Funeral home owners accused of storing decaying bodies expected to plead guilty to COVID-19 fraud
Prosecutors say the Hallfords stashed 190 decaying bodies in a funeral home storage building and sent grieving families fake ashes
Court documents say the Hallfords used the pandemic aid to buy expensive cars, cryptocurrency and trips
Updated 21 sec ago
AP
DENVER: Colorado funeral home owners accused of misspending nearly $900,000 in COVID-19 pandemic relief funds and living lavishly, all while allegedly stashing 190 decaying bodies in a building and sending grieving families fake ashes, are expected to plead guilty to federal charges Thursday.
Jon and Carie Hallford, owners of Return to Nature Funeral Home about an hour’s drive south of Denver, have been charged with 15 federal offenses related to defrauding the US government and the funeral home’s customers. Additionally, over 200 criminal counts are already pending against them in Colorado state court, including for corpse abuse and forgery.
The Hallfords used the pandemic aid and customers’ payments to buy a GMC Yukon and Infiniti that together were worth over $120,000, laser body sculpting, trips to California, Florida and Las Vegas, $31,000 in cryptocurrency and luxury items at stores like Gucci and Tiffany & Co., according to court documents.
The federal charges could carry up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
Jon Hallford is being represented by the federal public defenders office, which does not comment on cases. Calls and emails to Carie Hallford’s lawyer in the federal case have not been returned, and her attorney in the state case, Michael Stuzynski, declined to comment.
The federal indictment arrived after last year’s discovery of the 190 corpses in a bug-infested building owned by Return to Nature in Penrose, a small town southwest of Colorado Springs. The Hallfords allegedly stashed bodies as as far back as 2019, at times stacking them on top of each other, and in two cases buried the wrong body, according to court documents.
An investigation by The Associated Press found that the Hallfords likely sent fake ashes and fabricated cremation records to families who did business with them. Court documents allege that the dust inside some of the bags was dry concrete, not the cremated remains of lost loved ones.
The discovery devastated relatives of the deceased, who began learning that their family members’ remains weren’t in the ashes that they ceremonially spread or held tight but were still languishing in a building. The stories prompted Colorado lawmakers to patch the state’s lax funeral home regulations in 2024, requiring routine inspections of facilities and licensing for funeral home roles.
Mourners grieve Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish spiritual leader who died in US
A funeral prayer service is scheduled for Thursday afternoon in Sussex County, New Jersey
Gülen had long been one of Turkiye’s most important scholars, with millions of followers in his native country and around the world. He had lived in the United States since 1999
Updated 17 sec ago
AP
PENNSYLVANIA: Family, friends and followers of Fethullah Gülen are gathering Thursday to pay respects to the influential Turkish spiritual leader and Islamic scholar who died this week in self-exile in the United States. Gülen, who inspired a global social movement while facing unproven allegations that he orchestrated a failed 2016 military coup against Turkiye’s president, died Sunday at a Pennsylvania hospital. He was in his 80s. A funeral prayer service was scheduled for Thursday afternoon in Sussex County, New Jersey. The Alliance for Shared Values, a New York-based group that promotes Gülen’s work in the US, said thousands of mourners were expected to attend. After the service, Gülen is to be buried in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, on the grounds of the Chestnut Retreat Center, a sprawling, gated compound in the Pocono Mountains where he lived and worked for a quarter-century. A much smaller circle of family and close friends was expected at the burial. “This is a solemn time of mourning, reflection, and prayer,” the group said in a statement. “Mr. Gülen’s legacy transcends the circumstances of his life. He stands as a remarkable religious and intellectual thinker whose impact will be felt for generations.” Gülen had long been one of Turkiye’s most important scholars, with millions of followers in his native country and around the world. He had lived in the United States since 1999, when he came to seek medical treatment. His philosophy blended Sufism — a mystical form of Islam — with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue. His acolytes built a loosely affiliated global network of charitable foundations, professional associations, businesses and schools in more than 100 countries, including 150 taxpayer-funded charter schools throughout the United States. The religious leader began as an ally of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan but became a foe. He called Erdogan an authoritarian bent on accumulating power and crushing dissent. Erdogan cast Gülen as a terrorist, accusing him of masterminding the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, when factions within the military used tanks, warplanes and helicopters to try to overthrow the government. A total of 251 people were killed and around 2,200 others were wounded. Around 35 alleged coup plotters were killed. Shortly after the coup attempt, the normally reclusive cleric summoned reporters to his living quarters at the Pennsylvania compound to deny any knowledge or involvement in its planning. He said he wouldn’t have returned to Turkiye even if the coup had succeeded, fearing he would be “persecuted and harassed.” “This is a tranquil and clean place and I enjoy and I live my freedom here,” Gülen said of the secluded Islamic retreat, founded by Turkish Americans, that he adopted as his home and where he would be buried eight years later. “Longing for my homeland burns in my heart, but freedom is also equally important.” In Turkiye, Gülen’s movement — sometimes known as Hizmet, Turkish for “service” — has been subjected to a broad crackdown. The government arrested tens of thousands of people for their alleged link to the coup plot, sacked more than 130,000 suspected supporters from civil service jobs and more than 23,000 from the military, and closed hundreds of businesses, schools and media organizations tied to Gülen. The Turkish government reacted to his death this week by vowing to keep up the pressure on the Gülenist movement. Erdogan said Gülen had suffered a “dishonorable death” and likened him to a “demon in human form.” He pledged the movement would be “completely eliminated.” Gulen was never charged with a crime in the US, and the US government had rejected Turkiye’s demands to extradite him. The cleric consistently denounced terrorism as well as the coup plotters.
Flights suspended at India’s Kolkata, Odisha state as cyclone approaches
Cyclone Dana is expected to cross the coasts of the states between midnight and Friday morning with wind speeds of 100kph-110kph
Severe storms lash coastal cities in India and neighboring Bangladesh during the cyclone season from April to December each year
Updated 2 min 18 sec ago
Reuters
BHUBANESWAR: Flights to and from the capital cities of India’s eastern states of Odisha and West Bengal, including Kolkata, will be suspended from Thursday evening to Friday morning as the region braces for a cyclone set to hit during that time, officials said.
Cyclone ‘Dana’, currently over the Bay of Bengal, is expected to cross the coasts of the states between midnight and Friday morning with wind speeds of 100-110kph, gusting up to 120kph, the weather department said.
Both states have closed schools in the areas that are expected to be bear the brunt of the storm and asked fishermen not to venture out to sea.
Television footage showed fishermen rushing to secure their straw homes and boats with ropes, and officials escorting residents in coastal areas to shelters as heavy winds and rains pounded parts of Odisha on Thursday.
The Adani group’s Dhamra port in the state’s Bhadrak region has also suspended operations.
“We have evacuated approximately 50,000 people so far, and a total of around 300,000 people are likely to be evacuated,” Special Relief Commissioner Deoranjan Kumar Singh said.
Neighboring West Bengal state has also issued a red alert for three districts located close to the area where the cyclone is expected to make landfall, officials said.
The state’s capital city of Kolkata remained overcast on Thursday with short spells of rain.
Severe storms lash coastal cities in India and neighboring Bangladesh during the cyclone season from April to December each year, causing extensive damage.
Odisha’s worst cyclone in recent years was in 1999, which raged for 30 hours and killed 10,000 people.
At least 16 people were killed when a cyclone lashed India and Bangladesh in May, packing speeds of up to 135kph.
‘Sharp rise’ in anti-Muslim discrimination: EU rights agency
Several EU nations have reported a rise in anti-Muslim, as well as anti-Semitic acts since Oct. 7, 2023
Nearly one in two Muslims in the EU face racism and discrimination in their daily life
Updated 24 min 19 sec ago
AFP
VIENNA: Muslims in Europe are facing “ever more racism and discrimination,” the EU rights agency said Thursday, noting a “sharp rise” even before the Hamas attack against Israel caused “a spike in anti-Muslim hatred.”
Several EU nations have reported a rise in anti-Muslim, as well as anti-Semitic acts since October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, which then launched a retaliatory offensive on Gaza, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA).
“We are aware of reports from several EU countries, highlighting a spike in anti-Muslim hatred — as well as anti-Semitism — after the Hamas attacks,” FRA spokeswoman Nicole Romain said.
But even before then, a new FRA report shows “it was getting more difficult to be a Muslim in the EU.”
Nearly one in two Muslims in the EU face racism and discrimination in their daily life, “a sharp rise” from 39 percent FRA found in the last edition of its survey in 2016.
The highest rates were recorded in Austria, Germany and Finland.
“We are witnessing a worrying surge in racism and discrimination against Muslims in Europe,” FRA director Sirpa Rautio said.
“This is fueled by conflicts in the Middle East and made worse by the dehumanizing anti-Muslim rhetoric we see across the continent,” Rautio added.
More than 9,600 Muslims in 13 EU countries were surveyed between October 2021 and October 2022.
“Muslim women, men and children are targeted not just because of their religion, but also because of their skin color and ethnic or immigrant background,” FRA noted.
Young Muslims born in the EU and women wearing religious clothing are especially affected, it added.
The survey noted a surge in anti-Muslim racism most notably in the job market with a “knock-on effect on other areas of life, such as housing, education or health care.”
Two in five, or 41 percent, are overqualified for their job compared to 22 of people generally, FRA said.
A third of Muslim respondents’ households struggle to make ends meet compared to 19 percent of households generally, and they are twice as likely to live in overcrowded housing, FRA added.
About 26 million Muslims live in the EU, making up about five percent of the total EU population, FRA said, citing the most up-to-date estimates available for 2016 from the Pew Research Center.
Most live in France and Germany.
The number of Muslims in the EU has increased “significantly in recent years due to people fleeing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria,” FRA added.
In July, FRA said in a report that Europe’s Jewish community was facing a “rising tide of anti-Semitism,” with the conflict in the Middle East “eroding” progress made in the fight against it.
Tropical storm battering Philippines leaves at least 24 people dead in flooding and landslides
Deaths mostly due to drowning in the hard-hit Bicol region and nearby Quezon province
Most of the storm deaths were reported in the six-province Bicol region, southeast of Manila
Updated 26 min 31 sec ago
AP
MANILA: Widespread flooding and landslides set off by a tropical storm in the northeastern Philippines on Thursday left at least 24 people dead, swept away cars and prompted authorities to scramble for motorboats to rescue trapped villagers, some on roofs.
The government shut down schools and offices — except those urgently needed for disaster response — for the second day on the entire main island of Luzon to protect millions of people after Tropical Storm Trami slammed into the country’s northeastern province of Isabela after midnight.
The storm was blowing over Aguinaldo town in the mountain province of Ifugao after dawn with sustained winds up to 95kph and gusts up to 160kph. It was blowing westward and was forecast to enter the South China Sea later on Thursday, according to state forecasters.
At least 24 people died, mostly due to drowning in the hard-hit Bicol region and nearby Quezon province but the toll was expected to rise as towns and villages isolated by flooding and roads blocked by landslides and toppled trees manage to send out reports, police and provincial officials said.
Most of the storm deaths were reported in the six-province Bicol region, southeast of Manila, where at least 20 people died, including 7 residents in Naga city, which was inundated by flash floods as Trami was approaching Tuesday, dumping more than two months’ worth of rainfall in just 24 hours at high tide, regional police chief Brig. Gen. Andre Dizon and other officials said.
While thousands of villagers, who were trapped in floodwaters, have been rescued by government forces, many more needed to be saved Thursday in the Bicol region, including some on roofs. About 1,500 police officers have been deployed for disaster-mitigation work, Dizon said.
“We can’t rescue them all at once because there are so many and we need additional motorboats,” Dizon told The Associated Press by telephone. “We’re looking for ways to deliver food and water to those who were trapped but could not be evacuated right away.”
Flash floods swept away and submerged cars in some parts of Naga city while mudflows from Mayon, one of the country’s 24 active volcanoes, in nearby Albay province, engulfed several vehicles, Dizon said.
Stormy weather remained in the region, hampering relief efforts, officials said.
The government’s disaster-mitigation agency said more than 2 million people were affected by the storm, including 75,400 villagers who were displaced from their homes and are sheltering on safer ground.
About 20 storms and typhoons batter the Philippines each year. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest recorded tropical cyclones in the world, left more than 7,300 people dead or missing and flattened entire villages.
Harris says Trump ‘is a fascist’ after John Kelly says he wanted generals like Hitler’s
John Kelly, a retired general, warned in interviews that Trump meets the definition of a fascist and that while in office he suggested that Hitler “did some good things”
Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee, repeated her increasingly dire warnings about Trump’s mental fitness and his intentions for the presidency
Updated 24 October 2024
AP
ASTON, Pennsylvania: Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that she believes that Donald Trump “is a fascist” after his longest-serving chief of staff said the former president praised Adolf Hitler while in office and put personal loyalty above the Constitution.
Harris seized on comments by former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, about his former boss in interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic published Tuesday warning that the Republican nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that while in office he suggested that the Nazi leader “did some good things.”
Speaking at a CNN town hall, Harris said they offer a window into who the former president “really is” and the kind of commander in chief he would be.
When asked if she believed that Trump is a fascist, Harris replied twice, “Yes, I do.” Later, she brought it up herself, saying Trump would, if elected again, be “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
The Democratic presidential nominee said Kelly’s comments, less than two weeks before voters will decide whether to send Trump back to the Oval Office, were a “911 call to the American people” by the former chief of staff. They were quickly seized by Harris as part of her closing message to voters as she works to sharpen the choice at the ballot box for Americans.
“I believe Donald Trump is a danger to the well-being and security of the United States of America,” she said, saying the American people deserve a president who maintains “certain standards,” which include “certainly not comparing oneself, in a clearly admiring way, to Hitler.”
She added that if reelected, Trump would no longer be tempered by people who would “restrain him” from his worst impulses.
Earlier Wednesday, Harris repeated her increasingly dire warnings about Trump’s mental fitness and his intentions for the presidency.
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best, from the people who have worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room,” Harris told reporters outside the vice president’s residence in Washington.
The comments from Kelly, the retired Marine general who worked for Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019, built on past warnings from former top Trump officials as the election enters its final two weeks.
Kelly has long been critical of Trump and previously accused him of calling veterans killed in combat “suckers” and “losers.” His new warnings emerged as Trump seeks a second term vowing to dramatically expand his use of the military at home and suggesting he would use force to go after Americans he considers “enemies from within.”
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Kelly recalled to the Times. Kelly said he would usually quash the conversation by saying “nothing (Hitler) did, you could argue, was good,” but Trump would occasionally bring up the topic again.
In his interview with The Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing “German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant “Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who oversaw the unification of Germany. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Trump said on his Truth Social media platform that Kelly had “made up a story” and went on to heap insults on his former chief of staff, including that Kelly’s “toughness morphed into weakness.”
Trump’s campaign also denied the accounts. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Kelly had “beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated” and, after Harris’ statement, accused the Democratic candidate of sharing “outright lies and falsehoods.”
Chris Sununu, New Hampshire’s Republican governor and onetime Trump critic, said Kelly’s comments did not change his plans to vote for the former president.
“Look, we’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump, from Donald Trump. It’s really par for the course,” the governor told CNN. “Unfortunately, with a guy like that, it’s kind of baked into the vote at this point.”
Some of the former president’s supporters in swing states responded to Kelly’s comments with a shrug.
“Trump did his four years, and we were in great shape. Kelly didn’t have anything good to say about Trump. He ought to have his butt kicked,” said Jim Lytner, a longtime advocate for veterans in Nevada who served in the Army in Vietnam and co-founded the nonprofit Veterans Transition Resource Center.
Harris said Wednesday that Trump admired Hitler’s generals because he “does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution, he wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military who will be loyal to him personally.”
Polls show the race is tight in swing states, and both Trump and Harris are crisscrossing the country making their final pitches to the sliver of undecided voters. Harris’ campaign has spent considerable time reaching out to independent voters, using the support of longtime Republicans such as former Rep. Liz Cheney and comments like Kelly’s to urge past Trump voters to reject his candidacy in November.
Harris’ campaign held a call with reporters Tuesday to elevate the voices of retired military officials who highlighted how many of the officials who worked with Trump now oppose his campaign.
“People that know him best are most opposed to him, his presidency,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson.
Anderson said he wished Kelly would fully back Harris over Trump, something he has yet to do. But retired Army Reserve Col. Kevin Carroll, a former senior counselor to Kelly, said Wednesday that the former top Trump official would “rather chew broken glass than vote for Donald Trump.”
Before serving as Trump’s chief of staff, Kelly worked as the former president’s secretary of homeland security, where he oversaw Trump’s attempts to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. Kelly was also at the forefront of the administration’s crackdown in immigration policy that led to the separation of thousands of immigrant parents and their children along the southern border. Those actions made him a villain to many on the left, including Harris.
After Kelly left the Trump administration and joined the board of a company operating the nation’s largest detention center for unaccompanied migrant children, Harris wrote during her 2019 run for president that he was “the architect” of the administration’s “cruel child separation policy. Now he will profit off the separation of families. It’s unethical. We are better than this.”
When she was in Miami for a primary debate in June 2019, Harris was also one of a dozen Democratic presidential candidates who visited the detention center south of the city and protested against the administration’s harsh treatment of young migrants.
In his interview with the Times, Kelly also said Trump met the definition of a fascist. After reading the definition aloud, including that fascism was “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader,” Kelly concluded Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly added that Trump often fumed at any attempt to constrain his power, and that “he would love to be” a dictator.
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Kelly told the Times, adding later, “I think he’d love to be just like he was in business — he could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot.”
Kelly is not the first former top Trump administration official to cast the former president as a threat.
Retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bob Woodward in his recent book “War” that Trump was “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” And retired Gen. Jim Mattis, who worked as secretary of defense under Trump, reportedly later told Woodward that he agreed with Milley’s assessment.
Throughout Trump’s political rise, the businessman-turned-politician benefited from the support of military veterans.
AP VoteCast found that about 6 in 10 military veterans said they voted for Trump in 2020, as did just over half of those with a veteran in the household. Among voters in this year’s South Carolina Republican primary, AP VoteCast found that close to two-thirds of military veterans and people in veteran households voted for Trump over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump’s toughest opponent in the 2024 Republican primary.
