July 30 (UPI) — A federal jury has convicted the New Jersey man who attempted to murder writer Salman Rushdie on additional terrorism-related charges, including attempting to provide material support to the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah.
Hadi Matar of Fairview, N.J., was sentenced to 25 years in prison in a state court in May 2025 for trying to kill Rushdie on Aug. 12, 2022.
Matar rushed the stage and stabbed the India-born writer at New York’s Chautauqua Institution in Mayville, N.Y., before being subdued by audience members and taken into police custody. Rushdie lost vision in his right eye and suffered nerve damage as a result of the attack.
A federal jury in the Western District of New York on Wednesday convicted Matar on charges of attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, engaging in an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries and providing material support to terrorists. Matar faces a maximum penalty of life in prison on the most serious charge when sentenced on Nov. 3.
“Hadi Matar, who was born and raised in the United States, chose to align his values with the terroristic values of the leaders of Iran, which often promote violence, and in this case, the call for murder,” U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York Michael DiGiacomo said in a statement.
“The defendant spent months planning and preparing to carry out what he hoped would be the execution of Salman Rushdie and possibly follow in the footsteps of martyrs he admired. Instead, his attempted act of terror failed, and Salman Rushdie survived, thanks to courageous members of the public and law enforcement, who saved Rushdie and captured Matar.”
The trial began July 22, and Rushdie, 79, testified.
DiGiacomo said Rushdie answered every question asked of him by the defense and prosecutors.
“It was very powerful,” DiGiacomo said.
“And at the end, at some point, Mr. Rushdie removed his glasses so the jury could see the extent of the injury to his eye that he no longer has vision it.”
Prosecutors said Matar was attempting to carry out the orders of Iran’s late spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who in 1989 called for Rushdie’s murder after the publication of his award-winning novel The Satanic Verses on the grounds that it was blasphemous to Islam.
The fatwa was reaffirmed in 2017 by Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, and endorsed by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah was killed Sept. 27, 2024, in Israeli airstrikes on Beirut, while Khamenei was killed Feb. 28 in joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran.
Federal prosecutors said during the trial that Matar had spent more than a year researching the fatwa before deciding to try to kill Rushdie and discussed it with people in Iran, Australia and Canada.
According to the Justice Department, Matar had surrounded himself with Hezbollah symbols ahead of the attack and had traveled to the institution that day with a false driver’s license bearing the name Hassan Mughniyeh, with Hassan being Nasrallah’s first name and Mughniyeh being the surname of Hezbollah’s former external security organization head, Imad Mughniyeh.
DiGiacomo told reporters following the conviction that ahead of the attack, Matar traveled by bus from New Jersey to Buffalo, then traveled toward the Chautauqua Institution.
On the morning of the attack, Matar visited a website run by Hezbollah and took screenshots of Hezbollah operatives who had died that month.
“The evidence presented in the trial showed that this attack was not spontaneous. It was deliberate. It was research. It was planned. It was motivated by violent extremist ideology,” Alan Davis, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo field office, said during the press conference.
“For more than a year, the defendant researched a decades-old fatwa, communicated with individuals overseas about carrying it out and embraced the propaganda and symbols of Hezbollah before traveling to western New York to commit this violent act.”
WASHINGTON — President Trump and the Justice Department are asking the Supreme Court to toss an $83 million defamation verdict won by writer E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexual assault, saying he can’t be sued for comments he made while he was president.
It’s the second time Trump has asked the justices to nix damages awarded by a jury to Carroll, a longtime advice columnist and former TV talk show host. The Supreme Court refused in June to hear his appeal of another verdict, for $5 million, that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
The latest case centers on comments Trump made during his first term as president. The Justice Department wants to invoke the Westfall Act, which shields government employees from being sued for doing their jobs.
“Absent this Court’s intervention, the sitting President is facing nearly a hundred million dollars of personal liability for conduct that was well within the scope of his federal office,” federal attorneys wrote. “That alone deserves this Court’s attention.”
The appeal was filed electronically and is expected to be formally docketed with the court Wednesday.
Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued that an appeals court “engaged in procedural contortions” to avoid addressing Trump’s claims that presidential immunity protects him from the $83 million award because he made the statements in question in 2019 while he was president.
The lawyers argued that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled in a manner that “cries out for this Court’s review in this unprecedented case” and called the damages “grossly excessive.”
“This is the first case in our nation’s history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a president for his conduct in office,” the lawyers wrote.
Carroll’s lawyers have declined to comment on the latest Trump filing.
Trump has long argued he cannot be sued over comments he made about Carroll during his first term where he disavowed knowing her and attacked her motivations for going public with her story in a recent memoir. He’s also asking the Supreme Court justices to reconsider their rejection of his appeal in the $5 million verdict.
The appeal comes about two years after the Supreme Court granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.
Carroll testified twice before New York juries that Trump sexually assaulted her in spring 1996 in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury retailer across the street from Trump Tower. She first went public with the claims in a 2019 memoir.
She sued Trump for defamation after he accused her of making up the allegation to help book sales, adding that he’d never met her and “she’s not my type.” He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
A Manhattan jury awarded her $83 million in damages in January 2024. Lower courts have so far rejected Trump’s appeals to overturn the verdict, though the New York-based appeals court split over the decision and agreed to delay that payout until the Supreme Court weighs in.
In 2023, another jury said Carroll was entitled to $5 million after concluding that Trump had subjected her to sexual abuse in the department store encounter and for defamation for remarks he had made after his first term ended. That judgment has been paid.
The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
Whitehurst and Neumeister write for the Associated Press. Neumeister reported from New York.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge has dismissed the remnants of the government’s landmark case against far-right Proud Boys members who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting to attack the Capitol to keep President Trump in the White House after he lost his reelection bid more than five years ago.
The case’s dismissal late Friday became a foregone conclusion when Trump last year used his pardon powers to erase every case that the government prosecuted after a mob of his supporters stormed the building on Jan. 6, 2021. The judge who presided over the Proud Boys leaders’ trial saw no basis to preserve the convictions after Trump’s sweeping act of clemency last year.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, whom Trump nominated during his first term, said there is “little mystery” about why the second Trump administration decided to abandon this case and every other Jan. 6 riot case.
“President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — whether those views are based on fact or fiction — are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them,” Kelly wrote.
The judge stressed that his order should not be mistaken as an endorsement of the Department of Justice’s decision to abandon the case. He referred to the Capitol riot as “a perilous event” and an assault on the constitutional imperative for a peaceful transfer of power between presidents.
“Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people — no matter their partisan preferences — will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework,” Kelly wrote.
Juries in the nation’s capital separately convicted leaders of the Proud Boys and another extremist group, the antigovernment Oath Keepers, of orchestrating violent plots to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
A different judge has not ruled yet on the Justice Department’s related request to throw out Oath Keepers’ seditious conspiracy convictions.
Friday’s ruling applied to four of five Proud Boys members who were convicted after a jury trial: Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola. Trump commuted their prison sentences, but they were not covered by the president’s mass pardons.
Former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio was convicted at the same trial but received a pardon from Trump. Kelly had sentenced Tarrio to 22 years, the longest prison term in any Capitol riot case.
Kunzelman and Durkin Richer write for the Associated Press.
NEW YORK — E. Jean Carroll can be paid the $5.8 million that was set aside after a jury found three years ago that President Trump sexually abused her in 1996 before he became president and defamed her after she publicly revealed the attack, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued an order that says the money can be paid to Carroll, along with interest that has grown since the verdict.
Carroll’s lawyers had requested the disbursement after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the 2023 civil verdict.
Trump had resumed defamatory attacks against Carroll as his lawyers considered asking the high court to reconsider its decision.
Both sides’ attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The jury reached its verdict in a trial that Trump did not attend after Carroll testified that she was sexually abused by him in the dressing room of a Manhattan luxury department store after a flirtatious and friendly chance encounter between them turned violent.
Carroll, 82, first talked about the attack publicly in 2019 in a memoir while Trump was president. He repeatedly insisted that he never knew Carroll. He also accused her of trying to sell books at his expense and having political motives.
Trump is also appealing $83 million in defamation compensation granted to Carroll by a separate Manhattan jury after a January 2024 trial at which Trump briefly testified.
At that trial, Kaplan required the jury to accept the findings of the previous jury and only determine how much money, if any, Trump owed Carroll for comments he made about her as president.
Sisak and Neumeister write for the Associated Press.
NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana’s attorney general has been indicted over accusations she threatened the jobs of New Orleans leaders who fought a Republican-led overhaul of local courts in the heavily Democratic city.
The 16-count indictment against Republican Liz Murrill, handed up Thursday by a New Orleans grand jury, charges Louisiana’s first female attorney general with intimidation and malfeasance.
At the center of the case are deepening rifts between state leaders in Louisiana, which is heavily Republican, and Democrats who control the state’s most prominent city.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry promised a swift pardon, saying Murrill would not have her reputation tarnished by an “Orleans kangaroo court.” Mayor Helena Moreno, a Democrat, was among those who had accused the state’s top law enforcement official in May of making threats against public officials.
Murrill called the case against her “retaliatory, meritless, and unconstitutional.” Late Thursday, Murrill said she had filed for an emergency stay with the Louisiana Supreme Court.
“I will not back down. I will continue enforcing the law, fighting corruption, and doing the job the people of Louisiana elected me to do,” she wrote on X.
For months, political tensions intensified between Louisiana Republicans and New Orleans officials over a new law that abolished a court clerk office won by an exoneree, Calvin Duncan, who spent nearly three decades in prison. The change consolidated that job with another clerk’s office, which Republican supporters said would make the local judicial system more efficient.
The change was staunchly opposed by New Orleans leaders, and in May, the City Council set a special election that would have given Duncan a chance to win the newly combined job. Murrill responded by warning local officials in letters that they could lose their offices for violating state “usurper” laws, which forbid support for an unauthorized officeholder.
“We’re very interested in elected officials in New Orleans not being intimidated or threatened by letter or any other way,” special prosecutor Laurie White told reporters.
Bond for Murrill was set at $400,000 on Thursday, according to court records.
Landry said he was ordering state police to investigate what he called “alleged improprieties” of the grand jury and those who ran it.
“The criminal justice system is a circus at its finest in Orleans and we will not have any of that!” he wrote on X.
The Republican Attorneys General Assn. said that making statements to local officials — in writing — was simply “issuing a legal opinion and warning public officials about the law” as part of her official duties. It called the indictment “as outrageous as it is dangerous.”
Moreno, who was elected in January and was defiant after Murrill sent the letters, on Thursday called it a “matter for the courts” and did not directly address the allegations.
“My focus, as always, remains on fulfilling the responsibilities the people of New Orleans elected me to carry out,” Moreno said.
Duncan has said he believes state officials were retaliating against him in eliminating the job he won with 68% of the vote. Murrill and Landry have long refused to acknowledge his innocence, though he’s listed on the National Registry of Exonerations.
Republicans have said the change was not personal and supporters have noted that the offices of criminal and civil clerks of courts are combined in other parishes.
Duncan was a jailhouse lawyer who later graduated from law school. He founded a nonprofit dedicated to expanding incarcerated people’s access to the court system and was the driving force behind a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended nonunanimous jury convictions.
Duncan spent more than 28 years in prison over a fatal shooting during a robbery in 1981.
The night before a 2011 hearing to consider new evidence, prosecutors offered to reduce Duncan’s sentence to the time he’d already served in prison if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery. Duncan took the deal and was freed but didn’t give up on clearing his name.
In 2021, a judge agreed that Duncan had been unjustly convicted and vacated his sentence altogether. Landry and Murrill have pointed to the 2011 plea deal in objecting to Duncan calling himself exonerated.
Riddle and Hanna write for the Associated Press. Associated Press reporter Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused Monday to block an excessive force lawsuit against a former Los Angeles Police Department officer who shot and killed a knife-wielding man whose speeding truck had slammed into several cars near downtown Los Angeles.
The court turned down an appeal petition from the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, over the objections of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Litigation over the six-second shooting incident has extended over six years.
Federal judges in California agreed that Officer Toni McBride had reason to fire four shots at the suspect in April 2020 but not the two final shots that killed him.
Daniel Hernandez was alleged to be under the influence of methamphetamine when he got out of his truck and walked toward the officer. She repeatedly ordered him, “Drop the knife,” as he approached.
But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 6-5 vote, ruled last year that a jury could decide the officer went too far when she fired two final shots after the suspect had fallen to the ground.
The majority reasoned that in the one-second pause between shots four and five, McBride “could have and should first reassessed the situation” and possibly concluded the suspect no longer posed a danger.
That ruling would have sent the case to a trial.
But the Los Angeles city’s attorney’s office appealed to the Supreme Court in October and urged the justices to review and reverse the 9th Circuit’s decision.
The city’s attorneys said the appeals court failed to consider the “totality of circumstances from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene” and its decision refused “to allow for reasonable mistakes in fast-moving, life-threatening encounters.”
UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky filed a response for the Hernandez family. He urged the court to stand aside and let a jury decide whether the officer’s actions were reasonable.
“The 9th Circuit simply held that it should be for the jury to resolve the factual dispute over what happened,” he said.
The justices had considered the appeal since late February before finally turning it down without comment on Monday.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled police officers may be sued for unreasonable searches and seizures only if they are shown to have knowingly violated clearly established law.
However, this doctrine of “qualified immunity” has divided judges over whether a particular rule or limit has been clearly established.
The 9th Circuit majority said shooting a fallen suspect crosses the line.
“It has been clearly established for more than a decade that when an officer shoots and wounds a suspect, and he falls to the ground, the officer cannot continue to shoot him, absent some indication that he presents a continuing threat,” wrote Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen.
“A fallen and injured suspect armed only with a bladed instrument does not present a continuing threat merely because he makes nonthreatening movements on the ground. … Under such circumstances, a jury could reasonably find that she employed constitutionally excessive force. If so, she is not entitled to qualified immunity,” she said.
The five dissenters said the officer made a reasonable split-second decision.
Judge Ryan Nelson said McBride “was justified in shooting Daniel Hernandez to alleviate the risk that he posed when he advanced toward her while armed and ignoring commands to stop. … She cannot be reasonably expected or required to reassess her shooting in a tight six second period during an intense and dangerous situation throughout which Hernandez was rising and never stopped moving.”
Judge Patrick Bumatay echoed this concern.
“Judges review police shootings only in hindsight. We review police tapes years after the fact. We get to rewind, pause, fast forward — analyzing the situation frame-by-frame. While the advent of police bodycam videos has been a welcome change, we can’t ignore that real life isn’t in slow motion,” he said.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the former Democratic Unionist Party leader, is on trial for 18 sex abuse charges, including one count of rape, all of which he denies.
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PHOENIX — The Arizona Supreme Court has denied a prosecutor’s appeal of an order that the state’s fake elector case against President Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others over the 2020 presidential election be sent back to a grand jury.
The decision marks another setback for Democratic Atty. Gen. Kris Mayes as she struggles to push the sprawling case through the courts. Mayes’ office said it will again present the case in its entirety to a grand jury rather than end the prosecution.
The ruling came after similar cases in Michigan and Georgia were dismissed by the courts and a special prosecutor dropped a federal case in late 2024 that charged Trump with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. Cases related to the fake elector scheme remain in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin.
A lower-court judge in Phoenix concluded in May that the case’s first grand jury hadn’t been shown the text of the Electoral Count Act, a 19th century law that governs the certification of presidential contests and was invoked by those charged in defending themselves.
Defense lawyers argued the law allowed for multiple slates of electors to be submitted to Congress in case the results were disputed, though it was amended in 2022 to specify that a state could put forward only one slate of electors and that it was the governor who would sign off.
There has been no movement in the Arizona case at the trial court level since mid-May.
Former President Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020 by 10,457 votes.
Billeaud writes for the Associated Press.
Rico Gedel and Samuel Dodsworth had been on trial at Leeds Crown Court accused of his murder.
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A jury on Monday rejected Elon Musk’s claims against Sam Altman and OpenAI (OPENAI) following less than two hours of deliberations, ending a high-profile legal battle between the tech billionaires, according to media reports.
The nine-person jury unanimously found that
THE glitter has settled, the nerve-shredding votes are in, and Europe has crowned its brand-new pop royalty for 2026.
In a night packed with spectacular high notes, outrageous outfits, and the usual dose of nail-biting voting drama, one country managed to come out on top.
Whether your favourite act walked away with the grand prize or suffered the absolute dread of the infamous ‘nul points’ the night has not been short of entertainment.
Here is everything you need to know about who won Eurovision, how they managed to pull off the ultimate musical heist, and where the world’s biggest party is heading next year!
Lifting the iconic glass microphone trophy for 2026 was Bulgaria.
The country came through at the last moment to smash its competitors out of the water on 516 points.
After hearing the result, Dara performed her song Bangaranga for a second time before lifting the iconic glass trophy.
It’s also the first time Bulgaria has ever won the contest.
The UK suffered yet another crushing defeat in tonight’s grand final as Look Mum No Computer’s Sam Battle sadly didn’t do enough to win over the voters.
He ended up with just one point from the jury and zero points from the public, placing him in the bottom spot.
Here is the breakdown of tonight’s votes in full:
JURY VOTES
AUDIENCE VOTES
FINAL RESULTS IN FULL
Countries are unable to vote for themselves, but may vote for countries they consider friends.
This may be because the countries are close geographically, or if the nations have historical links, which could be culturally or in political terms.
The contest has been eager to avoid links to politics, with a view to avoiding bias.
The votes are split between public votes and national juries, often with celebrities from the various countries appearing to confirm where the juries have given their points.
RuPaul’s Drag Race UK and Strictly star, La Voix, announced the UK’s results.
The victorious nation is handed the honour of hosting the following year’s competition.
That means, thanks to Dara’s success this year, Bulgaria will have the chance to welcome all the other competing countries in 2027.
NEW YORK — President Trump won’t have to pay an $83-million defamation award to a longtime advice columnist until the U.S. Supreme Court gets a chance to review the case or reject an appeal, according to a court entry Tuesday.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to a request by one of Trump’s lawyers to let the president delay the payment to E. Jean Carroll, though it required that Trump post a $7.4-million bond to cover any additional interest costs, a request Carroll’s attorney had made.
The appeals court late last month refused Trump’s request for a rare meeting of the full 2nd Circuit to hear an appeal of a three-judge panel’s affirmation of the January 2024 verdict.
Afterward, Trump attorney Justin D. Smith asked the 2nd Circuit to stay the effect of its decision upholding the award so that the president would not be forced to pay the judgment before the high court has a chance to consider an appeal.
Smith said last week there was a “fair prospect” that the Supreme Court will find in favor of Trump, who has called Carroll’s claims — first made publicly in 2019 — that she was sexually attacked by Trump in a Manhattan luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996, a “made-up scam.”
The $83-million award to Carroll, 82, came from a jury that briefly heard Trump testify and observed his animated behavior for several days.
In upholding the verdict, a 2nd Circuit panel wrote in September 2025 that Trump continued his attacks against Carroll for at least five years, making them “more extreme and frequent as the trial approached.”
“He also continued these same attacks during the trial itself,” the appeals court said. “In one such statement, issued two days into the trial, Trump proclaimed that he would continue to defame Carroll ‘a thousand times.’ ”
The jury had been instructed to accept the findings of a jury that in May 2023 awarded Carroll $5 million after concluding Trump sexually abused her in the department store and then defamed her after she published her account of it in a 2019 memoir.
Trump is challenging the $83-million award on several grounds, asserting “absolute immunity” for comments he made while president as he disavowed knowing Carroll and attacked her motivations, saying they were politically driven or arose from a desire to promote her memoir.
Sisak and Neumeister write for the Associated Press.