By Victoria Allen Science Editor For The Daily Mail

Published: 14:00 EDT, 20 September 2023 | Updated: 02:10 EDT, 21 September 2023

A female hit-and-run driver who plowed into seven pedestrians in Midtown Manhattan late on Sunday night has been pictured entering court wearing a ‘good vibes’ t-shirt. 

Imani Lucas, 29, is charged with attempted murder after reportedly closing her eyes and praying as she ran a red light on the crosswalk between West 36th Street and 6th Avenue in her Honda Accord at 11.55pm, leaving a bloody scene in her wake. 

Lucas, from Belle Mead, New Jersey, was flanked by three cops Tuesday morning as she entered a Manhattan courthouse looking disheveled in handcuffs and a gray t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: ‘good vibes’. 

Her mother said she takes medication for bipolar disorder and was ‘hearing voices’ while seeming to suffer a manic episode at the time of the crash.

Lucas underwent a psychiatric evaluation before being charged with seven counts of attempted murder, seven counts of assault, reckless endangerment, leaving the scene of an accident with serious injuries, and reckless driving.

Gruesome images from the aftermath of the crash show many of the victims – six men and one woman ranging in age from 24 to 61 – sprawled on the ground unconscious and covered in blood.  

Lucas continued driving for around another 13 miles via the Midtown Tunnel before she crashed into two vehicles off the Long Island Expressway at Clearview, Queens. 

Miraculously, each of the pedestrians and other motorists impacted by her rampage are expected to survive – though some suffered horrific injuries ranging from leg fractures to spinal cord damage requiring five hours of surgery. 

The motorist’s mother, Melissa Lucas, said her daughter suffers from bipolar disorder and was ‘hearing voices’ in the moments before she crashed. 

‘She is on medication, and as far as we knew she was taking her medication,’ Melissa Lucas told Gothamist. 

‘This episode coming on all of a sudden, I don’t know what to think or what precipitated it.’ 

‘Imani would never do anything intentionally to hurt anybody or anything,’ she added. ‘Nothing like this has happened before.’

Melissa said she had been on vacation with her husband when she got a call from her daughter late Sunday night. 

‘She said she was hearing voices… I asked her, I said: “Imani, where are you?”‘ Melissa recalled. 

‘She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she was going. She said, ‘I’m just driving. I’m just driving.

‘And I said, ‘Where are you?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ And then that’s when I think I heard a police officer coming up to her talking, and then I heard something like Bayside, Queens.’ 

Lucas told detectives she closed her eyes and prayed to God in the moments before the crosswalk crash, according to Abc7.  

Photographs which emerged in the immediate aftermath show the front of Lucas’ Honda completely crumpled by the impact of the collision in Queens – and new images released on Tuesday show her in transit moments before.

CCTV images also show Lucas hurtling down the highway towards pedestrians at the crossing.  

Witness photographs caught moments later show the grisly impact of what police believe was an attempt to murder seven innocent pedestrians. 

Cops said they were mainly New Yorkers, with one or two tourists involved – reportedly from Italy. 

An alarmed employee from a nearby Taco Bell leapt into action after he saw what happened. 

He said each of the pedestrians appeared unresponsive when he first rushed out onto the street. Many were flung between bin bags near the sidewalk, photographs show.

‘I took them water and tissue to clean everything. It was a very dangerous accident,’ the Taco Bell staffer told Pix11 moments after the crash.

Footage of the scene shows people stepping between their bodies as they tried to check their vital signs, with one man on the phone to emergency services.

NYPD has so far identified the victims as six men aged 24, 27, 28, 30, 32 and 61, along with a 34-year-old woman. 

They were taken to area hospitals with the exception of the 30-year-old man who refused to go, cops said.

Their injuries range from ‘general complaint of distress to a fractured leg’.

A date for Lucas’ court appearance has not yet been confirmed as she continues to undergo psychiatric evaluation. 

Two of the pedestrians have been named by Italian English outlet La Voce di New York as Italian tourists Giulia Gardini, 34, and Matteo Maj, 51.

Gardani, a tennis instructor, from Piacenza just outside Milan, was left in a critical condition after the impact left her with a cervical spine injury requiring five hours of surgery.

Maj, a graphic designer, needed surgery for a tibia and fibula procedure, according to the paper, who spoke with his sister Monica Maj. 

Ruth Wilson teases a return to Luther during an appearance on Good Morning Britain despite her character Alice ‘falling to her death’

By Lily Jobson For Mailonline

Published: 05:23 EDT, 22 August 2023 | Updated: 06:40 EDT, 22 August 2023

• The Mediterranean diet contains lots of fruit, veg, seafood and nuts

By Victoria Allen

Published: 19:18 EDT, 16 August 2023 | Updated: 19:55 EDT, 16 August 2023

A former top advisor to Bill Clinton says there’s a ‘good chance’ Hillary Clinton will run against Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election if the current administration loses Congress in the midterms.

Dick Morris claimed Sunday morning a Clinton-Trump rematch is likely if the Democrats don’t pull the successful results in November’s election, alleging the failure would cause the party to turn on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

‘There’s a good chance of it,’ Morris told WABC radio host John Catsimatidis before applauding the former presidential nominee’s campaign strategy, which could see her face-off against Donald Trump again after Trump beat her to the White House in 2016. 

‘Hillary has set up a brilliant, brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do.’

He continued: ‘What she’s done — at a point at which no Democrat is willing to come out and criticize Joe Biden, but all Democrats are disappointed with him and have to realize the ultimate correctness of our accusations that he was incompetent to be president — she has set up a zero-sum gain with him. 

‘The worse he does, the better she does because she’s positioned herself as the Democratic alternative to Biden.’

Morris also claimed Clinton, 74, has portrayed herself as the opposition to the extreme left and cautioned her own party to be cognizant of the candidates they’re running in what she refers to as ‘purple districts’. 

That appears to be an attack on ‘woke’ progressive policies that have been blamed for turning many centrist Dems away from the party. 

The former political advisor alleged ‘there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill.’

Although Clinton has not yet said if she intends to enter the bid for president in 2024, she has publicly taken aim at the current administration’s efforts, saying they ‘mean nothing if we don’t have a Congress that will get things done and we don’t have a White House that we can count on to be sane and sober and stable and productive’.

Morris alleged Clinton is well positioned to be the Democratic party’s change candidate who can reference Biden’s failures, noting that a ‘left-wing took over the party and led us into disaster in the 2022 midterms’.

‘The person who staked out the turf first and owns the turf in the Democratic Party is going to be Hillary. It’s a brilliant, brilliant strategy​,’ he explained. 

His comments come just weeks after Clinton warned the Democratic Party it needs to be ‘clear eyed’ about what wins elections – a tacit warning that its progressive wing risks handing midterm victories to the Republican Party. 

She told NBC‘s Willie Geist last month that Democrats needed candidates who could win in purple states if it was to have a Congress that will ‘get things done.’

Her comments reflect divisions in both parties, as centrists grapple with fringes that offer ideological purity and headline generating Twitter accounts. 

For Democrats, that means the so-called Squad of progressives – including the likes of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.   

‘I think that it is a time for some careful thinking about what wins elections, and not just in deep blue districts where a democrat and a liberal Democrat or so-called progressive Democrat is going to win,’ said Clinton.  

‘We’ve got to be very clear eyed about what it’s going to take to hold the House and the Senate in 2022. And to win the electoral college because also Republicans are doing everything they can to create an environment in which winning the Electoral College, even narrowly the way Joe Biden did will be out of reach for Democrats,’ she argued in December, just weeks after the party’s defeat in Virginia’s gubernatorial election.

She added that she understood why politicians would want to argue for their own priorities. 

‘But at the end of the day, nothing is going to get done if you don’t have a Democratic majority in the House, in the Senate, and our majority comes from people who win in much more difficult districts and our majority in the Senate comes from people who can win in not just blue states and hold those wins … but can win in more purpleish states,’ she said. 

‘So this is going to be a very intense period, not just for the Democratic Party, but for the country.’ 

Morris, referencing her commentary, said Sunday: ‘She was absolutely right and nobody else has the guts to say that.’

He alleged other Democrats had to keep their alliance with the extreme left because ‘that’s their potential base’.

‘Hillary can say “go to hell, I don’t care about you guys. I’m going to be the anti-Chirst, I’m going to run against you.” Therefore, she’s the only one between now and the end of the midterm elections who’s prepared to say what the truth is,’ Morris said.

He added: ‘She staked out a ground, not on ideological issues, but on pragmatism.’ 

Morris’ statements echo those made last week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed making a case for a Clinton 2024 run.

The authors cited Biden and Harris’ poor poll numbers, alleging they could open doors for the former Secretary of State.

‘She is already in an advantageous position to become the 2024 Democratic nominee,’ Democratic political consultant Doug Schoen and former New York City Council president Andrew Stein wrote. 

‘She is an experienced national figure who is younger than Mr. Biden and can offer a different approach from the disorganized and unpopular one the party is currently taking.’ 

However, others argue Clinton isn’t ‘forward-thinking’ enough to secure a bid for the 2024 race.

‘Democrats have a rich history of bringing old-school politicians out of the stables for a comeback and having them get slaughtered,’ Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, told The Hill Sunday.

‘Not just Hillary Clinton in 2016 but Senate candidates like Ted Strickland in Ohio, Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, Phil Bredesen in Tennessee and Walter Mondale in Minnesota.’

‘We need forward-looking leaders who stand for a new vision and not the politics of yesteryear that everybody hates,’ he added. 

Although Clinton has not formally stated if she plans to run for president in 2024, a source close to the former First Lady and her husband claims the couple wants to return to prominence in the Democratic Party.

‘It’s a perpetual itch that will never go away,’ the insider told Politico. ‘They know how to slowly reenter. The Clintons want to reset the board in their favor and then move the pieces.

Trump also hasn’t announced if he plans to run 2024, but he has publicly said he’s thinking about it.’

‘I think a lot of people will be very happy, frankly, with the decision, and probably will announce that after the midterms,’ he said in an interview in November.

Recent polls have shown he is favored above other potential Republican candidates.

In a Reuters survey published last month, 54 percent of Republicans said they would pick Trump as their top choice. Eleven percent indicated they favored Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

A Florida woman who has been taking a weight-loss injection for nearly a decade is urging Americans to stop taking these drugs solely for weight loss. 

Danielle Payton, 33, is thought to be one of the longest-serving patients on a GLP-1 agonist, which was first approved in 2010. 

These drugs are at the center of concerns about long-term safety risks, already being linked to severe vomiting and suicidal thoughts.

Ms Payton – a publicist – began taking the once-daily injection Victoza – a precursor to Ozempic and Wegovy – in 2014 to stave off type 2 diabetes.

She weighed 209 pounds at the time and was prediabetic. She was told by her doctor if she didn’t lose weight, she would have to add diabetes to her long list of chronic illnesses.

Ms Payton originally went to her doctor for a breast reduction. She was a size 38F at the time. 

‘[The doctor] wouldn’t put me on the operating table, and he said I had to lose weight,’ Ms Payton told DailyMail.com.

She had to get down to 165 pounds before the doctor would perform the surgery.

Doctors said that taking the medication could help her lose a bit of weight, though the drug is not approved for weight loss.

‘I never thought it would go this route of losing so much weight because of an injection that ended up being not to lose weight,’ Ms Payton said. 

‘I was given a shot and told, “This is going to stop you from getting diabetes. The side effect is you might lose a little weight.”‘

Now, nine years later, Ms Payton is down to 120 to 130 pounds. 

‘I was not told, nor did I even think, that I could lose between 80 and 90 pounds. Ever,’ she said. 

Victoza was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2010 to treat type 2 diabetes in adults.

Similar to popular injections Ozempic and Wegovy, the drug binds to the GLP-1 receptor, which triggers hormones in the brain to slow digestion and keep the stomach full. This reduces cravings and the risk of overeating. 

Unlike these, which use the active ingredient semaglutide, Victoza uses liraglutide. While the drugs are largely similar, some studies suggest semaglutide is more effective for weight loss. 

A study published last year in JAMA, for example, found that participants who took semaglutide had a 16 percent weight change compared to liraglutide participants who saw a 6.4 percent difference. 

However, there’s little long-term data on GLP-1 agonists. And, neither Ozempic nor Victoza are FDA approved for weight loss.  

Despite surging across the US, there have been widespread fears about Ozempic, which has been linked to detrimental side effects like severe vomiting and suicidal thoughts. 

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, manufacturers of Ozempic and sister drug Wegovy, have also come under fire in a lawsuit over claims the drugs cause gastroparesis, or stomach paralysis. 

On Victoza, Ms Payton’s weight loss was gradual.  

‘It doesn’t come off immediately. You start seeing results after a couple months,’ she said. ‘It really took me like seven months to go from like 209 to 175.’

She estimates that it took about seven years total to get down to her current weight.  

She also didn’t intentionally change her diet. However, she found herself choosing odd combinations. ‘Your taste buds change,’ Ms Payton said. 

‘When I first went on the injection, I thought I was like a pregnant, hormonal woman. All I wanted was pickles, green juices, and like the weirdest things that I had never craved before in my life.’

‘It’s not that I changed my diet, per se…it’s that the shot actually changes how you look at food, what food becomes attractive to you, at least in my experience.’ 

‘It’s a mind game.’ 

Victoza also slashed Ms Payton’s appetite, which is a common side effect. 

When she first started taking it, she would go to the grocery store and stock up on a fridge full of healthy foods.

However, ‘I would look at it and say, “None of this looks appetizing.” I couldn’t eat it anymore.’

She also experienced constipation and bouts of nausea and vomiting, which have since subsided.

Ms Payton has since nixed the weird cravings, but they have left her with more sustainable habits. 

Instead of giving into temptation and snacking too much, she now only eats when she’s hungry.

‘The shots basically taught me to do that,’ she said. 

However, Victoza has left a lasting impact on her social life and mental health.

Friends have shamed her at group dinners for not being hungry, even when those friends have gone on to take Victoza and similar drugs for weight loss rather than diabetes. 

‘There’s a lot of shame that comes with taking the shot,’ Ms Payton said. 

Losing so much weight has led to judgment.

‘It’s a stark difference for your friends,’ she said. 

‘Unfortunately, friendships have been lost over taking medications like this. People have been like “You’re too thin.” And I’m like “You don’t get it. This is not a choice.”‘

Doctors have told Ms Payton that she will likely have to remain on Victoza for the rest of her life to keep from developing diabetes. 

She takes about a dozen other medications every day for multiple chronic illnesses and said that staying on Victoza is well worth not having to deal with diabetes. 

‘If I don’t have to get diabetes and go on multiple other medications, to me, that’s a win,’ she said.

‘[Victoza] is part of my daily routine, and my daily routine is what keeps me from getting progressively sicker, so as much as it sucks, it’s also what keeps me going.’

Staying on the medication long-term has been difficult as Victoza, much like Ozempic and Wegovy, has been affected by shortages from it becoming more and more popular.

Last December, she had to go off the shot for several months, leading her to gain back 15 pounds. 

‘I was freaking out. I was like, “You guys don’t need it. You’re just doing this to get thin, and I’m doing this so I don’t get diabetes,”‘ she said. 

‘It is a vicious, vicious game.’ 

Despite her mental health and social struggles, Ms Payton still considers the medication a healthy option for prediabetics and diabetics.

‘Just don’t listen to the background chatter and do it for yourself so that you can lead a healthy life going forward…so you’re not stuck with diabetes,’ she said. 

However, she encourages those taking diabetes shots for weight loss to seek out other options.  

‘Really take into consideration that people actually need this medicine and that there are other ways that those people can lose weight,’ she said. 

‘Please stop taking the supply that’s left in this country because it is dwindling by the day. And we don’t know whether we’ll be able to get the next script.’ 

Just thinking you’ve had a good night’s sleep is more important to your mood than actually having one, study finds

• Paying too much attention to your sleep could be having a detrimental impact 

By Xantha Leatham Deputy Science Editor For The Daily Mail

Updated: 19:38 EDT, 3 August 2023

Matt Doran returns to Weekend Sunrise from personal leave in good spirits – after vanishing while covering Hunter Valley bus crash tragedy

By Jimmy Briggs For Daily Mail Australia

Published: 21:53 EDT, 24 June 2023 | Updated: 21:53 EDT, 24 June 2023

City raises alarm over Bank plans to allow investors to hold up to £20,000 in a so-called ‘britcoin’ digital currency – warning it could result in bank runs

By John-Paul Ford Rojas For The Daily Mail

Updated: 16:50 EDT, 23 June 2023

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They love the heat! Drought resistant, good for wildlife… these beauties are all set for summer

By Ciar Byrne For The Daily Mail

Published: 21:23 EDT, 18 June 2023 | Updated: 21:23 EDT, 18 June 2023