Most Foul: Murder defendant Alex Murdaugh took a hammering yesterday about what he was doing in the minutes after he last saw his wife and son alive at the family dog kennel.

  The disgraced lawyer had denied for nearly two years that he had even been present at the dog kennels where his wife and son were shot dead. But then in testimony this week he admitted that he’d been there only minutes before the murders and was in the house at the time of the killings, yet heard no gunshots.

  Murdaugh testified that he had driven a golf cart down to the kennels where he saw his wife and son. About two minutes after he said he left, the phones of Paul Murdaugh, 22, and Maggie Murdaugh, 52, locked and were never unlocked again, suggesting that they were killed at about that time.

    Lead prosecutor Creighton Waters pointed out a flurry of telephone calls, texts, videos, car navigation data, and even a high number of steps counted by Murdaugh’s cellphone, revealing  a lot of activity at a time when he originally told the police he had been napping. He asked Murdaugh whether he made the phone calls and went to his mother’s house to establish an alibi.

  Murdaugh bluntly said, “Did I shoot my wife and my son? No.”

  Murdaugh maintained on the stand that someone had committed the murders in anger or revenge over Paul Murdaugh’s fatal boat accident in which a 19-year-old girl was killed.  He said, “Because I can tell you for a fact that the person or people who did what I saw on June 7, they hated Paul Murdaugh and they had anger in their heart.”

The War Room: Fighting continued along the battle lines in Ukraine today, but the one-year anniversary of the war passed yesterday without a Russian onslaught.

  The Institute for the Study of War says, Russia “has no meaningful successes to offer the Russian people after a year of costly war in Ukraine.”

  In an editorial, ISW says “Ukraine’s heroic resistance against the first year of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine and Russian defeats continue to stun the world, but the outcome of the war remains in doubt.” They go on to say, however, that, “We cannot say that Putin has lost strategically (despite endemic Russian tactical incompetence and repeated operational failures) simply because he has not yet won.”

  The ISW points out that Russian President Vladimir Putin believes Russia created Ukraine and that there is no such thing as an independent Ukraine. They say, “Putin is unlikely to ever change his maximalist intent to secure control over Ukraine.” 

The Obit Page: Robert Hébras, the last survivor of a 1944 massacre in which members of an SS Panzer division killed almost everyone in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, died earlier this month at age 97. Hébras survived shielded by bodies of the dead.

  He spent his life trying to make sure the slaughter was not forgotten.

  Hébras was 19 on June 10, 1944, when members of the Second SS Panzer Division ordered village residents to gather and slaughtered 643 of them. Men were herded into barns and shot before the barns were set on fire. Women and children were corralled into a church before the Germans threw in grenades and burned the building.

  Hébras was wounded but played down his injuries. “The bullets had passed through the others,” he said, “and by the time they reached me, they no longer had the power to go in deep.”

  The ruins of the original village of Oradour have been left as they were at the end of that day, a burned out memorial to the atrocity. Hébras  wrote in a memoir that as he walked through the ruins, “I still hear the church bells and the anvil of the blacksmith shoeing cows and hobnailing our clogs.”

The Spin Rack: The number of dead in the devasting earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has risen to more than 50,000. — Lawyers are busily signing up clients with damage claims after the toxic train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio. A dozen suits have already been filed. — After an outpouring of public objection, the publishers of Roald Dahl’s children’s books say they will continue to make the original texts available alongside the new bowdlerized editions that eliminate such words as “fat” and “ugly.”

Below the Fold: Despite Fox News being sued for $1.5 billion for spreading claims that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the election, the network is still at it. Host Tucker Carlson said last night on the first year anniversary of the Ukraine war and President Joe Biden’s speech that, “It is galling to be lectured about democracy by a man who took power in an election so sketchy that many Americans don’t believe it was real.”  He said, “Joe Biden is far less popular in the United States than Putin is in Russia. …. and it says everything about Joe Biden’s tenuous legitimacy.”

  Filings in the Dominion lawsuit revealed internal communications in which Carlson and other Fox hosts admitted there was no proof of election fraud. They admitted that they kept the issue alive to continue attracting viewers, and they are still doing it.

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