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Thursday, October 17, 2024

What we know about Liam Payne's death, including some of the unanswered questions

Repost Ent dalamlima.blogspot.com

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- Argentine authorities continue to investigate the death of former One Direction singer Liam Payne, who died Wednesday at age 31 after falling three stories from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires.

Payne was a beloved member of the group, which formed in 2010 after its members — Payne, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik — auditioned for “The X-Factor” singing competition series as solo acts and were brought together by judge Simon Cowell to form the band. They became one of the most successful boy bands of all time, with a loyal fan base of “Directioners” and a meteoric rise to fame on par with Beatlemania.

Here is what we know — and what remains unknown — about the star's untimely death.

Hotel staff at the Casa Sur Hotel in the chic Palermo neighborhood of Argentina’s capital where Payne was staying called the police Wednesday evening with concerns about a guest who they say was “overwhelmed with drugs and alcohol.” Police rushed to the hotel and responded to the call just after 5 p.m. local time and they later confirmed they arrived just minutes before the fall.

The hotel manager can be heard on a 911 call obtained by The Associated Press saying the guest was “destroying the entire room” and added, "We need you to send someone, please.” The manager’s voice became more anxious as the call went on, noting the room had a balcony.

Officials said Payne's fall injuries alone were enough to cause his death, but prosecutors described Payne’s case as “suspicious,” citing the likelihood that the star had been drinking alcohol and taking drugs. The office also confirmed all signs pointed to Payne being alone at the time of the incident and authorities have ordered a toxicology report.

Whether the fall was intentional or accidental remains unknown, but the public prosecutor said the lack of defensive injuries on Payne’s hands indicated that “he did not adopt a reflexive posture to protect himself and that he could have fallen into a state of semi- or total unconsciousness.”

Buenos Aires police said they found Payne’s hotel room “in complete disarray.” They saw “various items broken” and recovered packs of clonazepam, a central nervous system depressant, energy supplements and other over-the-counter drugs strewn among his belongings.

Forensics teams also reported that authorities recovered a whiskey bottle, lighter and cellphone from the internal courtyard where Payne’s body was found. Evidence collected from the scene, a statement from Argentine authorities added, suggested Payne “was going through some kind of substance abuse episode.”

In recent years, Payne had acknowledged struggling with alcoholism, saying in a YouTube video posted in July 2023 that he had been sober for six months after receiving treatment.

As police and prosecutors await the results of the toxicology report, they are continuing the investigation and trying to reconstruct Payne's final moments. Authorities said they took statements from three hotel employees and two women who had visited Payne in his hotel room hours before his fall. The two women had left the hotel by the time of the incident, the prosecution said.

TMZ, a celebrity news site known for its scoops and tabloid sensibilities, initially included cropped photos of Payne's body after the fall that featured his identifying tattoos in their early reporting Wednesday. After receiving swift backlash, the site pulled the photos.

In the updated version of the story, the outlet wrote, “TMZ has seen a photo showing Liam’s body on the deck at the hotel with tables and chairs nearby” and proceeded to describe the tattoos and how the image helped to confirm early reports of Payne's death.

Fans took to social media to express outrage at the outlet for its decision to share the photos.

TMZ did not immediately return requests for comment.

The photos are still circulating on social media, as well as a video of a man jumping from a building on fire that users are mistakenly taking as a video of Payne’s fall. Several other videos of falls or jumps from balconies have been circulating, as well. X’s “community notes” feature, where readers can provide context and — in this case — debunk falsely represented content, are present on several, but not all posts.

The surviving members of One Direction — Horan, Tomlinson, Styles and Malik — put out a statement Thursday saying they are “completely devastated” by Payne's death.

"In time, and when everyone is able to, there will be more to say. But for now, we will take some time to grieve and process the loss of our brother, who we loved dearly. The memories we shared with him will be treasured forever,” their statement concluded.

Malik, Tomlinson and Styles also shared individual tributes on their Instagram pages Thursday, each writing about their close friendships with Payne. All three wrote again that they are “devastated.”

Malik and Tomlinson addressed Payne directly in their statements, each of them calling him their brother. Tomlinson wrote that he wants to “be the Uncle” for Payne's 7-year-old son, Bear, and plans to “tell him stories of how amazing his dad was.”

Payne had his son, Bear Grey Payne, with his former girlfriend, the musician Cheryl, in 2017. He is also survived by his parents, Geoff and Karen Payne, and his two older sisters, Ruth and Nicola.

___

Huamani reported from Los Angeles.

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What we know about Liam Payne's death, including some of the unanswered questions
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October 18, 2024 at 06:47AM

McConnell called Trump 'stupid" and 'despicable' in private after the 2020 election, a new book says

Repost Ent dalamlima.blogspot.com

WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered," a “despicable human being" and a “narcissist,” according to excerpts from a new biography of the Senate Republican leader that will be released this month.

McConnell made the remarks in private as part of a series of personal oral histories that he made available to Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press. Tackett’s book, “The Price of Power,” draws from almost three decades of McConnell’s recorded diaries and from years of interviews with the normally reticent Kentucky Republican.

The animosity between Trump and McConnell is well known — Trump once called McConnell " a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack." But McConnell's private comments are by far his most brutal assessment of the former president and could be seized on by Democrats before the Nov. 5 election. The biography will be released Oct. 29, one week before Election Day that will decide if Trump returns to the White House.

Despite those strong words, McConnell has endorsed Trump’s 2024 run, saying earlier this year “it should come as no surprise” that he would support the Republican party's nominee. He shook Trump’s hand in June when Trump visited GOP senators on Capitol Hill.

McConnell, 82, announced this year that he will step aside as Republican leader after the election but stay in the Senate through the end of his term in 2026.

The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races.

Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”

“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “that's been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”

Before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”

Trump was also holding up a coronavirus aid package at the time, despite bipartisan support. “This despicable human being,” McConnell said in his oral history, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”

On Jan. 6, soon after he made those comments, McConnell was holed up in a secure location with other congressional leaders, calling Vice President Mike Pence and military officials for reinforcements as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Once the Senate resumed debate over the certification of Biden's victory, McConnell said in a speech on the floor that “this failed attempt to obstruct the Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic.”

McConnell then went to his office to address his staff, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the office as rioters banged on their doors. He started to sob softly as he thanked them, Tackett writes.

“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.

The next month, McConnell gave his harshest public criticism of Trump on the Senate floor, saying he was “ practically and morally responsible ” for the Jan. 6 attack. Still, McConnell voted to acquit Trump after House Democrats impeached him for inciting the riot.

In a statement to the AP on Thursday, McConnell referenced two fellow Republican senators — JD Vance of Ohio, the vice presidential nominee, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both of whom are strong Trump allies after harshly criticizing him during his first run in 2016.

“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said.

McConnell also had doubts about Trump from the start. Just after Trump was elected in 2016, as Congress was certifying the election, McConnell told Biden, then the outgoing vice president, that he thought Trump could be trouble, Tackett writes.

The book channels McConnell’s inner thoughts during some of the biggest moments after Trump took office, as McConnell held his tongue and as the two men repeatedly fought and made up.

In 2017, as Trump publicly criticized McConnell for the Senate's failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump and McConnell had a heated argument on the phone. Weeks went by with no contact. Then Trump invited McConnell to the White House and called a joint news conference without telling him first. McConnell said the event went fine, and “it’s not hard to look more knowledgeable than Donald Trump at a press conference.”

After the passage of a $1.5 billion tax overhaul that same year, McConnell said, “All of a sudden, I’m Trump’s new best friend.”

He blamed Trump after House Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett writes. Trump ”has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” McConnell said in an oral history at the time, and was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”

In 2022, as Trump continued to criticize McConnell and made racist comments about his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell told Tackett that “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball.”

“Every time he takes a shot at me, I think it's good for my reputation,” McConnell said.

Also in 2022, McConnell said in his oral history that Trump's behavior since losing the election had been “beyond erratic” as he kept pushing false allegations of voter fraud. “Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said.

By 2024, McConnell had again endorsed Trump. He felt he had to if he were to continue to play a role in shaping the nation’s agenda.

“It was the price he paid for power,” Tackett writes.

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McConnell called Trump 'stupid" and 'despicable' in private after the 2020 election, a new book says
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October 17, 2024 at 06:11PM