Luigi Mangione pleaded not guilty Friday to a federal murder charge in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as prosecutors formally declared their intent to seek the death penalty and the judge warned the Justice Department to stop making public comments that could spoil the case.

Mangione, 26, stood with his lawyers as he entered the plea, leaning forward toward a microphone on the defense table as U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett asked him if understood the indictment, which charges him with stalking and shooting Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel last December.

Mangione said, “yes.” Asked how he wished to plead, he said simply, “not guilty” and sat down.

A cause célèbre for people upset with the health insurance industry, Mangione’s arraignment attracted several dozen people to the Manhattan federal courthouse, including former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who served prison time for stealing classified diplomatic cables.

Mangione, held in a federal jail in Brooklyn since his arrest, arrived to court in a mustard-colored jail suit and chatted with one of his lawyers, death penalty counsel Avi Moskowitz, as they waited for the arraignment to begin.

Late Thursday night, federal prosecutors filed a required notice of their intent to seek the death penalty.

Aid group says its food stocks in Gaza depleted

The World Food Program says its food stocks in the Gaza Strip have run out under Israel’s nearly 8-week-old blockade, ending a main source of sustenance for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the territory.

The WFP said in a statement that it delivered the last of its stocks to charity kitchens that it supports around Gaza. It said those kitchens are expected to run out of food in the coming days.

Some 80% of Gaza’s population of more than 2 million relies primarily on charity kitchens for food, because other sources have shut down under Israel’s blockade, according to the U.N. The WFP has been supporting 47 kitchens that distribute 644,000 hot meals a day, WFP spokesperson Abeer Etefa told the Associated Press.

It was not immediately clear how many kitchens would still be operating in Gaza if those shut down. But Etefa said the WFP-backed kitchens are the major ones in Gaza.

Ex-Taliban commander pleads guilty in N.Y.

A former Taliban commander pleaded guilty Friday to providing weapons and other support for attacks that killed American soldiers and for key roles in the 2008 gunpoint kidnapping of a reporter for The New York Times and another journalist.

Speaking through an interpreter, Haji Najibullah entered the plea in Manhattan federal court to providing material support for acts of terrorism and conspiring to take hostages.

The bearded Najibullah, wearing a black skull cap over his shaved head, told Judge Katherine Polk Failla that he provided material support including weapons and himself to the Taliban from 2007 to 2009, knowing that his support “would be used to attack and kill United States soldiers occupying Afghanistan.”

“As a result of material support I provided to the Taliban, U.S. soldiers were killed,” Najibullah said.

N.Y. subway rider killed during dispute

A man was stabbed to death during the morning rush hour in the New York City subway system Friday after a dispute with another rider who had stepped on the man’s shoes, police said, adding it was the first homicide in the subway this year.

Police and medical personnel responded to the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall subway station in lower Manhattan shortly after 8:30 a.m. for a 911 call about a person being stabbed. The victim, 38, was found unresponsive with multiple stab wounds to his torso and brought to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said.

He was later identified by police as John Sheldon of Brooklyn. He had been mistakenly identified by police earlier in the day as Sheldon John.

Authorities said they were searching for the other rider, who they described as in his 20s or 30s and who was dressed in black and wearing black headphones.

Man, 20, guilty in Colo. rock-throwing death

Three Denver-area teens cheered each other during a night of throwing rocks at cars — until one of the stones crashed through a windshield and killed a woman, leading to a murder conviction Friday after the trio turned on one another.

Jurors found Joseph Koenig guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Alexa Bartell on April 19, 2023, after the other young men riding with him reached deals with prosecutors and testified against him. Koenig, now 20, was also convicted of attempted murder and other less serious crimes for rocks and other objects thrown at vehicles the night Bartell was killed and in previous weeks.

Bartell’s family and friends hugged and cried in court after the verdict.

Her mother, Kelly Bartell, said later that justice had been done but she had mixed feelings, expressing some sympathy for Koenig and the other two young men, who were all 18 when her daughter was killed.

Kennedy Center’s World Pride events canceled

Organizers and the Kennedy Center have canceled a week’s worth of events celebrating LGBTQ+ rights for this summer’s World Pride festival in Washington, D.C., amid a shift in priorities and the ousting of leadership at one of the nation’s premier cultural institutions.

Multiple artists and producers involved in the center’s Tapestry of Pride schedule, which had been planned for June 5 to 8, told the Associated Press that their events had been quietly canceled or moved to other venues. And in the wake of the cancellations, Washington’s Capital Pride Alliance has disassociated itself from the Kennedy Center.

“We are a resilient community, and we have found other avenues to celebrate,” said June Crenshaw, deputy director of the alliance. “We are finding another path to the celebration … but the fact that we have to maneuver in this way is disappointing.”

Feds to investigate N.Y. school mascot dispute

The U.S. Department of Education announced Friday it plans to investigate whether New York education officials are being discriminatory by threatening to withhold funding if a Long Island school district doesn’t stop using a Native American-themed logo.

The probe by the agency’s civil rights office stems from a complaint filed by the Native American Guardian’s Association, a nonprofit that supports “the beautiful artistry of native identifiers in sports and the mainstream,” according to its website. The organization says the funding threat constitutes a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

The announced investigation also comes several days after President Donald Trump waded in into a local fight over the Massapequa school district’s longtime “Chief” logo, arguing it was “ridiculous” and “an affront to our great Indian population” to now force the Long Island district to change it.

Indian, Pakistani forces briefly trade gunfire

Indian and Pakistani soldiers briefly exchanged fire along their highly militarized frontier in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, Indian officials said Friday, as tensions soared between the nuclear-armed rivals following a deadly attack on tourists.

India has described the massacre in which gunmen killed 26 people, most of them Indian, as a “terror attack” and accused Pakistan of backing it. Pakistan denied any connection to the attack near the resort town of Pahalgam in India-controlled Kashmir. It was claimed by a previously unknown militant group calling itself the Kashmir Resistance.

With the region on edge, three Indian army officials said that Pakistani soldiers fired at an Indian position in Kashmir late Thursday. The officials said Indian soldiers retaliated and no casualties were reported. Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment on the report.

Virginia Giuffre, Epstein accuser, dies at age 41

Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.

Giuffre died by suicide, according to a statement from the family. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in a crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 mph.

In 2019, Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in New York with sex trafficking and conspiracy, and was accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.

Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Epstein was found hanged in his cell. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.

In 2009 Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, had sued Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex-trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.

In 2015, she was the first of Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and go public, selling her story to a British tabloid.

Famed aerobatic pilot killed in Va. crash

Rob Holland, a famed aerobatic pilot who wowed airshow crowds and championship judges with tight spirals, meticulous loops and inventive sequences in the sky, has died in a plane crash. He was 50.

Holland died Thursday while landing his custom-built, single-seat aircraft at Joint-Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia, in preparation for an upcoming airshow at the military installation.

The plane was making a normal landing and was not conducting aerobatic maneuvers, the National Transportation Safety Board said. The crash remains under investigation.

— News service reports