Jeanine Pirro Announces Charges Against Two More DC Teens Over ‘Big Balls’ Attack

U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro announced on Monday charges against two teens allegedly involved in the attack against a Department of Government Efficiency staffer over the summer.

Federal prosecutors have charged Lawrence Cotton-Powell, 19, along with Anthony Taylor, 18, with robbery, assault, and carjacking in connection with the attack on a DOGE staffer, Edward Coristine, known as “Big Balls,” and another person in early August. Not long before Coristine was beaten while defending a woman, Cotton-Powell and Taylor were involved in the mugging of a victim named Ethan Levine, Pirro said.

In addition to the mugging prior to Coristine, Pirro said that both suspects are repeat offenders who should have been in jail for other offenses and never had the opportunity to attack the two men in August.

“Lawrence Cotton-Powell is 19 years of age. He is now charged with robbery, first-degree robbery for which he faces 15 years in prison. He also faces a charge of assault with intent to commit robbery, another 15 years, and robbery for Edward Coristine, 15 years, assault with intent to commit robbery, another 15 years, and attempted carjacking, five years,” Pirro said.

The U.S. attorney then went on to detail how judges ignored her office’s requests for jail time for Cotton-Powell, instead letting the teen loose on probation. A short time after he was released in each case, he allegedly committed other crimes that landed him back in the crosshairs of prosecutors.

“The codefendant in this case is an individual by the name of Anthony Taylor. He – charged also with the same arrest – he is fraught with the same crimes,” Pirro said.

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The attack on Coristine, which left the federal staffer bloodied, appeared to trigger President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime in major American cities. The president has deployed National Guardsmen to areas such as Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tennessee, to deter crime. He has attempted to deploy troops to other locations, such as Seattle, but has been blocked by the courts.

The charges against Cotton-Powell and Taylor come after two teens involved in the attack received probation, a punishment criticized by Pirro and Trump.

The president called the sentences of probation, handed down to a 15-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy, “terrible.” The president and Pirro have called for stricter penalties against youth in D.C. to deter crime that has exploded among the capital’s teens.

“I think the judge should be ashamed of himself,” said Trump.

Amazon Web Services Nears Recovery After Major Outage Disrupts Apps, Services Worldwide

Amazon.com said on Monday that a cloud computing unit at its data center in northern Virginia had largely contained fallout from a widespread internet outage that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites, including some of the web’s most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit.

Amazon said it had addressed the underlying issue and was close to a resolution, but some users were still complaining of lingering difficulties using services such as digital wallet Venmo and video calling site Zoom. The disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets.

It was the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies. It was at least the third time in five years that AWS’s northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown.

Amazon did not address a request for more clarity about why that particular data center keeps being impacted, instead pointing to an online statement that said the matter had been “fully mitigated.” The problems stemmed from what is known as the Domain Name System, or DNS, which prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS’s DynamoDB API, a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data.

After hours of disruptions, many applications were gradually coming back online in the afternoon in the U.S. But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several services.

There were “tons of broken internal services still now as individual resolution and repair occurring,” read language from an internal problem ticket describing the outage and reviewed by Reuters.

Lambda, one of AWS’s computing services, was experiencing errors due to issues with an internal subsystem, AWS had said earlier. “We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system,” it said.

Earlier, AWS said the root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers.

The issue, AWS said, originated from within the “EC2 internal network.”

EC2 refers to Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers to develop, launch and host applications.

AWS had said earlier in the day it was seeing signs of recovery for EC2 use at a few data centers.

It was taking similar measures at the remaining locations and expects the problems to subside, AWS added, without providing a specific timeline.

While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilized, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day.

Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said software developers need to build better fault tolerance into their code. He said AWS provides tools developers can use to protect themselves in the event of a problem at one of any of its sprawling network of data centers, and developers can also create backups with other cloud providers.

“When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn’t really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later,” Birman told Reuters.

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AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world’s largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud.

Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms – ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems – that rely on its cloud infrastructure.

AWS said on its status page that Monday’s outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020.

According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.

The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said.

“This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET.

In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland, and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were all hit, according to Downdetector’s UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC’s website.

“The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service,” said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey’s Department of Computer Science.

Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident.

“For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue,” said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at insurance broker McGill and Partners.

Wall Street was largely unfazed, sending Amazon shares 1.6% higher to $216.48.

Ookla said at least a thousand companies were affected by the outage.

Snapchat last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances at around 7:00 a.m. ET.

Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS.

Amazon’s own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity.

Fortnite, owned by Epic Games; Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States.

In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work.

(Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by James Pearson, Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Joe Bavier, Richard Chang and David Gregorio)

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