Colton Moore, a Georgia state senator was heckled and pushed into the ground before being arrested as he attempted to enter the state House chamber on Thursday (Jan 16). Mr Moore was banned indefinitely from entering the House chamber last year after making controversial statements about the late House Speaker David Ralston but returned to participate in the joint session, set to be addressed by Governor Brian Kemp, as per a Fox News report.

After nearing the chamber’s gate, Mr Moore was met by a wall of resistance as he was pushed back by an attending doorman. Not willing to back down, Mr Moore said he had a constitutional right to enter and that the doorman should be arrested for breaking the law.

A skirmish ensued, with one of the viral videos showing Mr Moore being pushed to the floor by one of the doormen. He was then shepherded away by the Georgia State Patrol (GSP) in handcuffs for defying the ban.

The GSP said its troopers were forced to step in when Mr Moore created a disruption outside the House Chamber. He was taken to the Fulton County Jail and charged with willful obstruction of law enforcement officers, a misdemeanour.

“Despite multiple verbal warnings and several attempts to de-escalate the situation, Sen. Moore persisted in his attempts to disrupt official proceedings inside the House Chamber,” the statement said.

“The disturbance escalated further when Sen. Moore pushed into troopers multiple times.”

No elected representative should be thrown to the ground & arrested for fulfilling their constitutional obligation.

I’m happy to help with paying for @realColtonMoore bail.

Please share details @FreedomCaucusGA @MalloryStaples1
pic.twitter.com/8DML6RQcox

— Harrison Floyd (@hw_floyd) January 16, 2025

“Senator Colton Moore, who exposed and defeated corrupt Fani Willis last year, has been arrested by the Anti-Trump Speaker of the Georgia House,” Mr Moore’s office said in a statement.

“Colton is being held in the same Atlanta jail as President Trump. We are working to ensure his expedient release. Please pray for all those standing up for freedom and peace for all Georgians.”

Moore released

A day prior to the kerfuffle, Mr Moore wrote a letter to the current House Speaker Jon Burns, outlining why the ban was unconstitutional while warning that he intended to crash Thursday’s joint session.

After his release from jail, Mr Moore shared a video of him in the hospital, saying: “Thank you to all the patriots who have shown their support today. I have a Constitutional duty and will be back in the legislature tomorrow.”

Mikheil Kavelashvili is a former footballer who played for Manchester City.

Tbilisi:

Eleven Indian nationals were found dead at a restaurant in Georgia’s mountain resort of Gudauri, the Indian mission here said on Monday.

Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said the initial inspection found no signs of injury or violence. All victims died from carbon monoxide poisoning, local media reported, citing police.

The Indian mission in Tbilisi said that it was saddened to learn of the unfortunate passing of eleven Indian nationals in Gaudauri and extended its deepest condolences to their families.

“The embassy is working closely with local authorities to facilitate the prompt repatriation of the remains to India. We are also in contact with the bereaved families and are committed to providing all possible support,” the mission said in a statement on Monday.

Earlier, the mission had said that all 12 victims were Indian nationals.

It is learnt that the victims were employees of an Indian restaurant ‘Haveli’, in Gudauri.

Georgia’s internal affairs ministry statement said 11 victims were foreigners while one victim was a citizen.

It added that the bodies of all victims, employees in the same Indian restaurant, were found in bedrooms on the second floor of the facility.

The police started an investigation under Article 116 of the Criminal Code of Georgia, which implies negligent manslaughter.

According to the preliminary investigation, a power generator was placed in an indoor area, a closed space near the bedrooms, which was turned on, probably after the power supply was turned off on Friday night.

A forensic medical examination has also been appointed to determine the “exact cause of death”.

Investigative actions are “actively” being carried out, with forensic-criminalistics working on the spot, and interviews of persons related to the case are being conducted.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

AFP

The party, which ruled Georgia since 2012, is reportedly founded by a billionaire who made his fortune in Russia. The party is often accused by critics of trying to move the country closer to Russia and away from the EU. Ahead of October’s elections, it pushed through legislation targeting independent civil society and curbing LGBTQ rights.

The EU and the United States see this as Georgia’s shift away from a pro-Western path and back towards Russia’s orbit. Georgian Dream says it is acting to defend the country’s sovereignty against outside interference and prevent it from being dragged, like Ukraine, into a war with Russia.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze accused the opposition of “coordinated violence” aimed at overthrowing the constitutional order.

AFP

Protest In Georgia

On Sunday night, thousands of protesters gathered again in the capital Tbilisi and some tossed fireworks at police, who responded with volleys of water cannon and tear gas. Some protesters stayed out all night, but police eventually ended the standoff by moving them away from the parliament building.

Georgia’s interior ministry said 21 police officers had been injured in the overnight protest, with 113 hurt since the beginning of the current unrest. Scores of protesters have also been injured in recent days, and the United States has condemned what it called the excessive use of police force.

AFP

Georgia’s public ombudsman said 124 out of 156 people arrested at rallies had complained of the police using violence against them, calling this a “very disturbing number”.

However, more rallies were planned on Monday and strikes and other protests have also started. Hundreds of diplomats and civil servants have signed open letters protesting the decision to suspend talks with the EU and stop receiving any funds from the bloc for four years. At least four Georgian ambassadors have resigned.

AFP

Russia’s Stand

Russia on Monday defended the crackdown on protesters, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying authorities are taking “measures to stabilise” the situation, accusing protesters of trying to “stir up” unrest.

Russia sees “the most direct parallel” with Ukraine’s “Maidan” protest that ousted a Kremlin-backed leader in 2014 after he suspended talks on closer EU ties, Peskov said.

An adopted woman in Georgia received the surprise of a lifetime after she found she had been Facebook friends with her birth father all these years. Tamuna Museridze made the astonishing discovery while she was on a mission to find her birth parents, according to a report in BBC. Ms Museridze’s search started in 2016 after the woman who raised her died. While clearing out the house, she found her birth certificate but noticed that it had the wrong birth date, leading to suspicion that she may have been adopted.

After doing some digging, Ms Museridze set up a Facebook group called Vedzeb, or I’m Searching, hoping to reconcile with her birth parents. It wasn’t up until this year that she received a message from a woman in rural Georgia, claiming that her aunt had concealed a pregnancy in Tbilisi in September 1984, which matched the time around Ms Museridze’s birthdate.

After some correspondence, the unnamed woman agreed to take a DNA test. While waiting for the tests, Ms Museridze decided to call her mother.

“She started screaming, shouting – she said she hadn’t given birth to a child. She didn’t want anything to do with me,” Ms Museridze told the publication about her first interaction with her mother.

“I was ready for anything, but her reaction was beyond anything I could imagine.”

Also Read | Two South Korean Sisters Separated At birth Reunited After Nearly 40 Years

The epilogue

A week later, the DNA test arrived, confirming that Ms Museridze and the woman on Facebook were indeed cousins. With the hard evidence by her side, Ms Museridze confronted her mother again and convinced her to acknowledge the truth. She also got her to reveal the name of the father. It was a man called Gurgen Khorava.

“The first two months were shocking, I couldn’t believe these things were happening to me. I couldn’t believe I had found them,” Ms Museridze said.

Once Ms Museridze had Mr Khorava’s name, she quickly tracked him down on Facebook. It turned out that he had been following her story on social media with the pair being friends for three years.

“[He had] been in my friend list for three years. He didn’t even know my birth mother had been pregnant. It was a huge surprise for him,” she added.

The father-daughter duo soon met in Mr Khorava’s hometown where Ms Museridze was introduced to her cousins and half-siblings. She said out of all of her father’s children, she looked the most like him.

Ms Museridze also found that her mother was ashamed of having a child out of wedlock. She hid her pregnancy and eventually travelled to a nearby city to have the baby in secret.

A 44-year-old murder case has gotten hope for closure after two skeletal remains were found in a car submerged in a murky pond in the United States last week. The car is believed to belong to a Scarsdale couple that vanished in 1980.

Charles Romer, a retired oil company executive from Scarsdale, and his wife Catherine were driving to the Westchester County suburb from their home in Florida in the spring of 1980. They made a stop at a Holiday Inn, now called the Royal Inn, in Georgia. However, they could not be found after that day even as the police found some of their unpacked belongings in the hotel, reported The New York Times.

The incident left their family searching for answers for decades, with the police suspecting that the couple may have been killed in a robbery as Ms Romer had a large amount of jewellery with her.

Now, nearly 44 years later, the finding of bones and a trove of jewellery, including a Rolex watch and diamond ring, from the submerged car has given hope that the cold case may have been solved.

According to Georgia police spokesperson Lawton Dodd, the human remains in the car “conclusively show the bodies of two people were in the vehicle”.

It is yet to be ascertained whether the remains belong to the Romers.

The police have also found a license plate bearing the couple’s initials, Ms Romer’s granddaughter told The New York Times.

Investigators are also reportedly seeking a VIN number from the car to see if it matches the couple’s 1979 Lincoln Continental – in which they were travelling the day they went missing.

Further investigation is underway to determine whether the remains belong to the Romers – who were in their second marriage, officials said.

“While the investigation will take months to complete, this development offers a resolution far better than the endless questions we’ve faced for so long,” another granddaughter of Ms Romer told the New York Post.

The police have also found another car in the same pond, but it is reportedly not related to the Romers’ missing case.

Atlanta:

At least two polling sites in the US election battleground state of Georgia were briefly evacuated on Tuesday after fake bomb threats that election officials in the state blamed on Russian agents.

The threats, which were deemed to be non-credible, caused two polling locations in Fulton County, Georgia, to be evacuated. Both reopened after about 30 minutes, officials said, and the county is seeking a court order to extend the location’s voting hours past the statewide 7 pm deadline.

Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Russian interference was behind the Election Day bomb hoaxes.

“They’re up to mischief, it seems. They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election, and if they can get us to fight among ourselves, they can count that as a victory,” Raffensperger told reporters.

The Russian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, the FBI said it was aware of non-credible bomb threats to polling locations in several states, with many of them originating from Russian email domains.

Georgia alone received more than two dozen phony bomb threats on Election Day, most of which occurred in Fulton County, an FBI official said.

A senior official in Raffensperger’s office, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said the Georgia bomb hoaxes were sent from email addresses that had been used by Russians trying to interfere in previous US elections.

The threats were sent to US media and the two polling locations, the official said. “It’s a likelihood it’s Russia,” the official said.

Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump are locked in a tight race to win the White House. Opinion polls suggest the contest is too close to call.

The phony bomb threats mark the latest in a string of examples of alleged interference by the Russians in the 2024 election.

On Nov. 1, US intelligence officials warned that Russian actors manufactured a video that falsely depicted Haitians illegally casting ballots in Georgia. Intelligence officials also found that the Russians created a separate phony video which falsely accused someone associated with the Harris presidential ticket of taking a bribe from an entertainer.

US intelligence officials have also accused Russia of interfering in previous US presidential elections, especially the 2016 race which Trump won against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Tbilisi:

When Georgia’s richest man first burst into politics 12 years ago, he vowed to “astonish Europe” with the democracy he would bring to the Black Sea nation.

But Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder of Tbilisi’s ruling party, has done what many critics say is the opposite: led the country into international isolation while curbing the power of his political opponents.

This month, the European Parliament called for sanctions against the powerful tycoon, accusing him of “undermining democracy” with the aim of pulling Georgia away from the West towards Russia’s orbit.

As the Caucasus nation gears up for crunch parliamentary elections Saturday, all eyes will be on what the reclusive 68-year-old oligarch does if his Georgian Dream party, in power since 2012, wins again.

‘Absolute power’

Born into poverty in the village of Chorvila in western Georgia, Ivanishvili made his fortune in Russia during the cutthroat 1990s, amassing huge wealth as state-owned Soviet assets were privatised.

He is now worth $4.9 billion, according to Forbes magazine — just under a sixth of Georgia’s GDP — and holds dual Georgian and French citizenship.

In 2012, he became Georgia’s prime minister after founding his own political party, serving for just over a year before officially retiring from politics.

In 2023, he returned to become Georgian Dream’s honorary chairman, assuming the role of a kingmaker who nominates prime ministers from among his loyal lieutenants.

After initially pursuing a liberal pro-Western agenda, his party has over the last two years intensified its anti-Western and anti-liberal positions.

Under his de-facto rule, Georgian Dream has “managed to gradually capture all branches of power and independent institutions in the country,” the Georgian branch of the Transparency International rights group said in May.

“The arrangement allows Ivanishvili to have near absolute power without any formal accountability,” it added.

He maintains control by placing close associates, such as personal bodyguards, ex-CEOs of his companies, personal assistants and family doctors in charge of state institutions, “with law enforcement and security services being the key”, it said.

Modern art, sharks, baobabs

“He thinks of the country as his personal property, as a private corporation,” said political analyst Gia Khukhashvili, Ivanishvili’s former adviser and one-time close confidant.

The billionaire is “detached from reality” and surrounded by a small circle of “sycophantic favourites”, he added.

Giorgi Bachiashvili, the former head of Ivanishvili’s Co-Investment Fund who used to be the tycoon’s right-hand man, called him a “power-drunk criminal” who “is trading away the future of our country.”

Ivanishvili has also faced accusations of having ties with Russia, a charge his party has rejected.

In addition to property and land in Georgia worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Ivanishvili owns luxury real estate in New York and Paris through a complex web of offshore companies and trusts.

His Georgian Co-Investment Fund is registered in Luxembourg and operates 25 projects in Georgia, including shopping malls, cement factories, and luxury hotels.

He is also the founder of a charity fund that has failed to publish financial reports for the last four years and faced accusations of vote-buying.

Now sporting a splash of grey in his neatly coiffed hair, Ivanishvili lives in a lavish glass-and-steel mansion overlooking the capital Tbilisi, where he keeps a priceless collection of contemporary paintings.

Among his possessions is a private zoo with exotic animals, a huge aquarium with sharks and a collection of giant baobab trees transported from Africa by boat in a journey that cost millions of dollars.

‘Global war party’

In recent weeks, Ivanishvili has attracted ridicule on social media for appearing at campaign rallies inside a bulletproof glass booth and for canned applause being played at his speeches.

He says his party is seeking to win a supermajority in the new parliament to enable a constitutional ban on pro-Western opposition parties.

His campaign has focused on a conspiracy theory about a mysterious “global war party” that controls Western institutions and seeks to drag Georgia into the Russia-Ukraine war.

Opposition parties, he said, “are trying to seize power by opening a second front (against Russia) in Georgia” with the help of their foreign partners.

“On October 26, we must once again save the country and choose between slavery and freedom, submission to foreign powers and sovereignty, war and peace,” he told a campaign rally in the Black Sea city of Batumi.

In spring, Georgian Dream lawmakers passed a Russian-style “foreign influence” law that targeted civil society and sparked weeks of unprecedented street protests, prompting Brussels to halt Tbilisi’s European Union integration process.

Recent opinion polls suggest that four leading opposition alliances are poised to garner enough votes to form a coalition government in the upcoming ballot.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

Reproductive rights groups erupted in outrage Monday after ProPublica revealed that a Georgia woman died from delayed medical care caused by the US state’s restrictive abortion law.

Amber Nicole Thurman, 28, developed a rare complication from abortion pills and died during emergency surgery in August 2022, with an official state committee blaming the fatal outcome on a “preventable” lag in performing a critical procedure.

Georgia had just passed a law that made performing dilation and curettage (D&C) a felony offense with medical exceptions that doctors had warned were vague and difficult to interpret.

“Amber would be alive right now if it wasn’t for Donald Trump and Brian Kemp’s abortion ban,” said Mini Timmara, president of Reproductive Freedom for All. “They have blood on their hands.”

The US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn national abortion rights unleashed a wave of bans and restrictions in 22 states, thrusting reproductive rights to the forefront of the upcoming presidential election.

ProPublica said this was the first abortion-related death officially deemed “preventable” and plans to publish details of a second case soon.

These official reviews are not made public, but ProPublica obtained copies of the reports.

Thurman, an otherwise healthy medical assistant and mother of a six-year-old boy, made the decision to terminate a twin pregnancy to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend Ricaria Baker told ProPublica.

She and her son had recently moved to a new apartment complex and she planned to enroll in nursing school. She wanted a surgical abortion, but Georgia’s six-week abortion ban forced her to seek care at a clinic in North Carolina.

On the day of the procedure, the hours-long drive was hampered by traffic, and Thurman missed her 15-minute appointment window.

The clinic offered a medication abortion with mifepristone and misoprostol. While overwhelmingly safe, rare complications can occur.

Thurman’s condition worsened over several days, turning into heavy bleeding and vomiting blood. She was taken to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge.

Doctors found she had not expelled all the fetal tissue from her body and she was diagnosed with “acute severe sepsis.”

But despite her rapidly deteriorating health, the hospital delayed Thurman’s dilation and curettage procedure for 17 hours.

By the time they operated, the situation was so dire it required open abdominal surgery. The doctor performed the operation and found a hysterectomy was also required — but during the procedure, Thurman’s heart stopped.

Her mother recalled her last words: “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

The state committee found there was a “good chance” that an earlier procedure could have saved Thurman’s life.

“Life of the mother” exceptions have widely proven inadequate, forcing women to cross state lines in desperate bids for lifesaving care.

“She died in a hospital, surrounded by medical providers who could have saved her life,” feminist author Jessica Valenti wrote on X. “This is what abortion bans do.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A law enforcement officer works near the scene of a shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, U.S. September 4, 2024.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Four people were killed and nine wounded in a school shooting in the U.S. State of Georgia on Wednesday (September 4, 2024), the State bureau of investigation said.

“Four dead. An additional nine were taken to various hospitals with injuries. The suspect is in custody and alive. Reports that the suspect has been ‘neutralized’ are inaccurate,” the bureau said in a social media post.