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Crystal Mangum, who in 2006 falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of raping her — making headlines about race, class and the privilege of college athletes — has admitted that she fabricated the story. Mangum, who is Black, told “Let’s Talk with Kat” podcast that she “made up a story that wasn’t true” about the white players who attended a party where she was hired to perform as a stripper “because I wanted validation from people and not from God.” Mangum, 46, said, “I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t and that was wrong." The interview was recorded at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, where Mangum is incarcerated for fatally stabbing her boyfriend in 2011. The former Duke players were declared innocent in 2007 after Mangum’s story fell apart under legal scrutiny. The state attorney general concluded there was no credible evidence an attack ever occurred, and it found no DNA, witness or other evidence to confirm Mangum’s story. Jim Cooney, one of the players’ lawyers, said Mangum’s allegations caused an “enormous tornado of destruction” for countless people involved, including the accused men. They were wrongfully vilified nationally as “racially motivated rapists,” Cooney said. The prosecutor who championed Mangum’s case was disbarred for lying and misconduct. Prosecutors declined to press charges against Mangum for the false accusations. The lacrosse players reached a settlement with Duke University in 2007 after suing it for the handling of the rape allegations. Mangum, who is eligible to be released from prison as early as 2026, said she hopes the three falsely accused men can forgive her. “I want them to know that I love them and they didn’t deserve that,” she said.

More than two years after the U.S. Supreme Court fundamentally expanded its interpretation of the Second Amendment, federal courts continue to strike down state restrictions on gun ownership. Since the 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen that firearm regulations must have some historical comparison going back to the nation’s founding, some state restrictions have been ruled unconstitutional. lower courts are still figuring out the limits of that historical test and have not come to a broad agreement on key gun-related laws. Wins for gun rights supporters have mounted. Over the past two years, federal courts have struck down bans on assault weapons in trend-setting blue states such as California and Illinois, reports Stateline. In October, a federal judge ruled that New York’s ban on carrying a concealed firearm on private property open to the public is unconstitutional. In September, a federal judge in northern Illinois ruled the state’s ban on carrying a concealed firearm on public transit violated the Second Amendment. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling that found Minnesota’s age restriction on residents carrying a handgun in public was unconstitutional. The Trace found that federal courts have ruled on more than 1,600 Bruen -based challenges to gun laws. The number of rulings is on the rise, straining the court system and raising public safety concerns. There were, on average, 91 rulings per month in 2024, up from 63 per month in 2023. The vast majority of rulings answered Second Amendment challenges by criminal defendants. There were 1,460 in total. In most of these cases, the defendant sought to have a gun charge dismissed or a conviction overturned as unconstitutional. The remaining 150 rulings were in civil lawsuits by gun rights groups, individuals, and other organizations. In criminal cases, judges have sided with defendants to invalidate gun regulations in 53 cases, 4 percent of the total. Most of these rulings apply only to the defendant and have a more limited effect. Civil challenges have been more successful, with judges invalidating gun regulations in 48 cases. These lawsuits tend to be more sweeping challenges against a gun restriction in general, as applied to anyone, resulting in broader implications, including a law being entirely overturned. Bill Sack of the Second Amendment Foundation, a Bellevue, Wa.-based legal advocacy organization that has flooded the courts with challenges to gun regulations nationwide, said, “The second Bruen came down, there was the starting gun for a sprint, for which we have not stopped yet,” he told Stateline . “Stuff is ripe for a fresh challenge.” Sack and other gun rights advocates are now asking the courts to define the Supreme Court’s new Bruen standard: a series of “who, what and where” questions about which gun rights limitations are allowed under the latest interpretation of the Second Amendment. The major question: Who can own a firearm? What sort of firearm equipment can someone possess? Where can people possess a firearm? “We are making major inroads,” Sack said. “The arc of history will show that this time period was very good for us and very bad for them.” Esther Sanchez-Gomez pf the Giffords Law Center said gun-rights advocates are not winning all cases. In August, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld Maryland’s ban on assault weapons. The issue might need to be resolved by the Supreme Court. “There’s movement on assault weapons,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that it’s a lost issue universally. Rather, I’d say that there’s a lot of different results coming out and that courts have yet to coalesce.”

New Jersey and Minnesota sued Glock, calling on the gunmaker to stop selling firearms that can be adapted with dime-sized switches to fire up to 1,200 rounds a minute. New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said top law enforcement officials in 14 states and the District of Columbia are forming a coalition to reduce gun violence by coordinating enforcement of the states’ consumer protection laws, the Associated Press reports. The moves by mostly Democrat-led states amount to early pushback against President-elect Trump’s second administration, which Platkin said “routinely sides with the gun industry.” Platkin’s office played a video of a law enforcement officer demonstrating how to use the Glock switch. The video shows an officer first firing the pistol without the switch, requiring a pause between shots. The officer then installs the switch and is able to fire multiple rounds without any pause. “For decades, Glock has knowingly sold weapons that anyone with a screwdriver and a YouTube video can convert into a military-grade machine gun in a matter of minutes,” Platkin said. The company did not immediately comment, but an industry trade group condemned the lawsuits as “lawfare” that abuses the judicial system and disregards federal law. “This is clearly an abuse of the courts to attempt to circumvent the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA),” said Lawrence Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Attorneys General Platkin and Ellison, along with the other colluding states, are attempting to extend the frivolous claims that have no foundation in law and abuse taxpayer dollars to advance an unconstitutional gun control agenda.” Ellison said, “Glock has known about this problem for decades and has done nothing. A change of design could prevent these handguns from being turned into illegal automatic weapons. But Glock has turned a blind eye. And again and again, the death toll continues to rise.” In addition to New Jersey and Minnesota, the coalition includes California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

“Wanted” posters with the names and faces of health care executives have appeared on the streets of New York. Hit lists with images of bullets are circulating online with warnings that industry leaders should be afraid. The targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the menacing threats that followed have sent a shudder through the health care industry, leading to increased security for executives and some workers. Health insurers have removed information about their top executives from company websites, canceled in-person meetings with shareholders and advised employees to work from home temporarily. An internal New York Police Department bulletin warned that the online vitriol after the shooting could signal an immediate “elevated threat," the Associated Press reports. Police fear that the Dec. 4 shooting could “inspire a variety of extremists and grievance-driven malicious actors to violence,” according to the bulletin. “Wanted” posters pasted to parking meters and construction site fences in Manhattan included photos of health care executives and the words “Deny, defend, depose” — similar to a phrase scrawled on bullets found near Thompson’s body and echoing those used by insurance industry critics. Investigators believe shooting suspect Luigi Mangione may have been motivated by hostility toward health insurers. They are studying his writings about a previous back injury, and his disdain for corporate America and the U.S. health care system. Mangione, 26, has remained jailed in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested Monday. Manhattan prosecutors are working to bring him to New York to face a murder charge. UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, said it was working with law enforcement to ensure a safe work environment and to reinforce security guidelines and building access policies. Just over a quarter of the companies in the Fortune 500 reported spending money to protect their top executives. Of those, the median payment for personal security doubled over the last three years to just under $100,000.

The McKinsey & Company consulting firm agreed to pay $650 million to settle a federal investigation into its work for opioids manufacturer Purdue Pharma, according to court papers filed Friday. In a deal with the U.S. Justice Department, McKinsey will avoid prosecution on criminal charges if it pays the sum and follows certain conditions for five years, including ceasing any work on the sale, marketing or promoting of controlled substances, reports the Associated Press . A former McKinsey senior partner agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for deleting documents from his laptop after he became aware of investigations into Purdue Pharma. Court filings say Purdue paid McKinsey more than $93 million over 15 years for a number of products, including how to improve revenue from OxyContin. One job was to identify which prescribers would generate the most additional prescriptions if Purdue salespeople focused on that. That resulted in prescriptions that “were not for a medically accepted indication, were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary, and that were often diverted for uses that lacked a legitimate medical purpose,” the court filing said. The company also tried to help Purdue get a say in shaping federal rules intended to ensure that the benefits of addictive prescription drugs outweighed the risks. The government said in its new filings that that resulted in making high-dose OxyContin subject to the same oversight as lower-dose opioids and made training for prescribers voluntary rather than mandatory. Since 2021, McKinsey has agreed to pay state and local governments about $765 million in settlements for its role in advising businesses on how to sell more of the powerful prescription painkillers amid a national opioid crisis.

Nearly two weeks after Eileen O'Neill Burke became Cook County, Ill., state attorney, Chicago is wondering how much of her predecessor's reforms she'll retain. Democrat O'Neill Burke handily beat Republican Bob Fioretti in November, taking over from Kimberly Foxx. After eight years in office, Foxx opted not to run again. Foxx had a reputation as a progressive or reform prosecutor, while O'Neill Burke is known as more law-and-order focused. Some experts say O'Neill Burke has many of the same priorities as her predecessor. In her campaign, O'Neill Burke supported the SAFE-T Act and a pretrial fairness act, which eliminated cash bail in Illinois. Ed Yohnka of the Illinois chapter of the American Civilian Liberties Union said people are too quick to frame these issues as binary when it's so early in O'Neill Burke's term. "I think there has been way too much of sort of trying to cast the progressive versus tough on crime kind of narrative," Yohnka said. An O'Neill Burke representative said she is promoting policy changes that prioritize public safety and victims of violent crime, but did not offer specifics about those policy changes. Foxx's term was mired in high profile cases and public scrutiny, but she did claim significant criminal justice reforms. Foxx' office overturned nearly 250 wrongful convictions, created programs to offer alternatives for jail terms for non-violent offenses and expunged all 15,000 marijuana case convictions since the drug was legalized. She faced criticism and had a tense relationship with the police union. Stephanie Kollman of the Children Family Justice Center at Northwestern University's Bluhm Legal Clinic, said much of the pushback stemmed her efforts to reform an office rife with problems. "When Foxx came into office, the state of the Cook County state attorneys office ... (had a] systemic gridlock and institutional racism that was really embedded in that office," Kollman said.

Shaun Golden, the sheriff of Monmouth County, N.J., wants federal officials to get to the bottom of mysterious drone activity in his state. Golden and other local officials are urging Gov. Phil Murphy to declare a state of emergency. “We continue to urge our governor to press the federal government to put more … resources out here,” Golden said Thursday on NewsNation, reports The Hill. “The only way we’re going to solve this is by the federal government coming in here and doing full investigations as to what these things are, how their movements are made. The White House insist that the drones do not represent a threat. The Pentagon said it does not appear that a foreign enemy is involved. Rep Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) claimed that the drones are being launched by an Iranian “mothership,” but Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh denied it. Meanwhile, Golden asked Murphy to issue an executive order banning nighttime use of recreational drones. Many of the drones sighted are actually manned aircraft being flown lawfully, a White House official said. John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, said there were no reported sightings in any restricted airspace. He added that the U.S. Coast Guard had not uncovered any foreign involvement from coastal vessels, The Guardian reports. One U.S. senator called for the drones to be “shot down, if necessary”, even as it remains unclear who owns them. “We should be doing some very urgent intelligence analysis and take them out of the skies, especially if they’re flying over airports or military bases,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT).

The city of Louisville and the Justice Department reached an agreement to address police misconduct after the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in 2020 brought attention to far-ranging abuses. The consent decree, comes after a DOJ investigation documented excessive use of force, illegal searches and car stops and widespread discrimination against Black people and those with mental illnesses. The agreement mandates that the police department improve those policies as well as other guidelines, including how it responds to protests and demonstrations. Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general overseeing DOJ's civil rights division, said, “This process will take time, but it will reap dividends down the line.” The agreement, which must be approved by a judge, is part of DOJ effort under President Biden to address police abuses. Overall, 13 such agreements are in place, two of which were negotiated during Biden’s term. Typically, these agreements last until the judge has found that the department achieved the established goals. Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said the new arrangement was intended to limit oversight to five years. In some cases, consent decrees can last for far longer. Baltimore Police Department operates under a consent decree that began in April 2017. Greenberg said changes have already been made since the death of Taylor , 26, who was fatally shot by the police in March 2020 during a botched raid of her apartment. The police entered unannounced and without a warrant. The city passed Breonna’s Law, which bans “no-knock” warrants in which officers break into a residence without warning. The city has offered more mental health counseling for officers, updated training programs, named an inspector general and named a civilian review board to monitor the department.

In 2022, the U.S. reached a grim peak in drug overdose deaths: Nearly 108,000 people died , more than twice the number who died in 2015, and more than four times the number in 2002. Now, in what experts hope is more than a blip, the overdose epidemic that has affected every state might be showing some signs of abating, Vox reports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s preliminary data on the 12-month period ending in June showed that overdoses dropped about 15 percentage points from the previous period. There were still roughly 94,000 deaths, signaling that the public health crisis is far from over, though a positive change could be on the horizon. The crisis was exacerbated decades ago by the increasing use of and addiction to synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, that have proliferated through the drug supply. Fentanyl was first produced in the 1960s and prescribed by doctors to people seeking relief from severe pain, such as cancer patients. A cheaper, more potent cousin of heroin, the drug soon became a favored commodity of traffickers, who began cutting other drugs with fentanyl and drawing people addicted to prescription painkillers such as oxycodone that have become increasingly more difficult to access. “There’s no one event that happened about a year and a half ago that would explain this sudden significant decrease in drug overdose deaths,” says journalist Lev Facher. “While there’s a lot of optimism in the harm reduction and addiction medicine and recovery world, it’s cautious optimism because people don’t really know what’s happening.” The simplest explanation for the drop in overdoses could be the nature of the drugs themselves; they simply may have become less toxic and less potent. Last month, Drug Enforcement Administration chief Anne Milgram suggested that the agency’s crackdowns were having a direct impact on the drug supply. Another explanation could be that harm-reduction efforts are working. Access to naloxone , the lifesaving, overdose-reversing drug, expanded significantly in the last few years. Local governments such as Los Angeles County made the drug available at schools, churches, libraries, and jails, and everyday Americans are increasingly encouraged to carry naloxone. Ae third explanation, floated by some epidemiologists, is the most bleak, and suggests that after hundreds of thousands of people were killed by drug overdoses in a relatively short time span, the epidemic is essentially burning itself out .

New York City Mayor Eric Adams met with President-elect Trump’s incoming “border czar” on Thursday, with the Democratic mayor expressing an enthusiasm to work with the incoming administration to pursue violent criminals as Trump promises mass deportations. Adams' meeting with Tom Homan, who will oversee the borders and be responsible for deportation efforts, came as Adams has welcomed parts of the president-elect’s hardline immigration platform, the Associated Press reports. Adams said he and Homan agreed on pursuing people who commit violent crimes in the city. “We’re not going to be a safe haven for those who commit repeated violent crimes against innocent migrants, immigrants and longstanding New Yorkers,” he said. “That was my conversation today with the border czar, to figure out how to go after those individuals who are repeatedly committing crimes in our city.” Homan said the two connected as career law enforcement officers and that he came away from the meeting with “a whole new outlook on the mayor.” “I’ve called him out this past year, many times, about being more of a politician than a police officer. I was wrong,” Homan told Dr. Phil McGraw on his Merit TV network. “He came through today as a police officer and a mayor that cares about the safety and security of his city.” The meeting marked Adams’ latest and most definitive step toward collaborating with the Trump administration, a development that has startled critics in one of the most liberal cities. Adams has mused about potentially scaling back the city’s so-called sanctuary policies. He has said migrants accused of crimes shouldn’t have due process rights under the Constitution, though he eventually walked back those comments. The mayor stunned Democrats when he sidestepped questions last week on whether he would consider changing parties to become a Republican, telling journalists that he was part of the “American party.” Adams clarified that he would remain a Democrat. For Adams, a centrist Democrat known for quarreling with the city’s progressive left, the recent comments on immigration follow frustration with the Biden administration over its immigration policies and a surge of international migrants in the city. Adams argues he’s trying to protect New Yorkers, pointing to the law-and-order platform he has staked out throughout his political career and while running for mayor. Adams reiterated his commitment to New York’s generous social safety net. “We’re going to tell those who are here, who are law-abiding, to continue to utilize the services that are open to the city, the services that they have a right to utilize, educating their children, health care, public protection,” he said. “But we will not be the safe haven for those who commit violent acts.”

Democrats are expressing disappointment at FBI Director Christopher Wray's decision to step down, arguing the move allows President-elect Trump to speed the agency’s transformation and skirt accountability for forcing the director out. "He should have forced Trump to fire him because by stepping down he sort of took the onus off Trump for breaking with the tradition and the policy of having FBI directors serve 10 year terms,” Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD), a former prosecutor and House Judiciary member, told The Hill. “There’s this precedent now for FBI directors stepping down when a new president comes in. And that’s not how this should work.” Trump chose Wray, a lifelong Republican, to lead the FBI after firing James Comey. He has soured on the director since nominating him for a role that would otherwise end in 2027. To succeed Wray, Trump has picked, Kash Patel, a loyalist who has echoed Trump's calls for retribution. “I’m disappointed, because I would much prefer to have continuity and viability in that office, before someone like Kash Patel gets his hands on it,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). Patel has written a book called “Government gangsters,” in which he lists 60 people he calls “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,.” including Wray and other current and former Justice Department officials. Wray didn’t name Trump in announcing his decision to leave as President Biden exits office. He told agents that the move was “the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”  Author Garrett Graff writes in Politico that "Wray’s surprise decision is, simply put, a damning decision, an abdication of leadership, and a terrifying indication of how unready Washington remains for a second Trump term ... (It) undermined decades of hard work — by Congress, presidents, the Justice Department and the FBI itself — to move it out of a partisan, political framework.