Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Kevin McCarthy Is Not the Only Loser in the House G.O.P.’s Speaker Mess - Notes from a historic debacle on Capitol Hill. - link

• The Conservative Who Wants to Bring Down the Supreme Court - The lawyer who wrote Texas’s abortion ban has a bigger project—disempowering the judiciary—that may appeal to liberals, too. - link

• The Profound Defiance of Daily Life in Kyiv - In the capital, Ukrainians track the trajectory of Russian missiles on smartphone apps, but refuse to be defeated by fear. - link

• Netanyahu’s Government Takes a Turn Toward Theocracy - The Israeli Prime Minister’s new coalition includes members who would enforce religious prohibitions over democratic liberties. - link

• How to Make Trump and the Wealthy Pay Their Taxes - Three core reforms would make the U.S. system eminently fairer for all Americans. - link

From Vox

• How Kevin McCarthy (finally) became Speaker of the House -

  

  Republican Kevin McCarthy was able to sway several far-right members of his party by agreeing to extraordinary concessions that will rewrite the politics of the House.

  Charlie Brown never kicked the football, Ralph Bellamy never got the girl, but early Saturday morning, Kevin McCarthy finally became speaker.

  On the 15th ballot, a total not reached since before the Civil War, McCarthy finally got the absolute majority of votes necessary to be elected speaker of the House. By a vote of 216 to 212 for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) with six voting present, he finally won the longest speaker’s election since Rep. William Pennington (R-NJ) won after 44 ballots on the eve of the Civil War.

  Since Tuesday, the California Republican had faced an ongoing rebellion from hard-right members of his party who did not trust him to sufficiently adhere to conservative doctrine if given power. After three days of vote after vote and late-night negotiations inside the Capitol, McCarthy finally achieved his long-desired goal of wielding the speaker’s gavel.

  After McCarthy failed again during a 14th vote late Friday night — falling short by just one vote — members of the leadership team surrounded Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to get him to change his mind after he voted present, effectively abstaining. It got so heated that Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), an ardent McCarthy ally, even lunged at Gaetz before being restrained by Reps. Richard Hudson (R-NC) and Garret Graves (R-LA).

  Rep. Hudson, R-N.C., left, pulls Rep. Rogers, R-Ala., as he confronts Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., during the 14th round of voting for speaker as the House meets for the fourth day to try and elect a speaker in Washington, Friday, Jan. 6, 2023. (@AP Photo/@andyharnik) pic.twitter.com/ok3K8ERtfU

  — Andrew Harnik (@andyharnik) January 7, 2023

In the 15th ballot which started in the waning minutes of January 6 and finished well after midnight, all of the remaining anti-McCarthy voters switched their choice to a “present” vote. That was enough to finally make McCarthy speaker.

The price he paid, though, was steep. McCarthy made a series of concessions to his critics in order to sufficiently mollify them and avoid a political deadlock. The result leaves him as a badly weakened speaker even before his first day in office. Gaetz perhaps McCarthy’s most virulent critic in the House GOP, said in a floor speech earlier Friday that even if the California Republican won, his powers would be more similar to the speaker in the British House of Commons than the American House of Representatives. In other words, McCarthy would be more of a constitutional figurehead than a powerful party leader. The concessions may not quite go that far and it’s unlikely that McCarthy will wear a black silk gown like his counterpart in Parliament. However, he’s not going to wield the same power as Nancy Pelosi did, or even Paul Ryan and John Boehner. After decades where the position of speaker has grown increasingly powerful, the deal reached Friday reduces the role of the office.

What got him over the top?

McCarthy made it with a series of concessions to the right that will give members affiliated with the House Freedom Caucus significant influence in the legislative process. Most importantly, they will get three members on the powerful House Rules Committee. The Rules Committee is not concerned with policy substance. As its chair, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), described it to Vox, “it is a process committee.” It sets the terms of debate and decides whether bills are subject to amendments on the floor or not. It has long been the redoubt of House leadership in both parties and exists, in Cole’s words, to “make sure [legislation] gets to the floor in the form that the speaker thinks is most likely to pass.”

In recent years, that has meant legislation has gone through the committee precooked with few amendments accepted inside the room and no ability to alter bills by rank-and-file members once they hit the floor. In theory, under the concessions McCarthy agreed to, the new members will now allow for more debate on bills and make it more difficult for comprehensive legislative leviathans — like the recent omnibus bill or the Democratic social spending bill dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — to be forced through the chamber.

The rebels also won concessions on limiting spending as well as a commitment by an outside super PAC affiliated with McCarthy, the Congressional Leadership Fund, not to spend in open Republican primaries in safe seats.

Perhaps the most symbolic concession, though, is the motion to vacate. This is a provision long in the House rules that allowed any individual member to offer a motion to “vacate the chair,” which would initiate a new election for speaker at any time. This tool carried great symbolism in the negotiations with McCarthy’s detractors; it was the threat used by the right in 2015 to eventually force Boehner out of the speaker’s office. Upon taking power in 2018, Pelosi changed the rules to limit its use. House Republicans pushed for it to be restored, even though McCarthy had once described it as a red line. While the California Republican had earlier conceded that the motion could be introduced with the support of five members, the threshold is now back down to one.

What happens next?

After McCarthy finally won election in the wee hours, the House moved on to passing its rules and letting everyone finally go home. In the short term, House Republicans will be able to pass through some of the agenda that they campaigned on in the days and weeks to come, including legislation to reverse the funding increase for the Internal Revenue Service contained in the IRA as well as legislation to address the southern border and illegal immigration. These will be nonstarters in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

In the long term, McCarthy’s concessions set the table for another major showdown over the debt ceiling in the months to come. The federal government will soon run up against the limit of $31.4 trillion and conservatives will demand that the Biden White House make concessions in order to approve raising the limit. This means a high-stakes showdown that would put the good faith and credit of the United States at risk. A similar showdown in 2011 under John Boehner led to the United States’ credit rating being reduced for the first time in history. But unlike then, far-right conservatives in the House will have a lot more power, and the Republican speaker will be in a much weaker political position.

• The deal that may make Kevin McCarthy speaker, explained -

  

  What we know so far about a proposal that could hand a lot of power to the hard right.

  After days of negotiations and failed votes in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy and his House GOP leadership allies have crafted a proposed agreement with holdouts on the right that has brought him quite close to becoming speaker.

  Though those involved continue to stress there is no final “deal” in hand — they’re calling it a “framework” — McCarthy presented an offer Thursday night. And over the course of the new rounds of voting for speaker Friday, 15 of the 21 GOP holdouts’ votes swung in his favor. If he swings just three of the remaining six recalcitrant Republicans, he’ll have the support he needs. Some reporting suggests he thinks he’ll get there when the House reconvenes late Friday night.

  So what, exactly, is in that deal — er, framework?

  The full proposal hasn’t leaked, but parts of it have, and from what we know, there appear to be three main components.

  First: McCarthy made promises about how he would approach government-spending-related issues like appropriations bills and the debt ceiling, and those promises appear to set the stage for tense showdowns with Democrats.

  Second: McCarthy agreed to a change in the House rules that would make it easier to trigger an effective no-confidence vote in his own leadership.

  Third: McCarthy agreed to committee assignments demanded by the holdouts, including placing Republicans associated with the hardline Freedom Caucus on the powerful Rules Committee.

  This likely isn’t everything McCarthy gave away — he probably also made various other specific promises to specific people in private. But the overall upshot is that the right flank of the GOP will have a major say in how McCarthy runs his House, and that there will be tense times ahead as they try to tackle the basic work of governance.

  That was always going to be the case, though, and the real questions are still about if and how House Republicans manage to climb down and make a deal with Democrats on keeping the government open and preventing a default on the country’s debt.

  1. McCarthy’s commitments on the debt ceiling and spending

  The framework, or at least what we know of it, covers McCarthy’s plan for how he and the House GOP will handle the thorny government spending fights that will likely dominate the legislative agenda this year. Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Times obtained text of this part of the framework and tweeted it in this thread. The important bits include:

  The debt ceiling

  At some point this year, Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling to prevent a potentially catastrophic default on the national debt. Conservatives want to use this must-pass bill as leverage, to force Democrats into accepting spending cuts they want. (This is a strategy the House GOP previously used in a 2011 showdown with President Obama.) Democrats have said this would be hostage-taking, and that they won’t negotiate with it.

  According to Ferrechio, McCarthy’s offer states: “We will not agree to a debt limit increase absent a discretionary budgetary agreement in line with the House-passed budget resolution or other commensurate fiscal reforms to reduce and cap the growth of spending.”

  This is basically a promise to try to drive a hard bargain on the debt ceiling battle. McCarthy had already said he’d do this last October, so it’s not new. But it does set up a dangerous situation for later this year.

  Budget

  McCarthy commits that House Republicans will create a plan for a balanced federal budget within 10 years, including “long-term reforms” to mandatory spending programs (entitlements like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid), as well as capping discretionary spending where it was during the first fiscal year of the Biden administration.

  This will be a politically perilous and controversial effort — it has already led to headlines pointing out it would mean cutting $75 billion in defense spending from current levels. And any such budget, if the House does manage to pass one, would be dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But Republicans on the right likely hope it will serve as a statement of their principles and a tough opening bid in negotiations over spending.

  Senate negotiations

  In recent years, Congress has tended to fund the government by running up to the deadline where previous funding bills would expire — which would mean a government shutdown — and then passing either a “continuing resolution” extending status quo funding levels for a time or one massive “omnibus” bill funding the whole federal government (as just happened last month). Spending hawks in the GOP hate this practice, and they want to put a stop to it. But they know they don’t have unilateral power to do so, because Democrats control the Senate and Biden controls the presidency.

  McCarthy’s proposal, then, is that the House would not pass any Senate appropriations bills that don’t comply with the House’s own budget resolution. That is — they’re saying Democrats must cave to their demands on spending levels. Democrats will not want to do this, so if they stick to it, it probably means a government shutdown.

  Still, again, this should probably be interpreted as what McCarthy is telling House Republicans he’ll do initially, rather than his drop-dead bottom line — though more on this below.

  For all of these spending topics, the House GOP will not be formally bound in any way by this framework. So if they feel political pain from being blamed for a shutdown or a potential debt default, these promises could go out the window.

  2. Making a no-confidence vote in McCarthy’s leadership easier to request

  If McCarthy violates his spending agreements in a way some conservatives dislike, they’ll have a way to put him through the wringer.

  For most of its history, the House gave any one member the power to file a privileged “motion to vacate the chair,” which would force the House to vote on whether to depose the speaker. Hardly anyone ever used it, but when then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) filed one to try to push out Speaker John Boehner in 2015, it helped contribute to Boehner’s decision to resign. Democrats then greatly weakened this power when they took over the House in 2019, requiring not just one member but half of a party’s members to advance this motion.

  Conservatives wanted to roll back this change, but McCarthy was initially reluctant to fully do so, offering instead to require five members. After losing his first few speaker votes, though, he gave in and said he’d let one member do it.

  All this matters because the dynamics of the speaker election, as we’re currently seeing, can give stubborn rebels great leverage over party leaders. But once the speaker is elected, the hardliners lose that leverage — unless there’s an easy way to force another speaker election. Now they have one.

  Still, there’s a reason almost nobody has ever used this in the House’s history — it would still take 218 votes to elect someone else speaker, and if the vast majority of House Republicans remain loyal to McCarthy, there will just be gridlock. Additionally, if McCarthy is put through this after cutting a deal with Democrats, it’s possible Democrats could then save him from a hard-right revolt in return.

  3. Plum committee assignments for the hardliners

  Finally, McCarthy made an offer of some kind involving committee assignments that the rebels were demanding. Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), who switched from an anti-McCarthy to a pro-McCarthy vote after he had the framework in hand Friday, described this issue as “conservative representation” in the House.

  The details here still appear to be in flux. But Politico’s Sarah Ferris reported that McCarthy would let the hardliners have three seats on the House Rules Committee.

  The Rules Committee is important because it determines what will come to the House floor, when it will be brought, and how debate and amendments over it will proceed. In recent decades, it has essentially done the bidding of the speaker of the House — indeed, it’s one of the main sources of the speaker’s power over the chamber.

  So handing over some committee seats to firebrand conservatives who have a tendency to try and muck up party leaders’ agenda would be quite a change. Per Ferris, three seats for hardliners would be enough to let them block legislation from moving through the committee (unless Democrats provide their own votes to help get a bill through).

  There have been rumors of other promises made about committee seats and subcommittee chairmanships. Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), one staunchly conservative holdout, reportedly wanted to chair the appropriations subcommittee on labor and health and human services, but other Republicans objected. Harris finally backed McCarthy in a speaker vote Friday afternoon, but there was no word on whether a deal had been struck on that.

• The horrifying revelations of the Idaho student murders -

  

  What the Idaho student murder investigation tells us about how criminal justice should work.

  What made their deaths all the more terrifying was how elusive their killer seemed — until a sudden arrest made everything even scarier.

  Sometime after midnight on November 13, four University of Idaho students — Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves — were all viciously attacked while sleeping in an off-campus townhouse. They were each, as eventual criminal charges would reflect, “stabbed and murdered with premeditation with malice and forethought.”

  Throughout the seven tense weeks that followed, the case now known as the Idaho student murders rocked the small town of Moscow, Idaho, became a riveting true crime obsession, and sparked a global media frenzy.

  But although everything that happened after their deaths would become international news, the lead-up to the quadruple homicide was completely uneventful. And so, nothing seemed to stick: There were no suspicious actions, changes, or alarming behaviors prior to the murders, and no immediate suspects, no big compelling clues, no key witnesses in the aftermath. An unknown intruder or intruders had simply entered the house, stabbed to death four of the six sleeping students inside, and then quietly slipped into the night.

  Still, as the University of Idaho community struggled to come to terms with the killings and cope with their fear of the perpetrator, local and federal investigators were hard at work. By late December, despite the massive amount of resources devoted to the investigation, along with a stream of steady case updates, the case appeared to be on the verge of going cold. But on December 30, Moscow police announced they’d made an arrest in the case.

  Bryan Kohberger, 28, had no apparent connection to any of the victims. Instead, he was a graduate student at a neighboring university, with an unsettling history and an obsession with true crime. The abrupt identification of the alleged killer, and the excavation of his personal background, meant that one of the most senseless, shocking crimes in recent memory became even more tragic.

  Had four devoted friends — two of whom were dating, two of whom were lifelong best friends — lost their lives to a would-be serial killer?

  The probable cause affidavit for the arrest, released Thursday after Kohberger’s first court appearance, sheds new light on an extraordinarily horrific crime and the equally extraordinary criminal investigation that followed it. What finally led to Kohberger’s arrest was simply excellent investigative work: a mix of well-organized policing, groundbreaking forensics using genetic genealogy, and old-fashioned detective work.

  The murders

  Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves were all University of Idaho undergraduates, all involved in the campus Greek system, and all fast friends. Kernodle, 20, was a bubbly junior majoring in marketing; she was dating Chapin, 20, a triplet and a fun-loving sports management major. Mogen and Goncalves, both 21, had been inseparable since the sixth grade. They did everything together: lived together, went to school together, and, ultimately, died side by side.

  On the night of Saturday, November 12, 2022, everything seemed normal. Kernodle and Chapin went to a party at the Sigma Chi fraternity; Mogen and Goncalves went out to a bar, then hung out at a food truck for a bit. By 2 am Sunday, according to the probable cause affidavit, everyone had gathered at the house on King Road where Mogen, Goncalves, and Kernodle lived with two other roommates. The three-story house was accessible primarily by a secure door with a coded entry on the bottom floor, as well as by a sliding glass door on the main level (second floor) of the house. The lower entry was locked, but the sliding glass door might have been more easily accessible.

  Angela Palermo/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

  At 4 am, Kernodle ordered Jack-in-the-Box; at 4:12 am, she was on her phone, surfing TikTok. Sometime in the next few minutes, the attack began. She tried to fight off her attacker — but by 4:25 am, she and her boyfriend would both be dead.

  Note: the following section contains disturbing details of the crime.

  The killer attacked on the second and third floors of the house, entering each of the victims’ rooms for separate attacks — but he left the roommates on the lowest floor alive. He used a large Ka-Bar knife of the style used by the US Marine Corps.

  Nearby surveillance footage captured audio of the attacks around 4:17 am, including distressed sounds and barking from Goncalves’s dog. As revealed in the affidavit, one roommate told police she heard noises and crying, but didn’t understand what she was hearing. Although she opened her door repeatedly to see what was happening, she saw nothing alarming — though she did report hearing Goncalves say, “There’s someone here.” Some time later, over sounds of crying coming from Kernodle’s room, she heard a male voice saying, “It’s okay, I’m going to help you.”

  The third time she opened her door, it was to the sight of a man clad all in black and wearing a mask, walking toward her. As she stood in “frozen shock,” the killer walked by her room; it’s unclear whether or not he saw her. With his face mostly covered, the roommate noted the only thing she could see clearly: the suspect’s “bushy eyebrows.” That detail would later prove accurate.

  Still stunned, the roommate returned to her room and locked her door, while the killer exited through the sliding glass door on the apartment’s main floor.

  Then he vanished.

  The aftermath: A media frenzy and public speculation run amok

  On Sunday, at 11:58 am, 911 received a phone call from a roommate’s phone, during which multiple people at the scene spoke to the dispatcher.

  This 911 call has not been released, but there’s been considerable confusion due to reports of “an unconscious person” at the scene. Police clarified that “the surviving roommates summoned friends to the residence because they believed one of the second-floor victims had passed out and was not waking up”; this statement, however, led to widespread bafflement from the public about how a bloody crime scene involving multiple fatalities could have been so misunderstood and misreported.

  The murders immediately made national headlines and left the community in disbelief. Despite police initially stating there was no “ongoing community risk,” the panic was real. Once news of the deaths broke, so many students on the 11,000-member University of Idaho campus fled the school that the university decided to allow students an optional early Thanksgiving break. Concerned calls to 911 spiked, and residents expressed fear of a Ted Bundy-like predator stalking and choosing their victims randomly. Early police statements didn’t help clear this up; after initially releasing contradictory statements about whether the attack had been personal or random, police settled on the inclusive conclusion that it was “an isolated, targeted attack,” but that they had “not concluded if the target was the residence or its occupants.”

  Ted S. Warren/AP

  Online sleuths immediately latched onto the murders, with speculation running rampant both locally and online. Police released bodycam footage taken the night of the murders, from unrelated nearby interactions. It’s unclear if the footage led to tips that proved useful in Kohberger’s eventual arrest, but it did lead to a flurry of rumors and speculation that brief, blurry motion in the background of the video might be a group of people running from the crime scene.

  On the hunt for clues, people pored over the four victims’ social media, accusing everyone from their friends to random people who showed up in the background of Instagram photos. The food truck, which ran a Twitch livestream, became a huge source of public speculation, with people examining footage of Goncalves and Mogen hanging out by the truck, looking for any clues that someone may have been stalking the two women.

  Police had to issue statements formally clearing multiple people (and one animal) of suspicion, including the surviving roommates, an ex-boyfriend of one of the victims who she had repeatedly called the night of the attack, a random man who was at the food truck, and, most bizarrely, a University of Idaho professor who was fingered for the crime by the “inner spirit” of a tarot reader on TikTok. (The tarot reader continues to insist the professor ordered Kohberger to carry out the murders.)

  That bonkers sidebar in this morbid case lends an idea of how chaotic things looked from the sidelines: a heinous crime, with an apparent lack of witnesses, no significant leads, and a lack of serious suspects — but plenty of distracting, obfuscating, unhelpful social media noise. When, on December 7, police asked the public for help locating a white Hyundai Elantra that had allegedly been spotted at the crime scene, it seemed to many people to be less like a real, promising lead and more like busywork: After all, a generic white car? What could be more of a needle in a haystack?

  But as improbable as it seemed, police focus on that generic white car was exactly right.

  Five days after the murders, a criminology doctoral student at Washington State University changed the title on his white 2015 Hyundai Elantra, before driving it cross-country from Idaho to his parents’ home in Pennsylvania. His attempts to prevent authorities from tracing the car, however, overlooked one thing:

  Police had his DNA.

  The investigation and arrest of Bryan Kohberger

  What’s striking about the investigation into Kohberger, as the affidavit makes clear, is both how quickly police homed in on him as a person of interest, and how seamlessly multiple law enforcement agencies worked together to apprehend him — collaborating across multiple states, jurisdictions, and even the country.

  The first big lead in the case came from nearby surveillance footage, which captured a “white sedan” repeatedly circling the neighborhood between 3:20 am and 4:20 am.

  David Ryder/Getty Images

  Police tracked the car to Pullman, Washington, about 10 miles away, home to the Washington State University campus. Meanwhile, an FBI expert identified the make and model, and even narrowed down the year range of the car: a 2014-2016 Hyundai Elantra.

  With that detail in hand, WSU campus police officers quickly tracked down a Hyundai Elantra owner who attended the school and lived near the last place the car had been seen on surveillance the night of November 13: Kohberger.

  By November 29, just over two weeks after the murders, the Moscow Police Department had a copy of Kohberger’s driver’s license photo, complete with his “bushy eyebrows.”

  Cell phone records showed Kohberger’s phone traveling from Pullman in the direction of Moscow the night of the murders, before it was shut off completely between 2:47 am and 4:48 am — “consistent with Kohberger attempting to conceal his location during the quadruple homicide,” according to the affidavit. They also showed Kohberger apparently returning to the scene of the crime in Moscow at approximately 9 am that day — still several hours before authorities would be alerted to the scene — and then immediately returning to his house in Pullman.

  But while authorities had strong circumstantial evidence tying Kohberger and his white car to the crime, the smoking gun in this case had been recovered from the crime scene on the first day of the investigation: an empty knife sheath with a trace of DNA from an unknown male.

  Armed with this clue, authorities turned to the groundbreaking technique that’s led to arrests in many cases since the 2018 arrest of the Golden State Killer: genetic DNA matching. In this process, investigators upload DNA to genealogy websites and then build out a potential family tree for a suspect (or, in many cases, an unidentified missing person). Then, using context clues and other practical detective work, they follow the family tree and trace which member is most likely to be a match.

  The use of genetic genealogy is controversial. Currently, only two genealogy websites, GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, allow law enforcement to use DNA from their users. Both are opt-in, meaning the user has to give explicit consent for the use, though GEDmatch encourages users to opt in and boasts that its genetic DNA matching has assisted in closing over 500 cold cases. That number seems accurate given how regularly genetic DNA matching is now used to solve crimes — and it may soon be even higher thanks to a recently developed predictive algorithm that could allow police to more quickly zoom in on the correct branch of a DNA family tree.

  Police were able to match the DNA on the knife sheath with DNA from Kohberger’s father, gathered from trash at Kohberger’s parents’ home. And that match was definitive, excluding 99.99 percent of the population from being the father of the suspect.

  Meanwhile, Kohberger and his dad embarked on a multi-day road trip from Washington to Pennsylvania. License plate readers across the country mapped them traveling from state to state: Colorado, Indiana, Pennsylvania. On December 15, they were stopped twice by Indiana patrol officers in a very short timespan for tailgating. A law enforcement source later told Fox News that a task force which had Kohberger under surveillance requested that the Indiana troopers pull him over specifically so that they could get a glimpse of his hands to see if there were any cuts or other injuries. (In bodycam footage of one of the two stops, Kohberger and his father appear only briefly on camera.)

  On December 30, after surveilling Kohberger for several days, the Pennsylvania State Police executed a raid on the home of his parents in the largely rural Chestnuthill Township, complete with smashed windows and broken doors. After being extradited back to Idaho, all the while under constant media scrutiny, Kohberger appeared in the Latah County District Court in Moscow on Thursday, January 5, and documents related to his arrest were unsealed by the court.

  Ted S. Warren/Getty Images

  That was the first time the world had heard of Bryan Kohberger. But internet sleuths quickly got to work uncovering his strange and ominous background.

  The fallout: Kohberger, his background — and what’s next

  Kohberger was a Pennsylvania native who grew up in the suburbs. His high school classmates described him as “analytical,” interested in human behaviors — but one friend described a physically and emotionally abusive friendship to the New York Times that “got so, so bad that I just shut down when I was around him.”

  Kohberger graduated from Northampton Community College in 2018 with an associate degree in psychology; two years later, he graduated from DeSales University, then went on to study criminology there as a grad student. While there, he took classes under legendary forensic profiler Katherine Ramsland, a household name in the world of true crime thanks to her long career and dozens of books covering famous cases. He also participated in a research study into criminal behavior, for which he recruited on Reddit using a retroactively chilling descriptor: “This study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense, with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience.” After getting his master’s degree in 2022, he began studying at Washington State as a criminology and criminal justice doctoral student.

  There are striking parallels between Kohberger and the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo Jr. Both men gravitated to law enforcement: DeAngelo was a police officer; Kohberger worked as a security guard for a local school district and had recently applied for an internship with his local police department, claiming he wanted to aid rural law enforcement with data collection and analysis. Both had glowing newspaper write-ups for small acts of valor they had performed.

  Both men also cased their crime scenes extensively: phone records showed Kohberger returning to the area of the King Road house again and again — “on at least 12 occasions” per the affidavit — beginning in June 2022, the earliest date that police could obtain records. That might be significant for multiple reasons. One of the rumors police downplayed about the case was that Kaylee Goncalves had expressed fear of a “stalker” in the weeks prior to the murders. This led to heated speculation that Goncalves was the focus of the attack, but authorities have never confirmed this. The evidence, instead, might point toward Kohberger being fixated, as authorities originally suggested, on the house itself.

  Kaylee’s father, Steve Goncalves, who’d been critical of police during the many weeks of scant updates, had nothing but praise for the investigation after the arrest, stating in a January 5 interview that “all is forgiven.”

  “People think Idaho is so old-fashioned and outback, but these guys — they hit a home run, man,” he said. “That affidavit is impressive.”

  “Impressive” might be an understatement: The swiftness with which police managed to identify, carefully build a strong case against Kohberger, track him across the country, and arrest him, all while working with multiple agencies and somehow managing to keep his identity from leaking to the public, is extremely rare. It’s even more extraordinary given how many victims were involved, how unusual the crime was, how many agencies were involved, and how intense the public and media scrutiny was.

  The triumph of the investigation, however, is tempered by the realization that Kohberger seems to have been working the criminal justice system in order to become a better criminal. Each half of the resolution to this case is a cold counter to the other: On the one hand, a picture of what we all, desperately, want policing to look like; on the other, a picture of what the criminal justice system too often becomes: exploitable.

  Still, it’s easy to imagine this investigation becoming a major case study for what effective policing can and should look like: law enforcement working with the community and with each other, and building the case methodically, based solely on the evidence.

  Perhaps most unusual of all is just how strong the case against Kohberger appears from the outset. Eyewitness? Check. Video surveillance of his car? Check. DNA match? Check. Implicating cell phone records? Loads. Even without the added circumstantial evidence of Kohberger’s own obsession with criminal psychology, this would be a hard defense to mount.

  And we know all of this just from the probable cause affidavit — which typically only contains enough information to make the case for an arrest. The trial process itself will likely reveal much more information about the crime and the alleged criminal.

  Although the probable cause affidavit was unsealed and made public, Latah County Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall had previously issued a non-dissemination order — a gag order — in the case, forbidding authorities to communicate with the media. It’s not clear how that order will affect the future release of public documents in the case. Kohberger’s preliminary hearing is scheduled for January 12. He is currently being held without bail on four felony charges of first-degree murder and one charge of burglary with intent to commit a felony.

  While the focus remains on the four deceased victims, the surviving roommates have also had to deal with their own trauma, as well as endure public suspicion and scrutiny. At the January 5 hearing, the judge granted a request for a no-contact order for a period of two years between the families of the four victims and their roommates — another sad grace note in a case full of heartbreaking details.

  Still, the bond these friends all shared can’t be broken. They leave us a legacy of living life to the fullest, of unabashed joy and camaraderie that shines throughout the wide digital footprint of the students’ social media. In a now-famous Instagram post, made on the day of the murders, Goncalves snapped several photos of her roommates, including Kernodle, Mogen, and Chapin. “One lucky girl to be surrounded by these ppl everyday,” she wrote.

  Instagram

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• Count Of Savoy, Lazarus, King’s Ransom and Ahead Of My Time excel -

• Aralina, Mazal Tov, Salento, Irish Coffee, Ravishing Form and Prana excel -

• Chetan Sharma retained as chairman of selectors - The other selectors are S. Sharath, Subroto Banerjee, Salil Ankola and Shiv Sunder Das.

• Lovepreet and Gurdeep bag gold -

From The Hindu: National News

• Sankranti holidays for schools in Andhra Pradesh from January 12 to 18 -

• 15 injured in bus accident -

• CJI Chandrachud to be conferred with ‘Award for Global Leadership’ by Harvard Law School Center - At the event, professor David Wilkins of the Harvard Law School will also have a conversation with the CJI

• Cannot put clock back: Supreme Court refuses to stop operations of Noida Metro - Keeping the question of law open, a Bench of Justices M.R. Shah and C.T. Ravikumar said the metro services in Delhi and Noida are being used by the public at large.

• AAP MLA Dr. Balbir Singh sworn in as Punjab Cabinet Minister - The development comes shortly after Fauja Singh Sarari resigned as Cabinet minister.

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine war: Russians accused of opening fire despite Putin’s unilateral truce - A unilateral ceasefire called by Russia breaks down within hours of coming into effect.

• In pictures: Orthodox Christians around the world mark Christmas - Some 200 million people are marking the holiday, one of the most important dates in the faith.

• Ukraine war: Western allies to send fighting vehicles to Kyiv - Germany and the US agree to join France in boosting Ukraine’s military capability on the battlefield.

• Filippo Bernardini: Italian admits stealing unpublished books - Margaret Atwood, Sally Rooney and Ethan Hawke were all targets of phishing scams.

• Spain tobacco firms to pay to clean up cigarette butts - Cigarette manufacturers will also have to educate smokers not to throw away butts in public.

From Ars Technica

• Ancient Roman concrete could self-heal thanks to “hot mixing” with quicklime - Mysterious lime clasts, dismissed as defects, turn out to serve a useful purpose. - link

• Apple rolls out AI-narrated audiobooks, and it’s probably the start of a trend - “This audiobook features ‘Madison’—a digital voice based on a human narrator.” - link

• Google’s split-screen Android Auto revamp is rolling out now - The new panel design fits big screens, wide screens, and small screens. - link

• FDA approves new Alzheimer’s treatment despite risks, unclear benefits - The drug’s price has already been set at $26,500 per year. - link

• ChatGPT is enabling script kiddies to write functional malware - For a beta, ChatGPT isn’t all that bad at writing fairly decent malware. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• My next door neighbor with massive boobs keeps walking around the backyard topless. -

  I wish his wife would do the same.

  submitted by /u/akirbydrinks
  [link] [comments]

• What do you get when you eat 3.14 slices of cake? -

  Diabetes.

  What?, did you really think I was gonna make a pie joke on my cake day?

  ^{btw I waited 1 whole year to tell this joke}

  submitted by /u/AdvaitChowdhary
  [link] [comments]

• I said to my boss the other day, “I need to leave early today, I’m going to be a father!” He replied, “Of course! Take the afternoon off.” When I returned to work the next day, he came to my desk, smiled and asked, “Well, how’d it go? Is it a boy or a girl?” I shrugged, “I don’t know…” -

  “I’ll tell you in nine months!”

  submitted by /u/madazzahatter
  [link] [comments]

• Did you hear about the non-binary gold prospector? -

  They dug up a fortune in them/their hills.

  submitted by /u/dirtybird971
  [link] [comments]

• My son asked me, “Dad, can I eat the last piece of cake in the fridge?” I smiled and said, “Sure…” -

  “But the dining room would probably be more comfortable.”

  submitted by /u/madazzahatter
  [link] [comments]