mnl168 jili slot It wasn't DNA or facial recognition technology that cracked the case. Nor did amateur online investigators hunting for clues break it open. In the end, it was a McDonald's restaurant employee - hours away from the scene of the crime - who spotted a man resembling a "person of interest" photo. The suspect was careful to wear a mask while traveling around New York City, but pulled it down for a second to flirt with a woman behind the desk at a youth hostel, and again to eat at McDonald's. That may have been enough. Police in Altoona, Pennsylvania swooped into the restaurant and arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old from a wealthy Baltimore-area family with an expensive private and Ivy League education. After six dramatic days, the hunt for the man suspected of shooting Unitedhealth CEO Brian Thompson was over. On Monday morning, a regular at the McDonald's in Altoona told the BBC that one of his friends spotted Mr Mangione as he entered the restaurant and commented: "There's that shooter from New York". "I thought he was kidding," the customer said. Police were called and when officers first approached Mr Mangione and asked him if he'd been in New York, he became "visibly nervous, kind of shaking", Altoona's Deputy Chief Derick Swope told reporters. As he was being led into a court hearing Tuesday, Mr Mangione shouted about an "insult to the American people and their lived experience". He now faces charges of second-degree murder along with weapons offenses. New York police say the suspect first arrived in the city on 24 November, in the busy run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday. He visited the Hilton Hotel, where the shooting would later happen, and his encounter with a clerk at the hostel, where he stayed, was captured on camera. Ten days later, on 4 December, Mr Thompson was shot dead on his way to a meeting at about quarter to seven in the morning. The suspect fled by foot, bike and taxi to a bus station near the George Washington Bridge. From there, he exited the city. The killing was identified as a targeted attack early on in the investigation. Video showed the suspect ignored several pedestrians on the busy Manhattan pavement and zeroed in on Mr Thompson. Shell casings at the scene had words written on them, thought to be references to the insurance industry: "delay", "deny", "depose". Mr Mangione comes from a large and wealthy family in Baltimore, Maryland, with business interests in nursing homes, real estate, a country club and a radio station, according to local news outlet the Baltimore Banner . He attended the all-male private Gilman School, where he graduated as valedictorian – at the top of his class. A former classmate, Freddie Leatherbury, told the Associated Press news agency that Mr Mangione came from a wealthy family, even by that private school's standards. "Quite honestly, he had everything going for him," Mr Leatherbury said. Mr Mangione went on to the University of Pennsylvania. There he received bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science, according to the school, and founded a video game development club. A friend who attended the Ivy League school at the same time as Mr Mangione described him as a "super normal" and "smart person". He worked as a data engineer and a video game developer, and most recently was living in Hawaii. Social media posts show that friends and family members had recently been attempting to contact him and asking about his whereabouts. In a post on X from October, someone asked Mr Mangione: "Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you." Monday's arrest ended a dramatic six days in which the alleged killer seemed to disappear, leaving few clues behind and eluding police. Not only was he able to leave one of the busiest cities in the world using public transport, before Monday his name was not publicly known. It's also unclear exactly where he was hiding in the days after he left New York. Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary for policy at the US Department of Homeland Security, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that his background in technology may have helped him evade capture for nearly a week. "This was someone who was studying how law enforcement and how these cities try to protect themselves, which is essentially they have lots of cameras around," she said. "Now that we know a little bit about him - that he's a smart person, he went to great schools, he had higher degrees, he studied engineering technology, he was into electronic gizmos - some of it is beginning to make sense," Kayyem said. The suspect also wore a face mask almost constantly, and Mr Mangione was found with a fake driving licence and an untraceable "ghost gun" – a firearm assembled by the owner without a serial number, which police said may have been 3D-printed. Authorities said he used cash for purchases in New York City and fled the scene of the crime into Central Park, where there are few surveillance cameras. But he also appeared to make some elementary mistakes – including revealing his face in the hostel, and holding on to the gun and the fake identification card. The Mr Mangione family released a statement Monday night through Mangione's cousin, a Maryland state lawmaker. "Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi's arrest," said Nino Mangione. "We offer prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved." Mr Mangione's online footprint shows few messages about health care or the insurance industry. Instead there are comments about artificial intelligence and technology, science and pop philosophy, and reviews of a range of books, including 1984 and the Harry Potter series. But a number of social media accounts matching his name and picture offer some potential clues about his motivation. RJ Martin, a former roommate of Mr Mangione's at a co-living and co-working community in Hawaii, told CNN that the suspect had a back injury. "He sent me the X-rays," Martin said. "It looked heinous, with just giant screws going into his spine." The banner image on his X account shows an X-ray of a spine with hardware in it. And his account on Goodreads, a user-generated book review website, indicated that he had read several books about managing back pain, one of them called Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry. Also on the Goodreads site, Mr Mangione gave four stars to a text called Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski – better known as the Unabomber manifesto. Starting in 1978, Kaczynski carried out a bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens of others. In his review, Mr Mangione acknowledged Kaczynski was a violent individual who killed innocent people. However, he also argued that the essay should not be dismissed as the manifesto of a lunatic but rather the work of an "extreme political revolutionary." He quoted another online commentator who said: "When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive". Mr Mangione wrote that he found the take "interesting". Police said a three-page, handwritten document Mr Mangione had when he was arrested further suggests a motive. The pages expressed "ill will" towards corporate America. A senior law enforcement official told the New York Times that the document said: "These parasites had it coming" and "I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done". Meanwhile mixed reactions to the shooting and Mr Mangione's arrest continue – sympathy for Mr Thompson and his family versus anger at the state of America's expensive, vastly complicated health care system . In some online spaces, the shooting prompted criticism of the health insurance industry, and Mr Mangione was even hailed as a hero. Police in Altoona said the department received hundreds of emails and calls, including death threats. Some members of the public called police in support of Mr Mangione, claiming they were actually the killer and that police "have the wrong guy". And police are advising McDonald's employees not to give interviews or statements out of concern for their safety. The restaurant received hundreds of negative reviews online, calling employees "rats" and criticising them for calling the police. Similar sentiments have been expressed online, often in posts by anonymous accounts. But others have condemned such sentiments. "In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint," Pennsylvania's governor Josh Shapiro told reporters. "I understand people have real frustration with our healthcare system... But I have no tolerance, nor should anyone, for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most. "In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this: He is no hero," Shapiro said. With reporting by Cai Pigliucci, Jessica Parker and Madeline HalpertNew state IDs, mandatory by 2026, reach 1.2 million

A federal appeals court panel on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in a few short months, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok's petition to overturn the law — which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January — and rebuffed the company's challenge of the statute, which it argued had ran afoul of the First Amendment. “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court's opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” TikTok and ByteDance — another plaintiff in the lawsuit — are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, though its unclear whether the court will take up the case. “The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue," TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people,” Hughes said. Unless stopped, he argued the statute “will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025.” Though the case is squarely in the court system, it's also possible the two companies might be thrown some sort of a lifeline by President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first term but said during the presidential campaign that he is now against such action. The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a yearslong saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China. The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect — a concern mirrored by the European Union on Friday as it scrutinizes the video-sharing app’s role in the Romanian elections. TikTok, which sued the government over the law in May, has long denied it could be used by Beijing to spy on or manipulate Americans. Its attorneys have accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S. They have also argued the law is predicated on future risks, which the Department of Justice has emphasized pointing in part to unspecified action it claims the two companies have taken in the past due to demands from the Chinese government. Friday’s ruling came after the appeals court panel, composed of two Republicans and one Democrat appointed judges, heard oral arguments in September. In the hearing, which lasted more than two hours, the panel appeared to grapple with how TikTok’s foreign ownership affects its rights under the Constitution and how far the government could go to curtail potential influence from abroad on a foreign-owned platform. On Friday, all three denied TikTok’s petition. In the court's ruling, Ginsburg, a Republican appointee, rejected TikTok's main legal arguments against the law, including that the statute was an unlawful bill of attainder, or a taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment. He also said the law did not violate the First Amendment because the government is not looking to "suppress content or require a certain mix of content” on TikTok. “Content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture, and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing,” Ginsburg wrote, using the abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China.

A fugitive gains fame in New Orleans eluding dart guns and nets