DNA samples collected from home confirmed to belong to Savannah Guthrie’s missing mother: Sheriff

(NEW YORK) — A year to the day after Luigi Mangione allegedly stalked and gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk, the 27-year-old alleged killer returns to court Thursday as a high-profile hearing in his state murder case enters its third day.

His lawyers are attempting to convince the judge overseeing his case to prohibit prosecutors from using critical evidence, including the alleged murder weapon and Mangione’s journal. They argue the evidence was unlawfully seized from his backpack without a warrant during his arrest.

The hearing has the potential to sideline what prosecutors say is some of the strongest evidence of Mangione’s guilt, and has provided the most detailed preview to date of their case against the alleged killer. As Mangione sat alongside his lawyers, the accused gunman has rewatched the video of him allegedly shooting Thompson in the back and heard from the officer who arrested him a Pennsylvania McDonalds. 

“It’s him. I have been seeing all the pictures. He is nervous as hell. I ask him have you been in New York, he’s all quiet,” Altoona police officer Joseph Detwiler told the courtroom on Tuesday.

Prosecutors have so far called six witnesses to make their case that Mangione was lawfully arrested five days after allegedly killing Thompson. They presented security footage inside the McDonalds showing Mangione enter around 9 a.m., the recording of the restaurant’s manager calling 911, and body camera footage of officers approaching Mangione before his arrest.

Defense attorneys have homed in on the 20 minutes between officers confronting Mangione and arresting him. They argue that Mangione’s rights were violated because they waited too long to read his Miranda rights.

During his day-long testimony on Tuesday, Detwiler offered his account of the high-profile arrest, telling the courtroom that he was so skeptical that the McDonald’s tip was legitimate that he didn’t even turn on his sirens on the way to the restaurant. But once he asked Mangione to pull down his face mask, Detwiler said he “knew it was him immediately.”

“Were you up in New York recently?” Detwiler asked Mangione, according to body camera footage played in court.  

According to Detwiler, Mangione claimed he was homeless and presented a New Jersey driver’s license with the name Mark Rosario. As Christmas music played in the McDonald’s, the video showed Detwiler attempting to make small talk with Mangione while a dozen officers arrived at the restaurant. Twenty minutes after he was first approached, Mangione was in handcuffs and under arrest for providing a fake ID to officers. 

The hearing could last into next week. The coming days are expected to focus on Mangione’s backpack, which officers placed on a table out of Mangione’s reach during the arrest — a standard move, according to Detwiler, to ensure the officers’ safety. 

Defense lawyers say that another officer conducted an illegal search of the bag while the arrest was underway, eventually finding a 3D-printed handgun that prosecutors say is the murder weapon. Mangione’s attorneys argue that the gun and Mangione’s writings — in which Mangione allegedly blasts the health care insurance industry and plans the assassination — were the products of an illegal search and should never be shown to a jury. 

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(NEW YORK) — It’s been 100 years since the 1st modern rocket launched. Humans are heading back to the moon

The experiment lasted only two and a half seconds, but it ignited a century of space exploration that sent humans to low Earth orbit and eventually to the moon.

On March 16, 1926, Robert H. Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket on a snowy farm in Massachusetts. Historians say that Goddard’s 10-foot rocket would pave the way for the modern machines that do everything from putting satellites in orbit to sending humans to the International Space Station and beyond.

“His unlocking of that ability to use liquid fuel really just sets the stage for any other country around the world that is launching rockets,” Ed Stewart, a curator at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, told ABC News. “It all comes back down to March 16 in 1926 because he was the one that proved that it could be done and then actually did it.”
The rocket was the first of its kind, powered by liquid propellant rather than gunpowder or other solid fuels used by most rockets at the time, according to NASA. The rocket flew for less than three seconds and reached an altitude of about 41 feet.

While scientists overseas had already been experimenting with rocketry in places like Russia and Germany, according to historical documents, it was Goddard’s 1919 paper, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” that made the physicist’s discovery famous worldwide, explained Stewart.

“It caught the attention of people all around the world, even people that were doing some experimentation with rockets and liquid fuels and things like that in other parts of the world,” Stewart said.

The paper suggested that rockets could one day travel to the moon and caught the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, which invested money in rocket research.

“I think the breakthrough was, first of all, that Goddard had this dream of getting a rocket ship off the surface of the Earth,” said Charles “Chuck” Agosta, a physics professor at Goddard’s alma mater, Clark University. “And then, of course, the dream was to go to Mars.”

Other scientists, like Hermann Oberth of Germany, later built on Goddard’s theory, and that progress eventually contributed to the development of the V-2 rocket, Stewart noted. And eventually, rockets based on Goddard’s pioneering work led to sending astronauts into space and to the moon.

Goddard earned his master’s and doctorate in physics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, before returning to teach at the school in 1914. He eventually served as director of the physics department for two decades.

Today, faculty at Clark say his legacy still looms large on campus.

Goddard once used a bicycle wheel to show funding agencies how gyroscopes could help steer rockets in space. Today, Agosta uses that same wheel to teach his students about angular momentum.

Despite his legacy, Goddard’s breakthrough didn’t immediately capture the public’s imagination. Stewart says that when the first liquid-fueled rocket launched, space travel was still widely viewed as science fiction by many.

“I do think that at the time it was still so far-fetched that even once he proved that the basic version of the technology would work, people still were thinking of it more as a novelty,” Stewart said.

Much of what we know about those early experiments comes from Goddard’s wife, Esther Christine Kisk Goddard, a photographer from Worcester, Mass. She documented many of the tests, leaving behind footage that offers a window into the creation of the world’s first modern rockets.

According to NASA, Goddard created and launched more than 35 rockets throughout his lifetime. It was because of his pioneering work in modern rocketry that, in May 1959, NASA renamed its first spaceflight complex to the “Goddard Space Flight Center.”

The center is home to missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch as early as fall 2026.

The global return to the moon and beyond

During his initial launch tests, Goddard fueled his rocket with gasoline and liquid oxygen, according to the Roswell Museum in New Mexico, where the physicist spent part of his career. Today’s modern rockets no longer use gasoline, opting for other fuels such as liquid hydrogen, liquid methane and refined kerosene along with liquid oxygen, which acts as an oxidizer.

On the 100th anniversary of Goddard’s discovery, the United States is on the cusp of sending the first astronauts to the moon since 1972 as part of the Artemis II mission. The 10-day trip will send four astronauts around the far side of the moon in NASA’s Orion spacecraft, launched into orbit by the most powerful rocket ever to send people into space. A rocket that may never have come to fruition had Goddard not experimented on that faithful day in 1926.

What could the next 100 years of rocket technology bring?

“I’m pretty confident that in a hundred years, we’re going to be all over space,” Agosta said.

Considering the thousands of airplanes in our own skies every day, he says it’s “inevitable” and that we’ll “at least be in the planets close to us” by the next century.

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(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Coast Guard is currently interdicting a sanctioned vessel off the coast of Venezuela in international waters of the Caribbean Sea, according to three U.S. officials.

No further details were available as to the name of the ship or where exactly the operation is taking place.

This is the second sanctioned vessel seized by the United States. On Dec. 10, an elite U.S. Coast Guard tactical operations team, with the support of U.S. Navy helicopters, boarded and seized The Skipper, an oil tanker sanctioned for being part of an illicit oil operation involving Venezuela.

Reuters was first to report that a second sanctioned vessel is currently being seized by the Coast Guard.

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