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George Clooney backs Kamala Harris for president
Actor George Clooney, a major Democratic fundraiser, threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday as she seeks the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
Clooney told CNN in a statement that President Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race showed “true leadership.”
“He’s saving democracy once again,” Clooney said, according to CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “We’re all so excited to do whatever we can to support Vice President Harris in her historic quest.”
Clooney shocked many in the Democratic Party when he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times urging Mr. Biden to exit the presidential race, saying earlier this month that “we are not going to win in November with this president.”
He made the assertion weeks after co-hosting a star-studded Biden campaign fundraiser that included former President Barack Obama, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and actress Julia Roberts. A record $30 million was raised — the most for a single Democratic fundraiser, the Biden-Harris campaign said at the time.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote in the Times op-ed weeks. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Mr. Biden has endorsed Harris, who is now the likely Democratic nominee. CBS News estimates she has received the endorsement of a majority of Democratic delegates, which — if the total holds — would make her the party’s nominee after a roll-call vote in early August.
A growing list of celebrities have rallied around Harris as donations to her campaign have mushroomed. She took in over $100 million between the time Mr. Biden announced Sunday he was bowing out of the race and Monday evening.
Musician John Legend said on social media he’s “ready to reject Trump’s authoritarian, oppressive Project 2025 and elect Kamala Harris as our President.” Film director, actor and producer Spike Lee wrote alongside a portrait of the vice president on Instagram: “once again a sista comes to da rescue.”
Christopher Brito, Melissa Quinn, Li Cohen, Aaron Navarro, Nidia Cavazos, Shawna Mizelle and Arden Farhi contributed reporting.
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Husband of Russia’s richest woman arrested for murder after deadly shootout at offices of retail giant Wildberries
The estranged husband of Russia’s richest woman and CEO of retail giant Wildberries was arrested Thursday and charged with several crimes including murder, a day after a deadly armed raid at the company’s central Moscow offices.
Billionaire Tatyana Bakalchuk released a tearful message a day earlier, saying her husband Vladislav Bakalchuk, whom she is currently divorcing, led an armed raid into the Wildberries offices.
Vladislav Bakalchuk’s lawyers said in a message on his social media page that he was “detained for 48 hours” and charged with murder, attempted murder, assault of a law enforcement officer and vigilantism.
Two people, including a security guard, were killed in the shooting at the offices, which lie a few streets away from the Kremlin.
The incident came weeks after the company finalized a merger deal that Vladislav criticized and that strongman Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov vowed to stop.
Vladislav’s lawyers said he was on his way to a “pre-agreed meeting to settle a corporate conflict.” Vladislav alleges that it was staff at the office who fired the first shots, the Reuters news agency reported.
But Bakalchuk called her husband’s claims “absurd” and said “no one agreed to any negotiations.”
“Vladislav, what are you doing? How are you going to look in the eyes of your parents and our children?”
Elena Chernyshova/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Wildberries is Russia’s largest online retailer. Tatyana Bakalchuk founded the company in 2004, growing it from an online clothes reseller into a major marketplace for countless other products, Reuters reported.
According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index in 2021, she was the 40th richest woman in the world and the first self-made woman billionaire out of Russia.
Tatyana Bakalchuk is the majority oner of the company, while her estranged husband holds a one-percent stake.
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More than 40 years later and thanks to advances in DNA technology, a man has received a 20-year term for a murder in the Uptown area of Minneapolis.