Wednesday, June 30 top stories
It is Tuesday, June 30. Here are today’s top stories.
(Correction: It is actually Wednesday, June 30.)
Bill Cosby will be released from prison after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court moved to overturn his sexual assault conviction from two years ago.
News reports explained that the PA Supreme Court found that Cosby had an agreement with a former district attorney, Bruce Castor, that he would not be charged if he testified in a civil deposition. Cosby did testify and then made incriminating statements, which were used against him in his criminal trial for allegedly drugging and molesting a woman named Andrea Constand in 2004.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said this was unfair and moved to vacate his convictions and sentence.
Cosby is 83 years old and had already served two years of a three-to-10 year sentence in a state prison.
News reports said there can be no retrial in this case.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to charge the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg with tax-related crimes on Thursday.
Prosecutors are focusing on whether the organization and its employees avoided paying taxes on fringe benefits and perks such as cars, apartments, and private-school tuition.
The WSJ said it would be the first criminal charges against the Trump Organization since it came under investigation three years ago. Donald Trump is not expected to be charged.
In New York City, there was a Democratic primary election for mayor, but the city’s Board of Elections said they made a major error in counting the votes because there were 135,000 test ballots that were included with actual ballots. Now the board will have to locate the test ballots, remove them, and count the votes again.
Axios said the final result will come in mid-July as the board has to make sure all ballots counted are the real ones and then count about 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. To make things more complicated, New York City is using a new voting process called “Ranked-choice voting,” in which voters can rank up to five candidates in order of preference.
Several conservative leaders on social media mocked the New York election mess and tried to tie it in with Donald Trump’s allegations of voter fraud.
A transgender woman named Kataluna Enriquez won Miss Nevada USA on Sunday, a historic first for the state. She will represent Nevada in the Miss USA pageant this November.
Enriquez posted on Instagram a thank-you message to everyone who supported her from day one.
In a posting last week, she highlighted the hate she’s received by showing comments from others that said things such as “disgusting,” “I’m moving to another state,” or mocking comments about plastic surgery. She said she used to want to die, but she’s now a warrior.
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The death toll in the Surfside condo collapse has increased to 16 with 145 people still missing.
Search crews said they recovered the human remains after they built a ramp that allowed a crane to reach new areas.
Crews have removed about 3 million pounds of concrete. The search is into its seventh day.
There are photographs of the missing that have been placed on a nearby fence. There are flowers and tributes to honor them. People also have placed signs thanking the first responders and asking them to please not give up.
Allison Mack, an actress known for her role in “Smallville,” was sentenced to three years in prison for recruiting women to join a cult called NXIVM. The cult leader, Keith Raniere, was sentenced 120 years in jail last year on sex-trafficking charges. Mack’s sentence was reduced after her guilty plea and cooperation agreement to work with prosecutors against the cult leader.
The cult is said to use female recruits as “slaves” for Rainere, in which they were forced to be on starvation diets, be branded with initials, and ordered to have sex with Rainere.
Mack apologized to victims for exposing them to Raniere.
There is a serious military conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region between the Ethiopian government and rebels in Tigray. News reports said Ethiopian troops had occupied the city of Mekelle for months but now rebels have seized the city, sending government forces on the run. Human rights groups say there are massacres of civilians and that thousands are fleeing to neighboring Sudan because of fears of a civil war. There are over 350,000 people who are suffering from famine conditions.
The Washington Post said this conflict started when the new Ethiopian president Abiy Ahmed took over in 2018 and took actions to dismantle a political and military group in the Tigray region called the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The TPLF does not recognize Abiy as their leader.
The U.N. Security Council will be meeting this week to discuss Tigray.
That is all the top stories for today. See you tomorrow and stay with the light.
https://www.instagram.com/mskataluna/
https://www.tmz.com/2021/06/30/bill-cosby-conviction-thrown-out-will-be-released/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/29/ethiopia-tigray-conflict-faq/