Talk About Tennis 2.0

Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis
‪@kendrawrites.com‬
Breaking news is tricky ... but FYI when news outlets don't use "alleged" in their headlines... they're not afraid of being sued. Which suggests the evidence is really really solid.

Police release ‘enhanced photo’ of Brown University shooting person of interest

Authorities are seeking the public’s help in the investigation of the campus shooting Saturday that killed two students and injured nine.
Updated
December 16, 2025 at 7:36 p.m. EST today at 7:36 p.m. EST


A combined image made with photos provided by the FBI and the Providence Police Department shows a person of interest in the shooting that occurred at Brown University on Saturday. (AP)

By Praveena Somasundaram
and
Angie Orellana Hernandez

Officials on Tuesday released a new photo and video footage of a person of interest they are seeking in the Brown University shooting investigation, asking for the public’s help in a chaotic search that has stretched into a fourth day.

The new photo shows a person dressed in dark clothes, a black hat and a face mask, wearing what appears to be a black cross-body bag. The video footage released by police, which appears to be taken from multiple home surveillance cameras, captures the person walking along streets on the east side of Providence more than an hour before a shooter opened fire in a Brown classroom. The attacker killed two students and wounded nine others.

Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman from Virginia, who were both killed in the shooting, were “brilliant and beloved,” Brown University President Christina Paxson said in a statement confirming their deaths Tuesday.

Seven of the injured victims remain hospitalized, including one in critical condition, Providence Mayor Brett P. Smiley (D) told reporters at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

Authorities played some video footage during the news briefing that was recorded by residents in the neighborhood around Hope Street, just off campus, around 10 a.m. on the day of the shooting. Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said the clips suggest that the person of interest was “casing out this area to commit the crime.”

Perez asked the public to examine the individual’s body movements, posture and gait. He added that authorities are still investigating the shooter’s motive.

The new photo and video are the latest leads police have publicly disclosed in an investigation that has vexed law enforcement officials and left the campus community uneasy. A previous person of interest was detained Sunday, then released about a day later after officials said they had “effectively cleared” the man of wrongdoing related to the shooting at Brown. They have since turned to other leads, hoping those fresh lines of investigation, along with the public’s eye, will help them make headway in the case.

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said that there is video footage from inside the building where the shooting took place, but that authorities are not releasing it because it shows only the chaotic aftermath and not the person of interest. He noted that the shooting took place in the back of the building, which is older and has fewer cameras than the recently built front.

Neronha expressed confidence that authorities will find the person of interest, saying: “Once we identify who this person is, I believe we’ll be able to locate him. It’s very hard to hide in this country.”

Initially, the FBI’s Boston field office posted more than six minutes of footage of the person of interest to its X account Tuesday afternoon, writing that it was a “video timeline showing the movements of a person of interest.” That footage was deleted within minutes, before local police posted the still-available minute-long video. The FBI and Providence police did not immediately respond to questions about why the longer video was taken down.

Providence police later released a roughly minute-long clip of surveillance footage, and the FBI released an expanded five-minute version showing the person of interest.

Some social media accounts Tuesday accused a Brown University student of being the person of interest depicted in the footage. The student drew further scrutiny when Brown deleted webpages that made reference to them. In a statement Tuesday evening, the university decried the accusations as irresponsible and dangerous, saying the webpages were removed as a routine safety measure.

“As law enforcement officials stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this individual’s name had any relevance to the current investigation, they would be actively looking for this individual and providing information publicly,” Brown’s statement said.

The university will soon announce plans to honor Cook and Umurzokov when students return to campus in 2026.

“It is important that we never forget them,” Paxson said Tuesday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... rovidence/

Measles outbreaks worsen in South Carolina, Arizona and Utah
Updated on: December 16, 2025 / 8:14 PM EST / CBS/AP

Measles outbreaks are growing along the Utah-Arizona border and in South Carolina, where hundreds are in quarantine.

Between Friday and Tuesday, South Carolina health officials confirmed 27 new measles cases in an outbreak in and around northwestern Spartanburg County. In two months, 111 people have been sickened by the vaccine-preventable virus.

More than 250 people, including students from nine area elementary, middle and high schools, are in quarantine — some for the second time since the outbreak began in October. Most of the state's new cases stemmed from exposures at Way of Truth Church in Inman. Church leaders have been "very helpful," said state epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell.

"We are faced with ongoing transmission that we anticipate will go on for many more weeks, at least in our state," Bell said.

In Arizona and Utah, an outbreak has ballooned since August. Mohave County, Arizona, has logged 172 cases and the Southwest Utah Public Health Department has logged 82 cases. The border cities of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, are the heaviest hit. Overall, Utah has confirmed 115 measles cases this year. Arizona has confirmed 176.

Nationally, the measles case count is nearing 2,000 for a disease that has been considered eliminated in the U.S. since 2000. Cases have mostly spread among people who were unvaccinated.

Last month, Canada lost that designation — which applies when there is no continuous local spread of the virus — as did the larger health region of the Americas.

Experts say the U.S. is also at risk of losing that status. For that to happen, measles would have to spread continuously for a year. A large outbreak in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma that started in January sickened nearly 900 and kicked off the United States' worst measles year in more than three decades.

All but eight states have logged at least one measles case this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has confirmed 47 outbreaks this year, compared with 16 in 2024. Three people — two of them Texas school children — have died.

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious disease at Vanderbilt Medical Center who has served as a liaison to the ACIP, told CBS News in an interview Tuesday that the "simple answer" behind the spread of the outbreaks is that "parents are withholding their children from vaccination."

"You know, vaccination is so very effective that ... by comprehensively vaccinating all of our children, eliminated measles from the United States," Schaffner said, later adding that "we are turning the clock back."

The combined MMR vaccine is safe and provides 97% protection against the disease after two doses, according to the CDC. Most children in the U.S. are required to get the MMR shot to attend school. But vaccination rates have declined as more parents waive the shots or have fallen behind on recommended vaccination schedules.

In September, the CDC's vaccine recommendation committee voted to recommend that the combined measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine, or MMRV, be separated into MMR and varicella shots for children under the age of 4.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices made the change after undergoing a complete overhaul by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in June. Several of those new members have a history of being vaccine skeptics.

According to CBS News medical contributor Dr. Céline Gounder, while the combined MMRV vaccine offers the convenience of one shot instead of two, it does carry a slightly higher risk of fever-related "febrile" seizures when used as the first dose in young toddlers aged 12-23 months. The side effect is most common between the ages of 14-18 months. Gounder says that while febrile seizures are rare and almost always resolve without lasting effects, they are frightening for families and can erode trust in vaccines.

Studies show there is no elevated risk when MMRV is given for the second dose at ages 4 to 6 years old, after children have outgrown the highest-risk window, Gounder says.


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/measles-ou ... =889592775

Suspect in Brown U. shooting found dead in New Hampshire, officials say
Authorities said the suspect acted alone as far as they know and added that there was no indication antisemitism was a component of the shooting.

By Jeremy Roebuck
,
Daniel Wu
,
Praveena Somasundaram
and
Andrew Jeong

A man suspected in the deadly shooting at Brown University has been found dead Thursday evening in a New Hampshire storage facility, authorities said.

“We’re motivated by the victims and survivors of this horrific incident,” Ted Docks, FBI Special Agent in charge of the Boston field office, said at a news conference. “Even though the suspect was found dead tonight, our work is not done. There are many questions that need to be answered. There’s a lot of evidence that needs to be processed.”

The body of 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former Brown graduate student and Portuguese national whose last residence was in Miami, was found with a satchel and two firearms, after FBI agents executed a search warrant.

Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar L. Perez Jr. said that Valente acted alone as far as authorities know. Law enforcement officials have also not recovered any manifesto-like document detailing the motivations for the attack, Perez said. Perez added there was no indication that antisemitism was a component of the shooting.

A massive law enforcement presence was seen surrounding the storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, earlier Thursday evening, and Salem police advised residents to look out for “any individuals on foot who appear out of place, unfamiliar to the area, or behaving in a manner that seems unusual or suspicious.” There is no risk to the public, Salem police said.

By Thursday evening, officers had tracked the suspect to the Extra Space Storage facility in Salem, near the Massachusetts border. News footage from a helicopter showed a large law enforcement presence surrounding the building as officers with long guns appeared to set the stage for a confrontation.

Earlier in the day, authorities had been exploring possible links between the university attack and the slaying of an MIT professor outside of Boston this week, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

The information about a possible connection between the shooting at Brown and the slaying two days later of professor Nuno Loureiro developed in the last 24 hours and centered on a car authorities believe the Brown University suspect had rented, the people said.

A car with that same make and model was also detected in the vicinity of the Brookline, Massachusetts, apartment where Loureiro had been gunned down Monday evening, they said.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts announced a press conference later Thursday to announce the “death of Brown University and MIT professor shooter,” indicating the suspect was involved in both incidents.

At the news conference Thursday, authorities said they believed the suspect and the slain professor attended the same university in Portugal.

Federal, state and local law enforcement have spent almost a week scouring the region for the gunman, who killed two Brown students and injured nine others at a study session for an economics exam on Saturday afternoon. The prolonged search sent thousands of scared students home and cast a pall over Providence, a tight-knit city where gun violence is rare.

In most mass shootings in the United States, suspects are either killed or captured quickly, making the violence at Brown stand out.

Each day during the manhunt, local news conferences have become more contentious as police provided bare-bones updates and asked for the public’s help identifying blurred images of a person of interest.

Frustration grew after police briefly detained a person of interest Sunday before releasing him without charges, saying their evidence showed he was not the shooter.

Witnesses have told The Washington Post that a man dressed all in black, his face covered, burst into a lecture hall where the study session was wrapping up around 4 p.m. Saturday. He yelled something unintelligible and opened fire. Students spent the night locked down in dorms and university buildings, barricading themselves and trying to find out if anyone they knew had been shot or killed.

The two slain students were Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama who was studying math and French, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman from Virginia who was an aspiring brain surgeon.

Emily Davies, Susan Svrluga, María Luisa Paúl and Todd Wallack contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... -interest/

Didn't a Reddit post break the case wide open? Wild. But there's a lot more to this story.

dryrunguy wrote: ↑Fri Dec 19, 2025 2:36 pm Didn't a Reddit post break the case wide open? Wild. But there's a lot more to this story.

How the Police Zeroed In on the Gunman

Authorities said a key to identifying a suspect was a Reddit user who provided information about an encounter he had with the gunman, now identified as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente.

By Mark ArsenaultThomas Gibbons-NeffAshley AhnQasim Nauman and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Dec. 19, 2025Updated 2:48 p.m. ET
Leer en español

A day after a suspect in shootings connected to two New England universities was found dead, new details were emerging on Friday about the dayslong manhunt for the 48-year-old killer.

It took a Reddit post, a series of surveillance camera images and a car rental contract to find the suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who had fatally shot himself inside of a storage unit in New Hampshire.

The discovery on Thursday came days after the killing of two students at Brown University last weekend and of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this week. It calmed anxiety that had mounted across the region as the killer remained on the loose.

What ultimately helped investigators find Mr. Neves Valente was a tip about a post someone had made on Reddit.

“I’m being dead serious,” the post began, according to an affidavit filed by the police in Providence, R.I. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.”

A day after the Reddit post was made, the writer approached law enforcement officials and told them about his encounter with a suspicious man in Brown University’s Barus and Holley building.

The information “blew this case right open,” Attorney General Peter F. Neronha of Rhode Island said at a news conference.

The tipster, whom the police referred to only as John, said that he encountered the suspect inside a bathroom on the ground floor of the building between 1:45 p.m. and 2 p.m., around two hours before the first shots were reported. John said that the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact.

John told the police that he followed the man after he left the building to a Nissan with a Florida plate. But instead of entering the vehicle, the suspect started walking around the block, with John behind him. John said it was like “a game of cat and mouse.”

At one point, the two men spoke. According to the affidavit, John asked the suspect, “Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?” To which the suspect responded, “Why are you harassing me?” John went his own way soon after.

Mayor Brett P. Smiley of Providence told CNN that the Reddit tipster was a Brown graduate who had been pictured in a photograph released by the police. However, John wrote on Reddit on Thursday that while he had indeed provided information to the authorities, but that he is not the man in the photograph. The authorities did not explain the apparent discrepancy.

“He provided the Reddit tip initially. Anonymously,” Mr. Smiley said. “And then when we put the photo out and put the call out that we needed to talk to this person, he then turned up to a Providence police officer and was fully forthcoming. And so it’s sort of an amazing sequence of events, but really turned out to be critical to our investigation. We’re grateful to him.”

When the police showed John images of the suspect’s car from safety cameras, he said: “That might be it.”

It was the breakthrough the authorities had been looking for.

The suspect’s vehicle was a key detail in the investigation. A Brown University faculty member had also described a suspicious vehicle in the same neighborhood, a gray sedan with Florida plates. It did not take long for investigators to find that the car was from an Alamo rental location in downtown Boston.

The area where Mr. Neves Valente parked his vehicle before the shooting showed some level of preparation. The Nissan was positioned on a street corner in a residential neighborhood sheltered by vegetation. Cameras at the Rhode Island Historical Society near his vehicle covered the front and rear approaches. The houses adjacent to his parking space were obscured by bushes and trees.

Yellow caution tape still flapped outside the Barus and Holley building on Friday afternoon even though the active crime scene investigation had move to New Hampshire, where investigators looked through Mr. Neves Valente’s storage unit.

The authorities had obtained the suspect’s name by early on Thursday, but they did not release it publicly at first because his rental car was due to be returned in Boston that day, according to Mr. Neronha, the Rhode Island attorney general. The authorities were waiting for him, but he didn’t show, he said.

The authorities were able to determine several other details about the suspect after getting his name from the rental contract. He was a Portuguese national and a former student at Brown, enrolled from the fall of 2000 through the 2001 spring semester. He was there for a Ph.D. in physics, but withdrew from that program in 2003.

Travel records showed that years later, in 2017, Mr. Neves Valente returned to the United States as a legal permanent resident.

At this point, the investigations into the Brown University shooting and the murder three days later of Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a professor at M.I.T., appeared to converge.

Through surveillance footage, investigators tracked the gray Nissan to near Dr. Loureiro’s home. They also determined that the suspect drove that car to a storage unit in Salem, N.H., where they found the body of Mr. Neves Valente, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, on Thursday night.

The investigators now also knew that Mr. Neves Valente had rented hotel rooms in Boston, as well as that storage unit. And according to Leah B. Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Mr. Neves Valente and Dr. Loureiro had attended the same academic program in Portugal from 1995 to 2000.

At some point after the shooting at Brown, the plates on the suspect’s car were changed from Florida to Maine, Ms. Foley added.

The suspect’s motives in both attacks remain under investigation.

“I think there’s a lot of unknowns,” said Mr. Neronha, the attorney general of Rhode Island. “In terms of why Brown? I think that’s a mystery.”

Victor Mather contributed reporting.


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/us/b ... eddit.html

I saw the post but Reddit can be very unserious so I didn't pay much attention to it. Thank goodness the pro's did.

‪James Hughes‬
‪@dystopian-fashion.bsky.social‬
· 20m
Epstein's best friend and neighbor Donald Trump appears nowhere, which is suspicious af. Epstein even put Trump's face on condoms, but he's not in any incriminating photos? Bill Clinton was never on the Island or the Lolita Express, but his pictures are everywhere???

ti-amie wrote: ↑Sat Dec 20, 2025 1:03 am

In my mind, If I'm interpreting this correctly, a mother telling her 14 yo daughter to dress sexy should be some kind of crime of child abuse. WTF?

A murky area. What does "dress sexy" mean for a 14 yo?
You know, for example, that at sex shops they sell "school girl" costumes. Is being dressed as a school girl "sexy"? Again, so hard to define.

But, yes. If you are 14 and your mother tells you to dress sexy, and you are being taken to an adult party, mom should bear certain responsibility.

BTW. I find the story hard to believe. How do you trace the sourcing? The same mother that told the daughter to dress sexy now comes forward to say that Marla Maples told her that? Seems dubious. Who else was in the conversation?
I know, I know, I know. I am sure that Tiny was involved in plenty of wrongdoing. But making up stories will not help that narrative.

ponchi101 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 20, 2025 3:16 pm A murky area. What does "dress sexy" mean for a 14 yo?
You know, for example, that at sex shops they sell "school girl" costumes. Is being dressed as a school girl "sexy"? Again, so hard to define.

But, yes. If you are 14 and your mother tells you to dress sexy, and you are being taken to an adult party, mom should bear certain responsibility.

BTW. I find the story hard to believe. How do you trace the sourcing? The same mother that told the daughter to dress sexy now comes forward to say that Marla Maples told her that? Seems dubious. Who else was in the conversation?
I know, I know, I know. I am sure that Tiny was involved in plenty of wrongdoing. But making up stories will not help that narrative.

Marla Maples has denied it - not sure if that changes anything or not.

Are any of these people especially believable?