchen said. Herrington, 24, is being tried on a capital murder charge in the death of Lee, 20, a gay man who was well known in the LGBTQ+ community at Ole Miss and in Oxford. Lee disappeared in Oxford, where Herrington’s trial is in its second week. Prosecutors and the defense both called their final witnesses Tuesday, and Herrington did not testify. Closing arguments are set for Wednesday. Lee’s body has never been found, but a judge has declared him dead. Herrington maintains his innocence and his attorney, Kevin Horan, told jurors last week that prosecutors have “zero” proof Lee was killed. Lee has not contacted friends or family, and his financial transactions and once-prolific social media posts have stopped since the day he went missing, investigators testified. Before officers interviewed Herrington, they had already obtained sexually explicit text messages exchanged between social media accounts belonging to Herrington and Lee in the early hours of July 8, 2022, when Herrington disappeared in Oxford, McCutchen said. Lee communicated with his mother daily, and sent his last message to her hours before he vanished to wish her happy birthday, according to earlier testimony. Google records obtained through a warrant showed that Herrington searched “how long does it take to strangle someone” at 5:56 a.m., University Police Department Sgt. Benjamin Douglas testified last week. The final text message from Lee's phone was sent to a social media account belonging to Herrington at 6:03 a.m. from a spot near Herrington's apartment, and cellphone tower in another part of Oxford last located any signal from Lee's phone at 7:28 a.m., McCutchen said Tuesday. A security camera showed Herrington jogging at about 7:30 a.m. out of a parking lot where Lee's car was abandoned, investigators testified earlier. “We’ve been looking for Jay Lee’s body for two years, and we’re not going to stop 'til we find it," McCutchen said in court Tuesday. On the day Lee vanished, Herrington was also seen on security cameras buying duct tape in Oxford and driving to his own hometown of about an hour away, police have testified. Herrington is from an affluent family in Grenada , Mississippi, about 52 miles (83.7 kilometers) southwest of Oxford, testified Ryan Baker, an Oxford Police Department intelligence officer who was a detective when he helped investigated the case. Herrington’s grandfather is bishop of a church in Grenada, other family members work at the church and Herrington himself taught youth Sunday school classes there, Baker said. Herrington “was not portraying himself as gay” to family or friends, Baker said. During testimony Tuesday, Herrington's father and grandfather both said Herrington had never spoken about having boyfriends. Herrington operated a furniture moving business with another man while they were students at the University of Mississippi, and they had a white box truck that Herrington drove to Grenada, Baker said. Security cameras at several businesses and a neighbor’s house showed Herrington and the truck in Grenada hours after Lee disappeared, Baker said. During McCutchen's testimony Tuesday, Horan asked whether DNA tests on items taken from Herrington's apartment and the truck showed “any trace evidence at all implicating my client.” McCutchen said they did not, but police first searched Herrington's apartment two weeks after Lee vanished and they searched the box truck a few days after the apartment. Both Herrington and Lee had graduated from the University of Mississippi. Lee was pursuing a master’s degree. He was known for his creative expression through fashion and makeup and often performed in drag shows in Oxford, according to a support group called Justice for Jay Lee. Prosecutors have announced they do not intend to pursue the death penalty, meaning Herrington could get a life sentence if convicted. Mississippi law defines capital murder as a killing committed along with another felony — in this case, kidnapping.
Stock indexes drifted to a mixed finish on Wall Street Thursday, as some heavyweight technology and communications sector stocks offset gains elsewhere in the market. The S&P 500 fell less than 0.1% after spending the day wavering between small gains and losses. The tiny loss ended the benchmark index's three-day winning streak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite fell 0.1%. Trading volume was lighter than usual as U.S. markets reopened following the Christmas holiday. Semiconductor giant Nvidia, whose enormous valuation gives it an outsize influence on indexes, slipped 0.2%. Meta Platforms fell 0.7%, and Amazon and Netflix each fell 0.9%. Tesla was among the biggest decliners in the S&P 500, finishing 1.8% lower. Some tech companies fared better. Chip company Broadcom rose 2.4%, Micron Technology added 0.6% and Adobe gained 0.5%. Health care stocks were a bright spot. CVS Health rose 1.5% and Walgreens Boots Alliance added 5.3% for the biggest gain among S&P 500 stocks. Several retailers also gained ground. Target rose 3%, Ross Stores added 2.3%, Best Buy rose 2.9% and Dollar Tree gained 3.8%. Traders are watching to see whether retailers have a strong holiday season. The day after Christmas traditionally ranks among the top 10 biggest shopping days of the year, as consumers go online or rush to stores to cash in gift cards and raid bargain bins. U.S.-listed shares in Honda and Nissan rose 4.1% and 16.4%, respectively. The Japanese automakers announced earlier this week that the two companies are in talks to combine. All told, the S&P 500 fell 2.45 points to 6,037.59. The Dow added 28.77 points to 43,325.80. The Nasdaq fell 10.77 points to close at 20,020.36. Wall Street got a labor market update. U.S. applications for unemployment benefits held steady last week , though continuing claims rose to the highest level in three years, the Labor Department reported. Treasury yields mostly fell in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 4.58% from 4.59% late Tuesday. Major European markets were closed, as well as Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia. Trading was expected to be subdued this week with a thin slate of economic data on the calendar. Still, U.S. markets have historically gotten a boost at year’s end despite lower trading volumes. The last five trading days of each year, plus the first two in the new year, have brought an average gain of 1.3% since 1950. So far this month, the U.S. stock market has lost some of its gains since President-elect Donald Trump’s win on Election Day, which raised hopes for faster economic growth and more lax regulations that would boost corporate profits. Worries have risen that Trump’s preference for tariffs and other policies could lead to higher inflation , a bigger U.S. government debt and difficulties for global trade. Even so, the U.S. market remains on pace to deliver strong returns for 2024. The benchmark S&P 500 is up 26.6% so far this year and remains near its most recent all-time high it set earlier this month — its latest of 57 record highs this year. Wall Street has several economic reports to look forward to next week, including updates on pending home sales and home prices, a report on U.S. construction spending and snapshots of manufacturing activity. AP Business Writers Elaine Kurtenbach and Matt Ott contributed.
Wall Street Holds Steady as Treasury Yields Weigh on Tech Giants
The Prime Minister said his younger brother, who had learning difficulties because of complications at birth, had met “all the challenges life threw at him with courage and good humour”. He died peacefully on Boxing Day, according to the Prime Minister’s spokesman. The Prime Minister had been due to go on holiday with his family on Friday, but it is understood that he will now remain at home, and hopes to join them later. Sir Keir said in a statement: “My brother Nick was a wonderful man. “He met all the challenges life threw at him with courage and good humour. We will miss him very much. “I would like to thank all those who treated and took care of Nick. Their skill and compassion is very much appreciated.” Sir Keir spoke candidly about his brother in a recent biography written by journalist and former Labour Party adviser Tom Baldwin. While growing up in Surrey, the brothers shared a bunk bed in a room with an airing cupboard, and “just enough space for a couple of small desks where we’d do our homework”. The biography recorded how each child of the Starmer family was given a dog for their 10th birthday, and Nick and his twin sister Katy received Jack Russell terriers called Greg and Ben. The book also described how their mother, Jo, had taught Nick to read, but Sir Keir remembered how the school described his brother as “remedial”. Sir Keir, the middle child of four siblings, said: “They had no expectation of him or anything and I’m not sure he even sat exams, so he had nothing to show for coming out of education. “We were a family of six, so it didn’t feel lonely and I shared a room with him, but Nick didn’t have many friends and got called ‘thick’ or ‘stupid’ by other kids.” He added: “Even now I try to avoid using words like that to describe anyone.” Nick worked on scrap cars and scaffolding, earning enough money to rent a home near where he had grown up, according to the book. It said Sir Keir was best man at Nick’s wedding, and the now Prime Minister recalled borrowing a car so his brother was not “driving his bride from the church in his beaten-up minivan, which had all his clothes in the back”. The marriage ended and Nick lived for some time in Yorkshire. In 2022, Sir Keir stepped away from local election campaigning to make several hospital visits to see his brother, who was seriously ill at the time. The Prime Minister also spoke about Nick in his speech at this year’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool. As he described his early encounters with art and culture, and the need to remove social barriers, Sir Keir told delegates: “My brother, who had difficulties learning, he didn’t get those opportunities. “Every time I achieved something in my life, my dad used to say, ‘Your brother has achieved just as much as you, Keir’. “And he was right. I still believe that.” Mr Baldwin, writing for The Times on Friday, recalled the moment in 2023 that he learned from Sir Keir that his brother was dying of lung cancer. He wrote: “This has been a huge part of his life over the past couple of years, during which he made regular trips to Leeds where his brother was in hospital. “Even during the election campaign and since he entered Downing Street, Starmer has continued to visit without a camera crew in sight. “He got to know the staff treating his brother so well that he could recite all their names and they would let him into the hospital through a back door so that there would be no publicity.” Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch was among those in the world of politics to offer their condolences. She wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “This is such awful news. Particularly devastating at Christmas time. “My sincere condolences to Keir Starmer and all his family.” Irish premier Simon Harris wrote: “My sincere sympathy to Keir Starmer and his family on such sad news. “They are in my thoughts at this difficult time.”
A Closer Look at Affirm Holdings's Options Market Dynamics
ROCK HILL, SC / ACCESSWIRE / December 26, 2024 / Recent regulatory changes have brought significant updates to the reporting obligations for companies filing beneficial ownership information with FinCEN. Following a federal Court of Appeals decision on December 23, 2024, reporting companies, except as indicated below, are once again required to file beneficial ownership information with FinCEN. The Department of the Treasury recognizes that reporting companies may need additional time to comply, given the period when the preliminary injunction had been in effect. As such, the BOI reporting deadlines have been extended as follows: Updated BOI Filing Deadlines: Reporting companies created or registered before January 1, 2024: The deadline has been extended to January 13, 2025 (originally January 1, 2025) for filing initial BOI reports with FinCEN. 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Sinn Fein ‘ignored role of 3,000 deaths in damaging community relations’
MR’s security de-militarised Essential reading on Ranil’s role Sri Lankans have been politically scammed as never before. With AKD and the NPP, there’s been generational, gender and governance change, no structural reform (let alone ‘system-change’), and most crucially no change of economic policy paradigm and corporate/superrich bias. In an inversion of their mandate, there’s stark continuity in the economic policy framework that caused Sri Lanka’s debt crisis and perpetuates mass economic austerity. As presidential candidate Anura emphasised improvement of human resources, upgrading of human capital, as his economic keystone, but his presidential policies have placed the keystone in the opposite direction, and his macroeconomic commitments are and cannot but be ruinous to human resources/human capital. What would it mean if, as Deshal de Mel, (former? intermittent?) advisor to the Finance Ministry exults, three Presidents who were perceived to have been and publicly purported to be very different from each other—Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Anura Kumara Dissanayake—deployed one and the same team, on core economic policy including the deal with the private creditors (ISB holders)? Is it because the team comprised the best of the best? Then why the ‘stealth’? Surely we should know the names of everyone involved so the nation could be grateful. Logically, three widely disparate presidents should have issued instructions with different emphases to the team, and under AKD they should have concluded with a quite different package than that which Ranil had chalked-out. But if there were three widely different presidents, one team, and the package that was worked on was the same, it means that whatever their public postures the three Presidents were of essentially the same view, shared the same economic policy paradigm. Bluntly, all 3 Presidents, 3 Finance Ministers and their unchanging team, over ‘983 days’ and counting, served the same interests: big private financial corporate interests, local and foreign. Though the threat to him is qualitatively higher than to any other Sri Lankan, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s security contingent is being stripped of its military component, reducing it to a purely Police detachment. Dinesh Schaffter’s brutal murder has not been solved. His shadowy, sadistic killers have not been identified let alone apprehended. How difficult would it be for a die-hard pro-Tiger Diaspora billionaire or consortium of contributors to hire foreign mercenaries specialised in Black Ops to infiltrate a team into Colombo and assassinate Mahinda Rajapaksa, in bitter, bloody revenge for their ‘Mahaveera’ Prabhakaran’s demise and the LTTE’s decisive defeat? AKD’s administration is leaving Mahinda wide-open. It has cold-bloodedly jeopardised the security and safety of the leader who restored security and safety for the immense majority of Sri Lanka’s citizens. Disguised as Santa, President AKD gifted social sectors who are among the most vulnerable, a tax on their fixed deposits i.e., their life savings, which will reduce the monthly or annual interest on which they live, buy medicines etc. Undertaken to offset loss of revenue through the slender, spotty VAT reduction, this heartless measure could be avoided by increased direct taxes on the top corporate earners and the superrich. The economic callousness of the Government is manifest when reading data provided by numbers.lk: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BLSjMSarQ/ The apologia for Anuranomics-- ‘what alternative did Anura have?’-- a pseudo-left echo of Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) is masterfully answered in concrete detail by Kusum Wijetilleke last Sunday, in a piece entitled ‘The Curse of Incrementalism: NPP Capitulation to the Status-Quo’. The Government has relaxed foreign exchange regulations for an initial period of six months. (https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking-news/Government-decides-to-further-ease-capital-controls/108-298515). That’s sugar to a diabetic. Foreign exchange regulations in place through the JR and Premadasa presidencies were relaxed by Ranil Wickremesinghe and Ravi Karunanayake in 2017, causing or contributing to a massive outflow of dollars, which according to figures provided in parliament by then Minister of Justice Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, is larger than our total foreign debt. Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe (appointed not elected, then electorally trounced) made an appearance on television, addressing the nation in robust support of President Anura Dissanayake’s recent address to parliament and specifically his ISB deal. Ranil kept using the term “we” (“api”), as in “we have now arrived at an agreement with the sovereign bond holders and a new bond will be issued on December 20th”. (https://youtu.be/IUAHz8mmwpk) He faulted the Opposition for its criticism of President Dissanayake’s economics and insisted the Opposition make it clear than any and all criticism was within the existing agreement with the IMF, i.e., without advocating renegotiation/revision, as Sajith does. Is Ranil Wickremesinghe AKD’s Emeritus Economic Advisor or ‘Economics Godfather’? Has his security been slashed as badly as Mahinda’s, or does Ranil (still) have Army Commandos and/or the STF? ‘Ranil Wickremesinghe & The Emasculation of the United National Party’ (Neptune, Colombo 2024) a brand-new book by Prof Rajiva Wijesinha (his cousin), is mandatory reading for any student of Sri Lanka’s politics and contemporary history. A chronicle by an erudite observer-participant in the politics of the last few decades, it is the seedbed of several doctoral dissertations. As I noted in my remarks at Rajiva’s book launch, Ranil Wickremesinghe’s story is one of negative dominance of Sri Lankan affairs. He is a reverse Midas, dooming through corrosion, every party and leader he has touched or has touched him. The long list includes the UNP, SLFP and SLPP, all of which have had their large vote bases fissure, decompose and disintegrate. Ranil’s toxic economic ideas and ideology have now possessed Anura Dissanayake and the JVP-NPP. The JVP was thought of either as (a) the anti-capitalist ‘third force’ or (b) the radical wing of the national liberation struggle, the leftwing vanguard of the anti-UNP bloc. It authentically occupied each role at different periods. During the so-called Yahapalanaya (‘Good governance’) coalition of Ranil’s UNP and dissident Maithripala Sirisena’s SLFP faction, Anura and the JVP were seen in a third way: as the leftwing ally of a centre-right neoliberal coalition. The green elephant being the UNP symbol, the JVPers were nicknamed “rathu ali pataw” or “red baby elephants” with Anura as the ‘Rathu Ali Patiya’. Malik Samarawickrema and Mangala Samaraweera were Ranil’s “AKD Whisperers”. This Christmas season it is even more appropriate than usual to call to mind the circumstances of bloody repression by the authorities that surrounded the birth of Jesus. Netanyahu’s Israel has been perpetrating the modern-day equivalent of King Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents. One of the most unforgettably heart-rending episodes was of a 6-year-old girl Hind Rajab, who made a plaintive telephone call for help which we all heard on TV around the world before she went missing and was discovered slaughtered by the IDF. According to a Belgium-based NGO dedicated to justice for Hind Rajab, an Israeli soldier who has earned the nickname ‘Terminator’ for self-advertised war-crimes was on holiday in Sri Lanka. Alerted by the IDF he has since skipped the island. (https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking-news/Belgium-based-NGO-claims-Israel-soldier-terminator-in-Sri-Lanka/108-298377). Sirimavo Bandaranaike or Ranasinghe Premadasa would have deported him and shut down the pipeline bringing IDF soldiers on R&R to Sri Lanka while Israel continues to attack countries and communities in a Nazi-like rampage. Not so, Anura Dissanayake. Recently, there was a two-hour discussion on foreign policy billed ‘Sri Lanka’s Place in a Turbulent World’, on TV1’s Face the Nation. The participants included an old friend and several young ones, including a very bright former student. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LioiN2q69Q&list=PLwBEINflt3JHYOP-1BUn6SjgBpVSHnvd0) Two propositions stated by the very smart younger analysts startled me. The first was that Israel’s war on Gaza and the West Bank was essentially the same as Russia’s invasion of/intervention in Ukraine. That’s a classic ‘category error’; apples and oranges. Israel’s is an Occupation and has been so for decades as acknowledged by numerous UN Security Council resolutions. Israel’s Occupation has structural characteristics of Apartheid, as affirmed both by former US President Jimmy Carter and the ANC leaders who fought apartheid in South Africa. This, and NATO expansion towards the East in the post-Cold war era, make the response to Ukraine far more muted in the global South (notably among the BRICS Plus constituency, containing the global majority) than the response to Gaza. The second, far more dangerous proposition, presented by the young academic in the strategic/security studies sector, issued from what he repeatedly insisted was ‘strategic thinking’: Sri Lanka should not recalibrate and retrench from its present policy on Israel which includes ‘R&R war tourism’, because from a ‘strategic’ point of view, Sri Lanka needs strong relations with Israel, an AI weapons hub. This is bad strategy and bad thinking. Which strategic interests—the strategic interests of what and who— are we or should we be thinking of, when we speak of strategy? Surely, of Sri Lanka as a country or more precisely Sri Lanka as State. The worst crisis and challenge the Sri Lankan state faced since Independence was in the 1980s when it had two civil wars – North and South, secessionist and anti-systemic--and an external military force on Sri Lankan soil. That crisis was caused by the mismanagement of Sri Lanka’s internal relations with one of its constituent communities (Sri Lanka’s Tamils), which had a co-ethnic rear-base, an ethnic kin-state as neighbour. No strategic thinking about Sri Lanka’s foreign policy or pathway can start from or limit itself to bilateral relations – diplomatic, economic or military relations with another state. Strategic thinking must flow from the foundational set of questions, axiomatically geostrategic but also ontological-existential, which I borrow from Mervyn de Silva: ‘who we are, what we are, where we are’. Strategic thinking about the Sri Lankan state must place high priority on grasping Sri Lanka’s composition and the necessity to manage with prudence its internal relationships between its constituent communities, especially when those communities have a larger global/globalised extended family they belong to. The Ranil-Manusha expansion of Sri Lanka’s relations with Israel during and despite its genocidal Gaza war, continued and maintained by Anura-Vijitha, does not take into account: What kind of ‘strategic thinking’ can recommend robust, expansive relations with Israel ignoring these three factors? What kind of ‘strategic thinking’ can ignore the possible outreach to Islamist militancy outside Sri Lanka or the gaze of Islamist militancy falling on Sri Lanka as a place which welcomes IDF war criminals with open arms? How can the expanded equation with Israel under the Ranil-Manusha and Anura-Vijitha dispensations not be seen for the strategic and security threat it poses to the Sri Lankan state by alienating an entire community which has already experienced one round of radicalisation, providing the backcloth of the Easter Massacre 2019, though external infiltrators and provocateurs were very probably involved? Sri Lanka’s passage in a turbulent world must be navigated with awareness of the tempest to come. nWashington is undecided: should Russia be neutralised with a Trump-propelled deal on Ukraine, or should the collective West go for broke on Ukrainian/Russian and Iranian fronts and possibly open a Cuban/Latin American front? Both the Israeli campaign in the Middle East and NATO/Ukraine in Europe, aimed at Iran and Russia respectively, are flanking moves in the West’s grand strategy aimed at the ultimate target, China. If Sri Lanka has a strong strategic bond with Israel, it is taking sides wittingly or unwittingly, and painting a target on its back. Our doctrine must be one of strategic prudence. This holds true of any Defence Cooperation Agreement with India. Just as Sri Lanka should not allow anything hostile to India to emanate from Sri Lanka’s land or sea, we must not allow anything hostile to China to do so either, still less allow ourselves to be enmeshed in a type of defence relationship which may be a subset of an Indian strategic configuration aimed separately or in conjunction with its fellow Quad partners, against China. It is absurd to regard moral-ethical factors and world opinion as unrelated to strategic policy-making, and compartmentalise the two. Prof Joseph Nye’s famous concepts of ‘soft power’ and ‘smart power’ incorporate the moral-ethical ingredient into the all-important ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ which seeks to persuade. Israel’s story is the nastiest in the world today (and in my lifetime since the Vietnam War). We should take our distance from it. Yet, Sri Lanka on the NPP’s watch is turning a blind eye to Zionist genocidaires enjoying themselves on our island. For Sri Lanka, a small state, it is strategically imperative that: (I)We establish a presence (a toehold) and participate in as many spaces in the world system as possible, raising our profile. (II) We share the same broad, autonomous – I call it ‘Neo-Nonaligned’--space and outlook as the majority of the world’s nations and peoples, in support of a multipolar world order which can contribute to global balance, global equilibrium.Southern California defense contractors optimistic Trump administration could create jobs locally
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