3 more funerals held for victims of market shooting in Buffalo
BUFFALO, N.Y. — A mother and sister known for baking. A restaurant worker buying a birthday cake for his 3-year-old. A father who worked as a school bus aide.
Those three victims of the racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket were laid to rest Friday during a week filled with goodbyes for family and friends.
Geraldine Talley, 62; Andre Mackniel, 53, and Margus Morrison, 52, were among the 10 people killed and three wounded when a white gunman opened fire on shoppers and employees at a Tops Friendly Market on May 14.
Authorities said he chose the grocery store because it’s in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
“We cannot sit here today and cry for Geraldine and not make sure justice is done for Geraldine,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights activist, told mourners at Talley’s service at Mount Aaron Missionary Baptist Church.
Vice President Kamala Harris is expected Saturday to attend the last of the funerals for the supermarket victims as 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield is memorialized.
Mackniel was a cook and stay-at-home father to his son, his obituary said.
“Andre was a very educated person, he was sweet and he loved his family,” his cousin Franchione Cook said outside of Buffalo’s Antioch Baptist Church. “It’s just sad, that’s what it is.”
Mourners remembered Morrison as a music lover, a fan of the NFL’S Bills, and a jokester.
“His smile was always there,” Pastor Darius Pridgen said at a funeral at Buffalo’s True Bethel Baptist Church.
Funerals for store security guard Aaron Salter, 55, and Pearl Young, 77, were held Wednesday. In previous days, 32-year-old Roberta Drury, 72-year-old Katherine Massey, 67-yearold Heyward Patterson and 65-year-old Celestine Chaney were also laid to rest.
The suspect in the shooting, Payton Gendron, was charged with first-degree murder and is being held without bail.
SEC probing Musk: The Securities and Exchange Commission revealed Friday that it began probing Elon Musk’s purchases of Twitter stock in early April and looking into whether he properly disclosed his stake and his intentions for the social media company.
In a regulatory filing, the agency said it approached Musk on April 4 after he had just become Twitter’s largest shareholder with a 9.2% stake in the company.
Musk also filed a document that indicated the investment would be passive and he did not intend to pursue control of the company.
Ten days later, Musk offered $54.20 a share to buy the social media platform. Twitter later agreed to sell itself to Musk for roughly $44 billion.
In last month’s letter to Musk, the SEC questioned whether he had disclosed his stake at the right time. The law requires shareholders who buy more than 5% of a company’s shares to disclose their ownership within 10 days of reaching that threshold.
In filings, Musk has said he crossed that threshold March 14 but did not make his purchases public until April 4. The SEC also questioned whether Musk was truly a passive investor.
Superyacht battle: The United States on Friday won the latest round of a legal battle to seize a $325 million Russian-owned superyacht in Fiji with the case apparently headed for the Pacific nation’s top court.
The case has highlighted the thorny legal ground the U.S. finds itself on as it tries to seize assets of Russian oligarchs around the world in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Some actions are raising questions about how far U.S. jurisdiction extends.
Fiji’s Court of Appeal on Friday dismissed an appeal by Feizal Haniff, who represents the company that legally owns the superyacht Amadea. Haniff had argued the U.S. had no jurisdiction under Fiji’s mutual assistance laws to seize the vessel, at least until a court sorted out who really owned the Amadea.
Haniff said he plans to take the case to Fiji’s Supreme Court and will apply for a court order to
stop U.S. agents sailing the Amadea from Fiji before the appeal is heard.
Oregon primary: Seven-term U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader, a centrist endorsed by President Joe Biden, has been ousted in the Democratic primary in Oregon by progressive challenger Jamie Mcleod-skinner after results were delayed more than a week by a ballot-printing issue.
The vote count in the state’s 5th Congressional District was slowed because tens of thousands of ballots were printed with blurry bar codes, making them unreadable by vote-counting machines.
Workers in Clackamas County, the state’s third largest, had to transfer votes by hand to fresh ballots so they could be tallied.
That process continued Friday for other races yet to be called.
Trump suit dismissed: A federal judge on Friday
dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James, rejecting the former president’s claim that she targeted him out of political animus and allowing her civil investigation into his business practices to continue.
In a 43-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Brenda Sannes wrote that case law bars federal judges from interfering in state-level investigations, with limited exceptions, and there wasn’t evidence to support the Republican’s contention that James, a Democrat, was proceeding in bad faith because of their differing political views.
Sannes, appointed in 2014 by former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, said James had a legitimate basis for investigating Trump and the Trump Organization.
Sannes also said Trump failed to show that recent court proceedings seeking to enforce subpoenas on him were “commenced for
the purpose of retaliation.”
Ethiopia-tigray crisis:
The biggest convoy of aid since Ethiopia’s government declared a unilateral “humanitarian cease-fire” in the country’s long-encircled Tigray region two months ago has departed for Tigray, according to a U.N. official.
A convoy of 215 trucks left the capital of the neighboring Afar region on Friday and is due to arrive in the Tigray capital Saturday.
But the U.N. World Food Program estimates that 500 trucks a week are required to feed the 5.2 million people in Tigray who need food, medicine and other humanitarian assistance and have been largely denied it for almost a year.
Ethiopia’s government in March declared the humanitarian cease-fire to allow aid to reach Tigray, whose leaders have been engaged in a war against federal forces and their allies since November 2020, with thousands of people killed.