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A man at Limestone Correctional Facility was killed Wednesday in an apparent inmate-on-inmate assault, the state prison system confirmed.

The Alabama Department of Corrections said Ariene Kimbrough, 35, was discovered deceased inside his cell at the north Alabama prison. The prison system did not say how Kimbrough died. The agency said the death is under investigation.

The state prison system has come under criticism and federal scrutiny for high rates of violence.

The U.S. Department of Justice has an ongoing lawsuit against Alabama, arguing that the conditions in state lockups are so poor that they violate the U.S. Constitution. The state has acknowledged problems within state prisons but disputes the Justice Department’s accusation.

4 FORMER ALABAMA PRISON OFFICERS CHARGED WITH BRIBERY, ETHICS VIOLATIONS

The prison system reported in monthly statistics that at least 11 prisoners were killed by other inmates in the fiscal year that ended in September. However, the prison system said the reported number does not include deaths that are still under investigation.

The Equal Justice Initiative has reported that at least 18 inmates died by homicide in 2022.

The Alabama Department of Corrections reported that 225 inmates died in the last fiscal year. At least four of those died by suicide, according to statistical reports.

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A New York Times report on the investigation into how the U.S. military conducted a drone strike that killed several civilians, including children, in Afghanistan last year, characterized the attack as a “deadly blunder” that was motivated by the “assumptions and biases” of those conducting the strike.

The report also claimed that the U.S. military was aware that innocent children had been killed in the attack only hours after the strike, and it made “misleading” statements to the public about that reality.

The Times report noted that through a FOIA request, it obtained internal documents from a U.S. Central Command investigation into the August 2021 U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan. 

GENERAL SAYS IT IS UNLIKELY ISIS-K MEMBERS KILLED IN AUGUST KABUL DRONE STRIKE: ‘A TRAGIC MISTAKE’

The strike happened just days after the U.S.’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that led the deaths of 13 U.S. service members after an ISIS terrorist bombing just outside one of the entrances to the Kabul airport. 

As The New York Times stated upon reviewing the “66 partially redacted pages” of the investigation, “assumptions and biases led to the deadly blunder.” 

It elaborated: “Military analysts wrongly concluded, for example, that a package loaded into the car contained explosives because of its ‘careful handling and size,’ and that the driver’s ‘erratic route’ was evidence that he was trying to evade surveillance.”

Intelligence proved after the fact that the driver of the car was Zemari Ahmadi, a man who “worked as an electrical engineer for a California-based aid group” and “had spent the day picking up his employer’s laptop, taking colleagues to and from work and loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.”

The report noted that military documents revealed that the U.S. military was on heightened alert for “an imminent attack on the airport that could involve suicide bombers,” which would purportedly involve a “white Toyota Corolla,” like the one Ahmadi drove. 

The documents detailed how U.S. intelligence analysts saw that Ahmadi had “’carefully loaded” a ‘package’ into the trunk” and assessed “the package to be explosives ‘based on the careful handling and size of the material.’”

Such “assumptions” led to the drone strike that killed Ahmadi and nine other civilians. The Times spoke to American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Hina Shamsi, who represented the families of the victims. She claimed the investigation “makes clear that military personnel saw what they wanted to see and not reality, which was an Afghan aid worker going about his daily life.”

US KABUL DRONE STRIKE APPEARS TO HAVE KILLED AN AFGHAN WHO WORKED FOR A US AID GROUP: REPORT 

According to the Times, the investigation showed that “military analysts reported within minutes of the strike that civilians may have been killed, and within three hours had assessed that at least three children were killed” in the attack. 

The Times accused U.S. officials of issuing “misleading statements” about these initial assessments.

For instance, the report noted that “Later that day, Central Command said in a statement that officials were ‘assessing the possibilities of civilian casualties’ but had ‘no indications at this time.’”

The report added, “An update several hours later noted that powerful subsequent explosions may have caused civilian casualties but did not mention that analysts had already assessed three children were killed.”

It also noted how “Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that the strike was ‘righteous’ and had killed an ISIS facilitator as well as ‘others,’ but who they were, ‘we don’t know. We’ll try to sort through all of that.’” 

Though the Times didn’t say whether Milley was himself misled, unaware of what analysts had indicated, or looking to mislead the public on the attack. 

The Times did note that the Pentagon “continued to say that an ISIS target was killed in the strike, even as evidence mounted to the contrary.” 

Only a week after the outlet’s September 2022 investigation into the witness accounts and video footage of the attack was published, did military officials acknowledge “that 10 civilians had been killed and that Mr. Ahmadi posed no threat and had no connection to ISIS,” The New York Times asserted. 

According to the report, the military investigation had never been released to the public though it had been completed only “a week and a half after the strike.”

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A northern Indiana man has been sentenced to nine years for a hit-and-run that killed a 12-year-old girl and injured a teenage boy.

A Fulton County judge sentenced Gage Rogers on Tuesday after the Akron, Indiana, man had pleaded guilty to two felony hit-and-run charges in the crash that killed Brelynna Felix.

The judge suspended about half of the sentence, and Rogers will serve part of it on either home detention or through community corrections, WSBT-TV reported.

INDIANA MAN SENTENCED FOR SCHOOL BUS HIT-AND-RUN THAT KILLED 16-YEAR-OLD

The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said dispatchers were alerted in November 2021 that a child may have been struck by a vehicle along State Road 19.

First responders found a 15-year-old boy who had been struck and injured before they found Brelynna, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

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Shubham Chandra knows how dangerous the coronavirus can be: He lost his dad during the pandemic. So when he cleared customs at Newark Liberty International Airport and saw people offering anonymous COVID-19 testing, he was happy to volunteer.

“It’s a minimum amount of effort to help a lot of people,” said the 27-year-old New York City man, who had just stepped off a plane from Cancun, Mexico.

The airport testing is part of the government’s early warning system for detecting new variants, which began expanding recently in the wake of a COVID-19 surge in China.

With the addition of Los Angeles and Seattle, there are now seven airports where arriving passengers can volunteer for COVID-19 tests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention program now covers about 500 flights from at least 30 countries, including more than half from China and surrounding areas.

COVID-INFECTED CHINESE TOURIST CAUGHT IN SOUTH KOREA AFTER FLEEING QUARANTINE CENTER

As of Thursday, the CDC is also requiring travelers to the U.S. from China, Hong Kong and Macao to take a COVID-19 test no more than two days before travel and provide a negative result before boarding a flight.

And down the road, some scientists are calling for wider use of an additional strategy: screening wastewater from toilet tanks on arriving airplanes.

“Without surveillance, it’s very hard to know what’s going on,” said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University. “Hopefully, with more sampling, we will get more information about what’s circulating.”

Some scientists are worried the COVID-19 surge in China could unleash a new coronavirus mutant on the world, since every infection is another chance for the virus to change. There’s no sign of a new variant from China at this point. But one reason for new testing requirements, according to the CDC, is a lack of adequate and transparent information from China on viral strains infecting people there.

“We have very little control over what happens elsewhere,” said epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, a consultant to the CDC. “What we can control is what’s happening in the United States.”

The airport program is based on an unfortunate reality: “Travelers … go across the globe quickly and they can get and spread infectious diseases really fast,” said Dr. Cindy Friedman, chief of CDC’s travelers’ health branch.

Friedman said the program is a partnership with two companies that take care of the testing and lab work — XpresCheck and Concentric by Ginkgo. A pilot program was expanded around the time the first omicron variant emerged in the U.S. more than a year ago. Besides Newark, Seattle and Los Angeles, the program includes New York’s Kennedy, Washington’s Dulles and airports in Atlanta and San Francisco.

The latest expansion of the traveler surveillance program aims to capture more flights from China. But on Wednesday in Newark, some of the targeted planes arrived from Mexico, France and Belgium. After clearing customs, travelers could stop at a table, swab their noses and fill out a form. Chandra said it took about a minute.

STATE DEPARTMENT CALLS ON CHINA TO BE MORE TRANSPARENT ON CURRENT COVID-19 SURGE, VIRUS’ ORIGINS

Like other travelers, he won’t get the results. But he tests for COVID-19 when he flies to Ohio every other month to see his mom, he said, since “the last thing I want to do is bring (the virus) home to her.”

About 10% of people on targeted flights volunteer. Their samples are pooled and PCR tested. Positive ones are genetically sequenced. Volunteers get free home COVID-19 tests.

Over time, Friedman expects the program to grow and potentially go global. It’s already shown it can spot coronavirus variants early — detecting omicron variants BA.2 and BA.3 and reporting them to a global database weeks before others did.

But Jetelina said a surveillance program at seven airports is “just not that big” so trying to spot variants might be like “looking for a needle in the haystack.”

To aid the search, experts suggest taking more samples from airplane bathrooms.

“It’s a little gross when you start thinking about it,” Jetelina said. “But these are really long flights and we would expect the majority of people would go to the bathroom.”

The CDC, which monitors wastewater in municipal systems, ran a pilot program last summer testing airplane wastewater at Kennedy airport. Friedman said the agency is working to expand this type of surveillance.

Such testing has been used elsewhere. A study last year in the journal Environment International looked at wastewater testing from 37 flights chartered to bring Australians home earlier in the pandemic, concluding that the practice “can provide an additional and effective tool” for monitoring the virus coming into a country. Recently, Canada announced an expanded wastewater pilot program and Belgium said it would test wastewater from airplanes coming from China.

As surveillance continues, scientists believe that the omicron variant BF.7, which is extremely adept at evading immunity, is driving China’s current surge. CDC data shows BF.7 is already in the U.S., and currently accounts for about 2% of COVID-19 cases. The most prevalent mutant in the U.S. is XBB.1.5, another variant responsible for 41% of U.S. cases. Ray said this one attaches more tightly than its competitors to a receptor that allows viruses to enter a cell.

Scientists said the virus will surely keep evolving — which is why they need to keep searching for new variants. The coronavirus is like a predator stalking humanity, Ray said, and “the predator adapts to the prey.”

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A Maryland man has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of a mother of four that went unsolved for 40 years.

Howard Jackson Bradberry Jr., 64, was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison by Howard County Circuit Court Judge Richard Bernhardt after he entered an Alford plea in July to a second-degree murder charge over the killing of 28-year-old Laney Lee McGadney in 1982, according to a press release.

An Alford plea allows a defendant to maintain his or her innocence but acknowledges that prosecutors have sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. 

McGadney, a mother of four, was seen by witnesses being abducted as she walked to the grocery store in Columbia, Maryland. Her body was discovered hours later in a vacant lot.

IDAHO MURDERS: RIDE ALONG BRYAN KOHBERGER’S SUSPECTED ROUTE HOME FROM STUDENT STABBINGS CRIME SCENE 

Investigators say McGadney was raped and stabbed to death.

Police collected evidence from the scene but were unable to determine a suspect, and the case went cold for decades. 

STATUE OF SEVEN-YEAR-OLD BOY WHO INSPIRED CREATION OF MAKE-A-WISH FOUNDATION STOLEN FROM PHOENIX HEADQUARTERS

Investigators from the Howard County Police Department recently revisited the evidence, and in 2021, they were able to link Bradberry to the scene using DNA from items discarded at the scene. 

“The brutal murder of Laney Lee McGadney fractured her family beyond repair and for 40 years there were very little leads in the case with no one being held responsible for her senseless killing,” State’s Attorney Rich Gibson said in the press release. 

“I want to thank Howard County police and our prosecutors for working so diligently on this case. We know today’s sentencing cannot bring back the matriarch of this family, but we do hope it provides some much-needed closure for her 4 kids, 22 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren knowing Bradberry will spend the rest of his life in prison for the innocent life he took and heinous crime he committed.”

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