Author: DispatchTimes News Desk

A jury in Massachusetts remained deadlocked on Thursday over whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children, leaving the high-profile murder trial without a verdict after six days of deliberations. The 12-member panel is due to return to Plymouth Superior Court on Friday, 4 September, after failing to agree on whether Clancy should be convicted, acquitted or found not guilty by reason of insanity. Clancy, a 36-year-old former labour and delivery nurse, is accused of killing five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan at the family home in Duxbury on 24 January 2023. Both sides…

Alex de Minaur has suffered his earliest US Open exit in five years after the sixth-seeded Australian was beaten 6-2, 6-2, 6-4 by Botic van de Zandschulp in the second round at Flushing Meadows. De Minaur, a three-time quarter-finalist in New York, had been expected to progress against the Dutchman but struggled to impose his pace and defensive game on the match. The defeat ends his hopes of another deep run at the final Grand Slam of the season and marks his first US Open loss before the third round since 2021. Van de Zandschulp produced a composed display to…

The dangerous underground cleanup at Ground Zero was under way several months after the 11 September attacks, as crews entered a shattered complex of basements, tunnels, garages and railway infrastructure beneath the World Trade Centre site. A 60 Minutes II report broadcast on 31 October 2001 showed correspondent Dan Rather being taken below the ruins by Ken Holden, New York’s Department of Design and Construction commissioner and the official overseeing much of the recovery operation. Large sections of the collapsed towers had punched through World Trade Centre Building 6 and continued down through the underground levels. Some pieces of the…

The British Army has ordered commanders to suspend large-scale training exercises for the rest of the financial year in a move intended to save about £30 million. A memo circulated to senior officers said no further collective training involving 90 or more troops would take place unless it was directly linked to an imminent deployment, a standby commitment or a quick-reaction role. The restrictions are expected to affect exercises involving tanks, helicopters and other heavy equipment, which carry significant fuel, transport and ammunition costs. Training for reservists due to take part in some of the exercises has also been cancelled.…

The Trump administration has delayed the launch of a controversial federal portal containing state-by-state lists of citizens deemed eligible to vote, abandoning a deadline set for Friday, 4 September – exactly 60 days before the US midterm elections. Justice Department lawyers told opponents in two lawsuits that the government would instead provide 48 hours’ notice before making the portal available to state election officials, according to court filings. The project is intended to identify people aged 18 and over who the administration believes are US citizens and eligible to vote in each state. It would represent the first known attempt…

Andy Lee has revealed how Hamish Blake secretly arranged an elaborate bucks party ahead of Lee’s wedding to Rebecca Harding, tricking him into arriving at a building site before unleashing 15 stages of increasingly unusual challenges. The comedian had been told by his builder to attend a meeting at his new Melbourne home on Saturday 29 August to discuss a list of outstanding issues. Instead, he was directed towards the basement, where about 30 friends were waiting to surprise him. “I got told by our builder that there was a long list of things that I needed to go through…

Google is rolling out a redesign of the Timers tab in its Clock app, bringing one-tap presets, a more prominent start button and a grid layout for users running several timers at once. The update is arriving with Google Clock version 9.1 through a server-side rollout, meaning it may appear on some devices before others. The refreshed interface follows a new app icon and a recent update to Google’s Now Playing app. Four preset options – one, five, 10 and 15 minutes – now sit within the timer interface. Tapping one starts the countdown immediately, while the time labels have…

Texas hospitals are losing an estimated $27 million (£20.4 million) a day after the Trump administration withheld approval for almost $9.8 billion in Medicaid funding at the start of the state’s new financial year. The payments are intended to help hospitals cover the gap between what Medicaid reimburses them and the cost of treating patients. The dispute centres on the way Texas raises its share of the funding through taxes paid by hospitals to local government bodies. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has not approved three payments programmes for the year beginning on September 1: the Comprehensive…

Distressing text messages sent weeks before Molly Ticehurst was murdered show she asked Daniel Billings why he wanted to “kill me” and “do all the bad stuff to me”, a court has heard. Billings, who pleaded guilty to murdering his former partner, killed the 28-year-old mother inside her home in Forbes, in New South Wales’ Central West, on 21 April 2024. In messages exchanged in March that year, Ms Ticehurst confronted Billings over his behaviour. He replied: “Maybe my thought process was if I couldn’t have you then I didn’t want anyone to.” Ms Ticehurst had reported allegations of sexual…

US federal prosecutors have charged Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Christian Castro with making false statements about the shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis. Castro was taken into federal custody in Texas on Thursday, 3 September, after a grand jury returned a six-count indictment. The charges remain sealed and are expected to be made public once he is formally brought before a court. The indictment follows a separate case brought by Minnesota prosecutors, who accuse Castro of four counts of second-degree assault and falsely reporting a crime over the same incident. He was arrested in Texas on…