
McDonald's in Times Square (Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)
Payton Gendron, the white supremacist accused of killing 10 people during a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket this Saturday, wrote back in March that he stabbed and beheaded a feral cat in a message that apparently originated on Discord, The Washington Post reports.
“I called my mom and she gave me a box and I dug a shallow grave in the backyard,” he wrote on March 25. “Honestly right now I don’t feel anything about killing that cat. I thought I would be in pain but I literally just feel blank.”
He also described smashing the cat on a hard surface after swinging it around by its tail.
In another message cited by The Post, Gendron said that he was nervous about his parents discovering his plot to shoot up the supermarket, which he targeted due to the fact it was in an area with a predominantly Black population.
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“My parents know little about me,” he wrote on February 22. “They don’t know about the hundreds of silver ounces I’ve had, or the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on ammo. They don’t know that I spent close to $1000 on random military s---. They don’t even know I own a shotgun or an AR-15, or illegal magazines.”
A recently rediscovered sketch by Michelangelo, the artist's first known nude, sold at auction at Christie's in Paris on Wednesday for 23 million euros ($24 million), a record for one of the Italian master's drawings.
Representing a naked man with two other background figures, the late 15th-century sketch in pen and brown ink recently resurfaced in a private French collection after more than a century.
Including the buyer's premium, the sale price far outstripped the Renaissance artist's previous record for a drawing of 9.5 million euros for "The Risen Christ" at Christie's in London in 2000 but fell short of the list price of 30 million euros.
"There are fewer than 10 drawings by Michelangelo which exist in private hands," Helene Rihal, director of Christie's ancient and 19th-century drawings department, told AFP ahead of the auction. The sketch was last put up for sale in 1907 at Paris's Hotel Drouot.
The nude, partly based on a fresco by Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel in Florence, had thus far managed to "escape the attention of specialists", according to Christie's, which has declared it to be very well preserved.
It was only in 2019 that experts identified it as the work of the Italian Renaissance genius (1475-1564) during an inventory of a private French collection.
In September that year it was declared a "national treasure of France", which prevented its exit from French territory for 30 months, while giving the French government and museums the opportunity to buy it.
No offer was forthcoming, however, and recent weeks saw the work exhibited in Hong Kong and New York to drum up interest ahead of the auction.
The sketch is the size of an A4 sheet of paper (eight by 12 inches, 21 by 30 centimeters) and closely resembles a figure in Masaccio's fresco "The Baptism of the Neophytes" (1426-27).
But "it's so much more than a copy", Christie's Old Masters expert Stijn Alsteens said on the auctioneer's website.
"Michelangelo has decided to make the figure into something that corresponded more to his aesthetic by making him much more robust and monumental, while at the same time keeping the fragility of the figure, who is exposed and shivering" as he awaits baptism, he said.
Alsteens added that the artist might have made the sketch aged around 21, on the cusp of his high-profile career.
(AFP)
A growing community of neo-Nazis in Massachusetts is preparing for action, WGBH warned on Wednesday.
Specifically, WGBH said it has viewed videos showing young white nationalists' plans to make their presence felt on local college campuses.
“If you’re in college you should be getting together with all the other guys on campus that think like you, circling all the frat parties and bullying the chicks that race mix and start dominating the party and take over the campus," said 23 year-old white nationalist Chris Hood, who founded the Nationalist Social Club. “Same policy as out here [the street] but just do it on campus.”
Last summer, he dictated those directions to a 22-year-old University of Massachusetts at Lowell student, Liam MacNeil, in a video posted online.
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“We can do that,” MacNeil promised in return. “Everyone knows where I am now, but they’re going to have to physically remove me. You know, they’re going to have to kick me out.”
Their racist and anti-Semitic demonstrations, attacks, and vandalism have been spreading across New England, the report said. It saw a huge uptick after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The rise in extremist violence and domestic terrorism has been a concern of the FBI's for some time, but it wasn't until President Joe Biden entered the White House that a plan was set to increase focus to such issues.
After the mass shooting in Buffalo over the weekend, federal law enforcement experts are growing more concerned about similar mass shootings inspired by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other ethnonationalist attackers.
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The Anti-Defamation League counted 388 terror incidents in 2021 that involved hate, extremism and antisemitism in Massachusetts. Five years previously, that number was less than half that (123 incidents). Most of those were graffiti or putting out leaflets and propaganda.
Addressing the attacks in Buffalo over the weekend, Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff for Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security, explained that there has been an ongoing fear about how much it is expected to increase over the next 10 years. He cited a conversation he had with a specialist who warned, "if you think the past ten years have been bad, you ain't seen nothing yet."
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