News of the World

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Tech Company CEO Charged in Decades-Old Murder of California Woman

A tech company executive was arrested in New York over the weekend in connection with the 30-year-old homicide cold case of Laurie Houts, according to prosecutors.

John Kevin Woodward, 58, the chief executive officer of the online training company ReadyTech, was taken into custody on July 9 at John F. Kennedy airport after arriving from Amsterdam, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office said in a July 11 press release.

Woodward has been charged with the 1992 strangulation murder of his roommate’s 25-year-old girlfriend, Houts, the DA’s office confirmed. A recent breakthrough in DNA enabled police to arrest the CEO. If convicted, Woodward faces life in prison.

Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Refuses to Go, Country’s Crisis Deepens

Fury exploded onto the streets of Sri Lanka’s capital on July 13 following the failure of the country’s leadership to honour an agreement for the president and prime minister to relinquish their positions.

The official resignations of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe occurred, but then were backtracked on.

Rajapaksa, his wife, and two bodyguards chose to flee the island nation’s capital city of Colombo for the Maldives early on July 13, leaving Wickremesinghe in charge as the interim president amid an escalating economic and civilian crisis.

Protesters responded en masse to this decision by storming the office of Wickremesinghe, demanding that he also vacate his post.
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After taking charge, Wickremesinghe promptly declared a state of emergency, which he rescinded hours later.
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Wickremesinghe then declared a nationwide curfew until the morning of July 14 in a desperate bid to stem the tidal wave of unrest within the capital.

Ex-CIA Engineer Convicted in Massive Theft of Secret Info

A former CIA software engineer was convicted Wednesday of federal charges accusing him of the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history.

Joshua Schulte, who chose to defend himself at a New York City retrial, had told jurors in closing arguments that the CIA and FBI made him a scapegoat for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017.

Schulte watched without visibly reacting as U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman announced the guilty verdict on nine counts, which was reached in mid-afternoon by a jury that had deliberated since Friday.

The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices. Prior to his arrest, Schulte had helped create the hacking tools as a coder at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.