WRTV News at 5 | Thursday, April 1, 2021

WRTV News at 5 | Thursday, April 1, 2021

Recommended Stories

  • North Carolina teacher killed in shoot-out after trying to rob Mexican drug cartel

    Barney Harris shot and killed despite wearing bulletproof vest to rob drugs and cash

  • ‘We failed him’: Mayor voices sorrow as prosecutors admit 13-year-old Adam Toledo wasn’t holding gun

    ‘An attorney who works in this office failed to fully inform himself before speaking in court’

  • Biden says it's 'time to end America's longest war' as he reveals plans to bring US troops home from Afghanistan

    Biden said he was the fourth president to preside over the Afghanistan conflict, adding: "I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth."

  • AOC ignores Marjorie Taylor Greene’s incessant Twitter pleas for a public ‘head to head’

    MTG says a debate ‘would be informative for the American People’ with her degree in business administration and AOC’s degree in economics

  • BLM activist arrested for anti-Asian hate crime in Seattle

    ‘Thank God the light finally changed and I was able to drive off’, said victim after abuse

  • SolarWinds: Russian intelligence behind major cyber attack, Raab reveals as US expels diplomats

    ‘We see what Russia is doing to undermine our democracies’, foreign minister says

  • Can you still get Covid-19 after having the vaccine?

    Pfizer is 95 per cent effective in preventing Covid-19 disease and Moderna is 94 per cent effective in preventing Covid-19 disease

  • Man charged with arson attack on Black church caught with help from Tesla security camera

    Prosecutors say Dushko Vulchev behind string of fires and tyre slashings in Massachusetts town

  • Biden expels Russian diplomats and announces new sanctions in retaliation for hacking

    Sanctions follow allegations of election interference and a hacking campaign

  • These parents had to bond with their babies over Zoom — or risk losing them forever

    During the pandemic, video chats replaced in-person visits between parents and their children placed in foster care. The effects could linger for years.

  • A sensor injected under the skin, backed by DARPA, is meant to spot COVID-19 days before symptoms appear

    A tiny strip of gel is injected under the skin and senses a change in the body's chemistry that can tell a sensor that an infection is developing.

  • Derek Chauvin news: Officer won’t testify as Kim Potter to appear in court over Daunte Wright shooting

    Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin confirmed on Thursday that he will not testify in his murder trial. Mr Chauvin is currently standing trial for the murder of unarmed Black man George Floyd, who died in the former Minneapolis police officer’s custody last May. Meanwhile, Former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter’s first court hearing on second-degree manslaughter charges is scheduled for today.

  • How raising the minimum wage to $70k helped one man’s company boom

    Dan Price was labelled a socialist by Fox News - but now his company is worth $10 billion. Kate Ng looks at how

  • NASCAR Xfinity driver Harrison Burton is getting a shot in Cup at Talladega race

    Harrison Burton, son of former NASCAR Cup driver Jeff Burton, will achieve two early career milestones in the same weekend.

  • Pro-Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Lin Wood clashes with Republicans at GOP meeting: ‘You’re a liar and a manipulator’

    ‘The Senate race was a rigged election – wake up and see it,’ attorney says during gathering

  • UnitedHealth ups profit forecast after strong start to year

    UnitedHealth's first-quarter profit jumped about 44%, and the nation's largest health insurer also hiked its 2021 outlook despite expecting more hits from the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said Thursday that the performance of its Optum division was particularly strong. UnitedHealth raised its full-year profit forecast to adjusted earnings of $18.10 to $18.60 per share, up from an outlook of $17.75 to $18.25 per share that it debuted in December.

  • Jimmy Lai: Hong Kong's rebel mogul and pro-democracy voice

    The rags-to-riches rise of a fiercely anti-communist Hong Kong tycoon who ended up in jail for protesting.

  • U.S. seeks to polish tarnished reputation with new climate change pledges

    WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) -The United States hopes to restore its shattered credibility when it hosts a climate change summit next week by pledging to cut its greenhouse emissions by at least half and securing agreements from allies for faster reductions, according to two sources familiar with the matter. A 50% reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 is a minimum level urged by environmental groups, hundreds of corporations and European Union lawmakers. It would be the first upgrade of the U.S. climate target since 2015, when former President Barack Obama pledged a 26%-28% reduction by 2025.

  • Congressional Democrats plan to introduce bill that would add four more justices to the Supreme Court, per report

    Congress has the power to set the number of justices and the count previously fluctuated before settling on nine in 1869.

  • A Self-Absorbed Journalist Cozies Up to a Serial Killer

    Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos via Starz/FBISamuel Little claimed to have fatally strangled 93 women in numerous states over the course of his homicidal life, and Confronting a Serial Killer lets him expound on his crimes—and his motivations—in hours of audio interviews conducted by author Jillian Lauren. Both for this docuseries and as part of the research for her forthcoming book Exit Sandman: The True Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, Lauren struck up a friendship with Little following his 2014 conviction and incarceration for the murders of three women. And as she states repeatedly throughout this five-episode affair, her goal was to coax confessions from Little (who died in December 2020) in order to identify his victims and, thus, to give voice to the voiceless, whose demises were ignored by a criminal justice system that saw them as, per Lauren, “less dead.”Thus, Lauren and director Joe Berlinger want Confronting a Serial Killer to be a story about not only Little but, more importantly, the dozens of female prostitutes and drug addicts he murdered—a noble cause, that, unfortunately, is undone by the fact that this non-fiction work’s real protagonist and subject turns out to be Lauren herself.Gang Members Murdered Her Teenage Daughter. She Hunted Them Down on MySpace.Premiering April 18 on Starz, the latest true-crime effort from Berlinger (Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel) is a case of a journalist allowing herself to become the story. Lauren’s intentions are principled and her triumphs are real, but from the moment she first appears on camera, there’s a performative quality to her every teary breakdown, breathy line reading, narrated piece of prose, and reference to Little as “Mr. Sam.” Especially when juxtaposed with the rest of the proceedings’ talking heads, Lauren overacts for the camera, which dovetails with the fact that she, and Berlinger, consistently keep her role in this saga front-and-center, such that it quickly becomes less about what Lauren is doing than about the fact that she’s doing it—empathetically, righteously, and at great cost to her own sanity and the well-being of her family.Lauren’s husband Scott Shriner (the bassist for Weezer) and their two sons occasionally pop up to expound on the toll Lauren’s work is taking on her and their clan. That notion is then emphasized by Lauren’s first-person commentary, during which, with intense sorrow in her voice and eyes, she talks about her responsibility to Little’s victims, her identification with them (thanks to her own history with drugs and abusive men), her desire to create safe spaces for her kids amidst her macabre toil, her inability to let go of these many victims’ ordeals, and—most of all—her struggle to endure endless chats with Little. Despite denying any culpability at his initial trial, Little candidly opens up to Lauren during their phone calls, providing all sorts of gruesome details regarding his childhood, his mindset, and his myriad disgusting crimes.Alas, in a manner that’s the opposite of Liz Garbus’ I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which married Michelle McNamara’s quest to ID the Golden State Killer with a portrait of the sociopolitical climate of ’70s and ’80s America, Berlinger turns the proceedings into a platform for his star. And every time Lauren says she’s putting the spotlight on the dead, it feels as if she’s courting it herself.Compounding matters further, Lauren’s analysis of Little is of a pedestrian variety—although that doesn’t stop her from delivering it as if she were dispensing heretofore-unknown insights. The notion that Little was a “predator” who preyed upon marginalized women whom society presumably wouldn’t miss—and who wouldn’t warrant serious police investigations—is spot-on and borne out by the facts of Little’s decades-long killing spree. Yet it’s also a quite obvious facet of this tale. Time and again, the series makes weighty pronouncements that just aren’t nearly as astute or revelatory as it thinks they are, thereby rendering everything a bit exaggerated and empty.Lauren’s larger contention is that Little’s saga is a stark example of criminal justice system failures, since despite having a rap sheet that totaled nearly 100 pages (including offenses that ranged from breaking-and-entering and assault, to rape and murder), he constantly evaded serious prosecution. This too is true, and speaks to a general disregard for sex workers and drug abusers (especially when they’re women of color). And an angry new confrontation between Laurie Barros, who survived a Little attack, and the prosecutor who failed to get a guilty conviction (instead, he settled for a plea deal that netted Little two years behind bars) speaks to the misogyny at play here, where on-the-skids women were discarded in fields, in barrels, and in trash dumps by the monstrous Little, and then were slighted by the institutions designed to stand up for them.The ‘Bride of Christ’ Cult That Commanded a Woman to KillEven in this respect, however, Confronting a Serial Killer tells us things we already know while simultaneously stating things that don’t jibe with the material at hand. For example, Lauren proclaims that Little’s ability to escape prosecution for so long is proof that the justice system is racist—this despite the fact that he was a Black man who, in many instances, killed white women, which you’d think would make him ideal fodder for a racist system. Not helping matters is a screwy non-chronological structure that makes things less—rather than more—clear, and suggests that Berlinger himself knows that there isn’t anything especially profound to be gleaned from Little’s reign of terror, save for the fact that it’s depressingly easy to get away with killing those who reside on the bottom rungs of the social ladder.In his chats with Lauren, Little offers up ample evidence of his own deviant sex-driven sociopathy, his preternatural coldness, and his arrogance. He repeatedly tells Lauren that she’s destined to be with him “forever,” and that like the souls of the women he killed, he “owns” her. He’s a chilling creep, to the end. Unlike its genre brethren John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise or The Confession Killer, though, Confronting a Serial Killer marks Little as a habitual liar and yet takes much of what he states at face value. Lauren and law enforcement’s success at pinning numerous unsolved murders on Little—based on his own testimonials—does suggest that, in many respects, he was telling the truth. But the possibility that he was also an egomaniac laying claim to crimes he didn’t commit goes unexamined here—unsurprisingly, given the series’ general blind spot when it comes to self-absorption.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.