The body of a South American soap star missing since January has been found stuffed in a trunk and buried in the backyard of a Campo Grande, Brazil, home, according to multiple reports.
According to local media outlet R7, the remains of Jefferson Machado were recovered by Brazilian authorities on Monday. The trunk in which the 44-year-old actor’s body was discovered was encased in cement, the outlet reports.
In a statement on Facebook, the Machado family attorney Jairo Magalhae Pereira confirmed the star’s death.
“It is with regret that I share the sad news of the passing of actor Jeff Machado, whose body was found with strangulation signs,” the statement reads. “This discovery confronts us with the cruelty present in our society, motivating us to seek truth and justice in the face of such impactful cases.”
“Preliminary information indicates that the actor’s body was found in a trunk, buried in a hole of considerable depth. This situation deeply saddens us and indignant in the face of the suffering faced by Jeff,” the statement continues.
“My commitment as a lawyer is to seek tirelessly for truth and justice. It is my responsibility to ensure that everyone involved in this brutal crime is held accountable and punished, and that Jeff’s family finds the support they need to get through this very painful time,” the statement adds.
Jeff Machado/Instagram
According to R7, the house where Machado’s body was found was rented by the actor’s friend, who is currently under investigation and has not been publicly identified.
Loved ones first reported Machado missing January 27 after his eight dogs were found alone, per the outlet.
Prior to his disappearance, he starred in the soap opera Reis.
Forty crocodiles killed a Cambodian farmer today while he was attempting to wrangle one of his reptiles.
The “crocodiles pounced, attacking him until he was dead,” Mey Savry — police chief of Siem Reap commune, where the man’s farm was located — told Viral Press of the freak accident.
The 72-year-old victim, named Luan Nam, had reportedly entered the enclosure so he could remove one of the crocs from a cage where it had laid eggs.
Things took a disastrous turn after the beast “attacked the stick” he was using to corral it, “causing him to fall into the enclosure,” according to Savry.
All of a sudden, the reptile shepherd was beset by dozens of the animals, which ripped his body to shreds, leaving the paddock awash in blood.
Accompanying pics show the animals paddling through a pool of Nam’s blood, and video depicts officials removing his remains from the area.
According to the police chief, Nam’s corpse was riddled with bite marks, and he reportedly lost both arms and a leg, which the crocs had swallowed during the feeding frenzy.
His mangled body was later transported to the family home.
Nam, who was also president of the local crocodile farmers’ association, had reportedly been urged for years to quit the business, CBS reported.
In a similarly horrific incident in 2019, a 2-year-old Cambodian girl was eaten alive after falling into a pit of crocodiles on her family farm.
Two young women stride along a New York street, barely breaking step to flash smiles at the camera. One of them is slightly out of focus, but her face — and the face of her friend — is unmistakable. Chillingly so.
The strawberry blonde on the right is Russian bridge player Mila Antonova, the woman alleged this week to have been the former lover of billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — as well as an associate and financial beneficiary of the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
What makes this photograph sensational, however, is the presence of the flame-haired woman on the left. She is none other than notorious Moscow spy Anna Chapman.
This week, a world exclusive investigation by the Daily Mail has uncovered a potentially disturbing and unexplained link between Gates’s erstwhile Russian ‘lover’ and Kremlin spook Chapman.
While there is no evidence of any wrong-doing on Antonova’s part, it seems to be a connection which raises serious questions for Gates and, of course, for the California-based Russian herself.
Despite repeated approaches this week, it’s still not known whether the 67-year-old Microsoft boss had any knowledge of any potential link between Antonova and Chapman, daughter of a former KGB officer.
Last week, however, Gates’s spokeswoman admitted that paedophile Epstein, who was known to cultivate friendships with the ultra-wealthy in order to exploit them, had ‘tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship’ to threaten the business magnate into doing his bidding.
At the time of his brief ‘relationship’ with Antonova, who is nearly 30 years his junior, father-of-three Gates was still married to his former wife, Melinda.
Registered sex offender Epstein wanted Gates to be an ‘anchor donor’ in a multi- billion dollar global charitable fund he planned to set up, to camouflage his sordid private life, and increase his influence.
The pair had more than half a dozen meetings and Gates once flew on Epstein’s private jet, known as the ‘Lolita Express’. He has since said he regrets meeting with the disgraced billionaire financier, who apparently killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Gates’s spokeswoman has insisted any meetings were ‘solely for philanthropic purposes’. Gates ultimately declined to join Epstein’s charitable fund, and the project did not go ahead.
Even so, the question remains: if Epstein knew about the alleged affair — and later made sure Gates knew that he knew — did he also know about Antonova’s apparent links to Chapman?
Certainly, a relationship between Gates, one of the most influential businessmen on the planet, and a woman who appears to have connections to a Kremlin intelligence agent is troubling.
Chapman, now 41, was among a ring of Russian spies who all carried out long-term, deep-cover assignments across the U.S.
She moved to New York in 2009 from the UK, where she had been issued with a UK passport after marrying a British man.
The FBI finally swooped on her and other Russian SVR (formerly KGB) intelligence agents in June 2010, after this photograph was taken in Manhattan. It captures a smug-looking Chapman gesturing with her hand towards the former Art Deco office block, a stone’s throw from Wall Street, where she kept a luxury apartment.
Her arrest came less than a year after the then 53-year-old Gates had first met Antonova, in the somewhat unlikely setting of the North American Bridge Championship tournament in Washington DC in the summer of 2009. Gates, now a technology adviser to Microsoft and one of its largest shareholders, is a well-known bridge devotee and a regular attendee at the three-times-a-year NABC tournaments.
Antonova, who is now believed to be 39, is also a keen player and has previously claimed that the card game, which she learned while at school in Russia, helped her to focus on her studies.
A professional player who has played with Antonova, described her as an ‘intermediate player, like Gates’. Speaking to the Mail, he added: ‘She was a nice young woman — very keen on bridge and smart. She certainly had an interest in the game and a drive to get better.’
The professional player added that the NABC tournaments were also ‘social events’.
It is not known exactly when the alleged affair between Gates and Antonova began, but in August 2009, just a few weeks after the Washington tournament held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, she appeared to be in a happy frame of mind when she tweeted that she was ‘going to bed and very excited about the future’. Seven months later, in March 2010, the pair were seen together again at the NABC spring tournament in Reno, Nevada.
This week, the Mail discovered a video of Gates made by Antonova during the tournament for her Bridgeunion.com website.
Speaking in heavily accented Russian, she begins by asking him: ‘Who are you?’
The flirtatious smile he gives in return and her off-screen giggles seem to suggest they both find the question amusing.
A couple of months later, on June 9, 2010, Antonova boasted of her connection to Gates at an ‘Ignite NYC’ conference, at which speakers were allowed just five minutes on stage in front of New York’s ‘brightest geeks’ to share their chosen subject. Giving her theme as ‘bridge is a powerful mind game’, she quoted the Hollywood star and acerbic wit Mae West, who had once famously quipped: ‘Good sex is like bridge: if you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.’
The late actress had, Antonova said, ‘found great connection between my two favorite things’.
A video of her confident performance shows the Russian, appearing much younger than her years, her dyed red hair plaited into girlish braids as she repeats that saucy Mae West quote on the stage.
She also name-drops Gates along with his close friend and sometime bridge partner, billionaire industrialist Warren Buffett, claiming the pair are ‘very avid players’ who’d ‘donated a million dollars to promote bridge at schools’. It’s worth noting that in 2009 Antonova had set up her own, and now defunct, organization, Bridge Union, to do just that — promote the game among deprived schoolchildren.
It’s perhaps worth noting, too, that Anna Chapman also claimed to have worked for Buffett when she was living in New York.
During her speech, an image of Antonova and Gates appears on a screen beside her. She tells the audience: ‘Two years ago, I said, ‘Everyone, I’m going to meet this guy’,’ suggesting that her meeting with the billionaire was premeditated.
She adds: ‘No one believed me. Last year, I played against him at the same table at the National Bridge Tournament in Washington DC. I didn’t beat him, but I tried to kick him with my leg.’
Antonova also said that she came to New York in 2006 —although she didn’t say why or how — barely speaking English, and had supported herself after she arrived.
Little is known about her early life in Russia. She attended university between 2000 and 2005 and studied at the Togliatti Institute of Management on the banks of the river Volga in the Samara region, south-east of Moscow.
The institution claims its mission is to train students who have a ‘heightened sense of responsibility to their people and the state for the worthy future of the country’.
The Mail has also discovered that before the alleged affair with Gates, Antonova had already forged an association with another wealthy, successful older man — the award-winning film director Chad Gracia whose debut film, The Russian Woodpecker, won a prize in 2015 at the renowned Sundance Film Festival.
In June 2009 — a month before Antonova met Bill Gates — Gracia posted photographs on his Facebook page of Antonova in a wetsuit, standing on Brighton Beach, a predominantly Russian enclave of New York.
Undated, posed professional photographs from a wedding in Brooklyn also include shots of Antonova sitting on Gracia’s knee, his arm around her waist. They appear in the background of another shot of the entire wedding party taken during the evening reception. Antonova appears to be on Gracia’s knee again.
She and Gracia were registered as living at the same address in New York and worked for the same company, public records show.
Gracia was the founder of Tipzu, a company which allowed people to launch and manage e-commerce sites based on their hobbies or interests.
According to Antonova’s LinkedIn profile, she was a bookkeeper there in 2008.
The company was based at a luxury apartment in Manhattan, and Antonova also lived at the same address, public records show.
Another old address for Antonova was a Manhattan apartment which now costs $11,500 a month to rent.
Based in Kyiv before the Russian invasion, aside from his film and theatre work Gracia describes himself as a U.S.-registered securities broker who has worked with the Saudi royal family and has raised more than $1.5 billion for his clients.
On his company website, he also claims to have worked with U.S. secret service agencies after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001. Gracia did not respond to email and phone messages from this newspaper this week.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where he studied Russian literature and history, 53-year-old Gracia is currently finalizing a film called Sex In The Soviet Union, described as ‘a powerful examination of the roots of Russia’s toxic sexual culture that helps understand the current invasion of Ukraine’.
In a 2017 interview with a Ukrainian magazine, Gracia said he started to research his latest film after unsubstantiated rumors emerged of the existence of a Russian ‘kompromat’ sex tape, featuring former U.S. President Donald Trump in a Moscow hotel with several prostitutes.
‘I started to research could it be possible and I discovered that starting from the Sixties there was a serious large-scale program to find young boys and girls — ‘Swallows and Ravens’ they were called — and recruit them into the KGB. First they had to train them in sex,’ he said.
He detailed how recruits were taught using pornography: ‘They had these students watch people have sex and then they themselves had to have sex with other students or visiting army cadets.’
It is not known how long Gates’s alleged affair with Antonova lasted. It came to light following a leak of records kept by Epstein to the Wall Street Journal.
Officials unravelling his complex finances and sex trafficking ring are focusing on wealthy individuals with whom the disgraced financier may have done business.
According to the WSJ, Epstein met Antonova when she was looking for funding to start an online business teaching people how to play bridge. Documents seen by the WSJ are said to reveal that they were introduced by Croatian-born Boris Nikolic, a Gates confidant and science adviser.
They met at Epstein’s townhouse in November 2013, where Antonova set out her proposal, asking for $500,000 for her ‘BridgePlanet’ project.
Documents seen by the WSJ show that Epstein gave feedback, and on November 9 Antonova emailed him to thank him for the meeting. Ultimately he didn’t invest.
But the following year, in November 2014, Antonova stayed briefly at a New York apartment provided by Epstein. Last week she told the WSJ that she ‘didn’t interact with him or with anyone else while there’.
She added: ‘I had no idea that he was a criminal or had any ulterior motive. I just thought he was a successful businessman and wanted to help. I am disgusted with Epstein and what he did.’
After failing to secure funding for her project, she said she decided to become a software programmer and asked several people, including Epstein, to lend her money for a U.S. programming boot camp called Hack Reactor.
‘Epstein agreed to pay, and he paid directly to the school,’ she told the WSJ.
‘Nothing was exchanged. I don’t know why he did that. When I asked, he said something like, he was wealthy and wanted to help people when he could.’
In 2017, years after Gates’s alleged relationship with Antonova had ended, Epstein allegedly emailed Gates asking him to reimburse him for the cost of her programming school fees.
Given that both men were billionaires, the sum involved was immaterial. According to the WSJ, ‘the tone of the message was that Epstein knew about the affair and could expose it’.
For decades, Epstein and his British girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell wooed the rich and the powerful, entertaining them at homes in New York, Florida and New Mexico as well as at Epstein’s 75-acre private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, nicknamed Little St Jeff by locals, which was a perfect hideaway and haven for trafficking young women and underage girls for sex.
He installed cameras in his properties, recording sex tapes he could later use to blackmail his rich and powerful friends.
Since his death, there have been several claims that Epstein was also in the pay of Russian secret services.
Epstein was placed on the New York sex offenders’ register in 2008 after pleading guilty to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution — with a warning that he was at high risk of re-offending.
He was arrested in July 2019 on charges of child sex trafficking, prompting dozens of his victims to come forward with claims of sexual abuse against him.
He died in his jail cell a month later in an apparent suicide, leaving behind a little black book full of contacts for politicians, celebrities and wealthy people and a trail of sex videos and documents.
A Wall Street Journal investigation earlier this month revealed that names uncovered in those documents included film director Woody Allen, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and author and political activist Noam Chomsky. Other associates include former U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, who both deny knowing about Epstein’s criminal activities.
Last year, Prince Andrew settled a sex assault case against him filed by Virginia Giuffre, who claimed to have been trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell. He agreed to pay her around £12 million.
British intelligence chiefs have already expressed concern that Russia may have obtained ‘kompromat’ on Prince Andrew over the Epstein scandal.
Ghislaine Maxwell is now serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, but the truth about Epstein continues to emerge.
Attempts to contact Mr Nikolic for comment were unsuccessful. However, he has previously said that he deeply regrets meeting Epstein, knew nothing about his sexual activities with young women and described his crimes as ‘despicable’.
Nikolic was named as the third executor of Epstein’s estate after his death, but he refused to fulfil his duties, saying he had known nothing about the businessman’s will and suspected his name had been included as a retaliatory gesture against Gates.
Once regarded as the face of global philanthropy, Gates’s formerly geekish image has undergone something of a sea change in recent years.
Married to Melinda French Gates for 27 years, the couple made the shock announcement that they were splitting two years ago, allegedly over his infidelity and his association with Epstein.
In the wake of that announcement came reports of a rather racier side to the tech tycoon.
As a student, one biographer claimed, he was a frequent visitor to Boston’s notorious ‘Combat Zone’, an area famous for its many strip clubs, peep shows, X-rated cinemas and adult bookstores.
And during the early days of Microsoft, he was said to have hired dancers to come to his lakeside home and swim naked with his friends in his indoor pool.
It is not clear if 58-year-old Melinda knew of her husband’s alleged affair with Antonova when she divorced him. She later said in an interview that she had warned Gates that Epstein was ‘evil personified’, but that her then husband still met with him.
In recent years, Gates has attempted to minimize his ties to Epstein, saying that it was ‘a huge mistake to spend time with him’.
Whether or not he regrets his alleged affair with Antonova, is another matter entirely.
That alleged relationship, Antonova’s links to Epstein and, above all, her apparent links to the spy Anna Chapman, add another tangled layer to this whole sorry saga.
And at a time when Russia is at loggerheads with both the U.S. and the UK, the connection will inevitably reignite concerns about attempts by Russian security services to infiltrate the ranks of the rich and powerful in the West.
A plane passenger in South Korea is said to have opened the aircraft’s emergency door during flight, violently blasting the interior with air and startling passengers and crew.
Other passengers attempted to stop the suspect but failed to prevent him from partially opening the emergency exit door.
The Asiana Airlines Airbus A321 aircraft was immediately filled with a whirlwind that disoriented passengers.
Upon landing, the suspect was arrested by police on charges of violating aviation security laws.
The plane was en route to the Daegu Airport in the southeastern region of the Korean peninsula.
The suspect allegedly pulled open the emergency door while at a 700-feet altitude during the plane’s descent.
Twelve passengers were reportedly so affected by the blasting winds that they were taken to the hospital.
Some of the affected passengers reported breathing issues and ear pain from the rapid decompression of the airplane cabin.
The identity of the passenger who opened the emergency door and was arrested is currently unknown.
At least 15 people are dead amid a cholera outbreak outside Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, according to multiple reports.
Three of South Africa’s nine provinces now have confirmed cholera outbreaks, including Gauteng, which contains Pretoria and Johannesburg, according to The Times UK.
The first death in the country was confirmed in February and traced to a case from nearby Malawi, which has seen hundreds of deaths from the illness.
The disease has spread further due to poor water and sewage infrastructure, Deputy Minister for Housing and Water David Mahlobo said.
He admitted his own agency’s response to concerns “has not been very productive.”
The mayor of Tshwane planned to visit Hammanskraal, a small town where the outbreak is intense, but had to leave due to the crowds surrounding his car.
There, one resident told News24 what the real problem with the water is.
“The mayor never came to address the people before, but now that people have died, he wants to act as if he cares,” Sophy Malope said. “The water issue started in 2011. Our tap water was contaminated with human feces. It was the same even after boiling it. We are tired of empty talks, we want action.”
A Florida roofer was killed by a lightning strike in front of his co-workers while on a job — and was found with one of his socks melted to his foot.
Edvin Cinto, 24, was working on a roof on a home on Sterling Point Drive in Deltona on Monday when he was struck by the bolt, WKMG reported.
Witnesses called 911 after the harrowing incident.
“Someone has fallen from the roof and I think he’s unconscious,” one caller said, according to the outlet.
“They’re saying he was struck by lightning.”
Another said: “They’re saying he’s not breathing, but he has a pulse, I guess.”
Cinto smelled like burned hair and one sock was melted to his foot when first responders arrived, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office told Fox 35.
One of the other workers told the outlet that Cinto had already died when they rushed to the hospital to see him.
“He was a fine guy, dedicated to his job and just a good boy,” Cinto’s cousin Cesario Cinto told WKMG. “Everyone should stop working because it’s dangerous to work when it’s lightning.”
The victim’s co-worker said it wasn’t raining at the time of the fatal incident.
Cinto’s relatives said they’re trying to raise money to send his body back to his native Guatemala for burial.
Officials with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration went to the scene Tuesday afternoon as part of the investigation.
“Terrible things do happen to good people, so don’t take any chances with your life or your family,” said Volusia County Emergency Services Director Jim Judge.
“You just never know where it’s going to strike,” he told Fox 35, adding that lightning can strike up to 15 miles ahead of a storm, so it doesn’t have to be raining at the time for a bolt to strike.
Prince Harry’s legal battle for permission to pay for his own police protection in the U.K. has ended in his first court defeat.
The Duke of Sussex sued the U.K. Home Office over a ruling that private individuals who have been denied Metropolitan Police bodyguards should not be allowed to pay to have them reinstated.
Harry was stripped of his taxpayer-funded security detail when he quit as a working royal in 2020 and has been campaigning to get it reinstated.
The ruling at the High Court in London on May 23 came days after Prince Harry and Meghan said they were involved in a “near catastrophic” car chase with paparazzi in New York, though the NYPD sought to tone down their description.
It is not, however, the end of Harry’s fight over his police protection as this was the second of two “judicial review” lawsuits against the British government and the first remains ongoing.
Harry’s lawyers argue that legislation allows police to charge for certain services, including for example at sporting events, and so he too should be able to pay for police security to protect public funds.
Among his reasons for rejecting the claim, Judge Martin Chamberlain wrote in his judgement that a Home Office committee, RAVEC, that made the ruling was entitled to argue officers should not be put in harm’s way in exchange for payment.
He wrote: “Those services are different in kind from the police services provided at (for example) sporting or entertainment events, because they involve the deployment of highly trained specialist officers, of whom there are a limited number, and who are required to put themselves in harm’s way to protect their principals.
“RAVEC’s reasoning was that there are policy reasons why those services should not be made available for payment, even though others are. I can detect nothing that is arguably irrational in that reasoning.”
“For these reasons,” he continued. “I refuse permission to apply for judicial review.”
Having lost this case, Harry faces the prospect of paying Home Office costs, though these currently appear to be a fairly moderate £8,042.20, around $10,000.
Home Office lawyers argued he already benefits from exceptional status as they offer him police protection for official royal events on a case-by-case basis.
He was protected for Queen Elizabeth II‘s Platinum Jubilee and King Charles III‘s coronation, for example, but only while attending official events.
As a result, Harry, Meghan and their children only attended the Platinum Jubilee events they were entitled to and otherwise did not leave their Frogmore Cottage home in June 2022.
Harry first asked for permission to pay privately to keep his police protection detail during a meeting, known as the Sandringham Summit, with his family to thrash out the terms of his royal exit in January 2020.
A statement announcing his first lawsuit on the subject in January 2022 read: “Prince Harry inherited a security risk at birth, for life.
“He remains sixth in line to the throne, served two tours of combat duty in Afghanistan, and in recent years his family has been subjected to well-documented neo-Nazi and extremist threats.
“While his role within the Institution has changed, his profile as a member of the Royal Family has not. Nor has the threat to him and his family.
“The Duke and Duchess of Sussex personally fund a private security team for their family, yet that security cannot replicate the necessary police protection needed whilst in the UK. In the absence of such protection, Prince Harry and his family are unable to return to his home.
“The Duke first offered to pay personally for UK police protection for himself and his family in January of 2020 at Sandringham. That offer was dismissed. He remains willing to cover the cost of security, as not to impose on the British taxpayer.”
Some elements of Prince Harry’s first judicial review over his police protection were rejected in July 2022 but others were waved through to a full hearing.
He will still need to prove his case if he is to force the U.K. government to re-take its decision on his police protection arrangements.
A Metropolitan Police court filing read: “It is wrong for a policing body to place officers in harm’s way upon payment of a fee by a private individual.
“It would be unjust to allow a wealthy principal [individual receiving protection] to pay for protective security when this would be denied a principal who did not benefit from such resources.
“To devote protection officers to principals who pay for them would divert such resources from those RAVEC has deemed to warrant protective security.
“To allow an individual to pay for protective security would create a precedent in which other wealthy individuals could argue that they too should be permitted to pay for such services.”
A driver has been arrested on charges of threatening to kill or harm the president, vice president or family member after he allegedly ploughed a U-haul truck into security barriers near the White House while carrying a Nazi flag.
The crash unfolded shortly before 10pm when the vehicle rammed into barriers on the north side of Lafayette Square, about a block away from the White House, Secret Service officials said.
The driver was detained on the scene and there were no injuries and no ongoing danger to the public.
Images and videos showed police recovering a Nazi flag from the scene in the aftermath of the crash.
Officers retrieved the red flag with a large swastika and other plastic evidence bags that had been laid out on the sidewalk after the crash and placed them back in the rear of the rented box truck, a Reuters photographer said.
On Tuesday morning, US Park Police spokesman Thomas Twiname said that the male suspect – who has not been identified – was arrested on suspicion of threatening to kill, kidnap or inflict harm on the president, vice president or a family member.
A video posted by a witness to the crash, Chris Zaboji, showed the truck driving into the barricades and, after crashing once, driving into them a second time.
The 25-year-old Zaboji, an airline pilot living in Washington, said he was walking home after jogging on the national mall when he heard a loud crash. The initial ramming made him take out his phone and start recording.
“I looked back and saw that the U-Haul van had rammed into the barricade. I backed away behind a guy on a golf cart and took the video on my phone. After I saw it rammed again I didn’t want to be anywhere near the truck and left,” he said.
“Preliminary investigation reveals the driver may have intentionally struck the security barriers at Lafayette Square,” Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the Secret Service, said on Twitter.
He added that US Park Police will file charges with investigative support from the Secret Service.
Officials at the White House did not specify the exact location of president Joe Biden at the time. Just hours earlier on Monday evening, Mr Biden held a meeting with the speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, at the White House.
The Washington DC fire department was informed of the incident at around 9.40pm (2.40am BST) and alerted of a “suspicious package investigation”, its spokesperson said.
Firefighters rushed to the spot alongside a major law enforcement and public safety response, before investigators determined the contents of the mostly empty truck were harmless.
The Secret Service also evacuated the nearby Hay Adams hotel by request, reported the Washington Post, citing a hotel official.
Some roads and pedestrian walkways around the park were closed, the Secret Service said.
Original Article – Twelve people died and about 90 others were injured in a stampede at a soccer stadium in El Salvador on Saturday, the authorities said, turning a highly anticipated match into a chaotic scene as fans rushed to save people suffocating under a mass of bodies.
Videos circulating on Twitter and published by local news sites showed dozens of people clad in white appearing to rush toward an exit at the stadium, with some lying on the ground as more pile on top.
It was not immediately clear what prompted the rush at Cuscatlán Stadium in San Salvador, El Salvador, where the first-league soccer teams, Alianza Fútbol Club and Club Deportivo FAS, were playing the second leg of a quarterfinal.
At a news conference on Saturday night, the director of the national police in El Salvador said the authorities were investigating a possible cause: The large number of people attending the game may have caused the stadium’s Wi-Fi to malfunction, which in turn could have led to a problem with scanning QR codes on tickets.
That ticketing problem, he said, may have led to hundreds of people being stuck at the southern gate of the stadium, trying to get in.
The police director, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, said that some fans had also forced their way into the stadium through the southern gate, where those who buy cheaper tickets typically enter.
He added that they would also investigate tickets sales for the game. Local news organizations have raised questions about whether too many tickets had been sold for the match.
Soccer matches around the world have for decades been the scenes of deadly stadium disasters, sometimes set off by crowd violence and often made worse by inept police responses that result in spectators being crushed as they try to flee.
In Malang, Indonesia, last October, at least 125 people died, many of them trampled, after the police fired tear gas in an effort to disperse crowds.
Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, said in a statement that “everyone will be investigated: teams, managers, stadium, ticket office, league, federation, etc.”
“Whoever the culprits are,” he said, “they will not go unpunished.”
The tumult appears to have started about 20 minutes into the game, when the teams remained tied.
On a livestream of the match posted on YouTube, game commentators said they could see some type of commotion in the stands, noting that some people appeared to have lost consciousness. Fans eventually stepped onto the field, and the game was suspended, the commentators said in the livestream.
Around 11 p.m. Eastern, the authorities said that they were trying to make it easier to get ambulances in and out of the stadium.
The health minister of El Salvador, Francisco Alabi, said in a statement that the country’s hospitals were providing medical care to people injured in the episode, adding that workers were doing “everything humanly possible” to save their lives. He said of the about 90 people injured, most were stable.
Credit…Jose Cabezas/Reuters
Mr. Alabi shared photos on Twitter of the scene outside the stadium, with ambulances lined up in rows as fans stand beside the vehicles. Nine of the victims died at the stadium, and three died in hospitals, the authorities said. The police did not immediately release their names.
A local radio station published video of fans waving their shirts near people on the ground in an effort to cool them off. Other photos showed people sweating and in tears.
The country’s soccer federation said in a statement on Twitter that it would “immediately request a report on what happened,” and that all games would be canceled on Sunday.
The president of El Salvador’s national institute of sports, Yamil Bukele, said in a statement that he had called a meeting on Sunday to look into what had occurred.
A shoot-out at a car show in northern Mexico has left at least 10 people dead and nine others injured, the municipal government said on Saturday.
Gunfire erupted during an all-terrain car racing show in the San Vicente area of the city of Ensenada, the Baja California state attorney general’s office said.
People with long guns were seen getting out of a van and shooting at the participants around 2.18pm local time, reported Reuters.
Municipal and state police, the Marines, the Fire Department and Mexican Red Cross were among the agencies who responded to the scene.
Video footage of the shooting was posted on social media and showed people running after gunfire erupts in the arena. Several figures can be seen lying on the ground.
The wounded were transported to hospitals in northern Baja California by Mexico’s Red Cross, reported Fox8.
The director of the Agencia Fronteriza de Noticias said that the mass shooting was “due to a ‘fight’ between the CJNG (cartel) and the Sinaloa cartel,” citing unnamed sources, according to theTimes of San Diego.
The organisers of the two-day event shared a message of sympathy following the shooting and said that “unfortunately, what happened during the tour was not in our hands”.
“We are as baffled as all of you since we have nothing to do with what happened,” the message read.
Attorney General Ricardo Ivan Carpio Sanchez commissioned a special investigation into the shooting.
The identities or nationalities of the victims have not been identified.
