Justin Timberlake Slapped With Lawsuit by Cirque du Soleil Over Hit Song

Cirque du Soleil is not clowning around when it comes to one of Justin Timberlake's mega-hits.

Timberlake was slapped with a lawsuit Thursday by Cirque du Soleil Canada over his song "Don't Hold the Wall."

In the lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, the company claims that the song from Timberlake's 2013 album "The 20/20 Experience," infringes on the composition "Steel Dream," from the 1997 Cirque du Soleil album "Quidam."

The song's co-authors -- Timbaland, James Fauntleroy and J-Roc -- are also named in the suit, as are Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music - Z Tunes and WB Music Corp.

The suit doesn't specify how the song allegedly infringes on the Cirque du Soleil song, but claims that the infringement is "willful and deliberate."

A spokeswoman for Timberlake has not yet responded to TheWrap's request for comment.

Alleging copyright infringement, the suit seeks damages "of no less than $400,000."

Timberlake has been slapped with a number of lawsuits in recent months.

In January he was sued by members of Sly and the Family Stone, who claim that the song "Suit & Tie" contains a sample from their tune "Sho' Nuff." And in February, he and Will.I.Am were sued over the tune "Damn Girl," which allegedly infringes on Perry Kibble's "A New Day Is Here at Last."

Trump enduring one of the worst weeks of his campaign; is it a bump or a turning point?

GREEN BAY, Wis. — After months of dominating the Republican race, Donald Trump has endured one of his worst weeks since launching his presidential bid, and while he remains the GOP front-runner, his struggles have underscored his weaknesses and increased the possibility that he might fall short of seizing the nomination.
The bad news piled up quickly for Trump: his campaign manager charged with misdemeanor battery on suspicion of grabbing a female reporter’s arm, a series of interviews with conservative talk radio hosts who pummeled him, a highly regarded poll showing him trailing badly in advance of Wisconsin’s primary next week, and finally Wednesday’s fracas over his stand on abortion.
All of those developments deepened existing doubts about Trump. Many Republican strategists worry about his staggering level of unpopularity with female voters, which were highlighted by the battery charge against campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Trump’s comment suggesting women should face “some sort of punishment” for getting abortions if the procedure is made illegal.
Those sorts of stumbles, as well as Trump’s calls to talk show hosts whose opposition to him he seemed unaware of, all raised questions about whether he is capable of building and running a campaign operation that can win a general election, experienced political operatives said.
“You’re seeing a campaign that’s making it up as they go along every day. That’s deadly,” said John Brabender, who was chief strategist for former Sen. Rick Santorum’s campaign and is now neutral on the race.
Trump’s “renegade campaign” and defiance of political norms “served them fine in the early phases,” Brabender said. Now, however, it’s “hurting Trump a great deal.”
The problems come at a contradictory point in the campaign for Trump. He has defeated one rival after another. But he continues to draw support from only a minority of Republican voters. That contrasts with front-runners in previous presidential contests who had begun pulling away from rivals by this point in their campaigns.
Of course, Trump has proved skeptics wrong time and again, demonstrating a hold on his supporters that has defied conventional political judgment.
Part of what may make this rough patch different is the Wisconsin polling, which has added something beyond anecdote to the forecasting.
Based simply on its demographics — with a large number of blue-collar Republican voters and an average number of conservative, evangelical Christians — Wisconsin would seem a much better fit for Trump than for his chief rival, Ted Cruz. The Texas senator has relied heavily on religious conservatives for his victories so far.
Instead, Trump trailed Cruz by 10 percentage points, according to the poll, released Wednesday by Marquette Law School, which has a strong track record for accurately forecasting the state’s elections. And that was before Trump began attacking Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who remains very popular with Republicans here, in response to Walker’s endorsement of Cruz.
If the poll forecast holds up, it could be enough for Cruz to sweep the state’s 42 delegates under the winner-take-most rules of Wisconsin’s GOP primary. That would be a setback for Trump, who is barely on track to win the 1,237 delegates he would need to avoid a contested convention when Republicans meet this summer in Cleveland.
The poll showed Trump doing particularly poorly with Republican women, among whom Cruz had a 15-point lead. Thursday, the Cruz campaign sought to reinforce that edge, sending Cruz’s wife, Heidi, and former candidate Carly Fiorina to campaign through three of Wisconsin’s smaller cities. Heidi Cruz was a central figure in last week’s Trump drama — an extended series of exchanges between Trump and Ted Cruz over which candidate had attacked whose wife first.
Julie Vajda, 45, a physician assistant in Appleton, is the sort of voter Trump’s rivals are targeting. She plans to vote for Cruz, she said, partly because of what she sees as Trump’s sexist attitudes.
“I find him to be disrespectful and derogatory toward women,” she said. His comments, including remarks he’s made about his daughter Ivanka, are “odd and inappropriate,” she added. “I don’t want that representing my country.”
Democrats, of course, were more than happy to pile on, seeking to keep alive the controversy Trump kicked off with his abortion comments and then his follow-up statement in which he abruptly shifted position, saying that doctors, but not women, would need to be punished for illegal abortions.
“Donald Trump is showing us exactly who he is, and we should believe him,” Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, said during a rally at a state university campus in a New York suburb. “For many young women today, it’s almost hard to imagine turning the clock back. But for those of us who have been around a little longer, we know what this means. So we’ve got to defend our rights.”
Clinton also criticized her Democratic rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, for saying during an interview on MSNBC that Trump’s remarks were a distraction from “a serious discussion about serious issues facing America.”
“To me, this is a serious issue. And it is a serious discussion,” she said.
Trump’s other Republican rival, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, went after him on a different topic at a news conference in New York, criticizing Trump’s recent comments suggesting that Japan and South Korea should consider building their own nuclear weapons.
The comments indicated Trump was “really not prepared to be president,” Kasich said. That marked a noticeable escalation of language from Kasich, who has tended to avoid direct criticism of Trump.
Trump’s schedule seemed to suggest that he thinks his chances in Wisconsin are poor: He spent Thursday in Washington, holding meetings at GOP headquarters, and has not announced plans to return to Wisconsin until Saturday.
All that gives cheer to Trump’s adversaries in the GOP.
“It seems like the wheels are coming off a little bit,” said Henry Barbour, a prominent Republican strategist from Mississippi who has backed Trump’s rivals. “It’s not been a good few days, and Wisconsin seems poised to send a message that Donald Trump is not their kind of candidate.”
Trump’s campaign aides did not respond to requests for comment. The candidate himself has begun to complain that he is being treated “unfairly” by Republican rivals. On Tuesday night, he publicly renounced the pledge he had agreed to in the fall to back the GOP nominee if he loses.
The next round of primaries after Wisconsin could be kinder to Trump, particularly in his home state of New York. Still, he has yet to win more than 50 percent of the vote in any of the 31 states that have held Republican primaries or caucuses.
In a nationwide poll released Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents surveyed said they wanted to see Trump get the party’s nomination; 52 percent supported someone else.
The share of voters overall who said Trump would be a terrible president hit 44 percent, Pew found, up from 38 percent in January. Among Republicans, at least half of those backing Cruz or Kasich said Trump would be either terrible or poor as president.
Only 38 percent of Republican voters in the poll predicted the party would unite solidly behind Trump if he were the nominee. That’s a sharp contrast to the Democratic race, in which 64 percent of the party’s voters polled said they expected Democrats would unite behind Clinton if she wins, a number on par with previous nominees in both parties.
Numbers like that should send a message to Republican convention delegates, say some of Trump’s critics in the party.
“Any candidate that looks like an almost sure loser in a general election is going to have a hard time getting a party’s nomination,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who was a top strategist for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s unsuccessful bid. “The weaker Trump looks as a potential nominee, the greater the pressure to open up the nominating process for someone who might actually win the general election.”

Top Black Staffers Leave The Republican National Committee

The Republican National Committee is losing the person who leads the GOP's outreach to black communities, as first reported by NBC News and confirmed by The Huffington Post. 
Kristal Quarker-Hartsfield, the national director of African-American Initiatives at the RNC, is leaving the organization to work for Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) as his director of intergovernmental affairs. Her last day is set to be Friday, and she is the second black top staffer to depart the RNC this month.
Quarker-Hartsfield and the RNC did not return repeated requests for comment on her reasons for leaving.
Quarker-Hartsfield joins several other staffers of color who have departed the RNC recently. Orlando Watson, communications director for black media, left earlier this month. Tara Wall and Raffi Williams, son of Fox News political analyst Juan Williams, both left their press positions at the RNC late last year.
RNC Chair Reince Priebus has said that expanding the party and reaching out to groups of people who don't usually vote Republican are priorities. After the 2012 elections, he famously released an autopsy report concluding that the GOP needed to broaden its base if it wanted to survive a changing country.
"The RNC cannot and will not write off any demographic or community or region of this country," Priebus said at the time.
But the GOP's presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, threatens to upend much of that work with his incendiary comments about women, immigrants, protesters and Muslims that appall many members of his own party.
Williams has denied that he left the RNC because of Trump.
"I left because I was just ready for something new. They were good to me, they treated me very well and I have no complaints about the place," he told The Huffington Post. "I think it's a part of the natural cycle of the RNC. People come and go."
A recent USA Today poll showed that if Trump faces off against Democrat Hillary Clinton in November, voters of color would overwhelmingly reject the business mogul. Black voters were the most pronounced, backing Clinton 67 percent of the time.

Bill Clinton Says His Superdelegate Vote Will Go To Sanders If He Wins Nom

Former President Bill Clinton, husband to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, suggested Thursday that he'd use his superdelegate vote to support Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) if he won the Democratic nomination.
The former President told The New York Daily News that he did the same thing in 2008 when Hillary Clinton lost the nomination to then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).
"It happened last time,” Clinton told the newspaper. “Last time I did what my candidate asked, I voted for Barack Obama."
The New York primary is April 19. The Daily News reported that a handful of superdelegates in New York have pledged to support Clinton regardless of the results of the primary.
This article was written by Sara Jerde from Talking Points Memo and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

Despite disputes, U.S., China strike climate, nuclear deals

WASHINGTON — Despite ongoing disputes over cyber espionage, intellectual property, and the South China Sea, the United States and China struck deals Thursday on nuclear security and climate change.
The two nations agreed to sign the new global climate change agreement on April 22, the day it becomes operational; the agreement reached in Paris late last year calls on countries to develop plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"We're committing to formally join it as soon as possible this year, and we urge other countries to do the same," President Obama said before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the bi-annual nuclear security summit.
As for that topic, the United States and China issued a joint statement pledging more cooperation on efforts to improve the storage and security of nuclear material in an effort to prevent nuclear terrorism.
Praising China's newly created "Nuclear Security Center of Excellence," Obama said that "I believe we can deepen our cooperation, including against nuclear smuggling."
Obama said the United States and China are also working together on other counter-terrorism measures and efforts to address the threats of North Korea's nuclear program.
The president pledged "candid" exchanges about various disputes with China, including human rights and allegations that it has engaged in intellectual property theft and cyber espionage against the United States. Obama also cited "maritime" disputes, an apparent reference to Chinese territorial claims and military activity in the South China Sea that have caused friction with neighboring nations.
"We have deep concerns about our ability to protect the intellectual property of our companies," Obama said. "And we care deeply about human rights."
Xi, who also cited "disputes and disagreements" with the United States, has denied accusations of cyber espionage and intellectual property theft.
While Xi said the two nations should "seek active solutions through dialogue and consultation," he acknowledged that won't always be possible. In those cases, he said, the United States and China should manage problems "constructively, and avoid misunderstanding and mis-perception or escalation."
The Chinese president pledged cooperation on an array of global economic and security issues.
"The world economic growth is sluggish, and regional issues are complex and protracted," Xi said at one point. "The terrorist threat is on the rise."
Obama made a similar pledge, noting that China will host a G-20 summit of nations later this year.
"As I've said before," Obama said, "the United States welcomes the rise of a peaceful, stable, and prosperous China, working with us to address global challenges."

Georgia executes man for fatal beating in 1994

JACKSON, Ga. (AP) — A man who was convicted of fatally beating another man after a night of drinking and drug use in 1994 was put to death late Thursday in Georgia.
Joshua Bishop was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. Thursday at the state prison in Jackson by injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital, authorities said. The 41-year-old inmate was convicted in the June 1994 killing of Leverett Morrison in Milledgeville.
Bishop spent June 19, 1994, drinking and using drugs with Morrison and a third man, Mark Braxley, according to court records. The records show they drank at a bar that evening and then went to Braxley's trailer, where they continued to drink and use drugs.
Morrison fell asleep and Braxley decided he wanted to take Morrison's Jeep to visit his girlfriend and instructed Bishop to take his keys. Morrison woke up as Bishop was trying to take his keys from his pocket, and Bishop hit him over the head with a piece of a closet rod to knock him out, according to the court filings.
Bishop told investigators he and Braxley both beat Morrison and, once they realized he was dead, they dumped his body between two trash bins and burned his Jeep.
Bishop told investigators he and Braxley also had killed another man, Ricky Willis, about two weeks earlier, also at Braxley's trailer. Bishop told police he repeatedly punched Willis after Willis bragged he had sexually assaulted Bishop's mother and then Braxley cut Willis' throat, killing him.
Bishop and Braxley were both charged with murder and armed robbery in Morrison's death. After a trial, a jury convicted Bishop and sentenced him to die. Braxley pleaded guilty and got life in prison. He's been denied parole twice and will next be eligible for consideration next year.
While Bishop confessed to his involvement in both killings, his lawyers argue that Braxley, who was 36 at the time, was the instigator and exerted his influence over Bishop, who was 19.
Bishop's lawyers also have said he had an extremely rough childhood, with a mother who constantly drank and used drugs and had a weakness for abusive men who beat her and her sons. He bounced between foster families and group homes and was homeless at times, they said.
Baldwin County Sheriff Bill Massee, whose office investigated the killings of Morrison and Willis, acknowledged that Bishop had a tough home life but said the slayings were very violent and that he believes Bishop was the most aggressive. Massee said he also met this week with two daughters and a son of Morrison, who said they want Bishop to be executed

Virginia trooper killed in shooting at Greyhound bus station in Richmond

RICHMOND — A Virginia State Police trooper on a training exercise for a criminal interdiction squad was killed and two civilians were wounded when a man the officer had just begun to question opened fire Thursday afternoon inside a Greyhound Bus Station near downtown Richmond, authorities said.
Two troopers shot and killed the gunman, police said.
Virginia State Police Superintendent Col. W. Steven Flaherty identified the slain trooper as Chad P. Dermyer, 37, who graduated from the academy in 2014 after having been an officer in Jackson, Mich., and in Newport News, Va.
Flaherty learned of the shooting while attending an event honoring police officers killed in the line of duty, and as candles were being lit for those lost. He later announced the death “with an in­cred­ibly heavy heart” and noted that Dermyer is survived by his wife, Michelle, and two children. The slain trooper grew up in Michigan, served in the U.S. Marine Corps and most recently lived in Gloucester, Va.
Dermyer’s brother John called him “my best friend’ before being overcome by emotion during a brief telephone interview Thursday night. His wife, Jennifer, remembered her brother-in-law as “giving” man, whose death was “heartbreaking.” She described him as a “loving brother, father, son and uncle. He was very involved with his son and daughter. He was a happy guy who died doing what he loved.”
Reva Trammell, a Richmond City Council member, hugged a crying state trooper at the shooting scene and called Thursday “one of the saddest days I’ve ever seen in the city of Richmond. A senseless act in the city. Cruel.”
Police said the two civilians suffered injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening. One of the victims is a female member of the Binghamton University track team who was on her way to a meet, school officials said.
Flaherty withheld the name of the shooter pending notification of relatives. He said a gun was recovered. He said the man was not from the Richmond area and had an arrest record but was not being sought.
The shooting occurred about 2:45 p.m. in an area that the city has tried to revitalize and known as the Diamond after the nearby minor league baseball stadium.
Flaherty said Dermyer and other troopers were at the station to train for what is called an a counterterrorism and criminal interdiction unit — police assigned to public transit areas and highways to identify and question people deemed suspicious. It is a way of intercepting drugs and guns.
Dermyer, wearing a dark blue uniform that resembles fatigues, had just started to question the man when police said the assailant pulled out a gun and shot the trooper. Dermyer was not wearing a protective vest.
Flaherty said the conversation lasted only about 30 seconds. He said he did not know what drew Dermyer’s attention to the man. Two other troopers returned fire, police said. Flaherty said the squad’s training task was “if you see some suspicious behavior, go over and engage and have a conversation. That was what was taking place here.”
The police superintendent said investigators do not yet know a motive.
Flaherty said Dermyer’s colleagues “have taken this very hard because of how well he was liked. Former Marine, you know the type, the demeanor that he had and the professional image.” In January, Dermyer and fellow trooper Jeremy Hagwood chased down a pet dog named Pinta who had gotten loose and ran in traffic on two Virginia highways, according to local news accounts.
Thursday’s shooting in Richmond comes after several recent attacks on police officers in the Washington area that claimed the lives of four members of law enforcement in Maryland and Virginia.
Two sheriff’s deputies were fatally shot 30 miles northeast of Baltimore in early February by a man wanted in the shooting of his wife, followed in the same month by the shooting of an officer in Prince William County killed on her first day of patrol answering a domestic disturbance call.
On March 13, a Prince George’s County police officer was killed in a shootout with a gunman who police said wanted to die in a gun battle and had brought his brothers to videotape the encounter. The plainclothes officer was killed by a fellow officer who mistook him for a suspect, police said.
Thursday’s shooting prompted the closure of the bus terminal.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) called the death “senseless,” noting Dermyer was a “husband, a father and a hero who was taken from us too soon.” Flaherty said that while at the remembrance ceremony he had been thinking of the 28 police officers killed this year across the country.
“I had just thought to myself, 28 is the biggest number we’ve had in a long time,” he said. “I hope and pray that next year we don’t have 28 — not knowing that in just a few seconds out here Chad . . . ”
His voice trailed off as he mentioned Dermyer’s name.
Hermann reported from Washington. Victoria St. Martin in Washington contributed to this report.

ISIS Leader Is My Ex-Husband, Woman Says, but Doubts Remain

A woman who said she was the ex-wife of the leader of the Islamic State spoke to a Swedish newspaper about their marriage in an interview published on Thursday but experts and officials expressed doubt that she was ever married to the self-styled caliph of the terror group.

The woman, Saja al-Dulaimi, 28, told the newspaper, Expressen, that she married Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2008 after her first husband, a bodyguard for Saddam Hussein, was killed fighting American troops during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The newspaper spelled her name “Saga,” although most press reports refer to her as “Saja.”

By her account a relative arranged for her to marry a man she described as a university lecturer and “normal person” who went by the name Hisham Mohamed, but the union was short-lived. She left him three months after the wedding because he had not told his first wife that he was marrying a second, she said. She claimed to have had a daughter by Mr. Baghdadi but told the newspaper she had not spoken to him since 2009.

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The interview appeared to have been the first Ms. Dulaimi had ever done, but her name has been in the news before in recent years, along with her claim to have once been wed to the world’s most wanted terrorist. The veracity of her story has always been unclear.

In 2014 Ms. Dulaimi was arrested by Lebanon with her daughter while trying to enter the country from Syria. At the time Lebanese authorities told reporters that she was Mr. Baghdadi’s ex-wife and the girl was his daughter, but Iraqi officials at the time disagreed. She had been arrested once before in Syria but was released as part of a prisoner swap between the government and the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate.

Will McCants, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, said he had researched Ms. Dulaimi while writing his recent book, a history of the Islamic State. He said he was “highly suspicious” of her claims.

“The Iraqi state and Baghdadi’s former associates have all said he had two wives, not three,” Mr. McCants said. Those women are named Asmaa Fawzi Muhammad al-Kubaysi, who is his cousin, and Isra’ Rajab al-Qaysi. It is a short list and Ms. Dulaimi’s name is not on it.

Mr. McCants also pointed out that Ms. Dulaimi called the ISIS leader by the “wrong name” in her interview. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a nom de guerre. He was born Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri, not Hisham Mohamed. While he has used aliases in the past, Mr. McCants said he was not aware of “Hisham Mohamed” ever being one of them.

There are other biographical details in Ms. Dulaimi’s account that appear not to fit with what is known about Mr. Baghdadi’s past. She described her former husband as a quiet man who sometimes vanished for days at a time, but said she did not think he fought against American forces in Iraq like her first husband had.

“I didn’t notice that he was actively involved in the resistance movement at all,” she said.

That was most certainly not the case for Mr. Baghdadi in 2008. By the time Ms. Dulaimi claims to have been married to the ISIS leader he was already rising through the ranks of Al Qaeda in Iraq, serving as the head of its various Islamic law committees and growing close to its leaders, according to research by Mr. McCants.

Veteran British actor and comedian Ronnie Corbett dies at the age of 85

British entertainer Ronnie Corbett has passed away at the age of 85 this morning according to reports. His publicist said: "Ronnie Corbett CBE, one of the nation's best-loved entertainers, passed away this morning, surrounded by his loving family. They have asked that their privacy is respected at this very sad time."

Ronnie was a Scottish actor and comedian who had a long association with Ronnie Barker in the television comedy series The Two Ronnies. He achieved prominence in David Frost's 1960s satirical comedy programme The Frost Report and later starred in the sitcoms Sorry! and No – That's Me Over Here!.

Corbett was one of the UK's best-loved comedians and along with Ronnie Barker, their double act was one of the most successful of the 1970s and '80s.

He was awarded the British title of CBE and performed in so many television shows, comedy programs and comedy skits during his lifetime.

May his soul rest in peace. Amen!!

14 dead, 78 injured and 150 feared trapped as flyover collapses in India (photos)

At least 14 people have been killed, over 70 injured and 150 feared trapped after a portion of a flyover under construction collapsed over taxis and other vehicles in the Indian city of Kolkata on Thursday, March 31, according to police.

 

Witnesses say rescuers are using their bare hands to try to save those caught under the rubble. Television footage shows people passing water bottles through to those who are crying out for help from beneath the debris.

One witness has told the New Delhi Television news channel (NDTV): "We heard a loud rumble and then saw a lot of dust in the sky."

Another added: "The area was very, very crowded. Motorised rickshaws, taxis ... there was a lot of traffic.

Large concrete slabs from the construction site fell onto traffic below, reports said.

Heavy duty cranes have apparently been brought in to move the wreckage, but attempts have so far been unsuccessful.

Senior police officer Akhilesh Chaturvedi said 15 critically injured people had been rescued.

"Most were bleeding profusely. The problem is that nobody is able to drive an ambulance to the spot," he added.

Some witnesses have been critical of the initial response, with one saying there appears to be very little co-ordination on the ground.Army officers and the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) have been called in to help.

An NDRF official said: "Our team is on their way to the site with all required equipment, we are also pressing into service canines which will help find trapped people"

US to give $600m as assistance to Nigeria this year- John Kerry

US Secretary of State, John Kerry, says the US government will be giving $600 million as assistance to Nigeria this year. He said this while speaking at the opening session of the U.S- Nigeria Bi-National Commission meeting in Washington DC yesterday March 30th.

"Our development assistance this year will top $600 million, and we are working closely with your leaders – the leaders of your health ministry – to halt the misery that is spread by HIV/AIDS, by malaria, and by TB. Our Power Africa Initiative is aimed at strengthening the energy sector, where shortage in electricity has frustrated the population and impeded growth" he said

Missing girl...

17 year old Elizabeth Shima, has been declared missing by her family. She's about 5ft.6inch tall and fair in complexion. She left her house which is on the campus of University of Ibadan staff quarters on the 29th March, to go make her hair off campus and has not been seen since then.

Any useful information please contact the nearest police station, university Ibadan campus security or these numbers: 08032741110, 0806 222 6300. Thank you.

Lionel Messi celebrates 40m followers on Instagram

The Barcelona super star footballer reached 40million instagram followers today and captioned the post; 'We've reached 40million fans here on Instagram, thanks everyone! '

Arizona’s primary was an utter disaster. But was it just a big mistake, or something more nefarious?

That's the question many of the thousands who waited for hours in the Phoenix area to vote last week are asking. Their answer largely depends on their politics and how much latitude they're willing to give Arizona's voting rights record.

The drama and finger-pointing about the much-maligned March 22 presidential primary in Arizona's largest county isn't likely to go away anytime soon. State officials are still investigating what went wrong and why it led to so much voter turmoil, and some are calling for a federal investigation. So let's quickly go through the arguments on both sides:

It was a mistake

© AP Photo/Ryan VanVelzer Maricopa County recorder Helen Purcell

The woman in charge of running the election for Arizona's Maricopa County said the decision to cut polling locations by 70 percent from 2012 was a miscalculation on her part about who would come out to vote and where.

"I made a giant mistake," Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell said in a heated hearing in Arizona's statehouse Tuesday as she accepted blame -- and peoples' scorn -- for what happened.

Purcell, a Republican, said she looked at numbers from the last contested presidential primary in 2008 and assumed many people would mail in ballots. She also blamed the legislature for not giving counties like hers enough money to properly hold elections.

The secretary of state's office attributed the long lines partly to voter confusion: They had been trying for a year to get the word out that independents couldn't vote in the March 22 primary since it's technically a presidential preference election for party members only; apparently that didn't work. (After the election, Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said Arizona should open the primary to independents, who can vote in every other primary.)

Those explanations didn't sit well with the dozens of voters and activists who showed up Tuesday to boo election officials and demand they to resign. One protester was even handcuffed. Some of the outcry has taken on a partisan nature, with Democrats saying this amounted to voter suppression and left-wing publications like Mother Jones focusing lots of coverage on the fallout.

State officials say they get why residents are so upset.

"When you combine a frustration about not being allowed to vote, that confusion about who can vote, and on top of that you have those folks wait in a line for hours, you have almost had this perfect storm of problems that exacerbated people's reaction to that frustration," said Matt Roberts, a spokesman with Secretary of State Michele Reagan's (R) office.

But they say this was a one-time mistake that they're doing everything possible to make sure won't happen again. Roberts added that Purcell has been running elections in Maricopa County since 1998 without similar trouble. And the secretary of state said she welcomed a federal investigation, like the one Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, a Democrat, called for.

It was something more

© David Kadlubowski/The Arizona Republic via AP People wait in line to vote in the primary at the Environmental Education Center, in Chandler, Ariz.

If the botched election happened in a vacuum, perhaps the long lines might not have become such an explosive political issue. But voting rights activists who were on the ground that day say there are too many parallels to past fudged elections in Arizona not to wonder whether there's something more sinister going on.

"We don't know if they were honest mistakes or not, but there's certainly a pattern of mistakes," said Shuya Ohno, director of the Right to Vote campaign at the nonpartisan civil rights organization Advancement Project.

Voting rights advocates say Latino voters didn't want to mail in their ballot because many recalled the bottleneck during 2012's heated election when controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio was on the ballot. People in minority communities waited in long lines, and eventually many had to cast provisional ballots that weren't counted until almost a month later. That same year, the county sent out a Spanish-language announcement that had the wrong voting day on it.

Going back to March 22's election, voting rights activists say they have evidence the poll closures were heaviest in the most disadvantaged areas of the county, like West Phoenix, which has a big minority population. They add they did not find nearly the volume of independent voters officials said there were.

They also argue that Arizona's voting laws don't suggest an openness to minority voters. Arizona's governor signed a bill making it a felony for third-party groups, like nonprofits, to collect and submit early ballots on behalf of voters. It's a move advocates say further discourages minority voters from participating. And Arizona is one of two states that required voters to prove their citizenship when applying to vote (though the courts recently said the states can't require a proof-of-citizenship document for voters registering via a federal form).

This is the first national election since a 2013 Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act meant that Arizona no longer has to review its changes to polling locations by the Department of Justice. Some wonder whether this would have happened if the federal government had a chance to intervene.

The bottom line: No one knows (yet)

© David Kadlubowski/The Arizona Republic via AP People wait in line to vote in at Mountain View Lutheran Church in Phoenix.

Stepping back from the rhetoric, it's unclear what county and state officials would have to gain from trying to disenfranchise Phoenix-area voters. They or their colleagues weren't on the ballot, and you could argue that cutting polling locations by 70 percent would have been a pretty brash and conspicuous way to go about using this election for political gain.

It was also a primary, meaning disenfranchising certain voter groups like Latinos wouldn't necessarily have accrued to Republicans' benefit. The parties were simply picking their presidential nominees, after all -- not casting their electoral votes.

But suspicion will remain until Arizona officials give more definitive answers about what happened. Right now, there's not one person or action that frustrated voters can point to to explain what went wrong. The uncertainty only fuels partisan theories. Plus, there's still the fact that in the United States of America in 2016, thousands of people had to wait in line for hours to vote.

The nation's eyes will likely stay on Arizona for the near future, and not just on the potential legal and political fallout from Maricopa County's botched election: The state still has three more statewide elections to pull off this year.

NASCAR driver arrested in epic tobacco-smuggling sting, reports say

NASCAR Xfinity Series driver Derek White reportedly was arrested Wednesday as part of what authorities are say is the biggest tobacco-smuggling bust in North American history.

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Sgt. Daniel Thibaudeau of the Quebec Provincial Police told NBC Sports that White, 45, is believed to have been a high-ranking member of the smuggling operation. It centered on purchasing tobacco leaf in North Carolina and transporting it across the border for redistribution in Canada. Profits from the tobacco were used to buy cocaine, police said.

MORE: Most heinous crimes connected to athletes

White, a member of the Mohawk tribe in Kahnawake, Quebec, turned himself in to police Wednesday after learning a warrant had been issued for his arrest, NBC Sports reported. He faces seven charges related to smuggling.

The Kahnawake chief peacekeeper and police sources confirmed to Bloomberg that White was one of three people arrested from the tribe.

The sting operation targeted 70 residences and businesses in Quebec and Ontario and involved nearly 700 law enforcement officers across Canada and the United States. Police said they seized 52,800 kilograms of tobacco, 836 kilograms of cocaine, 21 kilograms of methamphetamine and 35 pounds of marijuana.

Almost 60 arrests were made in all.

White has started in 22 Xfinity races since 2012. Last year, he became the first Native American driver to race in the Sprint Cup Series, competing at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

Bernie Sanders, Buoyed by Poll, Sprints Through Wisconsin

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont spent Wednesday crisscrossing Wisconsin, hosting events in three cities and arguing that his stances on trade deals, campaign finance and foreign policy make him a stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton.

As a new poll showed him leading Mrs. Clinton by four points in the Badger State ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Sanders attacked her for supporting what he characterized as “disastrous” trade policies that led to thousands of Wisconsin jobs being shipped overseas and several factories closing or scaling back across the state.

Mr. Sanders also assailed Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has waged public feuds with progressive groups over several issues, including voter identification laws, union organizing, reproductive rights and cuts to educational programs.

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The senator began the day in Kenosha, Wis., speaking to a crowd of 2,750 at Carthage College. There and in later events, he took aim at Mrs. Clinton for her stances on trade policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement and cast himself as the best person to protect American workers from companies who would rather employ lower-paid workers abroad.

“Over the last 30, 40 years, we have had trade policies in this country written by corporate America, and what they have been designed to do is to allow companies to shut down plants in Vermont, in Wisconsin and all over this country because they don’t want to pay workers here $15, $20, $25 an hour,” Mr. Sanders said. “They don’t want to pay them a living wage. They don’t want to protect environmental rules. They don’t want to deal with unions. They’d rather move to Mexico or China, pay people pennies an hour.”

He went on to connect Mrs. Clinton to those companies, using a line of attack that worked well in Michigan, where he pulled off a surprising victory this month. “We are talking, over a period of years, of the loss of tens of thousands of good-paying jobs here in Wisconsin, millions of jobs throughout this country,” he said. “On all of these trade policies, Nafta, permanent normal trade relations with China, I not only voted against them, I help lead the opposition against them. On the other hand, over the years, Secretary Clinton has supported virtually all of these disastrous trade agreements.”

Mr. Sanders listed several companies in Wisconsin that he said had been affected by trade deals. He said Chrysler received billions of dollars in a bailout in 2009 but then shut down its Kenosha Engine Plant and cut 800 jobs, moving the operation to Saltillo, Mexico. He also pointed to the 2008 closing of the General Motors manufacturing plant in Janesville, which he said meant the city lost more than 2,800 jobs because the company moved the plant to Silao, Mexico.

In an effort to further appeal to voters, Mr. Sanders also assailed Mr. Walker for making changes to the state’s voter identification laws and urged his supporters to set a new voter turnout record for Wisconsin.

“We will win if the voter turnout is high. We will lose if the voter turnout is low,” Mr. Sanders told 1,678 people who came out to his Madison rally. “And I am asking that all of those people who have given up on the political process, who have turned their backs on politics and no longer vote, please come out. And I am asking the young people who maybe have never voted in their lives to please come out. Let’s send a very strong message to Governor Walker.”

Earlier in the afternoon, Marquette Law School released a poll showing that among likely voters in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, Mr. Sanders held a 49 percent to 45 percent edge over Mrs. Clinton.

Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.

Elizabeth Warren: Donald Trump’s anti-Wall Street message is totally fake

First, many liberals wished Elizabeth Warren would run for president. Then, they wished she would support Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton.

Neither of those are happening. But what Warren has done is turned into one of the left's chief critics of Donald Trump -- using Trump's own language to do it.

Warren appeared on "The Late Show" on Wednesday night and explained her neutrality in the Democratic primary. Then the conversation turned to Trump. Colbert asked her whether Trump's anti-Wall Street message bore any similarity to her own.

"Donald Trump is looking out for exactly one guy, and that guy's name is Donald Trump," Warren said. "He smells that there's change in the air, and what he wants to do is make sure that change works really, really well for Donald Trump."

Then she took the gloves off.

"He inherited a fortune from his father," she said. "He kept it going by cheating and defrauding people, and then he (unintelligible) trough Chapter 11 [bankruptcy]."

And:

"Calling on Donald Trump for help is like, if your house is on fire calling an arsonist to come help out," Warren said.

Asked whether she was stooping to Trump's level by talking in these terms, Warren didn't back down.

"He is not a business success; he is a business loser," Warren said.

This isn't the first time Warren has gone after Trump. In a series of tweets last week, she called him a "loser" and lodged other accusations similar to the ones above. It all prompted Trump to rehash the controversy over Warren's heritage.

This is where bad bankers go to prison

This is where the world’s only bank chiefs imprisoned in connection with the 2008 financial crisis are serving their sentences, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its forthcoming issue. Kviabryggja is home to Sigurdur Einarsson, Kaupthing Bank’s onetime chairman, and Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, the bank’s former chief executive officer, who were convicted of market manipulation and fraud shortly before the collapse of what was then Iceland’s No. 1 lender. They spend their days doing laundry, working out in the jailhouse gym, and browsing the Internet. They and two associates incarcerated here—Magnus Gudmundsson, the ex-CEO of Kaupthing’s Luxembourg unit, and Olafur Olafsson, the No. 2 stockholder in the bank at the time of its demise—can even take walks outside, like Kviabryggja’s 19 other inmates, all of whom were convicted of nonviolent crimes.

It may not be hard time, but it’s a far cry from the giddy days when the Kaupthing bankers hosted parties for clients aboard yachts in Monte Carlo and hired the likes of pop legend Tom Jones to serenade guests at London galas. In sentencing these financiers to serve terms of up to 5½ years, the Icelandic courts have done something authorities in the world’s two great banking capitals, New York and London, haven’t: They’ve made bankers answer for the crimes of the crash. “The Icelandic banks went overboard,” says Olafur Hauksson, the onetime small-town police chief who in January 2009 was appointed special prosecutor to investigate the banking cases. “They were basically bankrupt.” 

Hauksson is still at it. In March his office indicted five others for market manipulation and fraud, including Larus Welding, former CEO of Glitnir Bank. In all, there have been 26 convictions of bankers and financiers since 2010. Welding declined to comment.

Holding its most powerful bankers accountable should have been a satisfying result for Iceland’s 333,000 residents. But a brewing scandal involving a secret share sale by the country’s biggest lender, Landsbankinn, has raised fears that the crony capitalism that marked the precrash era still lingers. The soaring popularity of an insurgent political movement called the Pirate Party, meanwhile, shows that anger continues to simmer beneath the surface of Iceland’s recovery. “The mood of society is still fairly dismal,” says Stefan Olafsson, a professor of sociology at the University of Iceland. “There is a loss of trust in politics, institutions, and parties. You could blame the nation for being ungrateful, because politicians have done some good things after the crisis. There is a contradiction.”

Iceland may be a faraway country with a population about the size of the Maldives, but it’s experiencing the same type of populist revolt that’s rocking governments across the West. In Spain the rise of the Podemos and Ciudadanos political movements has ended 40 years of two-party rule and prevented the formation of a government following the December general election. British voters will decide on June 23 whether to quit the European Union. And in America’s presidential contest, firebrands Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—who favors prosecuting Wall Street bankers—won over voters fed up with the status quo.

Just a decade ago, the status quo in Iceland was very different. The country’s top three banks, having thrown off decades of fiscal discipline in a spasm of deregulation in the 2000s, tapped international debt markets like never before. Blessed with stellar credit ratings and access to the European Economic Area, the trio borrowed €14 billion ($15.7 billion) in 2005 alone, double their intake in 2004. But they only paid about 20 basis points, or 0.2 percent, over benchmark interest rates, according to the Icelandic Parliament’s Special Investigative Commission. It was an easy moneymaker. As the banks lent the funds back out at high interest rates, they raked in huge profits and recorded a whopping 19.7 percent return on equity in 2007. Flush with credit themselves, Icelandic households bought flats in London, took shopping trips to Paris, and jammed Reykjavik’s streets with Range Rovers. By 2008 the banks’ assets had swollen to 10 times the nation’s $17.5 billion economy.

Then came the fall of 2008 and paralysis in global markets. The banks lost their short-term funding and could no longer service their owndebts. The krona’s value fell, making loans denominated in foreign currencies far more expensive. Kaupthing and its two rivals, Landsbanki Islands and Glitnir, defaulted on $85 billion in debt in October of that year, and households lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power. Citizens pelted the 135-year-old stone parliament building with eggs and rocks. Birna Einarsdottir, a marketing executive at Glitnir, was named that month CEO of Islandsbanki, a new lender formed from the old bank’s domestic assets after receivers took control. Sipping tea in a conference room with a view of Faxafloi Bay, she winces when asked to recall what it was like in those days. “Do you have something to give me if I do? A gin and tonic?” she says.

Einarsdottir says she and fellow staff members cried at their desks, struggling to understand how Glitnir had failed and what was next. The new CEO called an all-hands meeting in a hotel banquet room that was part strategy session, part group hug. With security guards outside the doors in case of protests, she urged her 1,000 co-workers to be patient with customers who feared they’d lost their livelihoods and their ability to obtain credit. The bank would regain trust by serving them, she told the throng. “I know it sounds like I’m speaking from a textbook,” she says, “but it was important for staff to see one year ahead. The only way to get through that time was to be optimistic.”

On a pale February afternoon, there are signs of economic renewal throughout central Reykjavik. Laugavegur, the main drag through town, is bustling with window shoppers. In the last few years, numerous boutiques, art galleries, and restaurants offering Icelandic delicacies such as smoked puffin have opened to serve the locals and tourists taking advantage of the devalued krona. On the waterfront, a five-star hotel is being built next to the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre, an angular structure with a honeycombed glass facade the color of the sea. Constructed during the crash, the $235 million complex used to symbolize the nation’s hubris. Now, a tour guide tells visitors, it’s become an “icon of resurrection.”

It’s a rebound other European nations would envy. Iceland’s gross domestic product is set to expand almost 4 percent this year, according to forecasts compiled by Bloomberg. The unemployment rate of 2.8 percent is about one-third the average of the European Union. As the state prepares to lift capital controls later this year, the banking sector continues to strengthen: State-owned Islandsbanki, the nation’s No. 2 lender with $8.4 billion in assets, boasts a common equity Tier 1 ratio of 28.3 percent. That’s more than twice the 12.7 percent average recorded by Europe’s 25 largest banks as of Dec. 31, according to Bloomberg data. “Before the crisis, the banks grew too fast and too much,” says Unnur Gunnarsdottir, director general of the Financial Supervisory Authority, which oversees the lenders. “That will not happen again.” 

But a deal involving Iceland’s top bank and a relative of Bjarni Benediktsson, minister of finance and economic affairs, is marring this feel-good story. In November 2014, state-owned Landsbankinn sold a 31.2 percent stake in Icelandic payment processing company Borgun for 2.2 billion kronur ($18 million) in a private placement. A company controlled by Einar Sveinsson, the cabinet minister’s cousin, was part of a group that bought the shares. While there’s nothing unlawful about a private stock sale, crisis-weary Icelanders didn’t appreciate a bank—especially a state-owned one under the finance minister’s jurisdiction—executing a deal behind closed doors. Landsbankinn, which succeeded Landsbanki after it failed in 2008, has publicly disclosed similar share sales.

It didn’t help that Sveinsson’s company is domiciled in Luxembourg. Shell companies based in the secretive European duchy were a hallmark of the criminal cases Hauksson brought against the Kaupthing Four, court records show. “Why is there still such a lack of transparency about these sort of actions?” asks Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Althingi, Iceland’s parliament, and co-founder of the Pirate Party. “There’s been plenty of time to fix that.”

The plot thickened last November when Visa agreed to acquire Visa Europe in a deal valued at as much as €21.2 billion. Borgun is one of 3,033 banks and payment companies that own Visa Europe. That means Sveinsson and his fellow investors are poised to more than double the value of their stake, to $12 million, when Visa completes the deal later this year, according to Landsbankinn. Outraged citizens protested in front of the lender’s headquarters in central Reykjavik in January. Someone recently hung a sign on a highway overpass: “Borgun investors: Return what you stole!”

The government’s overseer of state-owned assets is also alarmed. On March 14, Icelandic State Financial Investments, which reports to Finance Minister Benediktsson, said the Landsbankinn board should report what steps it’s taken to “regain the trust” of the public. “The sale procedure cast a significant shadow on Landsbankinn’s results and the professional appearance of the bank and its executives has been damaged,” ISFI wrote in a letter to Benediktsson. Two days later, five of Landsbankinn’s seven board members said in a statement that they won’t seek reelection at the lender’s annual shareholders’ meeting on April 14.

Landsbankinn Chairman Tryggvi Palsson didn’t return calls for comment; he said in March 2015 that the share sale was lawful but the bank should have conducted it in a public auction. Benediktsson declined to comment for this article, as did Sveinsson. The Financial Supervisory Authority also declined to comment on the affair.

The Borgun affair is unfolding as Icelanders are flocking to the Pirate Party, a left-leaning organization whose symbol is a Jolly Roger flag sporting a filleted fish instead of a skull and crossbones. The three-year-old group won the support of 38 percent of prospective voters in a March opinion poll, 2 percentage points behind the ruling Independence-Progressive coalition. If the party’ssupport holds, it could win 26 seats in the 63-member parliament in the next election in April 2017. Pirate Party co-founder Jonsdottir, a Doc Martens-clad writer and activist who calls herself a “poetician,” could be in a position to block government plans to eventually sell Landsbankinn and Islandsbanki. “The same parties that ran this country into the ground during the privatization from 2000 to 2004 now want to privatize the banks again,” says Jonsdottir, who sits on the legislature’s Constitutional and Supervisory Committee. “I have a massive problem with that, and it won’t happen if I have anything to do with it.”

Meanwhile, Hauksson, a bear of man with a fighter’s jaw, is pressing ahead with a half-dozen more cases related to the crash. The former top lawman in Akranes, a port town up the coast fromReykjavik, Hauksson was one of only two applicants for the job of special prosecutor—and the only lawyer. “It was important for the country to look carefully at what happened in the months that led up to the banking collapse,” he says. Few expected him to succeed in untangling the web of self-dealing that stretched from Reykjavik to Luxembourg to London. “He was used to issuing parking fines and breaking up drunken brawls,” says Sigrun Davidsdottir, a journalist who writes about the bank cases on her website, Icelog. “It’s earth-shattering what he’s accomplished.”

Working with the Financial Supervisory Authority, his office found that the country’s top three banks routinely made huge loans to their biggest stockholders. Worse, the banks secured the debts with their own equity, which spelled doom when share prices nosedived in September 2008. That month, Kaupthing Chairman Einarsson and CEO Sigurdsson surprised investors by announcing that Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, a member of Qatar’s royal family, had acquired a 5.1 percent stake in the bank. The two bankers, with the help of Gudmundsson in Luxembourg and stockholder Olafsson, had directed Kaupthing to lend the sheik $280 million to buy the stake through a daisy chain of shell companies in the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus, according to court records. Arion Bank was formed from the domestic assets of Kaupthing after it failed in October 2008.

By misrepresenting Kaupthing’s true condition, the four men defrauded investors and manipulated the bank’s valuation, the courts ruled. In February 2015, Iceland’s Supreme Court called the actions “thoroughly planned” and “committed with concentrated intent.” The Kaupthing Four argued their actions were lawful and blamed the bank’s failure on the global financial crisis. Hauksson scoffs at that argument. “That was the reason for everything,” says the prosecutor in an office where virtually every inch of surface space is stacked with legal filings. “The verdicts stripped away their excuses.” Al Thani, who never commented publicly in the case, wasn’t charged. Contacted through prison administrators, Einarsson, Sigurdsson, Gudmundsson, and Olafsson declined to comment.

In contrast to the Icelandic saga, no bank CEOs in the U.S. or the U.K. have been convicted for their roles in the subprime mortgage crackup and related disasters. Bringing white-collar criminal cases may be easier in Iceland because courts don’t use juries. Rather, they employ neutral experts to help judges understand the intricacies of finance. In Britain’s highest- profile case stemming from the crash, the country’s Serious Fraud Office investigated London-based real estate magnates Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz in connection with their business dealings with Kaupthing. The brothers were never charged, and in 2014 the SFO even had to pay them £4.5 million ($6.4 million) in damages to settle their claims of malicious prosecution. 

For its part, the U.S. Department of Justice has refrained from prosecuting individual bankers after a Brooklyn, N.Y., jury in 2009 acquitted two former hedge fund managers at Bear Stearns accused of securities fraud. “Washington wasn’t willing to take the risk of another stinging defeat, so they slowed down a host of other prosecutions,” says John Coffee, a professor of securities law at Columbia in New York.

In 2013 then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress that Wall Street banks are so big that prosecuting them might harm the economy. He later stressed no institution is above the law. Some watch-dogs are appalled the feds chose only to extract big civil fines from institutions. “There’s no justification over what appears to be a lack of effort to identify individuals engaged in misconduct and to bring charges,” says Phil Angelides, chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a bipartisan panel established by Congress. “It sends a signal that if you do wrong on Wall Street, there’s really no consequences. That’s bred cynicism about the justice system, and it’s bred anger.”

While Iceland’s leaders have meted out justice by jailing financiers, they still have work to do to repair the damage wrought by the crash. “The politicians did fail,” says sociology professor Olafsson. “They allowed this thing to happen, all the excesses and the greed and the debt accumulation. Something broke in terms of trust.”

Back at Kviabryggja Prison, the tumult in the capital seems worlds away. It’s dead quiet around the single-story barracks, and in the distance rise massifs that form Iceland’s western fjords. The Kaupthing convicts are marking time in different ways. A couple of them are tutoring fellow inmates. The subjects: math and economics.

To contact the authors of this story: Edward Robinson inLondon at edrobinson@bloomberg.net Omar Valdimarsson inReykjavik at valdimarsson@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anne Swardson at aswardson@bloomberg.net Stryker McGuire at smcguire12@bloomberg.net

Mississippi woman who attempted to join ISIS pleads guilty to terror charge

She tried to trade in her pom-poms for suicide bombs.
Former Mississippi State chemistry major Jaelyn Young – who had been a high school cheerleader, honor student and homecoming maid – pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to one count of conspiring to provide material support to ISIS. She’ll be sentenced at a later date.
The Vicksburg beauty turned her back on her teenage pageantry after she converted to Islam in March 2015, when she began wearing a burqa and distancing herself from non-Muslim friends. Prosecutors said she “began to express hatred for the U.S. government” and expressed “support for the implementation of Shariah law in the United States.”
Young, whose father is a police officer and Navy veteran, sought to travel to Syria with her fiancé, Muhammad Dakhlalla, in order to become a medic for a terrorist group infamous for its cruel treatment of women and non-members. Dakhlalla pleaded guilty to a similar charge on March 11 and is also awaiting sentencing.
But far from a case of a love-stricken young girl following her beau to a Middle Eastern fantasy, Young agrees with prosecutors who say she was the primary driver of the intended move to Syria and continually prodded Dakhlalla to speed up their passport approval so they could leave.
“I found the contacts, made arrangements, planned the departure,” prosecutors said she wrote to her family in a “farewell letter” last August. “I am guilty of what you soon will find out.”
The couple was arrested Aug. 8 before boarding a flight from Columbus, Miss., with tickets for Istanbul that Young had purchased using her mom’s credit card without permission.
Authorities began tracking Young and Dakhlalla in May when the couple contacted undercover federal agents for help traveling to Syria.
Aside from her own admissions and actions, prosecutors cited prior online statements from Young expressing support for ISIS and ISIS-inspired terror attacks. Prosecutors said Young approvingly cited a video of a man accused of being gay being thrown off a roof to his death by militants. She also expressed joy at the shooting of five members of the military in Chattanooga, Tenn., by an Islamic militant in July.
“What makes me feel better after watching the news is that an akhi carried out an attack against US marines in TN! Alhamdulillah, the numbers of supports are growing…” she’s said to have written.
In her “goodbye” letter, she told her family not to look for her.
“Do not alert the authorities,” Young wrote. “I will contact you soon. I am safe. Don’t look for me because you won’t be able to retrieve me if you tried. I am leaving to become a medic.”