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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/84632

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

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Paris Lee was shot six times and killed by Samuel Ward Jr.; this is an indisputable fact. Ward was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in May 2025. He claimed it was self-defense, but the jury didn’t buy it.

This week, however, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals reversed his conviction. A three-judge panel declared that the jury was under the impression Lee was cisgender; that in not disclosing the victim’s status as a trans woman, the trial judge “misled” the jury; and that Ward was entitled to a new trial where he could use this fact to bolster his claim of self-defense.

This story was first reported by independent journalist Jamie Satterfield. Other outlets and LGBTQ organizations also reported on Lee’s death at the time, with some referring to her as Kitty Monroe, which was her name on social media.

“After a short deliberation, a Shelby County jury found Samuel Ward guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of Paris Lee, concluding a case that revealed inconsistencies between the defendant’s claims and the physical evidence presented in court,” a May 2025 press release from the Shelby County District Attorney reads. “Ward claimed self-defense throughout the trial, but the jury rejected his narrative and found him guilty.”

The appellate judges did not contest any of the evidence. Rather, they took issue with one facet of the trial in particular: The original court had disallowed the defense from disclosing Lee’s sex assigned at birth to the jury, finding that it would cause an undue prejudice against the victim.

Ward’s defense appealed, and a panel of judges was tasked with answering several procedural questions: Did Ward have a right to use his victim’s sex assigned at birth as part of his defense? Moreover, did the trial judge dilute Ward’s right to defend himself by striking references to Lee’s assigned sex from the record?

“A deadly weapon is a deadly weapon is a deadly weapon,” the judge explained at trial. “Whether that person has a vagina or a penis has no bearing on the deadliness of a firearm.”

But the panel disagreed. They found that prohibiting the disclosure of Lee’s transgender status was prohibiting potentially exculpatory evidence for Ward.

“The State conceded that if the proof showed the victim’s assigned sex was the reason for the altercation between Defendant and the victim, it would be relevant to the adequate provocation element of voluntary manslaughter,” court documents read. “However, the State argued, the proof at trial would establish that the victim ‘was a large woman’ who was armed with a [firearm] and, therefore, the victim’s assigned sex was not relevant to the issue of self-defense.”

Conversely, Ward’s lawyers argued that Lee’s status as a trans woman impacted “how much fear” Ward felt, and therefore, how justifiable his actions were in the moment that he killed her.

Excerpt from the appellate ruling.

What’s more: During trial, Ward waived his right to testify. He refused to take the stand unless he was allowed to call Lee’s gender into question, explicitly stating that he thought he would be judged more harshly by jurors for killing a presumed-cisgender woman than a transgender one.

The defense also argued that, while a jury may hold prejudice against Lee as a trans woman, Ward would face equal amounts of discrimination on the basis of his decision to sleep with transgender women.

Excerpt from the appellate ruling.

According to the press release from the DA, the killing occurred after Ward went to Lee’s home, and a verbal altercation ensued. Lee asked Ward to leave, and he reportedly refused. Ward then claims that Lee pointed a gun at him.

In Ward’s telling, this caused him to fall backward down a staircase, with Lee still standing at the top. At the bottom of the stairs, he said he drew his gun and fired upward at Lee.

Ward shot Lee six times. Police found only one bullet casing from Lee’s gun; if she fired her weapon at all, she only did so once. Ward was wholly uninjured.

Physical evidence and expert testimony from the medical examiner “contradicted Ward’s version of events,” the press release continues. “The trajectories of the gunshot wounds did not align with the defendant’s statement. Additionally, Ward had no visible injuries, undermining his claim of self-defense.”

After killing Lee, Ward “left the scene and drove approximately 30 minutes to his home before calling 911—leaving Lee to die at the foot of her staircase,” the DA’s office concluded.

Even before killing Lee, Ward was a known entity to trans women in the area, according to Kayla Gore, who is the executive director of My Sistah’s House—a Memphis-based organization that supports Black and Brown trans people fleeing violence. Gore said Ward largely pursued relationships with transgender women.

After Lee’s death, Gore said she received countless calls about the case and spoke extensively to Lee’s loved ones. The crime left everyone terrified in its wake.

“What concerns me as a community organizer is what happens when a courtroom treats a Black trans woman’s identity as a material explanation like for someone’s fears,” Gore told Erin in the Morning. “They want that as evidence presented to the jury or the judge as a deciding factor on whether or not this was self-defense. It sends a message far beyond the courtroom.”

That message, she said, is that trans women can be harmed and killed with impunity—especially Black trans women, who are more likely than almost any other demographic to be the victims of hate crimes and domestic violence, while being the least likely to have resources available to them in the aftermath.

“I understand what the appellate court was addressing with the defendant’s right to present a defense,” Gore continued, “but there is a profound difference between saying evidence may be relevant to a legal defense, and saying that a transgender woman’s identity somehow makes her inherently more threatening.”

The case is a bitter reminder of the ways LGBTQ people have had their identities weaponized by the courts in the past, most notoriously through a legal defense tactic known as gay or trans “panic.”

According to the LGBTQ+ Bar Association, the trans “panic” defense is a legal strategy wherein someone charged with violent crimes uses their victim’s real or perceived gender identity to reduce or evade criminal liability, in tandem with other legal lines of defense—such as claiming provocation or an insanity plea.

“The LGBTQ+ ‘panic’ defense is usually employed to bolster a self-defense claim when the victim’s behavior does not meet the threat of serious bodily harm standard or when the defendant used greater force than reasonably necessary to avoid danger,” the LGBTQ+ Bar’s primer on the topic says. “This strategy requires the defendant to argue that their victim’s LGBTQ+ identity made them a greater threat than a heterosexual and/or cisgender person.”

This argument can be hugely consequential during a trial because self-defense claims rely on evaluating a defendant’s perceived risk of harm. This determines how justifiable deadly force might be.

So in Lee’s case, the argument stands to be that she was more dangerous than a cisgender woman, or that Ward otherwise had more reason to fear her because she was trans.

“We live in a society where Black trans women are stereotyped as dangerous, deceptive, threatening,” Gore said. She called the case’s remand “a slap in the face of all survivors.”

Moreover, according to Satterfield—the local journalist who broke the story—it is “the first such ruling of its kind in Tennessee’s legal history.”

The LGBT panic defense is banned in 20 states, but Tennessee is not one of them.

If you are a trans person of color fleeing domestic violence in need of affirming and inclusive resources, you can reach out to My Sistah’s House to be referred to a number of providers nationwide. You can also reach out to Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860, the LGBT National Hotline at (888) 843-4564, or the LGBT National Youth Talkline (serving youth through age 25) at (800) 246-7743.

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https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2108332127318073528#m

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation. I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.

Our thoughts are with the injured New Yorker and his family tonight. We are praying for his recovery.

Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.

Abolish ICE.

https://x.com/dhsgov/status/2108345517990129675

Department of Homeland Security

On October 8, at approximately 4:00 PM ET, ICE officers were conducting a targeted enforcement operation in the Bronx, New York, to arrest a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Repubic with a prior criminal conviction for grand larceny, and multiple prior arrests for assault, robbery, possession of drugs, and weapons possession. He has associations to the Trinitarios gang. The same gang who brutally killed a CBP officer last year.

This criminal illegal alien was arrested by the NYPD on December 7, 2023, but was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies that put American lives at risk.

During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured.

ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation. More information will be shared as it becomes available.

When dangerous illegal aliens are released back onto the streets by radical sanctuary politicians, our officers are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments. Our officers should not have to risk their lives, and innocent Americans should not have to face unnecessary danger, because sanctuary politicians refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement.

Snip:

A senior aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has been blocking and rewriting embassy reports to Washington to whitewash Israeli crimes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the New York Times reported on 8 October.

David Milstein, who joined the US embassy in Jerusalem in April 2025 and serves as a de facto chief of staff to Huckabee, oversees much of the mission's work on the West Bank and Gaza.

According to a dozen people who deal with him in Jerusalem and Washington, he has used that role to repeatedly suppress or doctor cables on illegal Israeli settlement expansion, settler attacks, the killings of Palestinian US citizens, and deadly aid distribution in Gaza.

Among the reports Milstein buried was a March embassy review of the killings of nine Palestinian US citizens by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank over four years. The latest, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam, was shot dead by a settler in February as he tried to stop the theft of his village's livestock.

Snip:

Araghchi made the remark in a post on his X account on Thursday, citing figures from the US Congressional Research Service as he questioned Washington’s account of losses at its military bases.

He said the Congressional Research Service had acknowledged in May that Iran’s armed forces had downed 42 American military aircraft.

However, the figure has now increased to 81, he added. “Real toll is far higher,” he wrote.

As evidence of a cover-up, the top Iranian diplomat pointed to CENTCOM’s refusal to allow a sitting US senator to inspect bases that it claims are undamaged, without providing further details.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/84516

Something strange just popped up in the Gulf of Mexico: a hurricane. Well, not so much Hurricane Isaias, which storm-watchers expect to make landfall as a Category 2 somewhere between the coast of Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle late Friday, causing widespread destruction. It’s more the timing of it: This is the first Atlantic hurricane of the season, which began all the way back in June. That smashes the previous record in the satellite era for the latest first hurricane of a season, September 11.

“This is pretty astounding, really, to break a record by just about a month,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami.

So what’s with the extraordinary delay? El Niño, of all things.

Even though that band of warm water is on the other side of the Americas in the Pacific, it messes with two of the fundamental ingredients for making hurricanes in the Atlantic: wind and humidity. To spawn a tropical cyclone, you need warm water, which provides energy, as well as high humidity and winds moving in a consistent direction. (Hurricanes have been getting more intense lately because climate change is rapidly warming the oceans, creating high-octane fuel.) While the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico have been plenty warm, providing huge pools of fuel, El Niño has been messing with weather patterns, creating dry, sinking air. It also provides wind shear — air moving at different directions and speeds as you gain altitude — which hurricanes really hate.

Hence the exceptionally quiet Atlantic hurricane season this year.

So why did Isaias finally break through in October? While it is indeed fighting wind shear in the Gulf, atmospheric conditions aren’t as bad for it as they are farther east. “It’s forming in one of the few places that a storm can occur in the Atlantic right now, because of the very strong El Niño that’s taking shape and imposing very strong vertical shear across the deep tropics,” McNoldy said. “The Gulf has a small window of opportunity for a storm to form, and it did.”

The Gulf is also running several degrees warmer than usual, at least at the surface, where Isaias is drawing its energy. Interestingly enough, though, the “ocean heat content,” a measurement of the thermal energy down through the depths, there is nearing a record low. “So that warmth is really only skin deep,” McNoldy said.

This sets up a weird dynamic for Isaias. Hurricanes are such violent storms that they churn up deeper waters: If that liquid is warm like the surface, that means more fuel. But if it’s cooler, that’s anathema to a hurricane. This effect is so pronounced that scientists can use satellites to trace the paths of hurricanes, just by detecting the trails of cold water they leave behind.

While the Atlantic hurricane season has been exceptionally quiet, in the eastern Pacific has been very busy as seven have formed, five of them being major. (It’s hosted 18 named storms so far, five more than usual.) Hawai’i has suffered particularly badly this summer, with hurricanes Lala and Nolo bringing torrential rain. Right now, Hurricane Rachel is taking aim at Baja Mexico and Southern California, where it could spawn dangerous surf and winds this weekend.

Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast is bracing for Isaias — a storm that may have arrived very late, but, with ferocious winds and a potential storm surge of up to 7 feet, is no less a threat for life and property.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Isaias is a typical storm — but it’s also ‘astounding’ on Oct 8, 2026.

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

Snip:

On Wednesday, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) called on its members and organizations to participate in two mass mobilizations in Caracas during October, to commemorate dates of significance for the political movement.

The first march was scheduled for October 7, the anniversary of the electoral victory of Hugo Chavez, former president of Venezuela and leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, in the 2012 presidential elections.

PSUV Secretary General Diosdado Cabello emphasized the importance of that election day and described it as “one of the most significant” political events in the recent history of the country and the Chavista movement.

The main gathering was scheduled for 10:00 a.m. at the headquarters of the National Anonymous Company Telephones of Venezuela, located on Libertador Avenue in Caracas, where participants paid tribute to Chavez’s “perfect victory.”

Snip:

Israeli occupation forces killed Civil Defense volunteer Mohammad Tammous on 7 October, the third anniversary of the start of Israel's genocide in Gaza, as he attempted to evacuate Palestinians wounded in an earlier Israeli strike near the ruined Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal said.

The assassination came during intensified overnight Israeli airstrikes, artillery shelling, and live fire across the Gaza Strip, as rescue workers continued to risk their lives under direct Israeli attack to save civilians.

Israel's latest attacks bring the number of Palestinians killed since the so-called ceasefire took effect in October of last year to 1,467, according to updates from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Snip:

A team of special forces from the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Ground Force has arrived in Belarus to participate in a joint anti-terrorism exercise involving the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The IRGC Ground Force said the team, representing Iran’s Armed Forces, traveled to Belarus to take part in the SCO member states’ joint anti-terrorism exercise.

The IRGC said Iran’s participation in the drill comes as Western and European countries seek to undermine the Islamic Republic’s relations with regional countries, adding that the exercise is part of Tehran’s continued strategic engagement with SCO members.

It said the IRGC Ground Force special forces team was dispatched to Belarus to participate in the exercise and exchange experience with the armed forces of other member states.

Link

https://www.fashiontimes.co.uk/onlyfans-star-maeurn-smiles-builds-school-cebu-1765117

Snip:

“The assessment appears to refer only to Israel’s Jewish citizens,” Drop Site News added.

CIA experts cited in the report point to “a volatile mix of pressures” including the Israeli economic crisis, heightened military spending, and the Haredi crisis, which has seen Ultra-Orthodox Jews continue efforts to evade military service.

This has compounded a serious manpower crisis within the Israeli military.

Pressures include “heavily armed veterans returning from prolonged combat, many carrying serious psychological trauma,” as well as increased settler violence and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “fighting to hold onto power and igniting a constitutional crisis.”

Snip:

Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s daughter Aisha has come out on top in an unofficial survey asking the beleaguered nation's people who they would prefer to lead the country in the future, the Al Hadath broadcaster reported.

According to the report, in the September poll, a total of 141,502 people out of more than 549,000 participants voted for Aisha Gaddafi, who outpaced the nearest competitor by over 30,000 votes. The organizers stressed that the informal poll had been neither an election nor a referendum.

Meanwhile, several groups of the former Libyan leader’s supporters have called on Aisha to lead the movement following the death of her brother Saif al-Islam.

Lt. Col. Tim Halbur had been deployed as an Army reservist seven months before six soldiers were killed and dozens were injured at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait on March 1, 2026, in the deadliest known strike on U.S. troops since Operation Epic Fury commenced on Feb. 28. He had served for nearly 30 years, but today he can no longer salute. His dominant right arm will likely never be able to bend past 90 degrees again after the blast shattered his forearm in four places, including his elbow. (AP Video by Nick Ingram)

Snip:

The Green Party of England and Wales voted for the first time to declare Zionism a form of racism at its party conference in Brighton on 4 October.

Party members voted on Sunday to pass the motion, which also calls for the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian state with equal rights for all ethnic and religious groups.

It also recognizes the Palestinian people's inalienable right to resist occupation and achieve self-determination “by all available means under international law.”

Previously, the Green Party supported a two-state solution calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza alongside the state of Israel in the remainder of occupied Palestine.