The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday overturned actor Jussie Smollett's conviction on allegations that he staged a racist and homophobic attack against himself in downtown Chicago in 2019 and lied to police.

Smollett's appeal argued that a special prosecutor should not have been allowed to intervene after the Cook County state's attorney initially dropped charges. The state's highest court heard arguments in September.

Smollett, who is Black and gay, claimed two men assaulted him, spouted racial and homophobic slurs and tossed a noose around his neck, leading to a massive search for suspects by Chicago police detectives and kicking up an international uproar. Smollett was on the television drama "Empire," which filmed in Chicago, and prosecutors alleged he staged the attack because he was unhappy with the studio's response to hate mail he received.

A jury convicted him of five counts of disorderly conduct in 2021. Smollett has maintained his innocence.

His attorneys have argued that the case was over when the Cook County state's attorney's office dropped an initial 16 counts of disorderly conduct after Smollett performed community service and forfeited a $10,000 bond. intervene after the Cook County state's attorney initially dropped charges.

The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday overturned actor Jussie Smollett's conviction on allegations that he staged a racist and homophobic attack against himself in downtown Chicago in 2019 and lied to police.

Smollett's appeal argued that a special prosecutor should not have been allowed to intervene after the Cook County state's attorney initially dropped charges. The state's highest court heard arguments in September.

Smollett, who is Black and gay, claimed two men assaulted him, spouted racial and homophobic slurs and tossed a noose around his neck, leading to a massive search for suspects by Chicago police detectives and kicking up an international uproar. Smollett was on the television drama "Empire," which filmed in Chicago, and prosecutors alleged he staged the attack because he was unhappy with the studio's response to hate mail he received.

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A jury convicted him of five counts of disorderly conduct in 2021. Smollett has maintained his innocence.

His attorneys have argued that the case was over when the Cook County state's attorney's office dropped an initial 16 counts of disorderly conduct after Smollett performed community service and forfeited a $10,000 bond.

In a matter of minutes, flash floods caused by heavy downpours in eastern Spain swept away almost everything in their path. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of livelihoods were shattered.

A week later, authorities have recovered 218 bodies — with 213 of them in the eastern Valencia region. Police, firefighters and soldiers continued to search Tuesday for an unknown number of missing people.

In many of the 69 devastated localities, mostly located in the southern outskirts of Valencia city, people still face shortages of basic goods. Water is back to running through pipes but authorities say it is only for cleaning and not fit for drinking. Lines form at impromptu emergency kitchens and food relief stands in streets still covered with mud and debris.

Thousands of volunteers are helping soldiers and police reinforcements with the gargantuan task of cleaning up the mire and the countless wrecked cars. At least 46,000 insurance claims for totaled vehicles had been filed, according to Spain’s Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo.

The ground floors of thousands of homes have been ruined. Inside some of the vehicles that the water washed away or trapped in underground garages, there were still bodies waiting to be identified.

The frustration over the crisis management boiled over on Sunday when a crowd in hard-hit Paiporta hurled mud and other objects at Spain’s royals, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and regional officials when they made their first visit to the epicenter of the flood damage.

The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins and, in the Poyo canal, produced walls of water that overflowed riverbanks, catching people unaware as they went on with their daily lives on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday.

In the blink of an eye, the muddy water covered roads and railways, and entered houses and businesses in towns and villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia city. Drivers had to take shelter on car roofs, while residents took refuge on higher ground.

Spain’s national weather service said that in the hard-hit locality of Chiva, it rained more in eight hours than it had in the preceding 20 months, calling the deluge “extraordinary.” Other areas on the southern outskirts of Valencia city didn’t get rain before they were wiped out by the wall of water that overflowed the drainage canals.

When authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the seriousness of the flooding and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the road, working or covered in water in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became death traps.

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections to human-caused climate change. One is that warmer air holds and then dumps more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream — the river of air above land that moves weather systems across the globe — that spawn extreme weather.

Climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding is called a cut-off lower-pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. That system simply parked over the region and poured rain. This happens often enough that in Spain they call them DANAs, the Spanish acronym for the system, meteorologists said.

And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. It had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit), said Carola Koenig of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.

The extreme weather event came after Spain battled with prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say that drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.

“Climate change kills, and now, unfortunately, we are seeing it firsthand,” Sánchez said Tuesday after announcing a 10.6-billion-euro relief package for 78 municipalities.

A Colorado man repeatedly made online threats about killing the top elections officials in his state and Arizona — both Democrats — as well as a judge and law enforcement agents, according to a guilty plea he entered Wednesday.

Teak Ty Brockbank, 45, acknowledged to a federal judge in Denver that his comments were made “out of fear, hate and anger,” as he sat dressed in a khaki jail uniform before pleading guilty to one count of transmitting interstate threats. He faces up to five years in prison when he’s sentenced on Feb. 3.

Brockbank’s case is the 16th conviction secured by the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force, which Attorney General Merrick Garland formed in 2021 to combat the rise of threats targeting the election community.
Earlier this year, French actor Judith Godrèche called on France’s film industry to “face the truth” on sexual violence and physical abuse during the Cesar Awards ceremony, France’s version of the Oscars. “We can decide that men accused of rape no longer rule the (French) cinema,” Godrèche said.

“As we approach Election Day, the Justice Department’s warning remains clear: anyone who illegally threatens an election worker, official, or volunteer will face the consequences,” Garland said in a statement.

Brockbank did not elaborate Wednesday on the threats he made, and court documents outlining the plea agreement were not immediately made public. His lawyer Thomas Ward declined to comment after the hearing.

However, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Colorado said in statement that the plea agreement included the threats Brockbank made against the election officials — identified in evidence as Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and former Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, now the state’s governor.

Griswold has been outspoken nationally on elections security and has received threats in the past over her insistence that the 2020 election was secure. Her office says she has gotten more frequent and more violent threats since September 2023, when a group of voters filed a lawsuit attempting to remove former President Donald Trump from Colorado’s primary ballot.

“I refuse to be intimidated and will continue to make sure every eligible Republican, Democrat, and Unaffiliated voter can make their voices heard in our elections,” Griswold said in a statement issued after Brockbank’s plea.

Investigators say Brockbank began to express the view that violence against public officials was necessary in late 2021. According to a detention motion, Brockbank told investigators after his arrest that he’s not a “vigilante” and hoped his posts would simply “wake people up.” He has been jailed since his Aug. 23 arrest in Cortez, Colorado.

Brockbank criticized the government’s response to Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted this year for allowing a breach of her election system inspired by false claims about election fraud in the 2020 presidential race, according to court documents. He also was upset in December 2023 after a divided Colorado Supreme Court removed Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot.

In one social media post in August 2022, referring to Griswold and Hobbs, Brockbank said: “Once those people start getting put to death then the rest will melt like snowflakes and turn on each other,” according to copies of the threats included in court documents. In September 2021, Brockbank said Griswold needed to “hang by the neck till she is Dead Dead Dead,” saying he and other “every day people” needed to hold her and others accountable, prosecutors said.

Brockbank also posted in October 2021 that he could use his rifle to “put a bullet” in the head of a state judge who had overseen Brockbank’s probation for his fourth conviction for driving under the influence, under the plea agreement, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say Brockbank also acknowledged posting in July 2022 that he would shoot without warning any federal agent who showed up at his house. Prosecutors earlier said in court documents that a half dozen firearms were found in his home after his arrest, including a loaded one near his front door, even though he can’t legally possess firearms due to a felony conviction of attempted theft by receiving stolen property in Utah in 2002.

The investigation was launched in August 2022 after Griswold’s office notified federal authorities of posts made on Gab and Rumble, an alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing and sometimes promoting far-right extremism, according to court documents.

A U.S. court has given two top associates of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman until early November to start turning over any evidence in a lawsuit from a former senior Saudi intelligence official who says he survived a plot by the kingdom to silence him.

The order is among a spate of recent rulings suggesting U.S. courts are becoming more open to lawsuits seeking to hold foreign powers accountable for rights abuses, legal experts and advocates say. That is after a couple of decades in which American judges tended to toss those cases.

The long-running lawsuit by former Saudi intelligence official Saad al-Jabri accuses Saudi Arabia of trying to assassinate him in October 2018. The kingdom calls the allegation groundless. That’s the same month the U.S., U.N. and others allege that aides of Prince Mohammed and other Saudi officials killed U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose columns for The Washington Post were critical of the crown prince.

Al-Jabri’s lawsuit asserts that the plot against him involved at least one of the same officials, former royal court adviser Saud al-Qahtani, whom the Biden administration has sanctioned over allegations of involvement in Khashoggi’s killing.

The ruling is among a half-dozen recently giving hope to rights groups and dissidents that U.S. courts may be more open again to lawsuits that accuse foreign governments and officials of abuses — even when most of the alleged wrongdoing took place abroad.

“More and more ... it seems like the U.S. courts are an opportunity to directly hold governments accountable,” said Yana Gorokhovskaia, research director at Freedom House, a U.S.-based rights group that advocates for people facing cross-border persecution by repressive governments.

“It’s an uphill battle,” especially in cases where little of the alleged harassment took place on U.S. soil, Gorokhovskaia noted. “But it’s more than we saw, definitely, even a few years ago.”

Khalid al-Jabri, a doctor who like his father lives in exile in the West for fear of retaliation by the Saudi government, said the recent ruling allowing his father’s lawsuit to move forward will do more than help recent victims.

It “hopefully, in the long run, will make ... oppressive regimes think twice about transnational repression on U.S. soil,” the younger al-Jabri said.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington acknowledged receiving requests for comment from The Associated Press in the al-Jabri case but did not immediately respond. Lawyers for one of the two Saudis named in the case, Bader al-Asaker, declined to comment, while al-Qahtani’s attorneys did not respond.

Past court motions by lawyers for the crown prince called al-Jabri a liar wanted in Saudi Arabia to face corruption allegations and said there was no evidence of a Saudi plot to kill him.

The Saudi government, meanwhile, has said the killing of Khashoggi by Saudi agents inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was a “rogue operation” carried out without the crown prince’s knowledge. Khashoggi’s killing and the events alleged by al-Jabri took place in a crackdown in the first years after King Salman and his son Prince Mohammed came to power in Saudi Arabia, after the 2015 death of King Abdullah. They detained critics and rights advocates, former prominent figures under the old king, and fellow princes for what the government often said were corruption investigations.

Al-Jabri escaped to Canada. As with Khashoggi, the lawsuit alleges the crown prince sent a hit team known as the “Tiger Squad” to kill him there but claims the plot was foiled when Canadian officials questioned the men and examined their luggage. Canada has said little about the case, although a Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigator has testified that officials found the allegations credible and said they remain under investigation.

Saudi Arabia detained a younger son and daughter of al-Jabri in what the family alleges is an effort to pressure the father to return to the kingdom.

Until now, efforts to sue Saudi officials and the kingdom over Khashoggi’s and al-Jabri’s cases have foundered. U.S. courts have said that Prince Mohammed himself has sovereign immunity under international law.

And judgments in civil cases against foreign governments and officials can have little effect beyond the reputational hit. Courts sometimes find in favor of the alleged victim by default when a regime or official fails to respond.

A North Carolina appeals court on Friday blocked students and employees at the state's flagship public university from providing a digital identification produced by the school when voting to comply with a new photo ID mandate.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the intermediate-level Court of Appeals reverses at least temporarily last month's decision by the State Board of Elections that the mobile ID generated by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill met security and photo requirements in the law and could be used.

The Republican National Committee and state Republican Party sued to overturn the decision by the Democratic-majority board earlier this month, saying the law allows only physical ID cards to be approved. Superior Court Judge Keith Gregory last week denied a temporary restraining order to halt its use. The Republicans appealed.

Friday's order didn't include the names of the three judges who considered the Republicans' requests and who unanimously ordered the elections board not to accept the mobile UNC One Card for casting a ballot this fall. The court releases the judges' names later. Eleven of the court's 15 judges are registered Republicans.

The order also didn't give the legal reasoning to grant the GOP's requests, although it mentioned a board memo that otherwise prohibits other images of physical IDs — like those copied or photographed — from qualifying.

In court briefs, lawyers for the RNC and N.C. GOP said refusing to block the ID's use temporarily would upend the status quo for the November election — in which otherwise only physical cards are accepted — and could result in ineligible voters casting ballots through manipulating the electronic card.

North Carolina GOP spokesperson Matt Mercer said Friday's decision "will ensure election integrity and adherence to state law."

The Democratic National Committee and a UNC student group who joined the case said the board rightly determined that the digital ID met the requirements set in state law. The DNC attorneys wrote that preventing its use could confuse or even disenfranchise up to 40,000 people who work or attend the school so close to the election.

North Carolina is considered a presidential battleground state where statewide races are often close.

Friday's ruling could be appealed to the state Supreme Court. A lawyer for the DNC referred questions to a spokesperson for Kamala Harris' campaign who didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A state board spokesperson also didn't immediately respond to a similar request.

Voters can still show photo IDs from several broad categories, including their driver's license, passport and military IDs. The board also has approved over 130 types of traditional student and employee IDs.

The mobile UNC One Card marked the first such ID posted from someone's smartphone that the board has approved. Only the mobile ID credentials on Apple phones qualified.

The mobile UNC One Card is now the default ID card issued on campus, although students and permanent employees can still obtain a physical card instead for a small fee. The school said recently it would create physical cards at no charge for those who received a digital ID but want the physical card for voting.

The Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature enacted a voter ID law in late 2018, but legal challenges prevented the mandate's implementation until municipal elections in 2023. Infrequent voters will meet the qualifications for the first time this fall. Voters who lack an ID can fill out an exception form.

Early in-person voting begins Oct. 17, and absentee ballots are now being distributed to those requesting them. Absentee voters also must provide a copy of an ID or fill out the exception form.