Wooster Rancy, 21, accused in death of Sgt Sarah Roque, 23, whose body was found at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri
A US army soldier has been charged with murder in the death of a fellow service member at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, the military announced Thursday.
The army office of Special Trial Counsel charged the 21-year-old specialist Wooster Rancy on Wednesday with murder and obstructing justice in the death of 23-year-old Sgt Sarah Roque.
Continue reading...State attorney general alleges without providing evidence that Google is manipulating search results, as tech firm says claim ‘totally false’
Missouri’s Republican attorney general has said he is launching an investigation into Google over allegations it was censoring conservative speech, as the tech corporation dismissed the claims as “totally false”.
“I am launching an investigation into Google for censoring conservative speech during the most consequential election in our nation’s history,” Andrew Bailey said in a post on X, without citing any example or evidence for his censorship claim.
Continue reading...Williams long maintained his innocence and the killing was opposed by victim’s family, jurors and office that tried him
Missouri executed a man on death row on Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who sought to have his conviction overturned and have supported his claims of innocence.
Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, was killed by lethal injection, ending a legal battle that has sparked widespread outrage as the office that originally tried the case suggested he was wrongfully convicted.
Continue reading...Ruling, which may be reviewed by appellate court, could strike reproductive rights measure off November ballot
A Missouri judge has ruled that a ballot measure asking voters whether abortion rights should be enshrined in the state constitution is invalid, potentially jeopardizing an election scheduled for November.
In a ruling issued on Friday, Cole county circuit judge Christopher Limbaugh said that the reproductive rights petition – also known as amendment 3 – led by Missourians for Constitutional Freedom did not comply with state law.
Continue reading...Also first time for someone with H5 virus to be hospitalized, and CDC says it is studying patient specimen more
A person in Missouri with no known animal contact has tested positive for H5 bird flu, the state’s department of health and senior services said Friday.
It’s the first time a patient in the US outbreak has had no known exposure to sick animals. And it is the first time someone has been hospitalized with bird flu – though it’s not clear yet whether influenza was the reason for hospitalization or it was incidental.
This article was updated on 6 September 2024 to correct that the Missouri department of health and senior services, not the state’s agriculture department, made the announcement about a person testing positive for H5 bird flu.
Continue reading...X-rays show flightless bird found near Springfield was not wounded, but full of roadkill raccoon
Wildlife officials in Missouri rescued what they thought was an injured and flightless bald eagle, only to discover it had gorged itself on a roadkill raccoon and was “too fat to fly”.
The bird was spotted on the ground near the boundary of Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield in Springfield, site of the first major civil war engagement west of the Mississippi river in 1861.
Continue reading...Lisa Jeanine Findley, 53, arrested for falsely claiming Elvis Presley’s daughter borrowed $3.8m from a bogus lender
A Missouri woman has been arrested on charges that she orchestrated a scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s family by trying to auction off his Graceland mansion and property, before a judge halted the mysterious foreclosure sale, the US justice department said on Friday.
Lisa Jeanine Findley, 53, of Kimberling City, Missouri, falsely claimed Presley’s daughter borrowed $3.8m from a bogus private lender and pledged Graceland as collateral for the loan. She fabricated loan documents, tried to extort Presley’s family out of $2.85m to settle the matter, and published a fraudulent foreclosure notice in a Memphis newspaper announcing that Graceland would be auctioned off to the highest bidder, prosecutors said.
Continue reading...St Louis prosecutor Wesley Bell defeated Missouri’s first Black female member of Congress with about 51% of the vote
A prominent member of the progressive “Squad” in Congress, Cori Bush, has lost her Democratic primary in St Louis after pro-Israel pressure groups spent millions of dollars to unseat her over criticisms of Israel’s war on Gaza.
St Louis prosecutor Wesley Bell defeated Missouri’s first Black female member of Congress with about 51% of the vote. Bush took about 46%.
Continue reading...Trump lawyer Will Scharf’s claims of prosecuting violent criminals conflicts with his record of mundane actions
A lawyer on the legal team that argued in favor of a US supreme court ruling granting Donald Trump broad criminal immunity has inflated his credentials as a violent crime prosecutor in a political beauty contest aimed at wooing the former president’s Maga supporters and becoming Missouri’s attorney general.
Will Scharf, who sat on the former’s president’s appellate team fighting charges of subversion brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith, has burnished his crime-fighting credentials on his campaign literature as he seeks to unseat Missouri’s sitting attorney general, Andrew Bailey, in a GOP primary next month.
Continue reading...One dead and 34 wounded as incidents in New York, Alabama, Missouri and Ohio swell 2024 mass shooting tally
A series of mass shootings rocked the US early on Sunday, leaving at least one dead and 34 others wounded in just four cases reported in New York, Alabama, Missouri and Ohio.
The shootings came amid a broader spate of recent mass shootings, including the one at an Arkansas grocery store on Friday that left four dead and nine wounded – as well as another at a nightclub in Kentucky on Saturday that killed one and injured seven.
Continue reading...Orville Allen, second world war and Korean war veteran, died on 29 May and his liver was successfully transplanted
Orville Allen lived a lifetime of service, and when he died at age 98 he had one last thing to give: his liver.
Allen, a veteran of both second world war and the Korean war and a longtime educator in rural south-eastern Missouri, is the oldest American to ever donate an organ, transplant organizations said. He died on 29 May and his liver was successfully transplanted to a 72-year-old woman, according to Mid-America Transplant.
Continue reading...Missouri state representative Ben Baker’s daughter and her husband were reportedly ambushed when leaving a church
The daughter and son-in-law of a US Republican politician are among three Christian missionaries who have been killed by gang members in Haiti as it emerged that the long-awaited deployment of an multinational security force tasked with rescuing the Caribbean country from months of bloodshed had been delayed.
Ben Baker, a Republican state representative from Missouri, announced the news of the couple’s murder on Facebook late on Thursday, writing: “My heart is broken in a thousand pieces. I’ve never felt this kind of pain.”
Continue reading...Judge declines to remove Darrell McClanahan, who claims one-year honorary membership in terror group, from GOP primary race
A long-shot Missouri gubernatorial candidate with ties to the Ku Klux Klan will stay on the Republican ticket, a judge ruled on Friday.
Cole county circuit court judge Cotton Walker denied a request by the Missouri GOP to kick Darrell McClanahan out of the August Republican primary.
Continue reading...Sai Varshith Kandula from Missouri, who was carrying a Nazi flag at time of arrest, said he hoped to overthrow the US government
A Missouri man pleaded guilty on Monday to crashing a rented truck into metal barriers surrounding the White House in May 2023, admitting that he had been “fueled by the ideology of Nazi Germany” and hoped to overthrow the US government.
Sai Varshith Kandula, 20, from Chesterfield, Missouri, and also a citizen of India, pleaded guilty to a single count of damaging federal property. He faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in August.
Continue reading...Some of the 27 states that have the death penalty have not executed anyone in years but others still do – and the divide is rooted in history
The execution of Brian Dorsey in Missouri on Tuesday, despite an extraordinary campaign asking for his sentence to be commuted, brought into focus the issue of the death penalty in the US – one of the few countries in the western world that still uses corporal punishment.
Dorsey, 52, was executed for the 2006 murders of his cousin and her husband, after the number of people executed in the US rose to 24 in 2023, from 18 in 2022.
Continue reading...Brian Dorsey, convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband, put to death amid efforts by many to have his sentence commuted
Brian Dorsey, who was convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband in 2006, was executed in Missouri’s Bonne Terre state prison Tuesday despite an extraordinary effort by corrections officials and his appeals judge to have his capital sentence commuted.
Prison officials confirmed that Dorsey had been put to death by lethal injection. They said he had been pronounced dead at 6.11pm.
Continue reading...Petition argues that Brian Dorsey is fully rehabilitated and that execution would violate eighth amendment
Attorneys for a Missouri death row inmate have asked the US supreme court to block an execution sentence from going ahead on Tuesday, following a petition for clemency from more than 70 correctional officers and a letter from the inmate’s appeals court judge.
The petition – a writ of certiorari – asks the court to spare Brian Dorsey’s life in favor of a life without parole sentence based on grounds that he is fully rehabilitated and therefore execution would be counter to the eighth amendment constitutional ban against punishments which serve no deterrent or rehabilitation purpose.
Continue reading...Prison guards, judges, jurors and prison workers have beseeched Mike Parson to commute capital punishment to life without parole
With less than a week until Brian Dorsey is scheduled to be executed at Potosi correctional center in Missouri for the 2006 killings of his cousin and her husband, an extraordinary effort is underway to have the 52-year-old’s capital sentence commuted to life without parole.
More than 150 people have called on the Missouri governor Mike Parson to commute Dorsey’s punishment – including more than 70 current and former prison workers, many of whom got to know Doresy behind bars, Republican state representatives, jurors and even the appeals judge who upheld Dorsey’s conviction and death sentence in 2009.
Continue reading...Move follows similar lawsuit by Texas attorney general, raising fear that news outlets could be next targets
The attorney general of Missouri is suing Media Matters, a progressive watchdog group, alleging that it failed to turn over internal documents following its 2023 coverage of hate speech on the social media platform X. The head of the group says news outlets could be the next targets.
“Media Matters has pursued an activist agenda in its attempt to destroy X, because they cannot control it,” the lawsuit said, describing X – formerly known as Twitter – as a “free speech platform” that allows “Missourians to express their own viewpoints in the public square”.
Continue reading...Hail as big as baseballs possible from Kansas to Missouri, with torrential rain from Louisiana to Arkansas
Volatile weather is expected to hone in on parts of Kansas and Missouri Wednesday night, and the biggest worry is the potential for massive chunks of hail.
Some are calling it “gorilla hail” because it has the potential to be so big, said Alex Sosnowski, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. The Kansas City metro area is at the center of the worry zone.
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