CBS News
Tennessee enacts law requiring GPS tracking of violent domestic abusers, the first of its kind in U.S.
A new law took effect Monday in Tennessee that requires GPS monitoring of the most violent domestic offenders. Born from an unspeakable tragedy, the law is the first of its kind in the U.S.
On April 12, 2021, Debbie Sisco and her daughter, Marie Varsos, were shot and killed outside Nashville by Marie’s estranged husband, Shaun Varsos, who later took his own life.
Varsos broke into his mother-in-law’s house, where Marie was staying, with guns, zip ties, and battery acid ready to hunt them down.
He had been out on bail after strangling his wife and threatening her with a gun a month earlier.
Alex Youn, Marie’s brother and Debbie’s son, was devastated.
“Two people that I love dearly were just quickly ripped out of my life,” Youn said.
Varsos was considered enough of a threat that the judge could have required a GPS tracking device as a condition of his bail, but he didn’t. Youn believes his mother and sister may still be alive if the judge had required it.
“That’s a question for the judge. It’s one that infuriates me,” Youn said.
Judges can require GPS monitoring as a condition of bail, but often don’t.
Youn turned his pain and anger into a successful push for mandated GPS tracking of aggravated assault offenders in domestic violence cases. Tennessee’s new law is called the Debbie and Marie Domestic Violence Protection Act.
One in four women and one in seven men are victims of domestic violence, according to the CDC.
“When there’s firearms at play, when there’s strangulation, when there’s elevated stalking, [offenders] are more likely to do it again,” said Jennifer Waindle, a deputy director of non-profit Battered Women’s Justice Project.
That’s how GPS tracking could potentially be the difference between life and death. With the technology, victims are notified through a phone app or electronic device when an offender violates an order of protection, such as moving within a certain radius of the victim or breaching an exclusion zone, like their house. When that happens, the victim can receive multiple alerts like texts and emails, while a monitoring center calls law enforcement.
Ray Gandolf, director of business development for Tennessee AMS, is helping to lead the charge on using GPS technology as a safety tool.
“Every second matters,” Gandolf said.
Gandolf said the alerts can allow victims to look for help or find cover. “They can position themselves in a safe place, lock themselves in a place where they have the opportunity to call 911 and to get help dispatched to them immediately,” Gandolf said.
In Tennessee, Youn has made sure the names of Debbie Sisco and Marie Varsos will live on.
“I’m hopeful that other states will potentially sort of look at what Tennessee is sort of doing and take this and implement it in other states as well,” Youn said.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by calling 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), visiting www.thehotline.org or texting “START” to 88788.
Serving in the U.S. House of Representatives comes with a six-figure salary, along with perks including paid travel and housing costs.
While the $174,000 annual pay likely doesn’t sound too shabby to those living in a country where the median individual wage comes to just over $59,000 a year, members of Congress are earning wages that were set in 2009. They haven’t gotten an automatic cost-of-living adjustment since 2009.
In getting elected as Speaker of the House in October of 2023, Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson’s annual salary jumped to $223,500. Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise and New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries each make $193,4000 a year as the House majority and minority leaders, respectively.
Members of Congress are not allowed to continue in their prior jobs while working on Capitol Hill, although their net worth continues to increase through investments. Indeed, many Washington, D.C., lawmakers were already millionaires when they began their political careers, especially in the Senate.
Although pensions are increasingly uncommon for most American workers, the perk is alive and well for lawmakers. Since 1946, members of Congress with at least five years of service or federal employment are eligible for “a generous pension that pays two to three times more than pensions offered to similarly salaried workers in the private sector,” according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
The value of the pension benefit is determined based on when a lawmakers was elected to office, time served and the average of the three years of their highest salary, noted NTUF, an affiliate of the National Taxpayers Union.
A lesser-known congressional benefit is the practice of leaving death gratuity payments to the heirs of members who die while serving in office. Equal to the member’s yearly congressional salary, the payments are provided regardless of how wealthy the deceased lawmaker was. From 2000 to 2021, the payments have cost taxpayers $5 million, the nonprofit research group found.
CBS News
2 shot dead, 4 wounded by Mexico’s National Guard on migrant smuggling route near U.S. border
Mexico’s National Guard fatally shot two Colombians and wounded four others in what the Defense Department claimed was a confrontation near the U.S. border.
Colombia’s foreign ministry said in a statement Sunday that all of the victims were migrants who had been “caught in the crossfire.” It identified the dead as a 20-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman, and gave the number of Colombians wounded as five, not four. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy. The victims were identified by the foreign ministry as Yuli Vanessa Herrera Marulanda and Ronaldo Andrés Quintero Peñuelas.
Mexico’s Defense Department, which controls the National Guard, did not respond to requests for comment Monday on whether the victims were migrants, but it said one Colombian who was not injured in the shootings was turned over to immigration officials, suggesting they were.
If they were migrants, it would mark the second time in just over a month that military forces in Mexico have opened fire on and killed migrants.
On Oct. 1, the day President Claudia Sheinbaum took office, soldiers opened fire on a truck, killing six migrants in the southern state of Chiapas. An 11-year-old girl from Egypt, her 18-year-old sister and a 17-year-old boy from El Salvador died in that shooting, along with people from Peru and Honduras.
The most recent shootings happened Saturday on a dirt road near Tecate, east of Otay Mesa on the California border, that is frequently used by Mexican migrant smugglers, the department said in a statement late Sunday.
The Defense Department said a militarized National Guard patrol came under fire after spotting two vehicles — a gray pickup and a white SUV — in the area, which is near an informal border crossing and wind power generation plant known as La Rumorosa.
One truck sped off and escaped. The National Guard opened fire on the other truck, killing two Colombians and wounding four others. There was no immediate information on their conditions, and there were no reported casualties among the guardsmen involved.
One Colombian and one Mexican man were found and detained unharmed at the scene, and the departments said officers found a pistol and several magazines commonly used for assault rifles at the scene.
Colombians have sometimes been recruited as gunmen for Mexican drug cartels, which are also heavily involved in migrant smuggling. But the fact the survivor was turned over to immigration officials and that the Foreign Relations Department contacted the Colombian consulate suggests they were migrants.
Cartel gunmen sometimes escort or kidnap migrants as they travel to the U.S. border. One possible scenario was that armed migrant smugglers may have been in one or both of the trucks, but that the migrants were basically unarmed bystanders.
The defense department said the three National Guard officers who opened fire have been taken off duty while the incident is being investigated.
Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office Sept. 30, gave the military an unprecedentedly wide role in public life and law enforcement; he created the militarized Guard and used the combined military forces as the country’s main law enforcement agencies, supplanting police. The Guard has since been placed under the control of the army.
But critics say the military is not trained to do civilian law enforcement work. Moreover, lopsided death tolls in such confrontations – in which all the deaths and injuries occur on one side – raise suspicions among activists whether there really was a confrontation.
For example, the soldiers who opened fire in Chiapas – who have been detained pending charges – claimed they heard “detonations” prior to opening fire. There was no indication any weapons were found at the scene.
A Kenyan man was convicted Monday of plotting a 9/11-style attack on a U.S. building on behalf of the terrorist organization al-Shabab.
A federal jury in Manhattan found Cholo Abdi Abdullah guilty on all six counts he faced for conspiring to hijack an aircraft and slam it into a building, according to court records.
He’s due to be sentenced next March and faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison.
Handout / Criminal Investigation and Detection Group
Abdullah represented himself during the trial, which opened last week. He declined to give an opening statement and did not actively participate in questioning witnesses.
In court papers filed ahead of the trial, prosecutors said Abdullah intended to “merely sit passively during the trial, not oppose the prosecution and whatever the outcome, he would accept the outcome because he does not believe that this is a legitimate system.”
Lawyers appointed to assist Abdullah in his self-defense didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
Federal prosecutors, who rested their case Thursday, said Abdullah plotted the attack for four years, undergoing extensive training in explosives and how to operate in secret and avoid detection.
He then moved to the Philippines in 2017 and began training as a commercial pilot.
Abdullah was almost finished with his two-year pilot training when he was arrested in 2019 on local charges.
He was transferred the following year to U.S. law enforcement authorities, who charged him with terrorism-related crimes.
Prosecutors said Abdullah also researched how to breach a cockpit door and information “about the tallest building in a major U.S. city” before he was caught.
The State Department in 2008 designated al-Shabab, which means “the youth” in Arabic, as a foreign terrorist organization. The militant group is an al Qaeda affiliate that has fought to establish an Islamic state in Somalia based on Shariah law.
