Violent attacks continue in Pakistan amid national election
02:25
Heavy rains killed eight people, mostly children, and injured 12 in Pakistan’s northwest, an official said Saturday.
Downpours in different districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province caused rooms to collapse, crushing the people inside, according to Anwar Shahzad, a spokesperson for the local disaster management authority.
Shahzad said that three of the dead were siblings aged between 3 and 7 years old, from the same family. The casualties occurred in the past 24 hours, he added.
Pakistan has this year experienced a delay in winter rains, which started in February instead of November. Monsoon and winter rains cause damage in Pakistan every year.
Fruit carts are pictured half submerged in a flooded street after rainfall in Karachi on February 4, 2024.
ASIF HASSAN/AFP via Getty Images
Earlier this month, around 30 people died in rain-related incidents in the northwest.
Across the border in Afghanistan, heavy rainfall on March 29 and 30 destroyed more than 1,500 acres of agricultural land, causing severe damage to hundreds of homes and critical infrastructure like bridges and roads in seven provinces, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Saturday.
The provinces most affected are northern Faryab, eastern Nangarhar, and central Daikundi.
It’s the third time that the northern region has experienced flooding in less than a month, with seven people killed and 384 families affected by heavy rains, the U.N. agency said.
Israeli airstrikes kill 44 people in Syria, war monitor says – CBS News
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A U.K. war monitor says Israeli airstrikes killed 44 people near the Syrian city of Aleppo early Friday. Human rights groups have called it the deadliest attack in Syria in years. CBS News national security contributor Sam Vinograd joins with analysis.
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DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — The Russian mercenary group known as Wagner is helping government forces in central and northern Mali carry out raids and drone strikes that have killed scores of civilians, including many children, rights groups said in reports published this week that span the period from December to March.
Mali, along with its neighbors Burkina Faso and Niger, has for over a decade battled an insurgency fought by jihadi groups, including some allied with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. Following military coups in all three nations in recent years, the ruling juntas have expelled French forces and turned to Russia’s mercenary units for security assistance instead.
Violence has escalated in Mali since Russian mercenaries arrived there following a coup in 2021. Its ruling junta has ramped up operations, carrying out deadly drone strikes that have hit gatherings of civilians, and raids accompanied by Russian mercenaries that have killed civilians.
Residents of the Sahel region that includes Mali say Russia’s presence doesn’t appear to have changed since Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a suspicious plane crash last year.
“Mali’s Russia-backed transitional military government is not only committing horrific abuses, but it is working to eliminate scrutiny into its human rights situation,” Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at Human Rights Watch, in a statement Thursday.
In an example of a raid carried out by Russian-backed government forces in January, Human Rights Watch said the army entered a village near a military base in central Mali and arrested 25 people, including four children. Their bodies were found later that day blindfolded and with bullet wounds to the head, the report said.
Amnesty International said in separate report earlier this week that two drone strikes in northern Mali killed at least 13 civilians, including seven children aged 2 to 17. A pregnant woman who was injured in the bombing miscarried days after the attack, it said.
Human Rights Watch has said the Turkish-supplied drones in Mali are capable of delivering precise laser-guided bombs. The group has also documented how drone strikes have killed civilians. In one example, a drone strike in central Mali’s Segou region killed at least seven people at a wedding, including two boys, it said. The following day, a second drone strike targeted a funeral held for those killed in the previous day’s strike.
The juntas ruling Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso earlier this month announced a joint security force to fight the worsening extremist violence in their Sahel region. This follows steps taken by the juntas to step away from other regional and Western nations that don’t agree with their approach and rely on Russia for security support instead.
Although the militaries had promised to end the insurgencies in their territories after deposing their respective elected governments, conflict analysts say the violence has instead worsened under their regimes. They share borders and their security forces fighting jihadi violence are overstretched.
A Utah woman who authorities say fatally poisoned her husband in 2022, then published a children’s book about grief, now faces another attempted murder charge for allegedly drugging him weeks earlier, on Valentine’s Day.
Kouri Richins, 33, is accused of killing her husband with a lethal dose of fentanyl at their home in a small mountain town near Park City in March 2022. New charging documents filed Monday by Summit County prosecutors allege that it wasn’t her first attempt on his life.
They detail the perilous months preceding Eric Richins’ death, painting a picture of a paranoid man walking on eggshells around his wife as she made secret financial arrangements and bought illicit drugs that were later found in his system.
Prosecutors have said previously that Kouri Richins, who is being held without bail, may have tried to poison her husband the month before his death, but they didn’t file the additional charges until this week.
Eric and Kouri Richins in an undated photo.
Skye Lazaro
The chilling case of a once-beloved author accused of profiting off her own violent crime has captivated true-crime enthusiasts in the year since she was arrested for her husband’s murder. She had self-published “Are You With Me?” — an illustrated storybook about a father with angel wings watching over his young son after dying.
Once lauded as a heartwarming must-read for any child who’s lost a loved one, the book has since become a powerful tool for prosecutors arguing that Kouri Richins carried out a calculated murder plot and attempted to cover it up.
The mother of three repeatedly called her husband’s death unexpected while promoting her book and was commended by many for helping her sons and other young children process the death of a parent.
Her attorney, Skye Lazaro, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the new charges. Lazaro has argued in early hearings that the evidence against her client was dubious and circumstantial.
Details on possible prior murder try
One bite of his favorite sandwich — left with a note in the front seat of his truck on Valentine’s Day — made Eric Richins, 39, break out in hives and black out, prosecutors allege in the new documents.
His wife had bought the sandwich from a local diner in the city of Kamas the same week she also purchased several dozen fentanyl pills, according to witness statements and deleted text messages that were recovered by police.
The state’s star witness, a housekeeper who claims to have sold her the drugs, told law enforcement that she gave Kouri Richins the pills a couple days before Valentine’s Day. Later that month, Richins allegedly told the housekeeper that the pills she provided weren’t strong enough and asked her to procure stronger fentanyl, according to the new charging documents.
In witness testimony, two friends of Eric Richins recount phone conversations from the day prosecutors are now saying he was first poisoned by his wife of nine years. After injecting himself with his son’s EpiPen and chugging a bottle of Benadryl, he woke from deep sleep and and told a friend, “I think my wife tried to poison me.”
His friends say they noticed fear in his voice as Richins, who had no known allergies, told them that he felt like he was going to die and that his wife might be to blame. Opioids, including fentanyl, can cause severe allergic reactions, including hives.
Details on Eric Richins’ death
A month later, Kouri Richins called 911 in the middle of the night to report that she had found her husband “cold to the touch” at the foot of their bed, according to the police report. He was pronounced dead, and a medical examiner later found five times the lethal dosage of fentanyl in his system.
“One or two pills might be accidental. Twenty — or five times the lethal dose — is not accidental. That is someone who wants Eric dead,” Summit County Chief Prosecutor Patricia Cassell said.
She alleges that Richins slipped the synthetic opioid into a Moscow mule cocktail she made for her husband amid marital disputes and fights over a multimillion-dollar mansion she purchased as an investment.
Eric Richins’ family believes Kouri Richins spiked his drink the night he died, according to “48 Hours.”
Possible motive?
Years before her husband’s death, Kouri Richins opened numerous life insurance policies on Eric Richins without his knowledge, with benefits totaling nearly $2 million, prosecutors allege.
Kouri Richins was also charged Monday with mortgage fraud and insurance fraud for allegedly forging loan applications and fraudulently claiming insurance benefits after his death.
Prosecutors argue she was in financial distress when her husband died and say she mistakenly believed she would inherit his estate under terms of their prenuptial agreement. Newly released documents indicated she had a negative bank account balance, owed lenders more than $1.8 million and was being sued by a creditor.
Charging documents indicate Eric Richins met with a divorce attorney and an estate planner in October 2020, a month after he discovered that his wife made some major financial decisions without his knowledge. The couple’s prenuptial agreement only allowed Kouri Richins to profit off her husband’s successful stone masonry business if he died while they were still married.
Utah law prohibits anyone convicted of murder from profiting financially off their crime.
Maternal murder accomplice?
The case took another turn when a newly released court affidavit revealed last week that investigators believe Kouri Richins’ mother might also have been involved in his death.
A Summit County Sheriff’s investigator wrote in the affidavit it is “possible” that Lisa Darden was “involved in planning and orchestrating” Eric Richins’ death.
Investigators discovered Darden had been living with a female romantic partner who died suddenly in 2006. An autopsy determined the woman died of an overdose of oxycodone, the affidavit said. The woman struggled with drug abuse, but at the time of her death she wasn’t in recovery, which the investigator said would “likely rule out the possibility of an accidental overdose.” Darden had become the recipient of the partner’s estate shortly before her death, the affidavit said.
The affidavit also said conversations “have been found on Kouri’s phone showing disdain for Eric on Lisa’s part.”
“Based on Lisa Darden’s proximity to her partner’s suspicious overdose death, and her relationship with Kouri, it is possible she was involved in planning and orchestrating Eric’s death,” the affidavit states.
Rescuers in boats and aircraft raced against the clock Sunday to help isolated people in Brazil’s mountainous southeast after storms and heavy rains killed at least 20 people.
With more rain predicted Sunday, the deluge pounded the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo, where authorities described a chaotic situation due to flooding.
The death toll rose there from four to 12 on Sunday as rescuers advanced.
The most affected municipality is Mimoso do Sul, a town of almost 25,000 inhabitants located in the south of Espirito Santo, where at least 10 people died in floods, though officials fear the toll may yet rise.
State Governor Renato Casagrande described the situation as “chaotic,” saying that so far it has not been possible to assess the damage in some of the more isolated areas, with fears the toll could yet rise.
At least eight people have been killed in the neighboring state of Rio de Janeiro, officials said, most of them caused by landslides.
Four of the deaths in Rio state occurred when the storm caused a house to collapse in the city of Petropolis, 70 kilometers (45 miles) inland from the capital.
Search teams rescued a girl buried for more than 16 hours there. Her father, who was found dead next to her on Saturday, had “heroically protected the girl with his body,” a neighbor told AFP.
The deluge came as Brazil, South America’s largest country, suffers through a recent string of extreme weather events, which experts say are more likely to occur due to climate change.
Such environmental tragedies “are intensifying with climate change,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, adding that thousands had been left homeless by the storm.
He expressed sympathy for the victims, and said his government was working with state and local authorities to “protect, prevent and repair flood damage.”
Around 90 people have been rescued since Friday, according to a bulletin from an emergency committee comprising Rio government and civil defense officials.
Images on local media showed rivers of water, mud and debris rushing down slopes in picturesque Petropolis, which in February 2022 saw at least 241 deaths from another catastrophic storm.
In Mimoso do Sul, a fire truck was seen being dragged down a street by currents, while images released Saturday by the state fire department showed entire neighborhoods under water, with only the roofs of houses visible.
The National Institute of Meteorology had predicted a severe storm, particularly in Rio, with rainfall of 20 cm (7.9 inches) a day from Friday through Sunday. Normally, the area receives 14 cm (5.5 inches) of rain in all of March.
Rio authorities had declared an administrative holiday on Friday as the storm approached and urged people to stay home.
The storm follows a record heat wave, when humidity helped send the heat index soaring above 62 degrees Celsius (143 degrees Fahrenheit).
CROWN POINT, Ind. — A former fifth-grade teacher in northwestern Indiana who was charged with felony intimidation after, authorities say, she told a student she had a “kill list” of students and staff has been sentenced to 2½ years on probation.
Angelica Carrasquillo, 25, of Griffith pleaded guilty Friday to an intimidation charge in Lake County Superior Court, court records show.
The terms of a plea bargain bar Carrasquillo from working at a school or day care while on probation. It also requires court-monitored mental health treatment, and she is barred from contacting victims in the case, news outlets reported.
St. Stanislaus School in East Chicago, Ind.Google Maps
If she successfully completes probation, she can petition to reduce the conviction to a misdemeanor, under terms of the agreement.
Court documents say Carrasquillo communicated “a threat to commit murder” on Oct. 12.
Once officials at the school where she was employed, St. Stanislaus in East Chicago, learned of the threat, they immediately confronted her and escorted her from the building, the Diocese of Gary said in a message to parents.
When Carrasquillo was asked why she wanted to kill herself and others, she reportedly told school officials: “I’m having trouble with my mental health, and sometimes the kids do not listen in the classroom. I also have trauma caused when I went to high school.”
The threats came to light when a counselor overhead a fifth-grader say, “I heard Ms. Carrasquillo wants to kill herself and has a list.”
The student reportedly said Carrasquillo voiced the threat to him directly and told the student he was on the list.
The principal and an assistant principal said Carrasquillo gave them the name of one student on the “kill list,” but she did not reveal all the names, a court document said.
Carrasquillo allegedly told school officials “she was only joking about it all,” the court document said.
Woman arrested in alleged plot to kill Ukraine’s Zelenskyy – CBS News
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Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the Secret Service of Ukraine (SSU), said Monday that it had arrested a woman in connection with an alleged assassination plot against President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The woman in question “was preparing a Russian airstrike in the Mykolaiv region during the visit of the President of Ukraine,” the SSU said. CBS News foreign correspondent Ramy Inocencio has more.
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An Arizona woman is accused of trying to kill her husband by poisoning his coffee. Melody Feliciano Johnson’s husband, who is in the Air Force, was suspicious of his wife and did not drink the coffee she had been prepping for him, according to court documents.
The couple, who have a child together, were going through a divorce while living in Germany. The husband, whose name was redacted from the police report, noticed that the coffee his wife prepped at night for him to drink in the morning started tasting bad. He told police he is the only one who drinks coffee from the machine.
He told investigators he bought pool chlorine testing strips and started testing his faucet water and the water in his coffee and found while the faucet water was normal, the coffee had high levels of chlorine.
He stopped drinking the coffee but didn’t immediately report his wife while they were in Germany. Instead, when they moved to Arizona on June 28, he decided to set up cameras in their new home on Davis Mountain Air Force Base.
On a video he recorded, he saw Johnson pour something into the water reservoir, according to court documents. He filed a police report with the Tuscon Police Department but there was no follow-up, so he bought additional cameras – placing one in the laundry room, where the bleach was kept.
One video showed his wife allegedly walking from the laundry room to the coffee maker. Another video showed her allegedly pouring bleach into a smaller container then walking it over to the coffee maker.
After the husband collected multiple videos to make his police report, police detained Johnson at home. Investigators searched the home with a warrant and found a liquid in the coffee maker that smelled like bleach. They also found a container that smelled like bleach.
Johnson faces charges of attempted first-degree murder, aggravated assault and adding harmful substances to food, drink or medicine.
Last month, a high bond was requested for Johnson, since she has a house and family in the Philippines and may be a flight risk, according to the documents.
Her bond was set for $250,000 and she pleaded not guilty during her arraignment on Friday, according to AZ Family.
Caitlin O’Kane
Caitlin O’Kane is a digital content producer covering trending stories for CBS News and its good news brand, The Uplift.
Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the Secret Service of Ukraine (SSU), said Monday that it had arrested a woman in connection with an alleged assassination plot against President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The woman in question “was preparing a Russian airstrike in the Mykolaiv region during the visit of the President of Ukraine,” the SSU said.
“Primarily, the woman tried to establish time and list of locations of the Head of State’s tentative itinerary in the region,” a statement from the SSU said, referring to a planned visit by the president to the southern region.
The report from Kyiv’s intelligence community came as Russian forces struck the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson in the south, and border areas in the northeast Kharkiv region, with at least three people killed in the attacks, according to Ukrainian officials.
A building damaged by Russian shelling in Kherson, Ukraine, August 7, 2023.
Reuters/OLEKSANDR PROKUDIN/TELEGRAM
“A difficult night for Kherson… The Russian army continued to set fire to the homes of Kherson residents in the central part of the city,” Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on social media. One woman was killed in the attacks, Prokudin said.
Separately, Andriy Yermak, President Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, said Moscow had shelled the village of Kucherivka, close to Ukraine’s border with Russia in the Kharkiv region. That strike left two people dead, Yermak said.
The strikes were just the latest examples of Russia’s daily aerial bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities. Both countries have ramped up attacks on each other’s troops, infrastructure and military hardware in recent weeks as the deadliest war in Europe since World War II nears the 18-month mark.
On Sunday, the Reuters news agency, citing officials in both Kyiv and Moscow, reported that Ukraine had struck two bridges linking Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula — a large region that has been occupied by Russia since 2014 — to the Ukrainian mainland.
Over the weekend, Russia unleashed a missile and drone barrage across Ukraine, including an assault on a blood transfusion center that Zelenskyy called “a war crime.” The strikes were seen as likely retaliation for a Ukrainian attack on a major Russian port in the Black Sea, which was struck by Ukrainian sea drones Friday, causing significant damage to a Russian warship.
Attacks on key strategic ports in the Black Sea have increased following Russia’s withdrawal in July from an internationally brokered deal that had allowed Ukraine to export grain to the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, senior officials from some 40 countries including Ukraine, the U.S and China, but notably not Russia, gathered in Saudi Arabia on Sunday for peace talks, with no concrete steps emerging from the summit.
The Ukrainian delegation described the talks as an attempt to secure broad international support for Kyiv’s terms and conditions for peace, including the withdrawal of all Russian troops and the return of all Ukrainian territory to its control.
On Monday, China’s foreign ministry said in a written statement to Reuters that the talks in Jeddah had helped “to consolidate international consensus.”
Last week, Ukraine’s Zelenskyy expressed hope that a Ukraine “peace summit” would be held later this year, and he said the talks in Saudi Arabia were a step toward that objective.
Ramy Inocencio
Ramy Inocencio is a foreign correspondent for CBS News based in London and previously served as Asia correspondent based in Beijing.
A man who officials say kidnapped and held a woman captive in a makeshift cell in his Oregon garage allegedly attacked, abused and threatened to kill another woman and their two children before she sought a protective order against him three years ago.
“He physically attacks me, he hits me, he brakes (sic) and throws things, he screams at the kids and me … we get woken up every night from him being drunk and loud and scares us,” the woman wrote in a 2020 petition for a domestic violence restraining order.
Negasi Zuberi — a 29-year-old who goes by the aliases “Sakima,” “Justin Hyche” and “Justin Kouassi” — was arrested July 16 in Nevada in the kidnapping case and has been linked to at least four violent sexual assaults in four states, the FBI said. Officials fear he may have other victims.
The woman’s petition seeking a restraining order against Justin Kouassi, one of the suspect’s known aliases, was filed in July 2020 in Contra Costa County, California, and obtained by NBC News on Thursday.
It’s unclear whether the restraining order was issued or if the case was dropped. The document states that a September 2020 appearance dropped from court calendar.
She also accused Zuberi of taking her phone to keep her from calling police and taking her money as a form of financial abuse. She also wrote that she had bruises from him “hitting,” “restraining” and “beating” her.
“He comes at night without my permission, broke my windows, trying to beat on me, treatening (sic) to kill me and my kids,” she wrote. “He treat (sic) to take them away so I can be miserable without them.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Portland Field Office is asking for the public’s help in identifying potential victims of a violent sex assault offender who has lived in at least 10 states.FBI Oregon
NBC News is not identifying the woman or her children, who may be victims of abuse. A phone number listed for the woman was not in service when NBC News attempted to reach her Thursday.
The petition also states that the woman’s two children, who she shared with Zuberi, are scared of him.
“My kids hide from him because he’s always loud and angry and unpredictable,” she wrote. “Wakes them up all hours of the night making them cry all time.”
A cinderblock cell in a home in Klamath Falls, Ore.FBI Oregon
Zuberi is accused of kidnapping a sex worker in Seattle last month and taking her to his residence in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where she was kept in a makeshift cell he constructed in his garage of cinderblocks with a metal door that couldn’t be opened from the inside.
He’s been charged with one count of interstate kidnapping in federal district court in Oregon.
According to a criminal complaint, the victim fought her way out and “repeatedly banged on the door” until it broke open. Once out, she flagged down a passing motorist who called 911.
Zuberi fled and was ultimately found in Reno, Nevada, on July 16, with his family at a Walmart parking lot.
He was in a car, holding one of his children in the front seat, speaking with his wife who was outside the car, officials said.
“He refused to exit the vehicle and cut himself with a sharp object causing him to bleed profusely. He also attempted to destroy his phone,” the complaint said. The child was unharmed, the document said.
The booking report in Washoe County, Nevada, shows additional charges of false imprisonment, child neglect, false imprisonment with victim as a shield, fugitive from another state, and assault with a deadly weapon.
Zuberi does not have an attorney listed yet. He is in the process of being transported from Nevada to Oregon, authorities said.
He has lived in 12 states — California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Alabama and Nevada — over the last decade, the FBI said.
Officials said that he may have used several methods to target victims, including drugging drinks and impersonating a police officer.
The FBI launched an investigation website where potential victims or others with information related to the case can fill out a form to offer more information.
“Some of the encounters may have been filmed to make it appear as if the assault was consensual,” the page noted. “The victims are threatened with retaliation if they notify the police.”
Doha Madani
Doha Madani is a senior breaking news reporter for NBC News. Pronouns: she/her.
David Ingram
David Ingram covers tech for NBC News.
Marlene Lenthang, Tim Stelloh and Donna Mendell contributed.
