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Trump wants to turn the clock on daylight saving timeDeranged prisoner tormented Home Office Minister Jess Phillips by stalking her from behind bars
Luigi Nicholas Mangione, the suspect in the fatal shooting of a healthcare executive in New York City, apparently was living a charmed life: the grandson of a wealthy real estate developer, valedictorian of his elite Baltimore prep school and with degrees from one of the nation's top private universities. Friends at an exclusive co-living space at the edge of touristy Waikiki in Hawaii where the 26-year-old Mangione once lived widely considered him a “great guy,” and pictures on his social media accounts show a fit, smiling, handsome young man on beaches and at parties. Now, investigators in New York and Pennsylvania are working to piece together why Mangione may have diverged from this path to make the violent and radical decision to gun down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in a brazen attack on a Manhattan street. The killing sparked widespread discussions about corporate greed, unfairness in the medical insurance industry and even inspired folk-hero sentiment toward his killer. But Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro sharply refuted that perception after Mangione's arrest on Monday when a customer at a McDonald's restaurant in Pennsylvania spotted Mangione eating and noticed he resembled the shooting suspect in security-camera photos released by New York police. “In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this, he is no hero,” Shapiro said. “The real hero in this story is the person who called 911 at McDonald’s this morning.” Mangione comes from a prominent Maryland family. His grandfather, Nick Mangione, who died in 2008, was a successful real estate developer. One of his best-known projects was Turf Valley Resort, a sprawling luxury retreat and conference center outside Baltimore that he purchased in 1978. The Mangione family also purchased Hayfields Country Club north of Baltimore in 1986. On Monday, Baltimore County police officers blocked off an entrance to the property, which public records link to Luigi Mangione’s parents. Reporters and photographers gathered outside the entrance. The father of 10 children, Nick Mangione prepared his five sons — including Luigi Mangione’s father, Louis Mangione — to help manage the family business, according to a 2003 Washington Post report. Nick Mangione had 37 grandchildren, including Luigi, according to the grandfather's obituary. Luigi Mangione’s grandparents donated to charities through the Mangione Family Foundation, according to a statement from Loyola University commemorating Nick Mangione’s wife’s death in 2023. They donated to various causes, including Catholic organizations, colleges and the arts. One of Luigi Mangione’s cousins is Republican Maryland state legislator Nino Mangione, a spokesman for the lawmaker’s office confirmed. “Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest,” Mangione’s family said in a statement posted on social media by Nino Mangione. “We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved.” Mangione, who was valedictorian of his elite Maryland prep school, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, a university spokesman told The Associated Press. He learned to code in high school and helped start a club at Penn for people interested in gaming and game design, according to a 2018 story in Penn Today, a campus publication. His social media posts suggest he belonged to the fraternity Phi Kappa Psi. They also show him taking part in a 2019 program at Stanford University, and in photos with family and friends at the Jersey Shore and in Hawaii, San Diego, Puerto Rico, and other destinations. The Gilman School, from which Mangione graduated in 2016, is one of Baltimore’s elite prep schools. The children of some of the city’s wealthiest and most prominent residents, including Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr., have attended the school. Its alumni include sportswriter Frank Deford and former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington. In his valedictory speech, Luigi Mangione described his classmates’ “incredible courage to explore the unknown and try new things.” Mangione took a software programming internship after high school at Maryland-based video game studio Firaxis, where he fixed bugs on the hit strategy game Civilization 6, according to a LinkedIn profile. Firaxis' parent company, Take-Two Interactive, said it would not comment on former employees. He more recently worked at the car-buying website TrueCar, but has not worked there since 2023, the head of the Santa Monica, California-based company confirmed to the AP. From January to June 2022, Mangione lived at Surfbreak, a “co-living” space at the edge of touristy Waikiki in Honolulu. Like other residents of the shared penthouse catering to remote workers, Mangione underwent a background check, said Josiah Ryan, a spokesperson for owner and founder R.J. Martin. “Luigi was just widely considered to be a great guy. There were no complaints,” Ryan said. “There was no sign that might point to these alleged crimes they’re saying he committed.” At Surfbreak, Martin learned Mangione had severe back pain from childhood that interfered with many aspects of his life, including surfing, Ryan said. “He went surfing with R.J. once but it didn’t work out because of his back,” Ryan said, but noted that Mangione and Martin often went together to a rock-climbing gym. Mangione left Surfbreak to get surgery on the mainland, Ryan said, then later returned to Honolulu and rented an apartment. An image posted to a social media account linked to Mangione showed what appeared to be an X-ray of a metal rod and multiple screws inserted into someone's lower spine. Martin stopped hearing from Mangione six months to a year ago. An X account linked to Mangione includes recent posts about the negative impact of smartphones on children; healthy eating and exercise habits; psychological theories; and a quote from Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti about the dangers of becoming “well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Mangione likely was motivated by his anger at what he called “parasitic” health insurance companies and a disdain for corporate greed, according to a law enforcement bulletin obtained by AP. He wrote that the U.S. has the most expensive healthcare system in the world and that the profits of major corporations continue to rise while “our life expectancy” does not, according to the bulletin, based on a review of the suspect’s handwritten notes and social media posts. He appeared to view the targeted killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO as a symbolic takedown, asserting in his note that he is the “first to face it with such brutal honesty,” the bulletin said. Mangione called “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski a “political revolutionary” and may have found inspiration from the man who carried out a series of bombings while railing against modern society and technology, the document said. ___ Associated Press reporters Lea Skene in Baltimore; Jennifer Sinco Kelleher in Honolulu; Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia; John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio; and Michael Kunzelman in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.A Democratic congressman is calling for the U.S. to decriminalize sex work nationwide in response to damning findings released by the House Ethics Committee about Matt Gaetz . Shri Thanedar of Illinois wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday that sex workers should be able to come to law enforcement when they are victims of abuse, adding that decriminalizing sex work would aid in efforts to prevent children from being trafficked and otherwise exploited. “We should decriminalize sex work to maximize sex workers' legal protection and their ability to exercise other rights, including unionization, justice, and health care. Decriminalization and regulation would prevent trafficking and exploitation of minors,” wrote Thanedar. The congressman added in a second post: “It also helps them report crimes against them.” Sex work is legal in just one state in the U.S.: Nevada. It is heavily regulated, and a 2023 count reported that less than two dozen businesses were operating statewide. Thanedar’s comments came in response to an allegation from the House Ethics Committee that Gaetz likely violated Florida’s statutory rape law during his time as a congressman and “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him” from 2017 to 2020. The committee spoke to one woman who said she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17 and was paid $400, “which she understood to be payment for sex.” Gaetz strongly denied the accusations and pointed to the Department of Justice’s decision not to bring charges against him as evidence of his innocence. The House voted to release the report on Gaetz in early December, after the ex-congressman resigned from Congress and then withdrew his bid for attorney general amid sexual misconduct allegations. That bid to lead the agency which once investigated him failed as it became clear that several Republican senators, in addition to the chamber’s Democrats , were unmovable in their opposition to his nomination. Gaetz is now headed to Trump-friendly cable network One America News and openly hinting about running for governor in 2026. But the rabble-rousing Trump loyalist has few close allies beyond the former president himself, and is expected to face strong opposition for the role if he runs. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy predicted to The Independent at the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee (where he and Gaetz had a confrontation on the event floor) that the allegations being investigated by the Ethics committee would specifically sink Gaetz’s bid for governor. The two men loathe each other, in particular after the Florida congressman led a successful bid to oust McCarthy from the speakership in 2023.
Thirty-five years ago, as communism was collapsing, U.S. scholar Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the "end of history." His argument, later expanded in an iconic 1992 book, was that the ideological battles of the 20th century had concluded with the triumph of liberal democracy (and free-market capitalism). With the Cold War over, humanity had supposedly reached its final form of governance—liberal democracy was the "endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution." It didn't take very long, though, for history to reappear. The disintegration of Yugoslavia and its accompanying horrors, the rise of nationalist authoritarianism in post-Soviet Russia, 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror, and the increasing traction of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis—all this dismantled the notion that the world was converging toward a harmonious democratic order. Fukuyama's grand vision was, by the mid-2000s, a cautionary tale about the dangers of pat certitudes in ivory towers. I spoke to Fukuyama about a decade ago. By then, he was notably sheepish about his original thesis—while at the same time clear-eyed and intellectually engaging at a far higher altitude than most figures I've spoken to; his view appeared to be that sometimes you take risks and they might backfire—nothing ventured, nothing gained. He conceded his thesis had been overoptimistic but maintained it still held as a long-term vision. I tended to agree. Even as authoritarianism and nationalism spread in many parts of the world, and as jihadism destabilized huge parts of the Middle East and spread terrorism in cities of the West, at least the true democracies were immune. Within Western societies, perhaps, the end of history still held true. Sadly, this too started falling apart, and 2024 was the year when we can move on to a different thesis. Western democracies—particularly the United States—revealed themselves to far be more wobbly than we thought. Hyper-polarization, rampant disinformation, the erosion of shared realities, and the indifference to liberal democracy's basic ideas are defining features of the era. Part of the reason is the digital revolution and social media in particular. These eliminated mainstream media as the gatekeepers ensuring the public discourse was largely confined within certain guardrails of civility and shared narrative. Now everyone, including the most radical agitators, is a publisher. And it turns out that human beings, if given the chance, are attracted to agitation and highly susceptible to lies. There is even an intellectual foundation for this in the "post-modern" thought of the middle and late 20 th century, which rejected universal truths and "metanarratives"—implying all ideas are somehow valid. Liberal democracy, basically, is thus just one more idea. It is also a profoundly beautiful vision that holds that every individual is inherently equal and possesses inalienable rights, and that the best way to govern is through institutions that protect these rights, balance power, and allow for the free and open expression of ideas, ensuring that decisions are made with the consent of the governed (or as many of them as possible).It was poetically manifested in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which alleges that all "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights (including) Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." There is an irony at work here: liberal democracy may not be so democratic by the definition many people around the world use. Go almost anywhere and ask a random sample what "democracy" is, and you will generally hear about fair elections and majority rule. You will hear a lot less about freedoms and protections, and almost never about checks and balances. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood this, which is why they baked into the Constitution as many freedoms as they could, made it exceedingly difficult to amend, and set up a system that is inhospitable to direct democracy, where a majority of the people can run amok with crazy schemes. They were, after all, the experts and the elite. The most dangerous assault on all of this comes from the ascendence of illiberal right-wing forces like the U.S. cult of President-elect Donald Trump —who has now been reelected to a non-consecutive term even though his first four calamitous years made his intentions crystal clear. We can safely say that Trump has no fidelity to the principles of liberal democracy, is a nationalist and would-be authoritarian, and hates the U.S. system. The Department of Government Efficiency—through which Elon Musk , the world's richest man, will try to put middle-income people out of work—well reflects the hatred. Versions of this are visible all over the democratic world. Some once-aspiring democracies are now dictatorships by choice of an electorate—the most egregious case being Russia, and to a lesser degree in Hungary and Turkey. Romania, too, is now teetering on the brink. Russian President Vladimir Putin staged a TikTok attack in the days before its Nov. 24 first round of the presidential election. The winner by plurality, which Putin illegally schemed to boost, hates the European Union and NATO and wants to reorient the country toward Russia—and away from liberal democracy. A week after that, a third of Romanians voted for parties that support that worldview. The presidential election has been annulled by the nation's supreme court, and many Romanians are in shock. Putin's campaign was illegal, yes—but the people who voted accordingly actually did vote. Some true democracies are teetering because of brilliant would-be authoritarians tapping into humanity's worst instincts, like Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu . France could well be headed in the same direction soon. All over the world, organized groups that want to burn down the house of liberal democracy, like Trump's MAGA movement does, are competitive. Some will find some solace in the seemingly rational reasons for this trend. In places like Germany, where the radical Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is ascendent, the support for the nativist right attaches to the ill-fated decisions of post-war governments to import masses of immigrants who are themselves illiberal and often remain that way—an irony. In America, part of the Trump phenomenon is a rejection of the excesses of wokeness, itself illiberal thought police (indeed, the public turning on wokeness can be seen as a sub-trend—or simply another major trend). But I've lived long enough to know that what's really happening is a rejection of liberal democracy by large numbers in many societies. They want authoritarianism—law and order, a monarchy perhaps—and don't care much about constraints on the minority (until it'll come, in turn, for them). Fukuyama's vision, while inspiring, underestimated humanity's penchant for conflict and chaos. He believed too much in reason's triumph over base instincts, in democracy's resilience against demagoguery, and in capitalism's ability to deliver broad-based prosperity. He now seems to get it. In a recent article for the Financial Times , Fukuyama asserted that Trump's 2024 victory signals a "decisive rejection" of liberalism by U.S. voters. This time he got it right. The events of 2024—the culmination of decades of systemic erosion—reflect a dispiriting reality: The supposed end of history, the good karma of 1989, was nothing more than a pause in the storm. There were other huge developments this year, like the unstoppable charge of artificial intelligence and the beginning of the end for Iran's "axis of resistance," but on balance, the end of the end of history is the main thing going on. Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com . The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Mikel Arteta says Raheem Sterling is an indirect victim of Arsenal ’s injury crisis this season as he explained his lack of minutes. Sterling has started just four games for the Gunners since joining on loan from Chelsea on transfer deadline day in August. The last of those starts came back on October 30, when Arsenal travelled to Preston in the Carabao Cup , and Sterling has made just two substitute appearances since then for a total of 23 minutes. Arteta insists he wants to give the 30-year-old more game time, but injuries and fitness issues with other players have had an impact. “There’s been moments,” said Arteta. “It’s been tough and very difficult for me as well to accept that I haven’t given him more. “When he hasn’t started the games, 90 per cent of the subs that I make is related to saving minutes or because of injuries or avoiding injuries. It’s not tactical reasons. “I would like him to play much more as I think he can impact the team in a very good way. He’s very good in the dressing room and is absolutely desperate to play. “He had this very important role, impacting every game, and suddenly you are in this position for a while. Not just here but at Chelsea as well. “So it’s always very difficult and I feel a lot of sympathy for players when they are in this moment. Hopefully we can change it.” Sterling may have struggled for regular game time at Arsenal, but Arteta has shown a willingness to give young players minutes this season. Academy graduates Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly have both broken into the first-team squad , and Arteta believes the dressing room environment has been key to that. “It is unbelievable,” said Arteta. “It is not for me to say, it is for them and they have already expressed the way [the dressing room] makes them feel. “The way they look after them, the way they can look at certain people and say: ‘Wow, these are the standards I want to become’. That is a great example. “The academy historically has been very, very successful and strong but there are moments as well. Sometimes you get a lot of players come through in the same position. “They need time in the squad, they need a role in the squad, and then it is when you throw a player in. That is the key. “They can be ready but the context in that team, dressing room, moment is not right. Now the work has been done and it is exceptional what everybody has done and now they have the right environment and they are prepared. “And the jump is so big, from what you ask from them in the Premier League to the Champions League. It is a huge step. But they are showing they are capable of doing it.”
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