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Missouri woman federally indicted over chilling death threats sent to Austin Metcalf's family
A Missouri woman was federally indicted in Texas after allegedly threatening the family of Austin Metcalf following Karmelo Anthony's conviction for the teenager's killing.
Sharifa Nicole Henderson, 34, was arrested in Kansas City on Sept. 11, two days after a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Texas indicted her on three counts of interstate threatening communications.
Anthony's trial concluded on June 9, and prosecutors allege Henderson made three separate death threats against the Metcalf family in the days that followed.
On June 10, Henderson sent a message through Facebook Messenger to one of the Metcalf family members saying she would kill them and put them in a body bag before stating, "now this is a threat take me to court [expletive]," according to the indictment.
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Again on June 10, Henderson called the Collin County government, which prosecuted the case against Anthony, and said she would "demolish" the Metcalf family and "strangle" one of them, per the indictment.
And on June 11, prosecutors say Henderson sent another threatening message on Facebook Messenger to a family member.
"Don't worry I'll kill you next," she allegedly wrote, according to the indictment. "I will hunt you forever until I kill you...I will be there. You will always have to look over your [expletive] shoulder."
If convicted, Henderson faces up to five years in prison for each charge.
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Jeff Metcalf, Metcalf's father, recently told FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth that his family has received more than 100 threats since the end of the murder trial.
The case drew national attention and became racially charged, with supporters of Anthony criticizing the lack of Black jurors and calling for his acquittal, while supporters of the Metcalf family gathered outside the courthouse seeking justice.
Anthony, 19, was convicted more than a year after fatally stabbing Metcalf, 17, during a regional high school track meet at Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco, Texas, on April 2, 2025.
Anthony, then a Centennial High School student, made his way over to the Memorial High School team's tent and sat under it, according to investigators.
Metcalf, a student at Memorial High, then allegedly told Anthony to leave. Prosecutors said Anthony provoked the confrontation that ended with Metcalf being fatally stabbed in the chest.
Surveillance footage later released showed Anthony running from the tent. In police reports obtained by Fox News Digital, Anthony was heard telling arresting officers: "I'm not alleged, I did it."
Authorities would later say they found no evidence suggesting the two knew each other prior to the incident.
A Collin County jury sentenced Anthony to 35 years in prison. Last month, a judge denied Anthony's motion for a new trial, though the family is readying another appeal.
Beloved restaurant chain dwindles from 850 locations to 87, but expert sees 'a lot of life left'
A casual-dining chain known for its ice-cream desserts, burgers and family atmosphere that once operated roughly 850 restaurants has dwindled to fewer than 100 locations in 11 states.
Friendly's was founded as the "Friendly" ice-cream shop in Springfield, Massachusetts, by "spunky" brothers Prestley and Curtis Blake in 1935 — at the height of the Great Depression, according to the company's website.
The two young entrepreneurs — Prestley was 20 years old and Curtis was just 18 — sold double-dip cones for 5 cents.
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In 1940, they expanded with a second location and began offering food, with hamburgers among the first additions to the menu.
By 1951, there were 10 Friendly restaurants operating in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and by 1974, that number had grown to 500 restaurants across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
Friendly's marked its 90th year in business in 2025.
Along the way, the company introduced new food and dessert items to its menu, began distributing its ice cream in supermarkets, set a Guinness World Record for the largest sundae in 1980 and added the apostrophe and "s" to its name in 1989.
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Friendly's also changed hands throughout the decades and filed for bankruptcy twice.
Hershey's acquired Friendly's from the Blakes in 1979 and sold the chain nine years later to Tennessee Restaurant Company. By the mid-1990s, Friendly's had grown to about 850 restaurants.
Friendly's first filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and again in November 2020.
"Over the last two years, Friendly's has made important strides toward reinvigorating our beloved brand in the face of shifting demographics, increased competition and rising costs," then-Friendly's CEO George Michel said in a news release in 2020.
"Unfortunately, like many restaurant businesses, our progress was suddenly interrupted by the catastrophic impact of COVID, which caused a decline in revenue as dine-in operations ceased for months and re-opened with limited capacity."
In 2021, Friendly's announced that Amici Partners Group, LLC had acquired the company and was "dedicated to reinvigorating 130-store restaurant chain."
Today, 90% of Friendly's restaurants have closed, and there are 87 locations in 11 Eastern states, The Takeout reported. Twenty-two of the restaurants – or about 25% of them – are in Massachusetts.
Some Friendly's restaurants were seen as old and tired and as failing to keep up with modern trends, Barbara E. Kahn, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told Fox News Digital.
Nevertheless, Kahn said there's "a lot of life left" in the Friendly's brand.
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"It has a legacy that could be built on and could serve to bring people in, especially on this trend of nostalgia, which can be a plus in restaurants," she said. "But it also has to keep up with changing times and changing tastes."
Kahn said Friendly's has "positive DNA" the brand can build upon by capitalizing on the restaurants' nostalgia and strong brand legacy surrounding its ice cream, while also modernizing its offerings.
"People who remember that brand from its heyday think of it as a fun place to go, a family restaurant known for its ice cream and fun food," she said.
McDonald's is one brand Kahn pointed to as having stood the test of time by tweaking its offerings, adjusting to trends and maintaining fresh appeal.
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Kahn said adding more non-meat items, healthy grains and salads could possibly help Friendly's attract new customers.
Fox News Digital reached out to Friendly's for comment.
BROADCAST BIAS: Networks embrace their latest form of panic – the AI apocalypse
Broadcast news often has a problem telling us what happened yesterday, or earlier in the day. These shows want to scare viewers about some dark and desperate future. Forecasts, not facts. The newest eruption of doom came over artificial intelligence, and how it could end up causing the destruction of all humanity within a decade. So much for soft-pedaling it.
Coming out of the weekend, on the Sept. 14 "Today," NBC co-host Savannah Guthrie sounded the alarm in the first seconds of the program: "Doomsday warning! The country’s leading developers of AI coming forward to call for a slowdown in the technology, saying humanity itself is at risk."
Guthrie interviewed Josh Tyrangiel of The Atlantic magazine, asking: "How worried should we be?" He said, "Extremely worried," and laid out OpenAI’s "Hugging Face incident" from July, when AI bots independently engaged in a cyberattack on the AI startup called Hugging Face. That led Guthrie to play up the possibility of "apocalyptic outcomes."
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On Sept. 15, on ABC’s "World News Tonight," anchor David Muir sounded like a TV news snippet from a disaster movie. "We do begin tonight with President Trump rejecting the new and dire warnings about AI, even as three of the top AI rivals agree now that it's time to slow it down, alarmed by what they're seeing and how quickly this is all moving."
It was President Donald Trump versus the big brains: "And tonight, even after that warning from a former AI researcher that there's a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans in a decade, tonight, President Trump saying the only guardrail AI needs is a high-IQ president, calling it a ‘hoax.’"
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You can sense the elitist sarcasm against Trump between the lines.
A similar spin led "NBC Nightly News," as anchor Tom Llamas echoed: "We begin with President Trump thundering into the debate today over AI regulation and perhaps the fate of humanity, saying that any predictions that artificial intelligence could destroy the human race are, quote, ‘a hoax.’ It comes as some of the country's top AI leaders say the opposite, that the danger is real and must be regulated."
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To their credit, the "CBS Evening News" at least allowed an expert to challenge this new doomsaying trend, Trump’s former AI czar David Sacks. "I think we are in a political season right now. It feels like a panic is being ginned up. And so, I do think that the threat here has been exaggerated." CBS reporter Jo Ling Kent pushed back with the president’s "hoax" language, to which Sacks replied: "The hoax is that somehow we're going to be extinct as a species within a few years because of AI, and therefore we have to stop completely."
It can be hard to listen to all of this very sudden panic-mongering and not think back on all the apocalyptic predictions we have heard about global warming since 1988 – and the left never wants anyone to remember them.
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In 1990, a PBS documentary series titled "Race to Save the Planet" featured narrator Meryl Streep forecasting the future weather: "By the year 2000 – that's less than 10 years away – the earth's climate will be warmer than it's been in over 100,000 years. If we don't do something, there'll be enormous calamities in a very short time."
Streep and her ideological allies despise anyone calling this kind of prediction a "hoax" – because the leftist elites always think they have a monopoly on facts and truth, and because it suggests that they are insincere, spinning doom to achieve more government control over our lives.
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If we’re going to gin up frightening forecasts, there’s always the conspiracy theory that the left wants to keep a dominant share of the AI environment, just as they always want a dominant share over our media environment. In the same spirit in which the left pushed around Big Tech to shut down conservative "misinformation," they might use AI to spread their information dominance.
For most Americans who do not have a deep understanding of computer science – as well as climatology – it's hard to dismiss the scariest of forecasts when the media marshals the capital-E experts.
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In this case, the AI panic is being driven by the makers of AI themselves. Does that make them more credible? Or should it raise suspicions about precisely how they want to "pace the frontier"?
We can observe the media trends over the years and be skeptical of wild talk about how "we may all perish if we don't take a drastic course of action immediately." It can feel like a high-pressure sales pitch insisting we're suicidal fools if we don't submit to Experts. The global-warming example is not encouraging.
Law professor's killer stalked him 'like a shark circling' before ex-mother-in-law's murder-for-hire ambush
After leaving the gym, Dan Markel drove home expecting an ordinary day. Instead, his killer was waiting for him.
As he arrived home, the prominent Florida State University law professor was talking on the phone with music teacher Stewart Schlazer about school options for his children. Then the conversation took a terrifying turn.
"Can you please hold on a second? There's an unfamiliar person in my driveway," Markel said.
Seconds later, Schlazer heard what he described as "a loud boom."
"There are really eerie parts of those final hours," producer Lily Fletcher told Fox News Digital. "You look at the CCTV footage, and it's a normal day. Dan dropped off the kids at school, he's gone to work out at the gym, and then there's a Prius driving around the gym car park. It never stops. It's clearly waiting for him."
"It's always reminded me of a shark circling," Fletcher said. "There was something just so sinister and eerie during such a mundane part of his day, just going to the gym. That really stayed with me. That's a really chilling part, just watching that footage."
Markel was shot in the head while sitting in his car in the garage of his Tallahassee, Florida, home on July 18, 2014. The 41-year-old died the following day.
The case is the subject of a new true crime docuseries from ABC News Studios, "Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel," now streaming on Hulu.
It features exclusive interviews, including with FBI agent Pat Sanford and a recorded conversation with Rob Adelson, the oldest Adelson son, who testified against his mother, Donna Adelson, at her trial. It largely follows the prosecution's investigation and trial evidence, while also including testimony and recordings introduced during court proceedings.
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Markel married Wendi Adelson in 2006 after the two met online. The docuseries depicts prosecutors' theory that Wendi's mother, Donna, was a dominating, controlling figure in their lives with strong opinions about her daughter's choices.
Wendi later said the couple's marriage fell apart after they had two sons, Benjamin and Lincoln. Their contentious divorce in 2013 centered on one question: where the boys would grow up. Wendi fought to move them to South Florida to be near her family, while Markel pressed to keep them in Tallahassee, where the parents shared custody.
According to the docuseries, Donna was furious after the relocation request was denied.
Prosecutors said the custody dispute became the catalyst for a murder-for-hire plot that would take years to unravel. They argued at trial that Donna helped orchestrate Markel’s killing after he stood in the way of letting her daughter and two young grandsons make the move south.
They also revealed that her son Charlie Adelson arranged for Markel's killing through his then-girlfriend, Katherine Magbanua, who connected him to Sigfredo Garcia, the father of her children, and Garcia's friend Luis Rivera.
Prosecutors said Garcia shot Markel while Rivera drove the getaway car. Over the next decade, investigators used cellphone records, surveillance video, financial records and secretly recorded conversations to build the case.
"Investigators suspected members of the family were involved, but weren't able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt for a really long time," Fletcher said.
"And I think what really surprised me about the investigation was how incredibly thorough and how many needles in how many haystacks they went through to find the evidence, whether it was tracking silver-colored Priuses across Florida, or going through thousands of phone data to find any links to the family and near the crime scene."
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At trial, prosecutors painted Donna as the calculated matriarch of an affluent South Florida family with the means and motive to orchestrate the killing of the ex-son-in-law she "hated." Defense attorneys, however, insisted the state didn't have sufficient evidence to link her to the murder plot.
In 2023, Charlie, a dentist, was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder in his former brother-in-law's killing. Prosecutors told jurors that Charlie paid to have Markel killed and used Magbanua to hire Garcia. They said Garcia enlisted the help of Rivera, his childhood friend.
Charlie testified that he had nothing to do with the killing and was stunned when Magbanua came to his home and said her friends were the killers. According to reports, he also said he needed to pay more than $300,000 in 48 hours or he would be killed. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Magbanua and Garcia were convicted of first-degree murder, and Rivera was sentenced to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and cooperating with prosecutors.
In 2025, Donna was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and an additional 30 years for the conspiracy and solicitation convictions.
While Fletcher said the surveillance video is one of the documentary's most haunting moments, she believes the hundreds of FBI wiretap recordings provide the clearest window into the Adelson family.
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"There are hundreds of wiretapped phone calls of the Adelson family," Fletcher said. "As a team, we listened to all of them. I think just the brazen way with which the family was continuing their lives during the investigation, really believing that they'd got away from it, was very disturbing. They really thought that they were above the law."
"Fletcher said listening to the wiretaps left her with the impression that some family members believed they would avoid accountability.
"They weren't used to not getting their way," Fletcher continued. "And I think that is really alarming to me, that there are people like that who believe that they can operate outside of the constraints of the law."
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Two years after Markel's murder, Donna and Charlie spent hours discussing Wendi's boyfriend at the time and whether she should stay in the relationship. Fletcher said the conversations showed her how deeply Donna and Charlie involved themselves in Wendi's personal life.
"It's hours and hours of conversations," Fletcher said. "It's Donna encouraging Charlie, and Charlie is suggesting to his mother as well that he will go and speak to Wendi. Just the meddling and the way they're speaking about Wendi and making decisions for her life, I felt that to be obviously really damning for them about their involvement in the case in terms of what the dynamics are like in their family."
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Wendi has repeatedly denied any involvement in her ex-husband's killing and has not been charged.
"I don't know why people online have such strong levels of certainty," Fletcher said. "In listening to the wiretap conversations of Wendi's mother and brother, and the way they are so accustomed to meddling in her life and deciding what is best for her, I could imagine a scenario in which she wasn't involved in it at all. I think that the vitriol around Wendi, especially online, is sad in a way. I imagine a scenario in which Wendi's family did this without her knowledge."
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Fox News Digital reached out to Wendi’s attorney for comment.
"This is the story of a breakdown of a marriage, a custody dispute, and problems that escalated and seemed so irreconcilable," Fletcher said. "But this was an instance where things got so out of hand, and no one comes out with what they want."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Jennifer Aniston’s romance with Jim Curtis faces celebrity relationship trap, expert warns
Jennifer Aniston’s relationship with hypnotherapist and life coach Jim Curtis has gotten serious in the more than a year and a half since they started dating, but a matchmaker worries the "Friends" star could be making classic mistakes as the higher-profile partner.
"I think one of the biggest mistakes is when a woman tries to kind of manage the guy," Los Angeles-based matchmaker Gina Hendrix told Fox News Digital. "When a woman steps into this role, and it's always a great, successful, amazing woman, she thinks, ‘I did it for myself, I can do it for you too,’ and she tries to build the guy up."
Hendrix warned that the guy often "ends up with all this new great life, but then he resents her for the help, and she takes on a very unsexy role, and then usually it just all fizzles out from there."
She said it takes an "incredibly secure person" to date a celebrity and "share that kind of spotlight, but still be out of the spotlight to keep this relationship afloat."
It’s always better to "keep your relationship out of the public eye as much as humanly possible for so many reasons, and if you can live a life where it's under the radar, and you can live a life that is as private as you could possibly have," she added.
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Hendrix said she appreciates it when celebrity spouses avoid red carpet events. "You really should just keep it out, keep it away as far as you can" from the public eye, she added.
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The key to a successful relationship involving a celebrity who has "kind of souped up their partner" is "mutual respect," she said.
"You have to be with somebody that, you know, that you want their opinion. You value how they think," she said. "And I think beyond the typical things of attraction and the butterflies in the stomach and the great sex and all these things, you also have to respect this person. And you do have to have a deep friendship because that's really what's going to sustain it way after the looks fade and things start to get ugly, no pun intended."
Hendrix said Lady Gaga and fiancé Michael Polansky are a "great example of two people who are living off-grid, living under the radar. And I don't know him, don't know her, but it does seem like that is the route you want to take versus, you know, going on social media with your guy and trying to help build him up."
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"Find a man who already has a strong footing, strong boundaries, and can kind of be your anchor, not your anchor to pull you down, but your anchor that holds everything in place," she added.
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Speaking specifically about Aniston’s relationship, Hendrix, who clarified that she doesn't know Aniston or Curtis, said: "For whatever reason, she’s decided to sort of help him with his social media."
Earlier this week, Hendrix posted a video on her Instagram, saying Aniston was making all the "classic, biggest mistakes" in a relationship involving a woman who is more successful than her partner, especially in trying to bring him up to her level.
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Curtis recently told the Sunday Times that the "drive" in his relationship with Aniston "was more natural, more organic, less needy. In the past, I’ve felt this idea of, ‘I need you to be in love with me …’ I wasn’t searching for love anymore. And what do I feel now? I feel real joy, real presence, real calmness, real partnership."
He said in his own life coaching that 82% of his clients are women, attributing that partially to his "nurturing and empathetic" tone. "It’s softer," he said. He told the reporter that he aims to embody the "divine masculine" and be "a person that is not disrupted easily, so I can hold your fear, trauma, suffering, chaos. Like a tree with deep roots, where in a storm you’ll find safety."
He noted that he's "very careful" how he engages as a newly-minted celebrity, which includes not reading anything about his relationship.
"It’s certainly not helping me, and it’s sensational," he said. "So I have decided it’s better if I don’t look."
Relationships are "hard enough for anyone," Hendrix told Fox News Digital. "You factor in celebrities and all of a sudden it’s coming from all angles, the scrutiny."
Curtis is Aniston's first high-profile relationship since her 2018 split from actor and husband Justin Theroux. She divorced her first husband, Brad Pitt, in 2005.
Caitlin Clark ‘would sign up’ for potential WNBA game overseas after returning from World Cup
Caitlin Clark may already be prepared for another trip across the ocean.
The Indiana Fever star said she would welcome an opportunity to play a WNBA game overseas after recently returning from the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup in Berlin.
"I think we’re just scratching the surface of where we can go globally," Clark told reporters following the Fever’s 103-85 victory over the Toronto Tempo on Friday. "I wouldn’t be surprised if next year you see a game played overseas of some sort. I would sign up for that. I think it’d be really good to help expand the WNBA, and I’m looking forward to that."
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The WNBA has not announced plans to hold a game in Europe next season, making Clark’s comments a prediction rather than confirmation of a league initiative.
Clark made her first appearance in a major international tournament this month while helping the United States win its fifth consecutive World Cup championship. Team USA defeated France 97-79 in the final Sunday in Berlin.
The tournament also offered Clark her first extended opportunity to play in Europe.
"That was the first time I’ve really played in Europe, and obviously basketball is really loved in Europe," Clark said. "It was fun to get to play in front of those fans."
Clark said she was particularly struck by the passion international players displayed while representing their countries.
"I think one of the biggest things I took away is how much pride those girls play with, especially the ones that are in the WNBA going to play for their home country," she said. "It means so much to them. I think that’s really cool, and they’ve done so much to help grow the game in their specific countries."
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The international influence within the WNBA has already reached record levels. According to the league, 51 foreign-born players had appeared in at least one game during the opening week of the 2026 season, setting a single-season record. A total of 70 current and former WNBA players later appeared on rosters for the World Cup.
The league’s geographic footprint has also expanded beyond the United States. The Tempo began play this season as the WNBA’s first Canadian franchise, joining the returning Portland Fire as the league grew to 15 teams. Franchises in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia are scheduled to begin play between 2028 and 2030, eventually bringing the league to 18 teams.
The WNBA played its first regular-season game outside the United States in Vancouver in 2025, but a game in Europe would further accelerate its international ambitions.
Clark saw evidence of the league’s reach throughout Team USA’s run in Germany.
"The amount of young kids and young fans that were super excited to see us was cool," Clark said.
Clark returned to WNBA action Friday and recorded 28 points and 14 assists in Indiana’s win over Toronto. Kelsey Mitchell scored 33 points and broke the league’s single-season scoring record during the victory.
The Fever have three regular-season games remaining before the playoffs begin.
Ole Miss, Lane Kiffin set for emotionally charged showdown 10 months after bitter split
A military flyover took place Friday afternoon over Oxford’s iconic Square ahead of Saturday’s matchup, when Ole Miss will welcome Lane Kiffin back to campus in a game 10 months in the making.
Fans streamed through the area, buying up Ole Miss gear while making stops within local restaurants to kick their weekend off.
There is nothing quite like Oxford, Mississippi, from its Southern charm to the small-town feel that defines it. An estimated 300,000 people are expected on campus today, with most of them partying in "The Grove" like it's going out of style.
The truth is, fans have had this weekend circled for 10 months.
Ole Miss faithful are going to try to unleash nearly a year’s worth of aggravation over 24 hours, hoping to party into the early morning hours Sunday — or at least until local police kick them out around 1 a.m. CT — regardless of the outcome.
Scenes that look more like something out of a John Grisham thriller tucked away in a small Mississippi town, it's not hard to notice how much this means to a fan base that has been put through the ringer over these past 10 months.
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In reality, they have a team capable a competing for a national championship this season. But first, they have a lot to get off their chest when it comes to their former head coach, Lane Kiffin.
A man who captivated a fan base, led them to heights rarely achieved and had them finally in the college football playoff after fumbling the opportunity in 2025, left them for a better job.
But, it was how he left Ole Miss that will forever tarnish his legacy in Oxford. This, along with trying to take nearly every star on the Rebels football team, left fans with a worse feeling than had he just bolted for LSU without trying to burn it all down on the way out.
Looking back, Lane has admitted to those around him that he should have handled the entire situation better. Maybe this weekend doesn’t contain as much vitriol.
Maybe, Kiffin receives plenty of boos from the crowd, but deep down inside they are content with how things would have played out if he had chosen to act like a grown-up during the entire ordeal while contemplating whether to take the Florida or LSU job.
But, we don't live in a "what if" world.
We live in reality, and that will be welcomed by Lane on Saturday when he walks off the bus that is tucked away inside a fenced-in area just outside Vaught Hemingway Stadium.
There is not much Ole Miss fans can say to Kiffin that he isn’t already prepared for. But, that doesn’t mean deep down inside it doesn’t bother him. As much as he loves playing the villain, he's still just a guy who feels lost at times without his father around any longer.
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Roaming around "The Grove" on Friday afternoon, Ole Miss fans had plenty to say about their former head coach, and the guy they worshiped for nearly six years.
"Man, I'm not gonna lie bro, F--- Lane Kiffin," one Rebels fan said. "Lane Kiffin is 'K' bro. We smokin' him, no cap. Whatever Lane Kiffin did, it's bulls---. He could have waited to leave until after the season. Nah, he wanted to wait until he got us to the playoff to leave.
"F--- Lane Kiffin, bro. And, f--- LSU."
There's no denying we are about to witness one of the more cinematic scenes in this sport's history.
I was in Austin last weekend as Arch Manning led Texas to the comeback win over Ohio State, and I'm still amazed at what I witnessed.
But, even that monumental game does not have the built-in drama compared to what we will witness inside Vaught Hemingway Stadium.
Lane Kiffin will stroll off the LSU bus later this afternoon, acting as if none of the noise is bothering him. He will walk into a stadium that he helped revitalize, alongside a number of assistant coaches on his LSU staff that helped him do it in this same town.
On the other side, Pete Golding will receive a hero’s welcome when he takes his first steps onto the field in front of the Ole Miss student section.
It's fitting. After the past ten months of buildup to this matchup that feels more like a heavyweight fight we used to witness in the late '90s.
I'm fascinated to see how this plays out, alongside 60,000 fans wearing mostly powder blue and red, with a smattering of purple and gold.
We made it.
No more talking. No more jabs being traded through social media and television networks.
The only thing left to do is watch two teams trade haymakers for 60 minutes, with Lane Kiffin and Pete Golding entrenched in their own war along each sideline.
Gabby Petito's mother urges public 'ripple effect' to help find the missing 5 years after daughter's murder
If you or someone you know is the victim of domestic abuse, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233.
BLUE POINT, N.Y. — Five years after Gabby Petito’s remains were found in Wyoming, her mother is asking the public to pay closer attention to the missing-person flyers that cross their social-media feeds because a single share can create a "ripple effect" that leads to someone being found.
"What I would say with missing cases is, if you see missing flyers pass by your feed, stop and take a look," her mother, Nichole Schmidt, told Fox News Digital Friday. "Don't just share it quickly."
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Look at it first, check the comments in case there are new developments, and verify the source, she suggested.
"If it seems legitimate, maybe give it a share," she said. "Because you never know who might see that with your share, and it causes a ripple effect — and missing people have been found by regular people just sharing flyers."
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Petito's remains were found on Sept. 19, 2021, in a remote campground north of Jackson, Wyoming. She is believed to have been killed three weeks earlier by Brian Laundrie, her former fiance.
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Laundrie drove home to his parents' house in Florida in her Ford Transit van before taking his own life before heavy rains in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park. His remains weren't found for a month, after a nationwide search that ended when floodwater receded and his own parents led detectives to one of his favorite clearings in the preserve.
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Since then, Petito's parents and stepparents have launched a foundation in her name, combatting domestic violence and raising awareness for other missing person cases.
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They've lobbied for new laws in multiple states, including Florida, Utah and New York, and even at the federal level.
But another focus of theirs is getting attention for the families of missing people who haven't gotten the same news coverage their daughter did.
If you or someone you know is the victim of domestic abuse, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233.
Delivery robots swarm Chicago sidewalk in viral video
You expect traffic jams on Chicago streets. You probably do not expect one on the sidewalk caused by a bunch of food delivery robots. That is exactly what runner Becca Ostien encountered near Lincoln Park. At least a dozen Coco delivery robots had gathered along North Clark Street, leaving her to navigate what looked like a miniature robot traffic jam.
The strange scene quickly spread online. Yet behind the viral video sits a bigger question about the growing number of delivery robots rolling through American cities. What happens when the technology designed to make deliveries easier starts getting in your way?
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Ostien regularly travels through the area near Lincoln Park. During a recent morning outing, she came across a group of Coco robots clustered together on the sidewalk. Some appeared to be trying to maneuver out of the group. Others remained stationary.
Ostien described the robots as "swarming" and said someone without agile feet would have had trouble getting through. Video of the encounter shows roughly a dozen robots packed into a narrow stretch of sidewalk. Their lights flashed as they moved around one another with nowhere obvious to go.
That may look funny for a few seconds on social media. For someone who depends on a clear pedestrian route, the situation can become far more serious. One commenter described the scene as "an actual nightmare" for a disabled person. Other reactions raised concerns about people using wheelchairs or walkers trying to get through.
Coco Robotics acknowledged the problem and apologized. In a statement to CyberGuy, Coco said a "sidewalk deployment error" caused several robots to reroute at the same time as they left their station to begin their daily routes.
"That's not how our robots are designed to operate, and we understand the disruption it caused," Coco told CyberGuy. The company said its team identified and corrected the problem quickly, clearing the robots and returning them to normal operation within minutes.
"We've since solved the routing behavior that led to this and added safeguards to prevent it from recurring," the company said. Coco called the situation rare and said it has completed tens of thousands of trips during its two years operating in Chicago.
The company also estimates those deliveries have saved consumers roughly $500,000, created skilled fleet-maintenance jobs and reduced vehicle traffic.
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The Lincoln Park pileup did not happen in a vacuum. Delivery robots have been operating in Chicago through a pilot program, and the rollout has already faced resistance from some residents.
Petitions have called for the city to pause the program. There have also been documented crashes involving delivery robots and bus shelters.
Those incidents help explain why another viral robot problem can quickly trigger frustration. The technology offers an obvious convenience. A small autonomous machine can handle short food deliveries through a neighborhood.
However, city sidewalks already have plenty of competition for limited space. Adding autonomous machines raises questions about how much room they should get and what happens when their navigation systems fail.
The bigger issue is pedestrian access. Public sidewalks need to work for people with very different mobility needs. A cluster of robots can narrow or block the path for someone using a wheelchair or another mobility device. A blind pedestrian may have difficulty navigating an unexpected obstruction. Parents pushing strollers can face the same problem.
For someone who cannot safely step around a robot or leave the sidewalk, a temporary blockage can become a serious obstacle. Coco says it is also working on accessibility through a partnership with BlindSquare, a GPS app for people who are blind or partially sighted.
The partnership operates in Chicago and other cities. According to Coco, its robots log sidewalk hazards such as fallen e-scooters and broken curb cuts. That data flows into BlindSquare, which provides spoken alerts in 26 languages about hazards roughly 10 meters ahead.
Coco says BlindSquare users can also report when an obstacle has been cleared, allowing the company to update its routing maps in real time. "Robots built to navigate the pedestrian environment have a responsibility to improve it for everyone who shares that space," Coco told CyberGuy. The partnership adds important context to the accessibility concerns surrounding delivery robots.
However, the Chicago incident also underscores the challenge: the robots themselves cannot become another obstacle on the sidewalk. That makes preventing deployment and routing failures especially important as these fleets expand.
Delivery robots are becoming more common in public spaces. We have already seen companies push these machines from college campuses toward grocery delivery and busy city neighborhoods. That means more people could soon encounter autonomous robots during an ordinary walk.
For consumers, convenience remains the appeal. You order lunch and a robot brings it down the sidewalk. But cities also have to decide how these machines fit into crowded pedestrian spaces. A successful system has to account for people who cannot simply step around a stalled robot or squeeze through a narrow gap. One strange Chicago morning gives us a pretty good preview of the challenge.
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Delivery robots could become a normal part of getting food and packages around crowded cities. I can see why companies are investing in them. They could make some short deliveries quicker and keep another car off the road.
Coco's response adds important context. The company says this was a rare routing problem, that it has fixed the behavior behind it and that new safeguards are in place. I also find the BlindSquare partnership interesting because Coco's robots are already moving through the same sidewalks where accessibility hazards can create real problems.
Using those robots to identify obstacles could be genuinely useful. But the Chicago pileup also shows why reliability has to come first. A robot that warns someone about a blocked sidewalk cannot become the thing blocking that sidewalk. As more of these machines appear in cities, companies will have to prove that their safeguards work when something unexpected happens. People should not have to compete with delivery machines for a safe route down the sidewalk.
Would Coco's response and its work with BlindSquare make you more comfortable having delivery robots in your neighborhood, or do you still think they should stay off sidewalks? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.
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Who is Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO pushing independent AI oversight?
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes artificial intelligence (AI) companies need the help of independent outside watchdogs to safeguard their developing technologies. But one of the organizations he believes could do the job, METR, is closely connected to the same AI safety community that has ties to Anthropic's start.
Many of its leading figures have ties to a movement called "effective altruism (EA)" — the belief that evidence and careful reasoning can help maximize the good that companies and people can do with their time and resources.
METR describes itself as an AI safety testing laboratory.
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"METR evaluates frontier AI models to help companies and wider society understand AI capabilities and what risks they pose," its website reads.
Although its website and public materials don’t make mention of effective altruism, its founders have used it as a framing for their work.
Beth Barnes, METR’s founder and CEO, worked at OpenAI alongside Amodei as the company developed early versions of ChatGPT.
At an Effective Altruism Global event, she laid out her vision for how to maintain AI safety.
"Our overall plan is — it sort of seems like it would be good if it was someone’s job to look at models and decide if they’re going to kill us, think through the ways that that might happen, anticipate them, figure out what the early warnings would be, that sort of thing," Barnes said.
Similarly, Paul Christiano, who led the research around OpenAI’s efforts to ensure its models followed acceptable strategies for delivering requested results, later founded the first iteration of METR. He too has framed parts of his approach to AI safety as a form of effective altruism.
"My suspicion is that it is more important for the ‘effective altruism’ movement to have a fundamentally good product and to generally have our act together than for it to grow more rapidly," Christiano said in a 2014 article.
Figures like Barnes and Christiano provide informal links to Anthropic — a company that received funding from effective altruism’s largest supporters when it emerged as a way of thinking among tech moguls. Barnes and Christiano also both worked on evaluations involving Anthropic models, providing safety checks for Anthropic's flagship AI, Claude.
Most notably, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, led Anthropic's 2022 Series B financing round before his company collapsed and he was convicted in a multibillion-dollar fraud case. Before FTX's downfall, Bankman-Fried was one of the highest-profile proponents of the Effective Altruism movement, publicly saying it shaped his approach to earning and giving money.
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Similarly, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn led Anthropic's 2021 Series A financing round. Tallinn has been one of the Effective Altruism movement's most prominent supporters, speaking at Effective Altruism Global conferences, helping found the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute, and donating more than $1 million to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, an organization focused on AI safety and alignment research.
Amodei isn’t calling for the rest of the industry's leaders to submit to the thinking of METR, specifically. But in a recent letter, he used them as an example of the guidance he believes the industry needs.
Amodei proposed a plan: accountability could come through "embedded evaluators" that would supervise AI development companies.
"Each frontier AI company commits to giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators (such as METR) whose role it is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.
"Regardless of what commitments we make, the public deserves to know what is going on. We are still the ones choosing what to include and omit. Embedded evaluators will change this dynamic," Amodei wrote.
Few figures in the AI space are as well known for their efforts on AI safety as Amodei.
Amodei originally studied biophysics, earning a Ph.D. from Princeton in 2011. He would go on to become a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
After his studies, Amodei worked for a series of technology companies like Baidu, Google Brain, and, in 2016, OpenAI — the company that developed ChatGPT .During his time at Baidu, Amodei worked to develop speech recognition through machine learning, a kind of pattern identification. And at Google, he began working on safety while helping develop the company’s neural-net research, computer models that loosely mimics brain function.
At OpenAI, Amodei continued those themes, eventually becoming vice president of research as the company developed its ChatGPT 2 and ChatGPT 3 models.
In its early stages, the GPTs were asked to fill in blanks to sentences like: "Today, I went to the ______ and bought some milk and eggs," and "I knew it was going to rain, but I forgot to take my ______."
But just as the company began to discover that it could amplify the power of its models through larger and larger language models, Amodei left OpenAI in 2020. He believed the company wasn’t doing enough to install guardrails on what he saw as a budding reality of the technology he had long theorized about.
He also didn’t know if he could trust the company to set aside its financial interests.
"When you feel that you can't trust someone, when you feel that their values are not what they say they are, when you feel that they're not honest, when you feel that they're not in it for the reasons that they say, when you see disturbing patterns of behavior, dishonesty, that makes it very hard to continue to work with a company, to continue to trust the company," Amodei said in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this year.
Since leaving OpenAI, Amodei helped start Anthropic, a company that has made AI safety a key part of its makeup. Anthropic even has a sort of constitution for its flagship AI; a guiding document laying out boundaries for its research."Anthropic wants Claude to be genuinely helpful to the people it works with or on behalf of, as well as to society, while avoiding actions that are unsafe, unethical, or deceptive," the company wrote.
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That directive has caused the company to clash with the U.S. Department of Defense over developing tools that could be used to autonomously target humans on the battlefield. It also refused to do work that, in its estimation, amounted to mass surveillance.
Although that tension cost Anthropic a $200 million contract, Amodei believes it's time for the industry to take similar stances, especially as some companies began to report trouble controlling their own agents.
Amodei continues to believe that AI capabilities can grow safely, but only if the industry sets standards for how it achieves "safe."
"I continue to believe that AI can enormously improve the quality of human life. My desire to achieve these benefits is undimmed. But the benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and — so long as we use the time we gain well — it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right," Amodei wrote in his letter.