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Prosecutors want mother’s communication privileges revoked in neglect case; and other top stories

A 49-year-old Macomb County man accused of strangling his father’s Labrador Retriever to death has been sentenced to community service. 

On Monday, William John Kucharski Jr. was sentenced to 62 days of community service after pleading no contest to one count of animal cruelty, according to court records. 

On Jan. 14, 2025, Macomb County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a home on Prinz Road in Richmond Township for a report of a possible dead family pet and a threat to a family member. Deputies say the caller was concerned about the welfare of Kucharski and Kucharski’s father. 

Kucharski was reportedly home alone with the dog and is accused of choking and killing the animal. When his father returned home, he allegedly found his son with his arms around the dog and was unable to remove them. Deputies say Kucharski made threats to harm himself. 

Kucharski was reportedly uncooperative with deputies and was later arrested.

“It is alarming to see innocent animals subjected to such cruelty. I urge everyone who believes in harsher consequences for animal abuse and the loss of animal life to contact their state legislature and push for changes in the law that will allow for stricter penalties for these heinous acts,” said Macomb County Prosecutor Peter J. Lucido when charges were announced against Kucharski.

Joseph Buczek

Joe Buczek is manager of digital content and promotion at CBS Detroit. He previously worked at WWTV, the Grand Traverse Insider, the Leader and the Kalkaskian, the Oakland Press and the Morning Sun.

A grief-stricken mother told an inquest she felt ‘let down’ by authorities after her mentally ill daughter killed herself.

Louise Fender’s 26-year-old daughter Rosie Fender was scared of going outside, had trouble sleeping, and was hearing voices when she died in February 2022 after laying down on a railway track near Romsey, Hampshire.

She had been living in multiple locations after moving out of her family home aged 18, initially to stay with her former IT teacher, Nicholas Haines, who Ms Fender said had ‘groomed’ Rosie as a schoolgirl.

The inquest heard Haines had been jailed due to the relationship, which began after he gave Rosie private guitar tuition from the age of around 14.

In the months before she died, Rosie was drinking to excess, would clean obsessively, and was convinced she was going to meet and marry broadcaster Bear Grylls.

The talented dancer’s family and Haines said NHS community health provider Southern Health offered virtually no support to Rosie, in spite of the level of need.

Rosie’s mother broke down in tears when she recalled being ‘passed from pillar to post’ seeking support from authorities.

She said: ‘I felt powerless. No one would listen or take me seriously. I felt no-one understood her or understood her or how ill she was. I felt seriously let down, and I can never forgive them for that.’

The inquest in Winchester heard Rosie was so paranoid about germs that she showered for up to eight hours at time, often refused to go outside or let people into wherever she was living, and drank glasses of water through a straw due to her fear of contamination.

Rosie told her mother an ‘evil entity’ was stopping her from sleeping, and she told her mother daily that she was suicidal.

Ms Fender said: ‘Her mental health felt more like that of a 13-year-old. She missed so much because of her relationship with Nick, she was completely isolated from her family and she had no friends.’

She added: ‘Although I didn’t approve of the relationship, I couldn’t do anything about it.’

Mr Haines described himself to the coroner as ‘a friend of Rosie’s’ who ‘looked after her for many years’.

He said Rosie was one of his students and that one day ‘she opened up and said she had been through a lot in her life’

He said: ‘We started seeing each other, we both knew it was stupid. It was something that should never have happened. Massive regret about what happened.’

Haines said he met up with Rosie again after she turned 18 and he served his sentence, and the pair started a relationship.

They moved to various parts of the UK, and that her OCD started getting worse.

He said she began keeping ‘notes on herself and Bear Grylls’ and said ‘she worked out she was going to meet him on a specific day at a specific time – When she didn’t meet him she was so down and suicidal.’

He said Rosie moved to Southampton when the 2020 lockdown hit, which he said ‘came at the worst possible time’ because she was no longer able to socialise.

She later went to see a ‘witch’, and Rosie then made her own ouija board. He said it was at this point she started hearing voices.

Haines said he was no longer in a relationship with Rosie when she died, but continued to visit her daily and care for her as a friend.

He denied any suggestion he prevented Rosie from seeing her family.

He said: ‘I was always saying you need to see your family, I needed the help – but she only let me. I felt people didn’t believe her, what she was going through. She needed urgent help.

‘I needed more help, but it was difficult when for so long she was refusing the help. With her OCD, I think Rosie thought she would get over it herself.

‘If she had got support, she would have had something to fight for. She needed someone from the mental health team or just a professional to tell her it was going to be alright rather than just (giving her) a pill.’

He said she was constantly given ‘negative news’ about waiting lists and delays when it came to involvement with medical professionals.

The inquest heard Rosie moved again, to Eastleigh, shortly before she died.

This meant she was no longer within the geographical boundary that covered her mental health services team, and she had not registered with a new doctor’s surgery.

Her previous GP Dr Bram Ganesan said: ‘It does seem there is a strict cut-off for the boundary issue, and she wanted to stay with the team.’

He said it seemed that ‘bureaucratic dictation got in the way’.

Rosie’s mother broke down in the witness box as she described how her life ceased to be ‘in technicolour’ since her daughter’s death, adding: ‘Every day when I wake up, it’s like I’m in a kaleidoscope of hell.

‘My life is completely hollow now that Rosie has been taken away from me.

‘I felt my daughter has been failed. She was individually let down by people who were meant to help her.’

The inquest before area coroner Rosamund Rhodes-Kemp is due to conclude next week.

• For confidential support, call Samaritans on 116 123, visit samaritans.org or visit www.thecalmzone.net/get-support

• Daniel Francis moved from the UK to Stockholm in 2022 with his wife for her job.
• He has embraced Swedish living and loves the rhythm of life and the benefits for new parents.
• Francis enjoys the changing seasons but struggles with the limited daylight hours in winter.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Daniel Francis, a charity consultant who moved from the United Kingdom to Sweden. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been drawn to Scandinavia since a road trip in my early 20s and made visits to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, before getting married in Copenhagen in 2018.

When my wife was offered a job at a big Swedish company in 2022, we jumped at the chance to move from London to Stockholm.

Having lived here for over three years, I finally understand what makes this country unique.

It’s the perfect country for new parents

Sweden is known for its extensive welfare system — and I’d say it certainly lives up to the hype, especially as a parent.

The year after we arrived, we had our daughter. Becoming a first-time parent in Sweden is wonderful because the system feels designed for parents to succeed.

Our child goes to a largely publicly funded nursery (a förskola) five days a week. Access to subsidized childcare in Sweden like this can help parents return to work with ease. Plus, we don’t have to spend most of our paychecks on childcare.

Sweden’s flexible parental leave policies also provide 480 days of paid leave (about 240 days per parent) when a child is born or adopted.

A paid leave this long that also includes fathers is rare to find around the world. It meant I was able to spend a good chunk of time bonding with my daughter when she was little, which was amazing.

The country offers unhindered access to dramatic natural beauty

One of the biggest draws is Sweden’s raw natural beauty — pristine forests, dramatic mountains, and wild skies. I can sometimes see the northern lights from my living room!

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There’s an abundance of nature just 15 minutes outside Stockholm, but one of my highlights came during a week in The High Coast, around five hours north of the capital.

At 286 meters above sea level, it’s widely considered the highest coastline in the world, and the cliffs continue to rise each year.

Perhaps the most beautiful thing about Swedish nature is that you have the right to roam, known as Allemansrätten. This means you can hike and camp wherever you like, providing you respect nature and don’t disturb the landowner.

People here seem to embrace the rhythm of life

My favorite thing about Sweden is its flow of life. I appreciate that many Swedes have rhythmic routines that aren’t overly regimented and prioritize comfort and coziness.

This may be part of a daily routine — such as lighting a candle in the morning to alleviate the darkness — or as big as an annual festival.

For example, Sweden has Valborgsmässoafton in April, where everyone burns wood in their gardens to celebrate the arrival of warmer weather.

There’s also Fredagsmys, or “Friday coziness,” where we all wind down on a Friday evening with comfy clothes, snacks, and friends.

The seasons are clearly defined …

Coming from the UK, where the weather is very unpredictable, I instantly loved the seasonality in Sweden.

Summers tend to be consistently warm and dry, which is perfect weather for exploring nature. Then it’s very cold and snowy in the winter, which really enhances the Christmas season.

Of course, summer can take a while to arrive. Swedes have a joke that after winter, you have the second winter, the third winter … and then the fourth. Then it’s instantly summer.

You don’t really get a spring or fall quite in the same way as the UK. But there’s a clear separation between the seasons, and that allows us to fully embrace them.

… but the winter darkness can feel endless

That brings me to the one part of Swedish living that shows I’m not yet a true Scandinavian: I struggle with the oppressive darkness during the winter.

In Sweden, winter means fewer hours of daylight, especially in December in January. Some winter days, we’re lucky to get just five hours of daylight.

I don’t mind the cold weather, but the darkness definitely affects me in a way I didn’t anticipate. My mood feels lower, and my world a bit smaller.

Above all, I think Sweden has the best capital city

Having lived in London for 10 years, I realized that I love living in a big city. However, Stockholm is my favorite.

It’s a truly beautiful city with brightly colored buildings in Gamla Stan and other historic areas that really give it warmth.

It has all the benefits of a major capital city but still has something of a small-town vibe. It is walkable and has the best baked goods, too — nothing beats a Scandinavian bakery.

Like the rest of the archipelago, Stockholm is a collection of islands, so you’re always near the water and can travel almost anywhere by boat.

This makes visiting each part of the city feel like an adventure.

Best-Yet ‘Baby Pictures’ of the Universe Unveiled

By Lee Billings edited by Dean Visser

Sometimes, a picture can be worth much more than a thousand words. For instance, one measure associated with the pictures below—new high-definition snapshots of the cosmos in its infancy—is 1,900 “zetta-suns.”

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Equivalent to almost two trillion trillion suns, that’s the amount of mass (or its counterpart as energy) that these images show to exist in the entire observable universe, which extends almost 50 billion light-years in all directions. The images, released today, are among the final results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), a National Science Foundation–funded observatory that operated on a mountaintop in Chile from 2007 until 2022. The researchers will present their results, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, tomorrow at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

“What I love about these new images is how they bring the whole history of the universe to life,” says Jo Dunkley, a Princeton University cosmologist, who led the ACT analysis group. “The fact that you can just look out into the sky to see the whole sweep of cosmic time is beautiful. And with ACT, we’ve been able to see this better than ever before.”

What Did ACT See?

ACT observed the big bang’s afterglow, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which was emitted when the universe was just 380,000 years old. Back then the cosmos was essentially a fireball, an expanding bubble of plasma as hot—and as opaque—as the surface of the sun. This opacity makes the CMB’s light the oldest that anyone can ever see. Building on past CMB surveys (such as that of the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite), ACT measured the intensity and polarization of the light emitted by this material with unprecedented sharpness and sensitivity. These values were then translated into estimates of the temperature, density and velocity of the swirling primordial stuff from which galaxies and larger cosmic structures would eventually coalesce. Those estimates in turn let ACT’s researchers effectively gauge the sum of all things and the way they came together.

How Much “Stuff” Is in the Universe?

Of the staggering 1,900 zetta-sun quantity the researchers came up with, only 100 zetta-suns come from normal matter: hydrogen makes up three quarters of the latter figure, and helium comprises the rest of it. Both of these elements emerged in the immediate aftermath of the big bang. All the rest of the elements—the carbon in your cells, the calcium in your bones, the oxygen you breathe and even the gold in your jewelry—showed up much later, after the ignition of the first stars, and are akin to a rounding error, just a meager sheen upon the greater cosmic ocean.

Of the remaining 1,800 zetta-suns’ worth of material out there, 500 zetta-suns represent dark matter, the invisible substance that serves as gravitational glue that holds galaxies together. But the bulk, some 1,300 zetta-suns, comes from the density of dark energy, the mysterious force that’s powering an acceleration in the rate of cosmic expansion. So most of the universe’s “stuff” is actually in the form of things for which we only have placeholder names—and a very limited understanding.

Why This Matters

Despite how little we seem to know, the most salient figure to assign to this all-encompassing “baby picture” of the cosmos arguably isn’t two trillion trillion suns (or a thousand words, for that matter). It is, in fact, six: the total number of core parameters that plug into the standard model of cosmology, called Lambda-CDM (with “Lambda” being a shorthand for dark energy and “CDM” referring to a sluggishly “cold” type of dark matter inferred from observations). Just six numbers, if properly arranged, seem to quite thoroughly explain the curious patterns imprinted on the CMB—and how they led to the cosmos we dwell in today.

Planck’s results had already suggested a similar conclusion. But with ACT’s five-times-higher resolution and three-times-greater sensitivity to polarization, researchers hoped to see signs of new physics beyond Lambda-CDM that its predecessor might have missed. “We came into this thinking the detailed patterns we’d see in ACT’s polarization data would reveal something about alternative cosmic models,” Dunkley says.

And it did—but not exactly as hoped.

What’s Next?

Rather than discovering telltale quirks that signpost a path to unraveling the nature of dark matter, dark energy and other cosmic mysteries, ACT’s results instead reinforced the soundness of the standard model of cosmology. The hoped-for breakthroughs may have to wait for fresh results from a new generation of CMB surveys, such as the Simons Observatory that’s now being built on the very same Chilean mountaintop that previously hosted ACT.

“The [Lambda-CDM] model just matches perfectly with all our data, which is pretty amazing, actually—that we’re able to look back to this earliest observable time, and this simple model is still working,” Dunkley says. “Something’s still missing from our understanding; we don’t know what dark matter and dark energy are, for example. But this result is important because it’s showing us that a lot of other things that could’ve made the universe more complicated aren’t happening. The early universe doesn’t seem to be where our problem lies.”

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — The father of a 20-year-old University of Pittsburgh student Sudiksha Konanki, who went missing in the popular Dominican Republic tourist town of Punta Cana while on spring break with friends, said he has asked authorities to widen their investigation.

Konanki was last seen before dawn on March 6 at a beach near the resort where she was staying, according to Civil Defense officials.

“It’s four days, and if she was in water, she would likely have been strewn to shore,” her father Subbarayudu Konanki told WTOP-FM. “She’s not found, so we’re asking them to investigate multiple options, like kidnapping or abduction.”

Authorities were using drones, helicopters and detection dogs on Monday to scour the waters off the island’s east coast where she was supposedly last seen, Jensen Sánchez, a Civil Defense spokesman, told The Associated Press.

“The search is underway at sea because it’s presumed she drowned. According to the boy who was with her, the waves swept her away, but that is under police investigation,” he said.

He noted it can take more than a week for a body to surface in warm waters.
When her family learned of her disappearance, Subbarayudu Konanki and his wife Sreedevi flew to Punta Cana with two family friends. He and a family friend filed a record of complaint Sunday, asking authorities to widen the investigation.

The complaint notes that the student’s belongings, including her phone and wallet, were left with her friends, “which is unusual because she always carried her phone with her.”
“In light of these circumstances, I respectfully request that the authorities take immediate steps to investigate not only the possibility of an accidental drowning, but also the possibility of a kidnapping or foul play,” he wrote, according to WTOP-FM.

Sudiksha Konanki, a citizen of India, is a U.S. permanent resident from Chantilly, Virginia, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, which is working with federal officials and university police in support of the Dominican National Police investigation.
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University of Pittsburgh officials are in contact with the family and authorities in Virginia, and have offered their support in the efforts to find the missing student and bring her home safely, the school said in a statement.

Konanki and five other female university students traveled to the Dominican Republic on March 3, according to her dad.

“She wanted to have a nice break with her friends in Punta Cana,” he said.

A Luton teenager, who shot dead his mother and two of his siblings, had been planning to kill as many as 30 very young school children.

Nicholas Prosper pleaded guilty last month to the murders of his mother Juliana, 48, alongside his 16-year-old brother Kyle and sister Giselle, 13.

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“The best evidence of his intent is that the first act of his plan that day was the pre-meditated shooting of his mother, brother and sister.

“His further intention in relation to the school was to carry out a mass shooting during the 9.00am classroom assembly, for the early years pupils; that is children aged between 4 or 5.”

However, Mr Gray KC said his meticulous plans hit an obstacle. He had planned to kill his family members as they lay sleeping.

However, they became aware of that plan and got into a violent confrontation with their killer.

In addition to the shotgun injuries he suffered, Kyle Prosper was stabbed around 100 times.

Aware that neighbours would likely have called the police because of the noise, the young killer decided to leave home early and head into nearby woods.

Around two hours later, he emerged from the place he had been hiding.

“The sound of sirens was everywhere as the emergency services responded to the shootings that had taken place.”

The prosecutor said: “He put his hand up to gesture to a passing police car. The officers stopped their car and arrested him. They found that he was armed with a knife in his trouser pocket.”

Prosper had been planning a mass shooting at St Joseph’s Catholic Primary SchoolGOOGLE MAPS

The teenager then took the officers to an area where he had hidden his shotgun and ammunition.

The court heard that evidence suggested that what drove him on most was the “desire to be famous or infamous as a mass killer. This was killing for the sake of killing.”

A report by Dr Iain Kooyman, a consultant psychiatrist concluded that the defendant “shows all the symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

“Although his parents and teachers suspected he might have this condition, it was undiagnosed and therefore untreated at the time the defendant planned and carried out the killings.”

Luton Crown Court was told that Nicholas Prosper uploaded a bizarre video to Facebook, just hours after he murdered his mother and two siblings.

In the video, recorded inside his home the night before, he references the Walking Dead video game.
In the 70-second recording, he appears to threaten violence against his 13-year-old sister.

Wearing a yellow bucket hat and black T-shirt, he calmly declared he would take violent revenge against Giselle for making “incorrect choices” in The Walking Dead game.

The 18-year-old said his sister’s “face will be mutilated further than necessary,” claiming he was “chosen” to protect a fictional character called Clementine in the zombie game.

A psychiatric report found that Nicholas Prosper suffered from undiagnosed ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder).

However, the report also points to psychopathic traits within his personality.

The psychiatrist’s conclusion read: “Almost all of the abnormal aspects of Mr Prosper’s mental state and behaviour can be explained by autism.

“The only aspects which can’t be fully explained by autism are Mr Prosper’s extreme lack of empathy and remorse.

“These are the very features which are most relevant when considering the alleged offences.”

The report states that those aspects can properly be described as being psychopathic traits.

The sentencing hearing continues.