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Pentagon opens misconduct investigation into Arizona democratic Senator Mark Kelly

admin - Latest News - November 25, 2025
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The Defense Department has now opened an investigation into Senator Mark Kelly after a video with Kelly and five other democratic lawmakers, all who served in the military or in intelligence, urged members of the military not to follow unlawful orders. The retired U.S. Navy captain could be recalled to active duty for a court martial, according to the Pentagon. NBC’s Garrett Haake reports.



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October 30, 2025
Oct. 30, 2025, 11:54 AM EDT / Updated Oct. 30, 2025, 12:24 PM EDTBy Gary Grumbach and David K. LiA former Virginia teacher told civil jurors on Thursday she thought she was dead or about to die in the moments after she was shot by a 6-year-old boy at school two years ago.Abigail Zwerner spoke slowly and at times struggled with her emotions, explaining how she was severely injured on Jan. 6, 2023, at Richneck Elementary in Newport News.“I thought I was dying, I thought I had died,” she told the jury of three men and six women. “I thought I was on my way to heaven or in heaven. But then it all got black.”The plaintiff’s testimony is at the heart of her $40 million civil lawsuit against former assistant principal Ebony Parker, who allegedly ignored several warnings about the boy who shot Zwerner.The attack was totally preventable had Parker acted on clear signs the boy posed a threat, Zwerner said in her civil complaint.The bullet, fired by the child, tore through Zwerner’s hand before it struck her in the chest, where it remains today. A doctor testified earlier in this trial that it’d be far more dangerous to remove that round than to leave it alone.To this day, Zwerner said she struggles with basic physical tasks. The plaintiff recalled having lunch recently with her lawyer and failing to open a bag of potato chips, after trying to rip it at different angles.“And I eventually asked you to open it, the same thing with water bottles,” Zwerner said.The psychological scars of the shooting are still fresh and painful, the plaintiff said.She recalled how loved ones had planned to see the movie “Hamilton” before breaking down the morning of, realizing there’d be scenes of dueling in the famous musical.“I felt like everything just came over my body,” the educator said. “I remember crying a lot, and I remember that afterwards.” Her family asked what she’d like to do in place of going to that movie. “I remember saying or telling them ‘nowhere,’ like I can’t go anywhere,” Zwerner said. “I just want to stay home. I’m not going anywhere today.” A Richneck teacher testified earlier this week that she told the assistant principal about the weapon three times after students had tipped her off about the boy having a gun in his backpack.Another teacher testified that she also shared similar information with Parker after a different student alerted her about the boy having a gun.Under cross-examination on Thursday, Parker’s attorney inferred that Zwerner, herself, could or should have taken more decisive action against the gun-wielding youngster.Zwerner testified that another teacher had told her she was going to report the child to Parker. At that point, Zwerner said she felt safe knowing that a superior was aware of the threat.“I didn’t (take any other action), honestly didn’t think twice,” she said. “ It was my understanding that the administration wouldn’t think twice as well when alerted about a potential gun in school.” The educator told NBC’s “TODAY” show, three months after the shooting that the attack left her with permanent emotional wounds.“I’m not sure when the shock will ever go away because of just how surreal it was and, you know, the vivid memories that I have of that day,” Zwerner said at the time. “I think about it daily. Sometimes I have nightmares.”When Zwerner originally filed her civil complaint, Parker, the school district and several other administrators were named as defendants. The case was eventually whittled down to Parker as the lone defendant.On paper, any civil verdict against Parker would be paid by the Virginia Risk Sharing Association (VRSA), an insurance pool made up of many public bodies statewide, including the Newport News School Board.This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.Gary GrumbachGary Grumbach is an NBC News legal affairs reporter, based in Washington, D.C.David K. LiSenior Breaking News Reporter
October 24, 2025
Oct. 24, 2025, 3:35 PM EDTBy David K. LiAssociates of four of New York’s infamous “five families” crime syndicates allegedly backed a multimillion-dollar poker con that used elaborate technology to cheat unsuspecting players — and brought rare, unappreciated light to the mob’s shadowy operations, officials said.Associates of the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese crime families were named in a sweeping indictment that also ensnared Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, and one-time NBA journeyman Damon Jones, according to prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York.Federal authorities didn’t hesitate Thursday to pin the poker scam on La Cosa Nostra, showing that organized crime is still a modern law enforcement concern even after FBI operations in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to decimate the five families.”The mafia … it’s still a thing,” said Geoff Schumacher, vice president of exhibits and programs for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. The mob works best when the public knows less about the people involved, according to Schumacher, who called famed bosses like the late Dapper Don, John Gotti, an “aberration.” “They didn’t want the general public to be well-versed in their business. The one guy who kind of defied that whole thing was John Gotti because he just believed that he was untouchable,” Schumacher said.A dozen mafia associates played a role in the poker scam, prosecutors said.Ernest Aiello and Julius “Jay” Ziliani were linked to the Bonanno crime family.Louis “Lou Ap” Apicella, Ammar “Flapper Poker” Awawdeh, John Gallo, Joseph Lanni, Nicholas Minucci, Angelo Ruggiero Jr. were associates of the Gambino crime family Matthew “The Wrestler” Daddino and Lee Fama were identified as associates of the Genovese crime family.Seth Trustman was linked to the Lucchese crime family.And Thomas “Juice” Gelardo was called an associate of the Bonanno crime family and later an associate of the Genovese crime family, according to the indictment.Gambling “is an easy pinch” and bread-and-butter income source for the mob, the author and former Gambino mobster Louis Ferrante told NBC News.”I wasn’t at all surprised,” Ferrante said. “Gambling has been a mafia mainstay for the last 100 years. With all the RICO indictments that put so many people away for the rest of their lives (in the 1980s and 90s), the mob has sort of scaled back and they stuck with loan sharking and gambling because if you get busted, as long as there’s no violence involved, nobody’s beat up or threatened, it’s a slap on the wrist.”He added: “These guys could do a nickel maybe in the can, as opposed to doing 30, 40 years or life sentences.” Organized crime soldiers and associates are busted all the time but rarely make news, said Seth Zuckerman, New York criminal defense lawyer and former Brooklyn prosecutor.“It’s not what it used to be, but it definitely still exists,” Zuckerman said. “In underground poker games and things like that, where you need protection, you need a source of cash, the mob still has its involvement.”With legal online gambling, users are required to put up all of the money before they place a bet but the crime families operate outside of the rules by acting as an intermediary, offering people the ability to place bets on credit.”There’s still a need for that,” Zuckerman said. “There are people who want to bet on credit, which as you know with legalized operations, you really can’t do. So that’s part of the mob’s territory.” Federal action against Billups and Jones spill into two separate indictments covering poker and insider sports betting information.The alleged mafia members are only tied to the alleged poker scheme. But the mob does have a long history of involvement in sports betting and poker.The most famous sports betting scandal in American history, when the 1919 Chicago White Sox threw the World Series, was allegedly engineered by gambler Arnold Rothstein, a mentor to early Genovese boss Charlie “Lucky” Luciano.The Colombo crime family had alleged connections to NBA officials in the 1990s and early 2000s.Even though sports betting is largely legal in most states, that still didn’t stop several Gambino soldiers from taking illegal bets in New York, state prosecutors said last year in a 17-person indictment.The Lucchese crime family had alleged ties to a racketeering, gambling and money laundering operation out of New Jersey poker rooms that was taken down early this year, officials said.The New York City area’s “five families” include the four mentioned in the indictment plus the Colombo crime family.FBI Director Kash Patel said federal law enforcement had “entered and executed a system of justice against La Cosa Nostra to include the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese crime families.” Old-fashioned mob muscle ensured victims paid up from their losses in rigged games, officials said.”With respect to poker games held in the New York City area, members of the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese Crime Families, used threats and intimidation to assure payments of debts” in games organized by defendants Awawdeh, Trustman, Zhen Hu and Robert Stroud, the indictment said.All crime families involved “received proceeds” from the crooked games, the indictment said.The mafia’s alleged use of cutting-edge technology that included hidden cameras and X-rays shouldn’t surprise anyone, Ferrante said, because a mob boss can reach out to experts as easily as anyone else.”The mob moves with the technology,” Ferrante said. “Don’t think that some capo, ‘Frankie nine fingers,’ or ‘Joe the butcher’ is making these moves. They’re getting some geek who knows technology and he’s doing it for them.” And poker is no different from fuel, concrete and construction when it comes to wise guy involvement, according to Ferrante, the author of “Borgata: Clash of Titans: a History of the American Mafia.””The mob only has multiple families involved when it becomes something like gasoline, when they’re doing multimillions of dollars,” Ferrante said. “Concrete, when they were pouring all the concrete in New York; the windows, when they were putting in all the new energy efficient windows in the 90s; that’s (when) all the families get involved because it’s so big and there’s so much money involved that you can’t, one family can’t keep it to themselves. “He added: “So when you see four (of the five crime) families involved, you know that this is a huge racket.”David K. LiSenior Breaking News Reporter
October 22, 2025
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November 25, 2025
Nov. 25, 2025, 6:00 PM ESTBy Denise ChowListen to this article with a free account00:0000:00Few things in the universe are as perplexing as dark matter — the invisible and exotic “stuff” that is thought to make up most of the matter in galaxies. The theory goes like this: To reconcile our current understanding of physics with what we observe in the cosmos, there must be massive amounts of matter that we can’t see. Scientists are sure that this “missing matter” exists because of the gravitational effects it exerts, but detecting it firsthand has eluded scientists, who have had to indirectly infer how dark matter occupies the universe.Nearly a century after dark matter was first theorized, a Japanese astrophysicist says he may have found the first direct evidence of its existence — gamma rays extending out in a halo-like pattern — in a region near the center of our Milky Way galaxy.“I’m so excited, of course!” study author Tomonori Totani, a professor in the astronomy department at the University of Tokyo, told NBC News in an email. “Although the research began with the aim of detecting dark matter, I thought the chances of success were like winning the lottery.”Totani’s claim of detecting dark matter for the first time is an extraordinary one that not all experts are convinced of. But the findings, published Tuesday in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, offer insights into the wild hunt for dark matter and the difficulties of searching the cosmos for something that cannot be seen.Dark matter is thought to make up about 27% of the universe, while ordinary matter — people, everyday objects, stars and planets, for instance — only makes up about 5%, according to NASA. (The rest is made up of an equally mysterious component known as dark energy.)Totani’s study used observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope aimed near the heart of the Milky Way. The telescope is designed to pick up a type of intense electromagnetic radiation known as gamma rays. Dark matter was first proposed in the 1930s by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky, who stumbled on an anomaly while measuring the mass and movement of galaxies in the large Coma Cluster of galaxies. The galaxies moved too quickly for his calculations, and instead of escaping the cluster, they were somehow being held together.The resulting theories proposed a truly strange form of matter. Dark matter cannot be seen because it does not emit, absorb or reflect light. However, because it theoretically has mass and occupies physical space in the cosmos, its existence can be inferred based on its gravitational effects throughout the universe.Different models exist to potentially explain dark matter, but scientists think the mysterious material is made up of exotic particles that behave differently from regular matter that we’re all familiar with.One popular school of thought suggests that dark matter is made up of hypothetical particles known as WIMPs (short for “weakly interacting massive particles”) that interact very little with ordinary matter. When two WIMPs collide, however, they could annihilate each other and unleash powerful gamma rays.In his research, Totani, an astronomer and astrophysicist, discovered intense gamma-ray emissions that he said were roughly equivalent to one-millionth the brightness of the entire Milky Way. The gamma rays also appeared to be spread out in a halo-like structure across a large region of the sky. If instead the emissions were concentrated from a single source, it might suggest a black hole, star or some other cosmic object was to blame for the gamma rays, rather than diffuse dark matter. Gamma-ray intensity map spanning approximately 100 degrees in the direction of the galactic center. The horizontal gray bar in the central region corresponds to the galactic plane area, which was excluded from the analysis to avoid strong astrophysical radiation.Tomonori Totani / The University of Tokyo“To my knowledge, no phenomenon originating from cosmic rays or stars exhibits a spherically symmetric and the unique energy spectrum like the one observed in this case,” Totani said.But some scientists who were not involved with the study were skeptical of the findings.David Kaplan, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, said it’s difficult to trace emissions back to dark matter particles with any certainty because too much is still unknown about gamma rays.“We don’t even know all the things that can produce gamma rays in the universe,” Kaplan said, adding that these high-energy emissions could also be produced by fast-spinning neutron stars or black holes that gobble up regular matter and spit out violent jets of material.As such, even when unusual gamma-ray emissions are detected, it’s often hard to draw meaningful conclusions, according to Eric Charles, a staff scientist at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.“There’s a lot of details we don’t understand,” he said, “and seeing a lot of gamma rays from a large part of the sky associated with the galaxy — it’s just really hard to interpret what’s going on there.”Dillon Brout, an assistant professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Boston University, said the gamma-ray signals and halo-like structure described in the study are in a region of the sky “that is genuinely the hardest to model.”“So, any claims have to be treated with great caution,” Brout told NBC News in an email. “And, of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”Kaplan called the study “interesting” and “worth following,” but said he isn’t totally convinced that follow-up analyses will confirm the findings. But he is hopeful that scientists will directly confirm dark matter’s existence in the future.“It would be a total game changer, because it really is something that seems to dominate the universe,” he said. “It explains the formation of galaxies and therefore of stars and planets and us, and it’s a key part of our understanding of how the universe formed.”Totani himself said additional study is needed to prove or disprove his claim.“If correct, the results would be too impactful, so researchers in the community will carefully examine its validity,” he said. “I am confident in my findings, but I hope that other independent researchers will replicate these results.”Denise ChowDenise Chow is a science and space reporter for NBC News.
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