ROME (AP) — One of the two Americans convicted in the 2019 stabbing death of an Italian plainclothes police officer has been granted house arrest after an appeals court significantly reduced his original life sentence.
Gabriel Natale-Hjorth can serve his 11-year, four-month sentence at the home of a grandparent in the seaside town of Fregene, west of Rome, state-run RAI and LaPresse news agencies reported, citing a court decision Monday.
Natale-Hjorth and Finnegan Lee Elder, both from California, had been found guilty in the July 2019 killing of Carabinieri Vice Brigadier Mario Cerciello Rega in a botched sting operation after a Rome drug deal went bad. After the first trial, were both sentenced to life in prison, Italy’s harshest penalty.
Italy’s highest Cassation Court last year ordered a new trial, ruling that it hadn’t been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Americans, with limited Italian-language skills, had understood that they were dealing with Italian police officers when they went to meet the alleged drug dealer.
An appeals court earlier this month upheld their convictions but greatly reduced their original sentences. Elder, who wielded the knife, is serving his sentence of 15 years and two months in prison.
Teenagers at the time of the killing, the former schoolmates from the San Francisco Bay area had met up in Rome to spend a few days vacationing. The fatal confrontation took place after they arranged to meet a small-time drug dealer, who turned out to have been a police informant, to recover money lost in a bad drug deal. Instead, they were confronted by two officers.
Cerciello Riga was stabbed 11 times with a knife brought from the hotel room.
FILE - Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, centre, attends a hearing for the appeals trial in Rome, on July 3, 2024. Natale-Hjorth, one of the two Americans convicted in the 2019 stabbing death of a carabiniere police officer in Rome has been granted house arrest after an appeals court significantly reduced his original life sentence. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street is hovering around record highs at the start of a week featuring another full slate of corporate earnings and the government’s latest inflation reading.
The S&P 500 slipped 0.2% in afternoon trading Monday. The benchmark index is within 0.7% of its record set in July. The Dow Jones Industrial average rose 129 points, or 0.3%, to 41,303 as of 1:07 p.m. Eastern. It is on track for a record.
The Nasdaq slipped 0.7%. It was weighed down by several technology companies that tend to tip the market because of their big values. Microsoft fell 0.7%.
Oil prices jumped 3% after Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah traded heavy fire on Sunday, triggering potential supply worries.
Bond yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 3.81% from 3.80% late Friday.
Investors have a busy week ahead that kicked off Monday with a surprisingly good report showing that orders for long-lasting goods from U.S. factories, including cars, jumped 9.9% in July. An update on consumer confidence is on tap for Tuesday and the U.S. will provide a revised estimate on Thursday of economic growth during the second quarter.
Semiconductor company Nvidia reports its latest financial results on Wednesday. It has been a big beneficiary of Wall Street’s mania around artificial intelligence, becoming one of the stock market’s most massive companies, with a total value topping $3 trillion. Its stock slipped 2.3% Monday, but it is up 155% for the year.
Others reporting this week include Kohl’s, Chewy, Salesforce and Dollar General.
The key report for investors this week will come on Friday, when the the government serves up its latest data on inflation with the PCE, or personal consumption and expenditures report for July. It is the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell strongly signaled on Friday that the central bank is planning to start cutting its benchmark interest rate, which currently stands at a two-decade high. The Fed raised interest rates in order to tame inflation back to its target of 2%. The final push to the target has been elusive.
Inflation has been steadily easing and economists polled by FactSet expect the latest PCE data to show a 2.6% inflation reading. The PCE was as high as 7.1% in the middle of 2022.
The Fed has been trying to tame inflation by slowing economic growth, but not by so much that it causes a recession. The dynamics of its concerns have shifted.
“Recent commentary coming out of conversations with Fed officials shows they care more about the risk of the economy slowing,” said Nathan Thooft, chief investment officer and senior portfolio manager at Manulife Investment Management.
Traders are forecasting a rate cut to come at the Fed's meeting in September. They expect the central bank to trim its main interest rate by at least 1 percentage point by the end of the year, according to data from CME Group.
FILE - The New York Stock Exchange is shown on Aug. 13, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan, File)
A custodian cleans up an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Monday, Aug. 26, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
A person walks in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Monday, Aug. 26, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
A person walks in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Monday, Aug. 26, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
People stand in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Monday, Aug. 26, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
A custodian cleans an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Monday, Aug. 26, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
