Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Defendant: Arbery was ‘trapped like a rat’ before fatal shooting
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — One of the three white men standing trial for the death of Ahmaud Arbery said they had the 25-year-old Black man “trapped like a rat” before he was fatally shot, a police investigator testified Wednesday.
Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael armed themselves and chased Arbery in a pickup after they spotted him running in their coastal Georgia neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the pursuit in his own truck and took cellphone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery three times at close range with a shotgun.
More than two months passed before the three men were arrested on charges of murder and other crimes, after the graphic video leaked online and deepened a national reckoning over racial injustice.
Glynn County police Sgt. Roderic Nohilly told the jury Wednesday he spoke with Greg McMichael at police headquarters a few hours after the shooting. He said Greg McMichael, 65, told him Arbery “wasn’t out for no Sunday jog. He was getting the hell out of there.”
The father told Nohilly he recognized Arbery because he had been recorded by security cameras a few times inside a neighboring home under construction. Greg McMichael said they gave chase to try to stop Arbery from escaping the subdivision.
“He was trapped like a rat,” Greg McMichael said, according to a transcript of their recorded interview Nohilly read in court. “I think he was wanting to flee and he realized that something, you know, he was not going to get away.”
Defense attorneys say the McMichaels and Bryan were legally justified in chasing and trying to detain Arbery because they reasonably thought he was a burglar. Greg McMichael told police Travis McMichael, 35, fired in self-defense as Arbery attacked with his fists and tried to grab his son’s shotgun.
White House summit: President Joe Biden is set to hold face-to-face talks with his fellow North American leaders next week in Washington, reviving a tradition that had been shelved during the Trump administration.
The White House on Wednesday announced plans for the Nov. 18 summit with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, billing the return of the trilateral meeting as a chance for the countries to “revitalize our leadership.”
The White House said the upcoming meeting will reaffirm the countries’ “strong ties and integration while also charting a new path for collaboration” on the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, immigration and economic growth.
COVID-19 misinformation: People who trust Fox News Channel and other media outlets that appeal to conservatives are more likely to believe falsehoods about COVID-19 and vaccines than those who primarily go elsewhere for news, a study has found.
While the Kaiser Family Foundation study released this week found clear ties between news outlets that people trusted and the amount of misinformation they believe, it took no stand on whether those attitudes specifically came from what they saw there.
Kaiser polled people on whether or not they believed seven widely-circulated untruths about the virus, among them that the government is exaggerating the number of deaths attributable to the coronavirus.
For people who most trusted network or local television news, NPR, CNN or MSNBC, between 11% and 16% said they believed four or more of those untrue statements, or weren’t sure about what was true.
For Fox News viewers, 36% either believed in or were unsure about four or more false statements, Kaiser said. It was 46% for Newsmax viewers and 37% for those who said they trusted One America Network News.
Kaiser’s study was conducted between Oct. 14-24 in a random telephone sample of 1,519 American adults.
Hand signal saves girl: A 16-year-old girl held captive by a 61-year-old man was rescued on an interstate highway in Kentucky after another driver noticed her using a distress signal with her hand that was made popular on TikTok, law enforcement officials said.
The girl’s parents reported their daughter missing from Asheville, North Carolina, last week.
Two days later, her hand-signal — and the alert driver — enabled sheriff ’s deputies in Kentucky to stop the car and arrest James Herbert Brick of Cherokee, North Carolina, on charges of unlawful imprisonment and possession of material showing a sexual performance by a minor, Deputy Gilbert Acciardo said.
The girl and the driver were acquainted, and she initially went with the man willingly, but at some point got scared, Acciardo told The Lexington HeraldLeader.
The other driver called 911 from Interstate 75 in Laurel County, Kentucky, last week to report that a girl in a silver Toyota car was making distress hand signals he recognized from TikTok as a plea for help from domestic violence.
Cuba accuses US: Cuba’s government said Wednesday that a decision to ban an opposition demonstration won’t hurt its image and accused the United States and anti-Castro groups in Florida of instigating next week’s planned march.
The protest scheduled for Monday would coincide with the reopening of the country after 20 months of lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic and with the 502nd anniversary of the founding of Havana.
The Foreign Ministry summoned hundreds of diplomats to a meeting Wednesday and accused the U.S. of instigating the protest as part of a plan to destabilize the country.
Cuomo case: Over an 11-hour interview with investigators last July, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo defiantly denied allegations he sexually harassed women and took a confrontational tone with the lawyers questioning him, accusing one of them of being out to get him, according to a transcript released Wednesday.
In separate interviews conducted with the same investigators over two months, the women accusing Cuomo of misconduct laid out their horror stories of working for a boss who made comments about women’s looks, asked questions about sex and gave inappropriate touches and kisses.
New York Attorney General Letitia James released hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews conducted by two independent lawyers, hired by her office, during their monthslong probe of sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo.
The transcripts covered interviews done with 10 of the women who accused Cuomo of misconduct, plus the interview that Cuomo himself gave on July 17.
Cuomo, 63, announced his resignation on Aug. 10.