Tag: News

What has been confirmed about the Minnesota school shooting
A shooter killed two children and injured 17 others when he opened fire during Mass at a Minneapolis Catholic school on Aug. 27, officials said.
The shooter, Robert “Robin” Westman, who law enforcement said is a man in his early 20s, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound moments later. Fourteen of the 17 people injured were children, police said, two of whom are in critical condition.
Here is what we know so far.
Shooter Opened Fire in the Middle of Mass
The shooting occurred during Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Aug. 27, two days after the first day of class of the new school year.
“This was a deliberate act of violence against innocent children and other people worshipping,“ Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at a news conference. ”The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children is absolutely incomprehensible.”
Authorities evacuated the school, and students’ families were directed to a “reunification zone.”
“Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said at the news conference with O’Hara. “These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting a “horrific act of violence” in a post on X.
“From the officers responding, to the clergy and teachers providing comfort, to the hospital staff saving lives, we will get through this together,” he wrote in another post.
Victims Mostly Children
Officials said the two children killed were 8 and 10 and were fatally shot while in the church pews celebrating a Mass during the first week of school. It is not clear how many people were present in the church when the shooting occurred, and authorities have not released the identities of the victims.
Police have heard estimates on the exact number of people who were in the church at the time, but will release a more definitive number when it’s determined, O’Hara said.
Hennepin Healthcare’s chair of emergency medicine, Thomas Wyatt, said the hospital treated 10 patients after the shooting, including eight children ages 6 through 14 and two adults.
Seven children ages 9 through 16 were also admitted to Children’s Minnesota, a trauma center dedicated to pediatric care, the facility said in a statement.
O’Hara said all of the wounded are expected to survive from their “range of injuries,” and that the children have been reunited with their families.
Shooter Identified
The shooter was Robert “Robin” Westman, according to FBI Director Kash Patel. Westman was armed with a rifle, shotgun, and pistol and approached the side of the church before shooting through the windows toward the children inside, O’Hara said.
Authorities believe that Westman fired all or most of the shots from outside the church before killing himself in the parking lot.
Westman identified as transgender, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on X.
He allegedly wrote the phrases “For the Children,” “Where is your God?”, and “Kill Donald Trump” on a rifle magazine, Noem said.
Officials did not say whether Westman had any known connections to the school. Potential motives are still under investigation, but officials said he does not have an extensive known criminal history and likely acted alone.
Patel said the FBI is investigating the shooting as an “act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics.”
O’Hara said Minneapolis police do not yet have a “motive or anything to suggest that,” but that it is working with its federal partners and reviewing “any possibilities from wherever the evidence will lead us from what we recover.”
Authorities previously said Westman was in his early 20s. Noem later said he was 23.
O’Hara said authorities located a smoke bomb, or a firework that would release smoke, but had not found any explosives.
They also found a video manifesto that had been timed to upload to YouTube following the shooting and are reviewing it for potential motives, O’Hara said.
Catholic School, Grades Pre-K to 8th
Founded in 1923, Annunciation Catholic School had 391 students enrolled for the 2023 to 2024 school year and has a student-to-teacher ratio of roughly 14 to one, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. With grades pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, each grade level has two classes and roughly 20 students per class.
The school is in Minneapolis’s tree-lined Windom neighborhood, about five miles south of downtown. Social media photos from the first day of school on Aug. 25 show students in green uniforms smiling, greeting one another at bicycle racks, and sitting together.
Annunciation Catholic School’s website states that teachers “focus on Christian values and civic-mindedness.”
Investigation Underway
In addition to investigating the shooting as a targeted act of domestic terrorism and an anti-Catholic hate crime, Patel said the FBI will provide updates to the public as its investigation proceeds. Law enforcement said previously it was investigating whether Westman had any known connections to the school.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) said it had completed a tracing of the firearms—the rifle, shotgun, and pistol—found at the school.
“ATF completed the urgent traces of the recovered firearms and has provided that information to all investigative partners involved in the shooting at Annunciation Church this morning,” the agency’s St. Paul, Minnesota, office wrote in a post on X. “This information is for investigative partners only and will not be released to the public.”
O’Hara said investigators are analyzing additional firearms found at three residential locations related to Westman.
The City of Minneapolis wrote on X that “there is no active threat to the community at this time” but warned residents to stay away from the area while emergency personnel help victims.
President Donald Trump has been briefed on the shooting. He signed a proclamation ordering all flags at federal buildings to be flown at half-staff “as a mark of respect for the victims of the senseless acts of violence,” the White House wrote on X.
Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X, “Our federal agents are on the scene of the horrific shooting at the Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”
Shooting at Another Catholic School
The shooting on Aug. 27 followed one that occurred the previous afternoon at nearby Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Minneapolis, in what officials believe was a targeted shooting. The shooter killed one person and injured six others among a group of adults who were hanging out near the school, the police chief said on Aug. 26.
At least one of the adults was targeted, and officials did not mention if anyone from the school was involved in the shooting.
Annunciation Catholic School is roughly four miles south of Cristo Rey. Authorities do not believe that the two incidents are connected.
O’Hara told reporters that law enforcement had arrested two suspects in relation to that shooting.
“We have not gotten the shooter yet, but we believe we have two people under arrest that were present with the shooter when that happened, and we’re making significant progress,” he said.
August 27, 2025
Cockpit recording from Air India suggests the captain cut fuel to the engines before the crash, source says
A cockpit recording of dialogue between the two pilots of the Air India flight that crashed last month supports the view that the captain cut the flow of fuel to the plane’s engines, said a source briefed on U.S. officials’ early assessment of evidence.
The first officer was at the controls of the Boeing 787 and asked the captain why he moved the fuel switches into a position that starved the engines of fuel and requested that he restore the fuel flow, the source told Reuters on condition of anonymity because the matter remains under investigation.
The U.S. assessment is not contained in a formal document, said the source, who emphasized the cause of the June 12 crash in Ahmedabad, India, that killed 260 people remains under investigation.
There was no cockpit video recording definitively showing which pilot flipped the switches, but the weight of evidence from the conversation points to the captain, according to the early assessment.
The Wall Street Journal first reported similar information on Wednesday about the world’s deadliest aviation accident in a decade.
A police officer stands in front of the wreckage of an Air India aircraft, bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, which crashed during take-off from an airport in Ahmedabad, India June 12, 2025. (REUTERS/Adnan Abidi/File Photo)
India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), which is leading the investigation into the crash, said in a statement on Thursday that “certain sections of the international media are repeatedly attempting to draw conclusions through selective and unverified reporting.” It added the investigation was ongoing and it remained too early to draw definitive conclusions.
Most air crashes are caused by multiple factors, and under international rules, a final report is expected within a year of an accident.
A preliminary report released by the AAIB on Saturday said one pilot was heard on the cockpit voice recorder asking the other why he cut off the fuel and “the other pilot responded that he did not do so.”
Investigators did not identify which remarks were made by Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and which by First Officer Clive Kunder, who had total flying experience of 15,638 hours and 3,403 hours, respectively.
The AAIB’s preliminary report said the fuel switches had switched from “run” to “cutoff” a second apart just after takeoff, but it did not say how they were moved.
Almost immediately after the plane lifted off the ground, closed-circuit TV footage showed a backup energy source called a ram air turbine had deployed, indicating a loss of power from the engines.
The London-bound plane began to lose thrust, and after reaching a height of 650 feet, the jet started to sink.
The fuel switches for both engines were turned back to “run”, and the airplane automatically tried restarting the engines, the report said.
But the plane was too low and too slow to be able to recover, aviation safety expert John Nance told Reuters.
The plane clipped some trees and a chimney before crashing in a fireball into a building on a nearby medical college campus, the report said, killing 19 people on the ground and 241 of the 242 on board the 787.
No safety recommendations
In an internal memo on Monday, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson said the preliminary report found no mechanical or maintenance faults and that all required maintenance had been carried out.
The AAIB’s preliminary report had no safety recommendations for Boeing or engine manufacturer GE.
After the report was released, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing privately issued notifications that the fuel switch locks on Boeing planes are safe, a document seen by Reuters showed and four sources with knowledge of the matter said.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has been assisting with the Air India investigation and its Chair Jennifer Homendy has been fully briefed on all aspects, a board spokesperson said. That includes the cockpit voice recording and details from the flight data recorder that the NTSB team assisted the AAIB in reading out, the spokesperson added.
“The safety of international air travel depends on learning as much as we can from these rare events so that industry and regulators can improve aviation safety,” Homendy said in a statement. “And if there are no immediate safety issues discovered, we need to know that as well.”
The circumstantial evidence increasingly indicates that a crew member flipped the engine fuel switches, Nance said, given there was “no other rational explanation” that was consistent with the information released to date.
Nonetheless, investigators “still have to dig into all the factors” and rule out other possible contributing factors which would take time, he said.
The Air India crash has rekindled debate over adding flight deck cameras, known as cockpit image recorders, on airliners.
Nance said investigators likely would have benefited greatly from having video footage of the cockpit during the Air India flight.
July 18, 2025
To speak to her brother’s killer in court, the sister made an AI video of him
Stacey Wales had a daunting task ahead of her: preparing a victim impact statement for the sentencing of the man who had fatally shot her brotherin a road-rage incident in 2021. She wondered how to convey the weight of her loss.
“The victims attorney said to us, ‘Try to bring him to life,’” Wales said.
So Wales turned to artificial intelligence. At the May 1 court hearing in Arizona, she played a video of her brother, Christopher Pelkey.
“Just to be clear for everyone seeing this,” the avatar of Pelkey said. “I am a version of Chris Pelkey re-created through AI.”
The facsimile of Pelkey thanked the judge and told his killer he believed in forgiveness, saying that“in another life, we probably could have been friends.” He ended the video with a farewell to his family: “Well, I’m going to go fishing now.”
It wasn’t a perfect likeness of Pelkey. His face moved stiffly, and his voice was clipped. But the video moved his family and friends and stirred the judge, who said he “loved that AI” in his closing remarks.
“I feel that that was genuine,” said Todd Lang, the Maricopa County Superior Court judge who ruled in the case. He sentenced Pelkey’s killer to 10½ years in prison, the maximum for manslaughter — which Wales had asked for.
Wales’s video joins a growing list of cases in which parties have brought generative artificial intelligence into the courtroom. Experts said the AI footage of Pelkeywas striking for its novelty — and how well it was received.
“This definitely caught a number of us by surprise,” said Diana Bowman, a law professor at Arizona State University.
Pelkey was killed in a road-rage incident in Chandler, Arizona, in November 2021, court records show. While stopped at a red light, Pelkey left his car and approached another car whose driver had honked repeatedly at him. That driver, Gabriel Horcasitas, shot and killed him as he approached.
A jury convicted Horcasitas of manslaughter in March. As hissentencing approached, Wales contacted Pelkey’s friends and family and gathered dozens of written statements, video clips and photos to show the judge. Then she thought thatshe could do more.
“I said to myself, ‘Well, what if Chris could make his own impact statement?’” Wales said.
Wales’s husband, Tim Wales, a tech entrepreneur, had experience using generative AI to animate photos and replicate voices. She proposed creating a video of Pelkey.
“I won’t let it [be published] if it’s hokey or flat,” Stacey Wales recalled reassuring him at the time.
Tim Wales and a friend used AI tools to edit a photo of Pelkey, clone his voice based on old videos of him speaking, and animate his face so his eyes blinked and his mouth moved as he spoke. Wales wrote Pelkey’s speech herself — by hand and without AI, she said — based on what she thought her brother would say.
Wales wanted the toughest sentence allowable for Horcasitas, she said, but she wrote in Pelkey’s voice that he “believed in forgiveness and God who forgives.”
Then she showed her victims attorney, Jessica Gattuso.
“I thought it was very effective,” Gattuso said. “It was appropriate. I didn’t know what kind of objections we might get or pushback. … I did kind of prepare for that.”
But no one objected when Wales played the video in court after dozens of other friends and family members gave their own tributes to Pelkey. Wales kept the video a surprise to her family. She also did not disclose it to the judge or Horcasitas’s attorneys; Arizona law does not require that, Gattuso said.
The video appeared to resonate with Lang, who praised it before delivering Horcasitas’s sentence. Lang requested a copy of the video to show his peers a few days after the hearing, Wales and Gattuso said.
Wales fared better in bringing AI-generated video into the courtroom than others who did so in different contexts. A New York man was scolded for using an AI avatar to represent him in an employment dispute in March. A Washington state judge rejected bystander video submitted as evidence in a triple-murder case last year because it was enhanced with AI tools.
Bowman, the law professor, said Wales’s case avoided controversy probably because the video was introduced during a sentencing and wasn’t being used to determine the defendant’s guilt. It also helped that Wales, unlike the New York man, clearly introduced her video as AI-generated.
Gary Marchant, a professor of law, ethics and emerging technologies at Arizona State, said attorneys might have objected to showing a video that fabricates a victim’s voice to a jury.
“In most cases, it’s going to be possibly misleading and prejudicial, probably,” Marchant said. “So I think it’s dangerous to start using non-real evidence that is created by an AI, even though, in this particular case, I’m kind of sympathetic to it.”
Arizona’s highest court is open to bringing AI into the legal process, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Ann Timmer said. The court formed an AI committee to investigate the risks of parties fabricating AI-generated evidence but has also begun using AI-generated avatars to explain court rulings on YouTube.
Timmer declined to comment on Wales’s videobut said any problems that arise from using AI-generated evidence during a sentencing would be decided under the state’s existing guidelines for victim impact statements.
“You can make statements that even can be emotional, but you can’t go so far as to deprive someone of a fundamentally fair trial,” Timmer said.
Wales said she didn’t think it was unfair to give a voice to her brother in court. The video would help keep his memory alive and gave her family closure after a long criminal trial, she said.
“Of course, AI is uncanny,” Wales said. “… But in this moment, for Chris to be able to speak on his behalf, it was absolutely worth it.”
May 9, 2025
J.C. Lee, Stan Lee’s daughter, has reached a settlement in her lawsuit alleging elder abuse and theft against her father’s former manager
The daughter of Stan Lee, J.C., has settled a lawsuit against Max Anderson, the comic book legend’s former longtime road manager accused of elder abuse and pilfering tens of millions of dollars in memorabilia, autograph revenue and appearance fees.
Ahead of a trial slated to start next week, both sides on Thursday informed the court of a deal to resolve the case. The agreement is conditioned on the completion of certain undisclosed terms. Further details weren’t revealed.
At the heart of the lawsuit: Allegations that Anderson leveraged his control over Lee’s life to steal over $21 million — as well as hundreds of pieces of collectibles and memorabilia, including Batman creator Bob Kane’s original drawing of the “Joker” and movie props featured across Marvel movies — toward the end of his former boss’ life.
Shortly after meeting Lee around 2007, Anderson assumed exclusive control of his operations for comic book conventions and public appearances until he was pushed out of Lee’s circle by J.C in 2017. He also acted as a caretaker for the aging comic book writer, who was in his 80s and 90s at the time and was essentially blind, coordinating health care services while serving as a business fiduciary in some dealings.
Over the course of almost a decade, Anderson, who said he didn’t receive monetary compensation for his work and was paid in the form of autographs on collectibles, accompanied Lee to 111 comic book conventions around the world. At these conventions, Anderson and a business partner operated a booth where fans could purchase a signatures on collectibles for up to $120 a piece. The origins of the business, “Stan Lee Collectibles,” was a subject of the lawsuit, which alleged that Lee didn’t see any profits from the venture. Before Lee died, he signed an agreement granting Anderson a worldwide license for use of his name and likeness in perpetuity for a dollar, the lawsuit alleged.
J.C. claimed that Anderson pushed her father to work tireless hours until months before his death. She accused him of stealing at least $11.1 million in autograph revenue and $10.2 million in appearance fees. Anderson has denied ever handling money at events, which saw Lee earn roughly $35,000 in a single day signing autographs and taking pictures.
At trial, witnesses, including Anderson’s twin brother who worked security at some events, were set to testify that they saw Anderson handling “duffle bags” of cash, which was allegedly used to buy art and other luxury items, according to court filings. Anderson’s ex-wife was also set to tell the court that she saw Anderson handle significant amounts of cash after returning home from events with Lee and that he kept “stacks of cash” in a large bedroom safe. Lawyers for J.C. claimed that Anderson’s personal wealth and assets ballooned in the years he worked for Lee.
A contentious part of the litigation was a museum intended to house Lee’s memorabilia, collectibles and personal items to be featured at various comic book conventions. Anderson, through his license for use of Lee’s name and likeness, arranged for Lee to gift him personal items that were to be placed in the museum but were allegedly rerouted to Anderson’s businesses. For the last decade, the pieces have been in Anderson’s possession at his comic book store and home while the museum has only been featured at a handful of conventions, the lawsuit alleged.
Anderson has said that he can’t identify which items belong to the museum and that much of it was stolen, damaged or thrown out since they weren’t valuable. J.C.’s lawyers have pushed back on that assertion, pointing to a lawsuit he filed over collectibles stolen from his home, including original movie props like Iron Man’s mask, the arm of Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy and a set of X-23 claws from Logan.
May 4, 2025