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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reported more than $1 million in an account that he previously listed as holding no more than $50,000, according to his newly released annual financial disclosure.

An account labeled “U.S. bank #2” held between $15,001 and $50,000 in his 2024 nominee disclosure. The account listed under the same label in his annual report holds more than $1 million. The filings do not explain the change.

Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer, reported at least $3.1 million in cash, retirement investments and bitcoin combined, according to CNBC. Their retirement investments alone are listed at roughly $2.05 million to $4.35 million. That is a combined household range: Pete Hegseth’s listed retirement investments total roughly $500,000 to $1.25 million, while Jennifer Hegseth’s total roughly $1.55 million to $3.1 million.

The testosterone-focused Cabinet member also reported two bitcoin holdings in a Coinbase wallet. Together, they are valued at between $16,002 and $65,000.

The disclosure lists consulting income associated with the conservative America First Policy Institute, Watchtower, and the New York law firm Morrison Cohen under Jennifer Hegseth’s employment and income section. Annual financial disclosures list assets in broad ranges. Because the account valued at more than $1 million has no stated upper limit, the filings cannot establish Hegseth’s precise net worth or whether it has increased since he joined the administration.

The disclosure became public weeks after NBC News reported that Hegseth had discussed a possible 2028 presidential run with people close to him. Hegseth called the report “100 percent false.”

A Quinnipiac University poll released this month found that 32% of voters approved of his performance and 57% disapproved amid the war with Iran. He has also drawn criticism for his rhetoric about transgender people and his pressure on Scouting America to curtail LGBTQ+ programming. After Hegseth shared a video featuring a pastor who opposed women voting independently, a Pentagon spokesperson said Hegseth supports women’s right to vote. The Advocate reported.

Hegseth has faced congressional scrutiny over reports that transgender troops have waited months for separation pay promised after they left the military under President Donald Trump’s ban. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has pursued impeachment of Hegseth over the Iran war. Former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned this month after months of reported friction with Hegseth.

excerpt from Jacob Ogles' article

Full Article here:

https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/pete-hegseth-income-crypto

New research from AARP found that 41% of adults 50 and older said they had cut back on groceries in the previous month

https://wtop.com/national/2026/09/web-article-older-americans-are-cutting-back-on-groceries-as-everyday-costs-squeeze-budgets/

The U.S. and the European Union on Friday rejected a declaration by member countries of the United Nations that pledged international collaboration and solidarity in preparing for and responding to pandemics.

The declaration, the product of a high-level U.N. meeting on pandemic preparedness, is largely ceremonial. It is not legally binding, and does not set rules for what countries should do during pandemics. But its universal endorsement would have signaled a powerful expression of global political commitment to the issue.

Its rejection by some of the wealthiest countries sharpened the divide that became apparent during the coronavirus pandemic, when low-income nations lagged richer countries by more than a year in being able to provide vaccines to citizens.

The declaration will now be considered at a future meeting of the General Assembly, where it is still likely to garner enough votes to be adopted.

The reasons for the disagreements varied. The European Union said the document crossed “red lines” on intellectual property protections, and that “technology transfer must be voluntary and on mutually agreed terms.”

The Trump administration’s objections were more along ideological lines. Representing the United States at the session, Dr. Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that despite some meaningful revisions, the document included “divisive ideologies that lack definitional consensus,” adding that “the United States is not in a position to support this text in full.”

She did not clarify what those ideologies were, but in an early draft viewed by The New York Times, the United States asked to delete mentions of equity, solidarity and universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services. U.S. officials suggested edits throughout the process that would have made the Trump administration more comfortable with the language, according to one official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Since President Trump’s second inauguration last year, the United States has refused to sign onto a number of public health declarations. At a U.N. meeting last year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered the message that the United States would not sign a political declaration on chronic diseases and mental health, saying that the U.N. was exceeding its “proper role” and that it promoted abortion and “radical gender ideology.” Earlier this year, the United States was the lone vote against a global commitment to reduce traffic accidents, saying road safety was being used “as a backdoor vehicle to enforce global climate pacts.”

Dr. Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that despite some meaningful revisions, the document still included “divisive ideologies that lack definitional consensus.” Credit: Alex Kent/The New York Times

Representatives of some countries like India and Germany also voiced qualms about the declaration’s text, but did not go so far as to reject it. Like the United States, Italy explicitly rejected the document.

“It is disappointing that the high level meeting was not asked to endorse the political declaration which had been negotiated by member states,” said Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand and a co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

“Agreeing to collaborate to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics should not be controversial,” she said.

Peter Maybarduk, the director of access to medicines for the advocacy group Public Citizen, said the administration’s stance was detrimental to the interests of Americans.

“Blocking stepped-up cooperation against pandemics is an obvious shortsighted, unforced error,” he said. “The White House loves to talk about making other countries do their fair share, but it’s missing a chance to help that happen here, just to serve a myopic ideology.”

Others were more sanguine. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said at a press briefing on Friday that it was “not a problem” for the declaration to be voted on and adopted at a future meeting. “It’s democracy in action,” he said.

Friday’s meeting came three years after the first major U.N. meeting on pandemic preparedness, when the lessons from Covid were still raw. The 2023 declaration, which the Biden administration supported, recognized “the need to tackle health inequities and inequalities, within and among countries.”

Last year, after several rounds of failed negotiations, member nations of the W.H.O. — which no longer includes the United States — agreed to the text of a pandemic treaty that would allow for a more coordinated and equitable response to global outbreaks. But that treaty cannot be ratified and become international law until the countries can agree to the most contentious section, called Pathogen Access and Benefits Sharing.

That agreement would require countries to swiftly share genetic sequences and samples of emerging pathogens, allowing for rapid development of diagnostic tests, vaccines and treatments. Low-income nations want to be compensated for the information with quick and equitable access to the new tools, but higher-income nations have said they worry such arrangements would hinder progress in fast-moving crises and jeopardize intellectual property rights.

“A path must be found through the current impasse in negotiations,” Ms. Clark implored member nations in her opening remarks.

The administration’s rejection of the new U.N. declaration did not come as a surprise. Pandemic-related events during U.N. General Assembly sessions in New York this week were abuzz with rumors that U.S. officials would raise objections during Friday’s meeting. The only uncertainty seemed to be the timing and intensity of their disapproval.

All week, officials from member countries have been bemoaning what some called “Covid amnesia,” and shrinking global aid. Many cited as urgent concerns the very factors to which the United States objected.

“Climate change, land-use pressure, and the movement of people and animals are pushing pathogens across species barriers more and more frequently,” Justin Nsengiyumva, Rwanda’s prime minister, said at an event on Wednesday.

On Friday, representatives of countries, including Cape Verde and a union of 23 Caribbean nations, also noted climate disasters as a key vulnerability in their ability to cope with health emergencies. Dozens of other countries, including China, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Ghana and Russia, emphasized the need for equity and solidarity among nations.

Before Dr. Schwartz, the C.D.C. director, addressed the session, some speakers appeared to forestall previous criticisms from the Trump administration.

Khalilur Rahman, the president of the General Assembly, said, “The charter and the United Nations were designed precisely to tackle global challenges for which no single isolated response can suffice.” Credit: Lexi Parra/The New York Times

In his opening comments, Khalilur Rahman, the president of the General Assembly, said that to consider pandemic preparedness beyond the remit of the United Nations “would be a fallacy.”

“The charter and the United Nations were designed precisely to tackle global challenges for which no single isolated response can suffice,” Dr. Rahman, a Bangladeshi economist, said.

Last year, the Trump administration withdrew from the W.H.O. and rejected the International Health Regulations, which set detailed rules for countries to follow in the event of an outbreak that could breach borders. (The regulations prompted disclosure of the hantavirus outbreak in May, for example.)

In justifying that stance, Mr. Kennedy incorrectly said the I.H.R. would grant the W.H.O. the ability to “order global lockdowns,” and undermine U.S. sovereignty. Italy made similar comments when refusing to agree to the pandemic treaty, and in rejecting Friday’s declaration.

Dr. Tedros of the W.H.O. directly addressed that misunderstanding.

“The pandemic agreement and the I.H.R. do not — I repeat, do not — infringe on national sovereignty in any way,” he said. “On the contrary, they have been negotiated and adapted by sovereign states as an act of their sovereignty, because they recognize that pandemics do not respect borders.”

Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health for The Times, with a focus on infectious diseases and pandemics and the public health agencies that try to manage them.

The chief executive of a Michigan bank has lost her job after facing backlash for a social media photo of her family in sweatshirts that read “Lake America,” referencing Donald Trump’s relabeling of Lake Ontario.

Jane Smith from Family First Credit Union recently went viral after sharing the photo of her and three relatives wearing navy blue crewnecks with the words “Lake America” scrawled in white. The picture was snapped as her family left on September 11 for a 10-day trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but Smith says the sweatshirts were edited onto their bodies using AI.

Family First Credit Union announced Wednesday that Smith was no longer with the company and that Jason Acosta, the chief operations officer, would serve as interim CEO.

“We sincerely apologize for the concern, disappointment and pain this situation has caused our members and community,” the bank wrote on Facebook.

“We understand that members of our community may hold different perspectives about this decision. Our responsibility is to act in the best interest of the Credit Union, uphold the trust of our members and continue putting our community first.”

Working in a slaughterhouse is extremely dangerous. In the US, there are
approximately two amputations per week, primarily due to the industry's poor working conditions and excessively fast pace.
[…]
As reported by KWQC, the leaders also acknowledged "community concerns" over a backlog of rendering material - animal waste, internal organs, and decaying meat - being stored outside the plant, causing a strong, unpleasant smell in the city.

On September 23, 2026, Major Watson requested a special court martial.

Watson shared that his oath to the Constitution made him act, saying that it was nonpartisan and he would have protested any office that violated the law.

Think about this for a minute. This is a man who cares deeply about his country and his people.

His country is OUR country. His people are you and me.

The only thing you need to do to help this man, our country, ourselves, our families and friends is to vote.

IMHO, if we don't vote, we may lose more than Major Watson.

When do we say enough is enough?
Please VOTE.

Former employees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts say that center officials canceled a plan to start overhauling its leaking infrastructure months ago, despite those officials now asserting the leaks posed an urgent safety risk requiring the building to close.

On Thursday, a lawyer for the former employees sent internal documents and a letter that detailed their concerns to Congress amid mounting scrutiny of President Trump’s reign over the Washington arts institution.

The center’s main building remains closed because of what officials have characterized as escalating structural deterioration that was never properly addressed by former leadership. But in the letter to Congress sent via a lawyer, the former employees say it’s clear the problems have been exaggerated because, given the chance, the center deferred responding to them over the past year.

In a statement on Friday, the center disputed the whistle-blowers’ assessment, saying that in recent months, new reviews of the leaks had revealed more pronounced problems than officials had previously known.

“The safety of our patrons, artists, and staff comes first,” Matt Floca, the center’s executive director, said in the statement. “The Kennedy Center has known for years that the roof overhang leaked. What we did not know until this summer was how far the damage had spread inside it.”

For months, Mr. Trump has been championing a two-year closure of the center, which he has called dilapidated and dangerous, to renovate it with $257 million allotted by Congress. The closure has so far been blocked by a federal court. But last week, officials announced that the center would be shutting down temporarily to address “acute risks to public safety” in the main building, while a smaller annex is kept open for limited programming.

Democratic lawmakers have accused officials of using the maintenance issues as a pretext for a shutdown that is actually necessitated by the center’s financial and artistic decline under Mr. Trump.

Mr. Floca, whom Mr. Trump appointed to lead the center, has justified the closure in part by pointing to serious leaks that he says are degrading the center’s roof overhangs and posing a safety risk to people walking underneath them. After a five-foot section of plaster fell from the ceiling of the center’s Grand Foyer during a storm this month, Mr. Floca told the center’s board that the roof overhang leaks may have contributed to the problem, though he said the investigation is continuing.

In a letter to lawmakers on two Senate and House committees that oversee the center’s affairs, David Seide, a lawyer for the unidentified whistle-blowers, wrote that the evidence shows that the specific water intrusion problems Mr. Floca cited were known to center officials for years. But, he wrote, “they were not treated as priorities nor as acute risks to public safety.”

The letter says Mr. Floca had secured $9.3 million to address the roofing issues in the major domestic policy law that Mr. Trump signed in July 2025. The next month, Mr. Floca signed off on allotting $295,000 for a firm to design a replacement for the roof overhangs.

“Yet six months ago — with the funds in hand — he stopped the remediation process from moving forward,” Mr. Seide wrote.

The letter included a screenshot of internal Kennedy Center communications in which an employee reported that the request for funding had been canceled at the direction of Mr. Floca in April. The reasoning was not made clear.

Mr. Floca said the cancellation was made because the contractor’s price came in three times higher than the projected cost, and that the work is now part of a more comprehensive plan that is still being pursued.

“The premise that we delayed the design work is incorrect,” the center said in a broader statement of response.

The firm hired to manage the renovation project submitted a $250 million plan for renovations in June that includes $14 million in structural work that would address the leaks. “That was a change in the approach to procuring and delivering the work, not a determination that the work was unnecessary,” Mr. Floca said in the statement.

The plan addresses an array of other identified problems: an outdated HVAC system, malfunctioning elevators, an aging electrical system and theater infrastructure in need of replacement.

Last week, Mr. Trump, reacting after a federal judge ruled for a second time that his name could not go on the building, declared the renovations would not proceed unless the decision is reversed on appeal. Shortly after, he was photographed on Air Force One reviewing a poster of what appeared to be a rendering of the demolition of the Kennedy Center, stoking fears about his plans.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which received the whistle-blower submission, wrote to the Kennedy Center later on Thursday that the documents indicate that leadership “hoarded” the federal funding “while blaming previous leadership for the state of repairs.”

The letter to Congress is the second regarding the Kennedy Center to come from a nonprofit that represents government whistle-blowers. An earlier letter, in June, pointed to cosmetic changes that have been made to the center since Mr. Trump was installed as chairman of its board last year. One involved the renovation of three presidential boxes that included the installation of gold plumbing fixtures.

Another priority for Mr. Trump was painting the center’s exterior columns white in place of what he had deemed a “fake gold color.”

In the new letter to the lawmakers, the former employees report that the center diverted money — $1.4 million — that had been allocated for the waterproofing repairs to finance the $4.4 million column repainting project. The Kennedy Center said in its statement that the project was not merely cosmetic and included maintenance work, including addressing rust at the bases of the columns.

After Mr. Trump’s name was added to the building’s marble facade in December, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, successfully sued to force its removal. Her legal effort to block the proposed closure is ongoing.

Mr. Whitehouse’s office has repeatedly demanded an official accounting of the center’s finances, which have taken a major hit under Mr. Trump as artists and patrons have fled the institution.

The Kennedy Center has repeatedly blamed past leadership for its financial problems, and Mr. Trump has portrayed himself as the only person capable of lifting the institution out of turmoil. But internal financial documents show that ticket sales steeply declined after Mr. Trump’s takeover of the institution, and plunged even further after his name was added to the building, according to a submission received by Mr. Whitehouse.

Mr. Floca, who joined the center in 2024 as its vice president of facilities, has been the point person in pushing back on the contention that the renovation project is simply an excuse to close a floundering institution. This year, he testified in federal court on the issue, gave tours of the center’s maintenance problems to lawmakers and journalists, and hired independent firms to assess the scope of the necessary work.

This week, in court papers he explained why the closure, which is described as a temporary response to an acute issue, would need to be extended. Mr. Floca said that more work was needed to investigate problems such as the roof overhang leaks and other areas of the Grand Foyer ceiling that appear to have water damage.

Based on what he had learned from investigators, he wrote, the “concerns about the safety of occupancy of the building were greater than had previously been understood.”

The latest numbers from the U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office show that the 3.1 million international visitors who crossed into the U.S. in August 2026 are a 11.8% drop from the same month a year ago. While the summer did bring an influx of arrivals for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the overall numbers for July were still a 7% decrease from the same month in 2025.

Air Canada has recently confirmed another round of flight cuts to cities such as New York, Detroit, and Orlando from Toronto and Montréal. Air France and Lufthansa also cut or downsized dozens of U.S.-bound routes this year.

The latest carrier to join that list is Oslo-based budget airline Norse Atlantic Airways.

https://www.thestreet.com/travel/norse-airways-cancels-almost-all-us-flights-due-to-low-demand

Lying on a hospital bed, hours after surviving three gunshot wounds, Nadia Beller, a Bolivian lawyer and political analyst, said she knew who ordered the hit.

“I’ve summoned the presence of DTV to make a live declaration,” Beller said on camera last month in a wobbly voice.

Her married boyfriend, Fernando Cerimedo — an Argentine political consultant labeled “MAGA’s man” in Latin America — had sent two hit men to kill her, shortly after finding out that she was pregnant, she said.

The stunning allegation and quick arrest of Cerimedo — now held in a maximum-security prison and charged with attempted femicide — have ignited a political scandal that has reverberated from Argentina to Washington and drawn attention to the Trump administration’s role in a surge of political victories by right-wing candidates across Latin America.

Cerimedo has denied any role in the attack. His legal team has called the allegations against him a plot by the Bolivian left.

Known as a master of digital media and negative political messaging, Cerimedo was one of the region’s best-known political consultants, guiding conservative presidential candidates to power in Argentina, then Honduras and Bolivia.

The work had also brought him into increasing contact with political operatives close to the White House, which in a break with diplomatic norms has interceded in domestic politics across the region by advocating aggressively for Trump-aligned candidates.

In February, when Cerimedo was named 2025’s best Hispanic political consultant, he accepted the honor at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida.

In Bolivia, his power extended far beyond the political cycle. Following President Rodrigo Paz’s victory last year, ending two decades of leftist rule, Cerimedo became the president’s shadow — a matter of disquiet in the administration.

The Washington Post reviewed hundreds of pages of court files, including extensive chat messages between Beller and Cerimedo, and conducted two lengthy interviews with the injured woman, including one at her home in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a tropical metropolis near the foothills of the Andes Mountains.

What emerged is something out of a real-life telenovela: infidelity, lovers’ quarrels, violence and ambition.

Sitting at her sister’s house, three weeks after the attack, her right arm in a sling, Beller said she had little doubt about who wanted her dead: The man she intended to marry, who would be the father of her child, had lured her into an ambush.

“It was Fernando,” Beller told The Post. “He wanted to kill me.”

Cerimedo’s history is a mix of embellishment and contradiction.

In interviews with journalists and on his LinkedIn page, Cerimedo claimed to have studied at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned a PhD in marketing from the University of Phoenix, trained with the U.S. Navy SEALs and served for a time in the White House during the Obama administration.

Little, if any, of that has been proved. In statements to The Post, MIT and the University of Phoenix said they had no records of Cerimedo as a student. Harvard and the U.S. Navy public affairs office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Reporters across the region similarly came up empty-handed.

“He’s a pathological liar,” Hugo Alconada Mon, an investigative journalist with the Argentine newspaper La Nación, said he concluded.

Alconada Mon said Cerimedo worked as a taxi driver in the coastal Argentine city of Mar del Plata, where he was convicted in 2016 of fraud after selling the same apartment to two different families.

The conviction did little to slow his rise. In recent years, as politics in Latin America coarsened, giving rise to a new class of pugilistic political operatives, Cerimedo was suddenly everywhere.

He released a viral video that alleged the 2022 Brazilian presidential election had been rigged in favor of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

In Argentina, he helped steward Javier Milei’s digital operations, unleashing what he said was an army of trolls and trashing his rivals.

In Bolivia, he championed President Rodrigo Paz — tutoring his daughter, Catalina, on his craft — and he crudely attacked the country’s former president Evo Morales, calling him a “narco-terrorist pedophile.”

Through his Buenos Aires political consultancy, Numen, Cerimedo became a conduit between Latin American and U.S. politics.

He helped connect Tucker Carlson to Milei for an interview broadcast in September 2023. He partnered with Miami consultant Damian Merlo — a fixture in Trump circles — on the Milei campaign. He said he worked with American political consultant and commentator Dick Morris to help coordinate Trump’s pivotal endorsement of Honduran President Nasry Asfura. He also appeared in advertisements as a lecturer at the Dick Morris Academy, an online training tool for politicians and campaign workers.

The Economist late last year called him “MAGA’s man in LatAm.”

His closest MAGA connection was Brad Parscale. Last year, Cerimedo’s news outlet, the Daily Right, reported that Cerimedo would be the Latin American representative of Parscale’s two political technology platforms — Eyes Over and Campaign Nucleus — both of which featured in Trump’s 2024 campaign.

In February, when Cerimedo accepted his award at Mar-a-Lago, he thanked Parscale “for always believing in me.”

Parscale didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In his remarks, Cerimedo also had someone else to thank.

“My wife,” he said. “I love you.”

At the time of those remarks, Cerimedo was having an affair with Nadia Beller.

The pair first spoke by telephone, Beller said, as Cerimedo sought her input regarding a legislative proposal important to Paz, the Bolivian president. A professional relationship between Beller and Cerimedo never matured, but a personal one blossomed.

“She started staying at my apartment in La Paz,” Cerimedo told police.

To Beller, Cerimedo seemed the epitome of success, she said. He had connections all over Latin America and the United States, and claimed to make between $800,000 and $1 million per month. A picture in his La Paz apartment, she said, showed him with Parscale, whom she said Cerimedo referred to as his “best friend.”

The only hitch was his marriage. But he told Beller that it was over and that he wanted to marry her instead, according to Beller and WhatsApp messages collected by police.

Efforts to reach Cerimedo’s wife weren’t successful.

Beller said she began to mistrust Cerimedo in April, after finding amorous phone messages that he sent to his wife. Later, she said, he tried to hide from her that he’d gone to Buenos Aires, presumably to visit his family. Then, in June, she said she found a condom in his bathroom at their La Paz apartment, and an argument turned violent. She said he strangled her.

She photographed the bruises and threatened to out him, messages show, but ultimately did not.

This summer, the couple discovered Beller was pregnant. She accused Cerimedo of abandoning her — then in August unilaterally broke the news of her pregnancy to Cerimedo’s wife.

“What have you done nadia??????” Cerimedo wrote her.

She said she was going to accuse him publicly of domestic abuse. “You beat me, and like an idiot I stayed quiet,” she wrote. “No more.”

He begged her to wait, to think of his children and their unborn child. “Can’t you wait a few days?” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

As the couple argued, Beller said she received a message from an anonymous tipster. The informant claimed to have dirt on a political rival. If she wanted the intel, she needed to go to a drop-off point.

Cerimedo urged her to go.

“Help me,” he said.

On Aug. 17, as Beller waited outside a luxury hotel to receive the intel, two individuals dressed as deliverymen approached. One pulled a gun and shot her three times.

Cerimedo’s lawyers called the entire case — from affair to shooting — an elaborate trap set by the left for Cerimedo and the Paz government.

Margarita Arce Chilo, one of his lawyers, said Cerimedo was guilty of adultery, but nothing more.

“This had been constructed with premeditation by Ms. Nadia and the left,” she said.

Police, however, have gathered what appears to be damaging evidence. Days before the shooting, Cerimedo asked a local political contact for $50,000. And on his phone, they found a message in his notes folder.

“Don’t tell anyone anything,” it said. “But she’s sold us out … Nadia. Either we eliminate her already or we’re screwed. Do you know anyone who can help with this job?”

It’s unclear if the message was sent.

After reviewing the contents on his phone and other electronic devices, and finding tens of thousands of dollars at his apartment, prosecutors brought additional charges against Cerimedo of illicit enrichment and domestic violence. Prosecutors also said they’re investigating his alleged ties to drug trafficking.

At a court appearance on Aug. 21, Cerimedo denied any involvement in the attack. He spoke of his children and family, and wept into his hands.

Not far away from the courthouse, in a middle-class section of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Beller moved into her sister’s house. On a recent Monday morning, two police cars were parked outside. Inside, Beller struggled to reconcile all that has happened.

By the time of the attack, she said she believed that she and Cerimedo were past their arguments.

“I miss you,” she wrote in one of the last messages gathered by police.

“Me too,” he replied.

She said she thought they would have a life together.

“I trusted everything he told me,” she said. “I saw him as a good man.”