If a campaign cheats during this election season, chances are high it’ll never be investigated. That’s according to some of the very Federal Election Commissioners tasked with enforcing the law, who call the agency “dysfunctional” and “broken,” NBC 4 Washington.
The FEC is made up of six people – one independent, two Democrats and three Republicans – who hold tremendous power. Under federal law, they’re supposed to investigate and penalize candidates and campaigns caught breaking the rules.
But to even investigate these complaints requires at least four votes, and a News4 I-Team investigation found they often deadlock on potentially precedent setting cases – effectively preventing those cases from moving forward.
The death of Terence Crutcher, the unarmed Tulsa man shot dead by police on Friday, sparked outrage in the community and around the country, especially after authorities released dashcam and helicopter footage of his death on Monday.
But to Arlando Jasper, he was the man who 15 years ago pulled up to a bus stop and said, at random, "God told me to take you wherever you want to go," NBC News reported.
Just like that, Crutcher drove him to his job, and they've been friends ever since. Crutcher was studying music appreciation at Tusla Community College, and Jasper remembered him as a family man who frequently went to church — so he was shocked at Crutcher's death.
"He just wanted to be a good father for his children, his four children, he wanted to do something life," his twin sister, Tiffany Crutcher, said at a news conference on Monday.
Donald Trump promised to "rebuild our inner cities" at a rally on Tuesday, telling a North Carolina crowd that “places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities.”
Violent crime in American cities is expected to rise by 5.5 percent in 2016, according to New York University's Brennan Center. According to the United Nations, 5,166 civilians were killed or maimed in Afghanistan during the first six months of the year. Trump did not back up his comparison with statistics.
In an effort to win African American communities, Trump has recently pitched himself as the candidate to vote for those who have nothing to lose, NBC News reported.
Despite exaggerating disparities in black communities -- lack of quality education, safety concerns, absence of jobs -- Trump has made minor gains. An ABC/Washington Post poll average from August to September showed Trump polling at five percent with African Americans, compared to previous zero or one percent.
Evenflo has issued a recall for some models of its Evolve booster seat over an issue that could allow children to loosen the harness.
The car seat company said its voluntary recall affected 32,000 seats across the U.S. and Canada.
Evenflo said it would provide owners with a new harness adjustment button to stop the possibility of a child loosening the harness without an adult's help.
The recall affects model numbers 34411700, 34411741 and 34411700C for seats that were made before Feb. 9, 2016.
For questions, or to receive a kit to fix the issue, call 1-800-233-5921 on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET. or click here.
An airstrike on a medical site near Aleppo, Syria, left at least four aid workers dead overnight on Tuesday, NBC News reported.
The attack in the town of Khan Touman, controlled by rebels, comes amid a fragile cease-fire brokered by the U.S. and Russia. But another airstrike hit a convoy of aide workers Monday, killing at least 20 people and touching off a round of blame-trading.
The Associated Press reports that both nations claim the others' aircraft were overhead when the convoy was struck, and it was not immediately clear who launched the airstrike that hit the medical facility overnight on Tuesday.
The humanitarians killed in Tuesday's strike were ambulance drivers and nurses who worked for the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations. A fifth person injured, a nurse, was critically injured in the strike.
The organization condemned the "unacceptable" loss of life, and said the medical center was completely destroyed and left victims buried under debris.
A man who was buried up to his neck after the trench he was digging collapsed has died, according to the Clarke County, Virginia, Sheriff's Office.
Crews are working to recover his body.
The victim was digging a trench for a water line in Berryville when the dirt collapsed on him at about 10 a.m. Wednesday, said Chief Deputy Travis Sumption of the sheriff's office.
Chopper4 flew over the scene as rescue crews tried to free the man from the dirt.
Berryville is near Maryland and West Virginia in northern Virginia, about 65 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.
A woman found a 3-foot python in her apartment Monday night on Chicago’s South Side.
Police were called to the Englewood neighborhood home in the 6500 block of South Normal just after 10 p.m. after the woman said she found the massive python in her bathroom.
It is the fourth time a snake has invaded her apartment, police said. Residents say an old neighbor in the building used to breed the animals, and some believe some may have been left behind.
This time the python was discovered wrapped around the shower curtain, the woman said.
Chicago Animal Care and Control were dispatched to the apartment and were able to capture the snake, which was reported to be harmless, police said.
August was a good month for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, both of whom reported their best fundraising yet, NBC News reported.
Clinton brought in $59.5 million and Trump $41 million, according to new Federal Election Commission filings released Tuesday.
While Clinton raised more than her Republican rival, she also spent more than him. Clinton spent $49.6 million in August, compared to Trump's $29.9 million.
The fundraising totals are less than what the campaigns had announced earlier this month — those sums included money raised for their joint fundraising committees to help their parties and down-ballot candidates. Those fundraising numbers won't be released until October.
Donald Trump and Mike Pence hold a campaign rally in Toledo, Ohio.
Check here for a live stream.
Hillary Clinton is holding a campaign event at the Frontline Outreach Youth and Family Center in Orlando, Florida.
Check here for a live stream.
A South Jersey crossing guard arrested at her post Wednesday morning for allegedly macing a man says she did it because she believes the man deals heroin and recently sold drugs that caused a loved one to overdose.
Amy Stanley, 35, of Pennsville, Salem County, told NBC10 that while driving through town Wednesday morning, she spotted a man she suspects sold heroin that nearly killed one of her family members recently.
Stanley said she pulled up next to the man, who was walking, and asked his name.
That's where Stanley's version of the events and the version provided by police differ. Stanley says the man then tried to reach into her passenger-side window, where she had her handbag sitting on the seat.
"When I asked him his name, he reached into my car, which was intimidating to me," Stanley said.
So she sprayed him with mace when she felt threatened, she said.
"My pocketbook was sitting on the passenger side. I carry mace for protection. He got maced," she said.
Pennsville police, though, said the man told them he reached toward Stanley after she reached out to him first, as if she intended to shake his hand.
It's not clear which version of the story is accurate. Stanley, who is now facing aggravated-assault and weapons possession charges, on top of a suspension without pay from her job as a crossing guard, said she plans to fight the accusations.
"This is not an innocent man walking the streets that got sprayed with mace. I've never been in trouble in my life. I work. I pay bills," Stanley said. "This is a guy that's making a living selling drugs [and is] basically OK with murdering people."
Stanley said she didn't go out looking for the man, but happened upon him at random.
Pennsville Police Chief Allen Cummings confirmed that a person in Stanley's immediate family did indeed recently suffer a serious overdose, and had to be revived using the opiate antidote Narcan.
But, Cummings said, police can't prove solely based on Stanley's assertion that the man she maced is indeed the same man who sold the drugs that caused the OD.
"Obviously that's not the proper way to handle it," Cummings said of the alleged macing. "We really can't prove anything that he sold it. We can't just go knock on this guy's door and say, 'Where's the heroin?'"
Cummings said it would help the police if Stanley's family member who suffered the overdose would be willing to come forward and identify the man as the person who sold the heroin. Until then, though, there's no probable cause, he said.
Stanley said her family member is in treatment now after the overdose.
She said she's never had a brush with the law before in her life, pointing out that as a crossing guard, she is technically employed by the police department.
"I would never get into the police department if I had anything on my record," Stanley said. "I just hate for my name to be thrown out there like this was an innocent person. I'm a good, hardworking person who owns a home in this town and pays my bills and works every day."
NBC10 earlier this year aired and published an exclusive special report on the heroin and opioid epidemic in the Philadelphia area and beyond. Explore the special report, Generation Addicted, here.
A fire at a Puerto Rican electrical plant left hundreds of thousands across the island without power on Wednesday afternoon, according to the island's power utility.
The fire is contained and did not cause any injuries, Telemundo reports (story in Spanish).
The power outage affected a large portion of the island, causing traffic jams and confusion. Law enforcement officials were dispatched to help direct traffic and deliver aid with the power down.
A representative of the island's power company, Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica, said that the failure started at a central power plant. The utility tweeted the outage is affecting customers across the whole island, and they are investigating its cause.
See live video from Puerto Rico here, via Telemundo.
While antibiotics were once hailed as miracle drugs, they've been abused and overused so much that they are now often powerless against fast-evolving bacteria. That bacterial evolution is far outpacing humans’ ability to research and develop new drugs effective enough to fight those infection-causing “superbugs,” NBC News reports.
"If antibiotics were telephones, we would still be calling each other using clunky rotary dials and copper lines," said Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that in the U.S. alone, more than two million people are infected by drug-resistant germs each year, and 23,000 die of their infections. Globally, the death toll from antibiotic-resistant microbes is 700,000 per year.
"Antimicrobial resistance poses a fundamental threat to human health, development and security," Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the United Nations' World Health Organization, said Wednesday while opening a U.N. meeting on the problem of superbugs.
"We are running out of time," she added.
An police chief in Ohio voiced his anger after the recent shooting of unarmed black man Terence Crutcher in Oklahoma, NBC News reported.
Rodney Muterspaw took to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon and wrote, “As an officer I am so sick and drained of some cops doing things like this. You are making us all look bad. STOP."
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The 26-year veteran of the Middletown, Ohio, police force told his local paper that he could not longer stay silent following the “questionable” shooting of Crutcher in Tulsa.
These types of incidents, Muterspaw told his local newspaper, “set us back every time and it’s hard to get a grip on what we are trying to do.”
The FBI and NYPD are looking for two men who took a suitcase from 27th Street Saturday night — and left behind the bomb that was sitting inside it.
The bureau's New York office released a photo of the two men Wednesday, saying it was taken between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Saturday on 27th between Sixth and Seventh avenues. One of the men appears to be wearing a tan or gray long-sleeved dress shirt and black slacks, while the other is apparently in a light red or pink polo shirt and jeans.
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"They are witnesses, we are very interested in talking to them and hearing about how they found the bag," Jim Waters, head of the NYPD's counterterrorism bureau, said Wednesday. "They found the bag, opened it, found the device -- a pressure cooker -- and took the bag. They are witnesses. There are no criminal charges. I want to stress that."
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The pressure cooker bomb inside the suitcase was allegedly planted by Ahmad Rahami, a New Jersey resident who was charged with planting that device and one that exploded on 23rd Street, injuring 31 people, Saturday night. He is also charged with planting the pipe bomb that exploded in a trash bin along a Marine 5K race in Seaside Park, New Jersey, hours earlier.
Waters said the men who removed the bomb from the bag were "very lucky" they weren't hurt. He said if the men weren't plugged into news coverage, it was possible they still didn't know they had taken the bag that held the bomb.
Newly sworn-in NYPD Commissioner Jimmy O'Neill said the men should head to a police precinct or call law enforcement. People with information on them are asked to call 1-800-CALL-FBI.
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Rahami continues to recover in a hospital after he was shot 10 times in the confrontation with police in Linden, New Jersey, that led to his capture Monday. Two officers who were wounded have been released from the hospital. Rahami has been charged with five counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer in connection with that shootout.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Wednesday Rahami would face terror charges in New York first, and that the Department of Justice planned to bring him to the city "in the near future." She says the charges reflect the Justice Department's "unwavering determination to finding, capturing and prosecuting all those who attempt to commit or commit acts of terror against our nation."
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Law enforcement recovered a "rambling" journal on Rahami when he was captured that referenced Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the ISIS spokesman killed in a U.S. airstrike, and Anwar al-Awlaki, the American al-Qaida cleric killed in a drone strike, authorities have said. The journal ended with the message "Death to your oppression," according to court filings.
Rahami's public defender had asked he be brought to court Wednesday to face federal charges, but authorities said that could not happen until he was removed from the hospital in New Jersey, where he is in custody on the shootout-related charges, and brought to New York.
In a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 69 percent of registered voters said they are concerned by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's comments and language in regard to women, immigrants and Muslims, NBC News reported.
More than half of that group said they have "major" concerns about those issues, according to NBC News.
By comparison, nearly as many — 64 percent of registered voters — said they have concerns about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Thirty-three percent of those polled said that Trump's temperament concerns them the most about him; 36 percent said that the issue about Clinton that concerns them the most is her judgment when it comes to dealing with Syria, Iraq and Libya.
