Lady Gaga’s dog walker shot as bulldogs stolen
Control, personnel involved indicate role
Lady Gaga’s dog walker was shot late Wednesday and her two French bulldogs, Koji and Gustav, were stolen, USA TODAY has confirmed.
Around 9:40 p.m. in Hollywood, California, a man in his 30s was walking three dogs when a male suspect approached the dog walker and shot him, according to Los Angeles Police Department’s Officer Drake Madison. The LAPD said the suspect took two bulldogs and took off in a white vehicle, while a third dog fled the scene and was later recovered. Police said the victim is in critical condition.
The “A Star Is Born” star, who is currently in Italy, is offering a $500,000 reward for the return of her two stolen dogs, Lady Gaga’s representative Amanda Silverman confirmed to USA TODAY. Those with information can email Kojiandgustavo@gmail.com.
The singer, 34, told USA TODAY in an interview last month she shares what many people are feeling during the pandemic: “an epic sense of powerlessness over what’s happening in the world.”
“We’ve encountered a super virus that is epic in its disastrous proportions,” she said. “So that feeling of powerlessness in some ways is, I think, something that we all share.”
WASHINGTON – Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, approved the operation “to capture or kill” Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, according to a newly declassified U.S. intelligence report released Friday.
U.S. intelligence officials came to that conclusion based on the crown prince’s “absolute control” over the kingdom’s security and intelligence operations, the direct involvement of one of his key advisers in Khashoggi’s murder, and “the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad,” the report stated.
“Since 2017, the crown prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the crown prince’s authorization,” the report says.
Khashoggi, a U.S. resident who had been critical of the Saudi ruling family, died inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018.
Lawmakers said the long-anticipated report demands a U.S. response – including possible penalties for the crown prince.
“The highest levels of the Saudi government, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, are culpable in the murder of journalist and American resident Jamal Khashoggi,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
“There is no escaping that stark truth laid bare in the Intelligence Community’s long overdue public assessment,” Schiff said. “The Biden Administration will need to follow this attribution of responsibility with serious repercussions against all of the responsible parties it has identified, and also reassess our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki noted that Biden has promised to “recalibrate” the U.s.-saudi alliance and hinted that additional actions would follow the release of Friday’s report.
“Stay tuned,” she told reporters aboard Air Force One.
The report was released one day after a courtesy call from Biden to Saudi King Salman, though a White House summary of the conversation made no mention of the killing and said instead that the men had discussed the countries’ longstanding partnership. The kingdom’s state-run Saudi Press Agency similarly did not mention Khashoggi’s killing in its report about the call, rather focusing on regional issues such as Iran and the ongoing war in Yemen.
The Trump administration had refused to release the unclassified report on Khashoggi’s murder, even though it was mandated by Congress. Former President Donald Trump and his sonin-law, Jared Kushner, cultivated close ties with the royal family, and with the crown prince in particular.
It marks the first public acknowledgment from U.S. intelligence officials of the Saudi leader’s role in the killing of Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who had been living in the U.S. in self-exile.
Friday’s release is likely to fuel the debate over America’s alliance with Saudi Arabia – and over the prince’s future as Saudi Arabia’s king-in-waiting.
The crown prince has denied he ordered Khashoggi’s killing. Saudi officials have acknowledged that operatives from the kingdom carried out the killing, but they’ve portrayed it as a rogue operation gone awry.
Rep. Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat who crafted the legislation mandating the report from the director of national intelligence, said he wanted “a clear statement by the U.S. government that (MBS) was responsible” as a form of accountability. The provision required the DNI to provide Congress with a list of all Saudi officials responsible for Khashoggi’s death.
In an interview last year, Malinowski said he hoped the report would spur a debate about MBS’S leadership.
“This is about holding individuals accountable and sending a signal to the Saudi leadership that perhaps giving this one reckless individual absolutely power for the next 50 years might not be the best idea,” he said.
In 2019, a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced five people to death for Khashoggi’s slaying, but it placed no blame on the royal family. Critics have called the Saudi proceedings a “mockery” and a whitewash.
While in the White House, thenpresident Donald Trump and his foreign policy advisers refused to publicly condemn the Saudi leader’s alleged role in Khashoggi’s death.
“It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Trump said in an unusual statement nearly two months after the killing. “The world is a very dangerous place!”
But during closed-door briefings, Trump’s own CIA Director Gina Haspel told members of Congress that the crown prince directed Khashoggi’s killing. “I think he’s complicit to the highest level possible,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., said in December 2018, after a briefing with Haspel.
A top United Nations expert on extrajudicial executions also found “credible evidence” that high-level officials in Saudi Arabia – including MBS – were involved in Khashoggi’s death.
The U.N. investigation, led by special rapporteur Agnes Callamard, provided new details, including snippets of conversation between Khashoggi and his Saudi killers. Callamard urged the U.S. government to open an FBI investigation into Khashoggi’s slaying and pursue criminal prosecutions in the U.S. for those responsible, among other steps.
In the wake of his killing, lawmakers in both parties have pushed for a reassessment of the U.s.-saudi alliance, voting, for example, to ban some weapons sales to the kingdom. Trump nixed those efforts, but Biden has signaled a willingness to be more confrontational with the Saudis.
He paused some U.S. weapons sales to the kingdom and halted U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition’s offensive operations in Yemen.
Pentagon airstrikes against Iranbacked militias in Syria are not only the first military action taken by President Joe Biden. They are a test of his broad pledge to pursue a foreign policy that is more cooperative and mindful of international partners than his predecessor’s but still eschews the U.S. role as the world’s police to focus on making life better for Americans, some experts and lawmakers say.
Biden on Thursday night ordered the airstrikes on multiple facilities at a Syrian-iraqi border control point in southeastern Syria in retaliation for rocket attacks on U.S. targets in neighboring Iraq. The Pentagon identified the targets as a “number of Iranian-backed militant groups including Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-shuhada.” It called the airstrikes “proportionate” and “defensive” and said the airstrikes were taken after consultation with coalition partners and unspecified “diplomatic measures.”
The military action comes as Washington and Tehran are locked in apparent stalemate over who should take the first step to revitalize a nuclear deal exited by the Trump administration; as Biden has vowed to recalibrate national security actions to favor the middle class; and as reporting from USA TODAY has revealed the voluminous scale of U.S. overseas military bases and counterterror operations two decades after 9/11.
“We are concerned that President Biden’s first instinct when it comes to regional security in the Middle East appears to be to reach for military options instead of diplomacy,” said Ryan Costello, director of The National Iranian American Council, an organization that seeks improved relations between Washington and Tehran.
“Biden wanted to respond to the incident in Iraq,” said Max Abrahms, a professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University, “but he wanted to do it in a way that didn’t seem too heavy-handed ... the more fundamental question that needs to be asked, and isn’t, is what are Iranian militias doing in Iraq? The answer is they are there partly because the U.S. toppled (Iraq’s former president) Saddam Hussein.”
Abrahms said that the Biden administration is trying to balance the instincts of veteran national security officials and diplomats such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken – Obama administration-era officials who have long gravitated toward military interventions
and regime change from Syria to Venezuela – with “the zeitgeist of the American citizenry, which has moved over the course of the Trump administration.”
He described this “zeitgeist,” which is backed up by polling that shows many Americans are most concerned about economic and security threats closer to home, as “a more limited role for the United States in the world, a greater delineation of where our vital interests lie and a skepticism of a democracy-promoting agenda.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters he was “confident in the target we went after. We know what we hit.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based monitoring group, said the airstrikes killed at least 22 pro-iranian fighters, wounded many more and destroyed several trucks carrying munitions. Some Iranian media reported a similar death toll.
Earlier this month, a civilian contractor from the Philippines working with the U.s.-led military coalition in Iraq was killed in a rocket attack on U.S. targets. Several others were wounded in that assault, including a National Guard solider and four American civilian contractors. Iran denies any involvement or ties to the Feb. 15 assault near Erbil.
A little-known Shiite militant group calling itself Saraya Awliya al-dam, Arabic for Guardians of Blood Brigade, claimed responsibility.
Iranian-backed Shiite militia groups have been responsible for numerous rocket attacks that have targeted U.S. personnel or facilities in Iraq. The December 2019 killing of a U.S. civilian
contractor in a rocket attack in Kirkuk, itself retaliation for the Pentagon’s assassination of senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, sparked a tit-fortat fight on Iraqi soil that brought the U.S. to the brink of a war with Iran.
The U.S. has about 2,500 troops stationed in Iraq.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-VA., said in a statement that the “American people deserve to hear the administration’s rationale for these strikes and its legal justification for acting without coming to Congress. Offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Defense Department briefed congressional leadership before the airstrikes and that there will be a full classified briefing next week. She called the action “pursuant to (the president’s) Article II authority to defend U.S. personnel.”
“The targets were chosen to correspond to the recent attacks on facilities and to deter the risk of additional attacks over the coming weeks,” she said Friday. “As a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to a threat of self-defense as reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The strikes were both necessary to address the threat and were proportionate to the prior attacks.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CNN that Biden’s airstrikes marked the fifth consecutive time a U.S. president has ordered such strikes against targets in the Middle
East.
“There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization. We need to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate,” Khanna said, noting that it was action taken under the “broad, outdated” Authorization for Use of Military Force law (AUMF).
AUMF is legislation that sprung from President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” and the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. That 2001 authorization has been stretched to target militant groups in Syria, Kenya, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia and beyond, according to research by Stephanie Savell, a defense and security expert at the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute. USA TODAY reported this week, based on Savell’s research, that from 2018 to 2020 the U.S. military was active in counterterrorism operations in 85 countries, either directly or via surrogates, training exercises, drone strikes or low-profile U.S. special operations forces missions.
“I spoke against endless war with Trump, and I will speak out against it when we have a Democratic President,” Khanna said in his comments to CNN.
Adnan Tabatabai, the founder and CEO of CARPO, a German-based think tank that specializes in issues that affect the Middle East, said in a Twitter post that when “policymakers in #Tehran (and elsewhere) argue that nothing really changes with a new (U.S. president), this is what they mean.” Tabatabai was referring to the airstrikes by successive U.S. administrations that have targeted Iranian interests in Iraq.
However, the action also received some bipartisan support.
“Today’s airstrike demonstrates President Biden’s resolve to prevent Iran from targeting America’s personnel and allies with impunity,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-PA., said, “The commander-in-chief has a responsibility to protect Americans at home and abroad” and that Biden was “right to respond.”
Jennifer Cafarella, a national security fellow at The Institute for the Study of War, a policy research organization in Washington, argued – also on Twitter – that the airstrikes demonstrated “that the #Biden administration is not wholly overlooking #Iran’s malign & escalatory regional operations” as it finds a way to resume nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
“Much still remains to be seen, but this was a good step,” Cafarella wrote.
Contributing: Tom Vanden Brook
A Texas woman filed a class-action lawsuit seeking $1 billion in relief for customers of electricity retailer Griddy, which the suit says illegally engaged in price gouging amid widespread power outages across the state last week.
Lisa Khoury, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of all Griddy customers who were charged the high prices, faced a $9,546 electric bill from Feb. 1 through Feb. 19 as a result of the massive spike in wholesale electric prices in Texas amid a severe winter storm.
Griddy is a service that allows customers to pay variable rates on their electricity, being charged what wholesale customers would be charged, or “exactly the price we buy electricity at,” the company says on its website, instead of a fixed price.
But last week, wholesale prices soared amid the outages that hit millions of Texans, spiking to $9,000 per megawatt hour compared with the typical rate of $50 per megawatt hour, the lawsuit says.
“At this point we don’t know how many people might be affected, but there are likely thousands of customers who’ve received these outrageous bills,” Derek Potts, an attorney representing Khoury, said in a statement. “A class action will be the most efficient and effective way for Griddy’s customers to come together and fight this predatory pricing.”
Griddy did not immediately respond to USA TODAY’S request for comment on the litigation, but on a page of frequently asked questions about the storm on its website, the company denies allegations of price gouging.
The lawsuit seeks to prevent Griddy from billing and collecting payments on
the charges with excess prices during the storm and forgiveness for late or unpaid payments as well as the monetary relief.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that the state was investigating providers whose prices spiked, and the Public Utility Commission of Texas issued an order Sunday preventing providers until further notice from disconnecting customers who have not paid their bills.
Many customers use Griddy with the expectation of paying less, the lawsuit said. On its website in a video explaining how the service works, Griddy bills itself as a company that saves consumers money by not marking up prices as do “all those other guys, you know the ones who have been preying on you,
your parents and your neighbors for the past 20 years.”
While using the service is “a gamble,” the lawsuit said, “Griddy knew it was overcharging consumers, that consumers would be harmed, and Griddy would be unjustly enriched by retaining customers’ payments.”
According to the lawsuit, Khoury’s typical monthly electric bill is $200 to $250, so she allows the service to charge her bank account every time it reaches $150. From Feb. 15 to Feb. 19, Khoury had $1,200 automatically withdrawn from her bank account, the lawsuit says. She placed a stop payment on her account but still owed more than $8,000 to Griddy, according to court documents.
For two days last week, Khoury was largely without power, and she had hosted her parents and in-laws, who are in their 80s, according to the lawsuit.
Before the high prices were charged, Griddy emailed its customers on Feb. 14 warning them that they should find a fixed-rate provider amid the potential for soaring prices, but the lawsuit says many could not find one because providers were not accepting new customers during the storm.
Khoury tried to change providers on Feb. 16, but she could not get a new provider until Feb. 19.
The lawsuit says Griddy took advantage of its customers “to a grossly unfair degree” and pointed to the fact that Griddy suggested customers find a new provider as evidence it knew prices would be grossly inflated.
It says Griddy’s actions violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which prevents a company from charging an “exorbitant or excess price” on necessary goods during a disaster.
Abbott and President Joe Biden both declared emergencies in the state because of the winter storm. Historically low temperatures and unusual snow and ice knocked large supplies of electricity off Texas’ power grid last week. The storm and the power outages have been blamed for numerous deaths.
In Texas, which largely has its own power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas manages the flow of electricity for about 26 million people, or 90% of the state.
According to Griddy, wholesale prices soared last week because the Public Utility Commission of Texas “cited its ‘complete authority over ERCOT’ to direct that ERCOT set pricing at $9/kwh.”
Abbot and lawmakers in Texas have called for investigations into what went wrong with the state’s electricity grid.