"In the span of two years, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has gone from one of President Joe Biden’s most prominent surrogates — important enough to get vetted as a potential VP pick..."

"... to abandoning what once was considered a shoo-in re-election bid.... [A] 60% spike in homicides and accusations that she had become disconnected from the community seriously complicated her chances.... [Bottoms's statement] lacked... any sort of explanation about why she isn’t running. So her allies are filling the void. They say she genuinely believed she could have won a second term, but passed because she felt her motivation sapping.... Will she run for another office? Bottoms didn’t rule it out, and several statewide offices are up for grabs next year. Your Insiders are skeptical of this possibility. If she faced a tough citywide re-election bid this year, a statewide race with a more conservative electorate would objectively be an even heavier lift."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. 

Here's an AJC article from January: "Atlanta’s deadliest year in decades has city on edge and demanding change": 

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was hailed after her response to destructive rioting in May after protests over the death of George Floyd devolved into chaos. Glamour featured her in its Women of the Year issue....

Former APD investigator Lakea Gaither said Bottoms has “lost the confidence of the officers.” An 18-year veteran saluted as Officer of the Year in 2013 and Investigator of the Year in 2015, Gaither was one of 37 officers who either retired or resigned in a single month, August of last year. More than 200 officers quit in 2020. Many left after Erika Shields stepped down as chief in June, shortly after former Officer Garrett Rolfe shot Rayshard Brooks after a scuffle in a Wendy’s parking lot near downtown.

After Bottoms quickly announced that Rolfe had been fired and then-Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard announced criminal charges, hundreds of officers staged an unofficial “blue flu” in protest.... 

Bottoms says pinning blame on her for Atlanta’s historically high homicide tally is “misplaced frustration.” One 2020 shooting left a man dead near her southwest Atlanta home even as a patrol car sat outside her house, she noted. “Even if we had officers on every single corner — and in this instance an officer was literally on the block — homicides can happen,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Wherever people would like to place blame, (that) doesn’t get us any closer to the solution. This is a challenge across the country and we’re all trying to wrap our arms around it.”

"An Oklahoma man who was released early from prison broke into a woman’s home this month, cut out her heart, cooked it and tried to feed it to his relatives..."

"... and then killed two of them, the authorities said this week. The man, Lawrence Paul Anderson, who has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the killings, had been sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2017 for a probation violation in a drug case, but public records show that he was granted clemency last year by the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board as part of a mass commutation program."

The NYT reports.

"Simon told police that he was walking his dog with his girlfriend in the 3000 block of North Fox Street when he told the dog to poop."

"He then heard a voice from a ground-level apartment yelling at them and asking if they were going to train the dog or just yell at it, according to the probable cause statement. Simon said he tried to ignore the yelling but then saw the man point a gun at him."

From "Suspect in homicide near Coors Field opened fire because of dispute over dog poop, police say/Michael Close, 36, accused of firing on victims from his apartment while they were walking their dog" (Denver Post).

"Bedeviled for over 34 years by the mysterious killing of Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister who was shot in the back by an unknown assailant on a quiet Stockholm street..."

"... Sweden’s judiciary finally made its case on Wednesday. At a news conference in Stockholm, the prosecutor Krister Petersson said that there was 'reasonable evidence'that the assailant was Stig Engstrom, a graphic designer at an insurance company, who killed himself in 2000, at the age of 66....It was hardly a surprise, however, as the Swedish case was widely considered solved in 2018 by a freelance journalist, Thomas Pettersson, whose reporting led to Mr. Engstrom.... There has been widespread criticism about the way the Swedish judiciary and the police have handled the case over the past decades. The mystery endured through six investigations and three commissions over the years, but Mr. Engstrom eluded suspicion though he had presented himself to the police as a witness to the killing.... At the time of the killing, investigators were focused on the suspected complicity of Kurdish militants, and Mr. Engstrom was not taken seriously, according to Mr. Pettersson.... 'He has the right timing, the right clothing; he has unique information, he lied, he had close access to guns of the right type,' Mr. Pettersson said. 'He was right-wing and Palme unfriendly,” he added. “He had a deep political interest and a deep anti-Palme sentiment.'"

The NYT reports.

You'll have to take my word that this was my theory all along.

I didn't want to cast aspersions on a particular individual on this blog, so I never wrote it on the internet, but I said it out loud around the house. This was always my theory: "Woman Who Blamed Trump after Giving Her Husband Fish-Tank Cleaner Now Under Investigation for Murder" (National Review).

"Lee Boyd Malvo, half of a two-man sniper team which terrorized the Washington region and killed 10 people in October 2002, was married in a ceremony at Red Onion State Prison..."

"... in Virginia this month.... Malvo, who was 17 when he committed the crimes, was arrested with John Allen Muhammad, and ultimately convicted of two murders in Virginia and six murders in Maryland. He was given life sentences without parole in all eight cases. Virginia recently changed its rules to consider parole for juvenile offenders after they have served 20 years, but if Malvo, now 35, were paroled from Virginia, he would then have to begin serving his Maryland sentences. Carmeta Albarus, who helped Malvo’s defense team in 2003 break the psychological grip Muhammad had exerted over the teenager, said Tuesday that she was a witness to the marriage. 'I was honored to be there,' Albarus said. 'It was a beautiful occasion, given the circumstances of where it took place... She’s an absolutely wonderful individual.... I believe the institution was very accommodating'...."

WaPo reports.