Chris Francescani

Facing an existential threat, hundreds of the most iconic independent rock clubs in America have banded together to do the unthinkable in an industry forged on pride, risk, ingenuity and imagination.

Last month, a coalition of club owners now numbering more than 1,600 -- the National Independent Venue Association -- hired top-shelf Capitol Hill lobbyists to petition Congress for financial assistance.

"We're in dark times," said Michael Swier of New York's Bowery Ballroom. "The unknowns are just staggering. It's hard to see the entrance to the tunnel, let alone the light at the end of it."

The novel coronavirus has already claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. But experts fear that number could be far higher at this point in the outbreak -- perhaps by tens of thousands -- once the pandemic subsides enough for officials to go back and make a true reckoning of the dead.

The plot had the hallmarks of an international spy thriller: a desperate pathologist, a contact code-named “Strawberry,” a secret associate in China, tense waiting games, a six-figure payout, an 11th-hour international rescue mission – and then a gut-punch twist ending.

The haul was significant: 100,000 COVID-19 diagnostic tests airlifted from Shanghai to Seattle.

As much of the nation adjusts this week to sudden, indefinite home confinement, prison and jail wardens nationwide are scrambling to forestall nightmare scenario: an outbreak of COVID-19 inside a crowded U.S. correctional facility.

With the world's highest incarceration rate, the U.S. faces unique challenges among its roughly 2.3 million inmates as the coronavirus surges silently through America.

“People refer to cruise ships as petri dishes, but nobody has invented a more effective vector for transmitting disease than a city jail,” said former NYC corrections commissioner Martin Horn.

Two more women took the witness stand in New York on Wednesday, weeping as they described unwanted sexual encounters with Harvey Weinstein in 2004 and 2005.
Dawn Dunning and Tarale Wulff are two of three "prior bad acts" witnesses called in to support prosecutors' efforts to demonstrate a pattern by Weinstein of grooming and then sexually assaulting women looking for work in Hollywood.

The defense's first witness in the Harvey Weinstein rape trial took the stand late on Thursday to challenge actress Annabella Sciorra's account of being raped by the disgraced producer and stumbled memorably through a cross-examination when a series of texts he sent to Weinstein were read aloud in court to the witness' surprise.

"Listen," the agitated witness explained at one point. "I'm learning a lot now and I had no idea that my text messages would end up in a courtroom."

"Sopranos" actress Annabella Sciorra took the witness stand on Thursday at Harvey Weinstein's criminal trial and testified in wrenching detail about the night nearly 30 years ago that she said the disgraced Hollywood producer violently raped her at her apartment.

Sciorra's testimony is the first and among the most highly anticipated at a pivotal moment in the #MeToo movement as Weinstein faces rape and sexual assault charges in New York.

Experts in sexual assault and victims' advocates say that the use of so-called “prior bad acts” witnesses – women with credible sexual assault claims against a defendant which fall outside the statute of limitations for prosecution – are an increasingly vital tool for prosecutors at a time when the #MeToo movement is drawing forth long-delayed reports of sex abuse.

Yet critics contend these witnesses can serve to tilt the case unfairly against the defendant and subvert the spirit of the law.

Harvey Weinstein’s rape and sexual assault trial, which begins Monday in New York City, has already seen more backstage drama, intrigue, infighting and cast changes than the Hollywood legal thriller that it could very well become one day.

New technology driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is helping prison wardens and sheriffs around the country crack unsolved crimes and thwart everything from violence and drug smuggling to attempted suicides -- in near real time, in some cases -- through digitally mass-monitoring millions of phone calls inside the nation’s sprawling prison and jail systems.

A long line of well-heeled, would-be presidents have sought the White House, banking on their money overcoming a lack of name recognition or raw experience in retail politics, and fallen short -- at times spectacularly.

But Steyer, a billionaire and Democratic mega-donor, could become the first to test whether President Donald Trump’s electoral success in 2016 has changed that calculus.

In a wide-ranging interview with ABC News which touched far more on the personal than the political, Steyer spoke at length about his faith, his fortune, his quirks and his passions.

The U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service program has reached what critics describe as an acute crisis point marked by a recent rash of suicides, psychotic episodes, a murder-suicide, a bomb plot, devastating health problems and a pervasive sense of dread and depression among the ranks of the most elite cadre of marksmen and women in the nation, according to a month-long ABC News investigation into the secretive federal agency.

A skeptical panel of appellate judges peppered Cosby's attorneys with challenges to their arguments, while barely interrupting a pair of prosecutors during oral arguments in Cosby's appeal.
State law bars uncharged criminal accusations from trials, but prosecutors convinced a judge of an underlying pattern of "prior bad acts." Cosby has had dozens of sex assault allegations made against him recently.
The strategy is also being tested elsewhere. A New York judge is deciding whether to allow additional accusers to testify to uncharged crimes against Harvey Weinstein.

When Jeffrey Epstein was born in January 1953 to working class parents living in a rented, second-floor apartment on Maple Avenue on New York City's Coney Island, no one could have predicted the extraordinary heights of wealth to which he would climb as a Wall Street money manager.

Nor could anyone have predicted the depths to which he would plunge from that privileged perch.

The #MeToo movement has unearthed numerous, shocking allegations about the abuse of women by powerful men, but no case to date has surfaced such a damning set of allegations as those now leveled against Epstein.

Prosecutors in Nantucket on Wednesday dropped a felony sexual assault charge against the actor Kevin Spacey, after watching their case against the actor slowly fall apart under scrutiny from Spacey's defense team during months of contentious pre-trial hearings that unfolded in the resort island's lone courtroom.

The criminal case against Spacey appeared to be plagued nearly from the start by one stunning revelation after another about missteps by the case investigators, the prosecutors and the alleged victim's relatives and civil attorney.