National News

China reported eight new coronavirus cases in the mainland for July 4, compared with three cases a day earlier, the health authority said on Sunday. Six of the new infections were imported cases, according to a statement by the National Health Commission, while the capital Beijing reported two new cases. China reported seven new asymptomatic patients, up from four a day earlier.

Two Oklahoma police officers have been charged with second-degree murder for allegedly applying multiple electrical shocks from stun guns to the body of a man who died afterward. Wilson Police Department Officers Joshua Taylor and Brandon Dingman reportedly responded to a call around midnight on July 4, 2019, that 28-year-old Jared Lakey was allegedly acting disorderly. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations was requested by the Carter County Sheriff’s Office to assist with the investigation.

A global pandemic could not stop Coney Island's venerable Fourth of July hot-dog eating competition from going ahead on Saturday, or its reigning men's and women's champions from setting new records in their respective divisions. In fact, men's winner Joey Chestnut said, moving the Nathan's Famous event to a climate-controlled indoor setting to keep the coronavirus from spreading among hundreds of spectators who would normally pack the often-sweltering boardwalk gave him edge he needed. "This is a crazy year and I'm happy to get a record," the 220-pound (100 kg) Chestnut told ESPN after the 10-minute eating frenzy at the Nathan's Famous hot dog mecca.

Alleged scammer, "Ray Hushpuppi," 37, is facing charges related to his role as "key player in a large, transnational conspiracy," prosecutors said.

A transgender woman was found fatally shot at her home Friday night, and the shooter remains at large, Broward Sheriff’s Office said.

Police in Winnipeg have charged a 14-year-old boy with first degree murder and a number of other serious offences after a string of shootings that began on the Canada Day national holiday.The unrelated shootings claimed the life of one woman and saw five others injured in a series of incidents that officials described as shocking.

The prosecutor locked in a tussle to get Prince Andrew to give evidence about Jeffrey Epstein for much of this year will appear before a congressional committee this week, potentially throwing new light on the matter. Geoffrey Berman was the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, the unit leading the Epstein investigation, until last month when he was controversially sacked by the Trump administration for reasons that remain unclear. Mr Berman will appear before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Thursday and is expected to face hours of questioning from members, offering an insight into his work and unexpected dismissal. The testimony will be given behind closed doors, meaning the public cannot watch along with proceedings, but it is not uncommon for newsworthy comments to find their way into the press via leaks.

It had earlier reported 52,492 cases 749 deaths. CDC did not respond to requests for clarification on Saturday. The CDC reported its tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as COVID-19, caused by a new coronavirus, as of 4 pm ET on July 3 compared with its previous report a day earlier.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s father has defended his decision to fly to Greece via Bulgaria in order to “COVID-proof” his property there before he potentially rents it out. Stanley Johnson, the father of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has defended his widely criticized decision to fly to Greece via Bulgaria in order to “COVID-proof” his property ahead of potentially letting it out. With a towel draped over his shoulder, Stanley Johnson told reporters Friday on a dirt track outside his villa on Mount Pelion that he wasn’t “100% up to speed” on the British public's reaction since he went to Greece for “a quiet time, to organize the house.”

Phoenix officials are set to begin the process of changing the names of two streets — one seen as demeaning to indigenous Native American women and the other glorifying the Confederacy. The Phoenix City Council voted unanimously this week to rename Squaw Peak Drive and Robert E. Lee Street. In a letter to the city manager last month, Mayor Kate Gallego and Councilwoman Thelda Williams wrote squaw is a “demeaning and degrading word."

Maxwell, a longtime associate of financier Jeffrey Epstein, has been charged her with crimes related to the grooming and sexual abuse of young girls.

For weeks, law enforcement authorities have warned pedestrian protesters not to use the highways as the setting for protests. "The freeway is simply not a safe place...We feared something like this would happen," said Captain Ron Mead, commander of Washington State Patrol field operations for District 2, at a press conference Saturday morning. A 27-year-old man from Seattle is accused of driving his car onto the closed I-5, going around the vehicles that were supporting the protesters, and striking the pedestrians standing in the shoulder of the road, said Mead.

Royta Giles Jr. was shot as he waited in line to go into a Children's Place clothing store with his family Friday afternoon.

During the early morning hours of July 4 at the M-Bar Sports Grill on Ridgewood Ct., a suspect got into an altercation with another customer before shots were fired. The suspect, described by police as a Black man wearing a red baseball jersey, shot the person he was having a confrontation with and injured three others, police said in a press release issued Saturday morning. One of the victims was identified by police as 41-year-old Cortez Shelby, who was shot in the neck, and died on the scene, police said.

On the strength of six eyewitnesses’ lineup identifications, Lydell Grant was sentenced to life in prison in 2012 for the murder of a young Texas man, Aaron Scheerhoorn, who was stabbed to death outside a Houston nightclub in 2010.All six of those eyewitnesses were wrong.New DNA testing on biological material collected from underneath the victim’s fingernails cleared Grant and implicated another man, Jermarico Carter, who police said confessed to the killing. Carter has now been indicted for the murder by a grand jury, and Lydell Grant was released from prison. But his name has not been cleared.Faith in eyewitnesses runs so deep that despite the overwhelming proof of Grant’s innocence, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused his exoneration request. Instead, the court wants the six eyewitnesses who originally testified against Grant to respond to his claims of innocence.It’s a fact that eyewitnesses make mistakes. There have been hundreds of cases in which mistaken eyewitness identification testimony led to the conviction of innocent people.The puzzling question in this case, though, is why did six eyewitnesses independently identify Lydell Grant as the killer and then confidently testify in court?One might assume that Grant was the murderer’s unlucky doppelganger. But a comparison of the pair’s mugshots reveals that they bear little physical resemblance to one another beyond both being Black men. As an experimental psychologist who conducts research on eyewitness identification, I’ve seen hundreds of examples of highly confident yet mistaken eyewitnesses – both in the laboratory and in actual court cases. My review of the transcripts from Grant’s trial suggests a simple explanation for these high-confidence mistakes: The police did not use scientific best practices for collecting the eyewitness identification evidence. Conducting a lineup with the suspect in mindScientific best practices for conducting eyewitness lineups require that the person administering the lineup not know who the police suspect. Just as double-blind clinical trials in medical studies are intended to prevent patients’ and doctors’ expectations from affecting outcomes of the clinical trial, double-blind lineups aim to prevent witnesses’ and administrators’ expectations from influencing the outcomes of the identification procedure.The transcript from Lydell Grant’s trial revealed that the homicide detective in charge of investigating the case administered the lineup to the eyewitnesses. Of course, he knew that Lydell Grant was the one under suspicion.Psychological experiments have shown that lineup administrators who know who the suspect is end up cuing witnesses toward that person. Compared to administrators conducting double-blind lineups, these informed administrators are more likely to ask witnesses about the suspect and smile when witnesses are looking at the suspect rather than at another person in the lineup.Such behaviors are often inadvertent; neither lineup administrators nor eyewitnesses may be consciously aware that they’re happening. Nevertheless, these subtle behavioral cues affect eyewitnesses’ decisions by making them more likely to choose the suspect.But if the six eyewitnesses chose Lydell Grant from the lineup only because they were cued to do so by the case detective, why were they so confident in their identifications? According to the trial transcript, most of the eyewitnesses testified to having been positive when they picked Grant out of the lineup. One reported that he had identified Grant without doubt or hesitation. Another stated that the killer’s face was “burned into [her] memory immediately.” Reinforcing what eyewitnesses ‘remember’The witnesses’ trial testimony reveals a simple explanation for these high-confidence errors: All of the eyewitnesses received confirmatory feedback following their identification of Grant.Three of the eyewitnesses reported that the detective told them that they had picked the same person other people had, though the detective himself denied having made such statements. Two other eyewitnesses, a couple, remembered discussing their selection with one another and confirming each other’s decisions. One eyewitness couldn’t recall whether the detective had told him anything after he identified Grant, but the detective acknowledged telling that particular eyewitness “good job” following the identification. The detective also admitted making a similar comment to at least one other witness. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that simple confirming comments such as these have dramatic effects on eyewitnesses’ testimony. Not only do such statements inflate eyewitnesses’ confidence in the accuracy of their identification, but they lead them to falsely remember having been that confident all along.As a result, witnesses who have received confirmatory feedback provide testimony that is highly persuasive to jurors.In one study, people playing the role of jurors were able to reliably distinguish between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses when the witnesses had not received any confirmatory feedback.But when the witnesses had received a simple reinforcing comment following their identification (“Good job, you got the guy”), the mock jurors could no longer tell the difference between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses. In other words, the confirmatory remark made the mistaken eyewitnesses just as persuasive as the accurate ones.Witnesses aren’t able to tell whether their testimony was influenced in this way. Moreover, confirmatory feedback can alter witnesses’ memories of the original crime, making them less able to recognize the actual perpetrator when they see him again. So, there is little to be gained from speaking to the original eyewitnesses from Lydell Grant’s case. How to run less biased lineupsThe processes at play in Lydell Grant’s case are predictable and unfortunately common. The way to avoid these problems with eyewitness testimony is for police to adopt best practices based on the psychological research. In addition to implementing double-blind lineup procedures, it’s essential that lineup administrators document eyewitnesses’ confidence immediately following an identification. Confidence collected at the time of an identification during a double-blind lineup procedure is informative regarding the eyewitness’s accuracy. Confidence reported at trial after the eyewitness has received confirmatory feedback is not. To date, 24 states have adopted these core procedural reforms, including Texas in 2011, one year after the investigation of Aaron Scheerhoorn’s murder. Unfortunately for Lydell Grant, these reforms came a year too late. The remaining 26 states should act swiftly to prevent additional miscarriages of justice, and Lydell Grant should be exonerated.[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend.]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * Feeling sleepy? You might be at risk of falsely confessing to a crime you did not commit * Vagaries of memory mean eyewitness testimony isn’t perfectLaura Smalarz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Donning masks and observing social-distancing practices, movie and theatre fans on Saturday bid a final farewell to Thailand's La Scala theatre in Bangkok, which is set to close its doors in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Nanta expects a high-rise to replace her theatre.

The New York Post obtained photos showing Cohen, Trump's former lawyer, eating out with his wife and another couple in Manhattan Thursday night.

After months of silence from the Broward Sheriff’s Office to the family of Kevon Todd, who died after an altercation with deputies at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, Sheriff Gregory Tony has released video and reports that shed new light.