Investigators are probing whether there was a struggle before an Albanian actor and his wife plunged to their deaths from their apartment in New York over the weekend, a police source said.
Florind Belliu, 35, an actor and aspiring filmmaker originally from Albania, and his wife Ornela Shehi, 28, were found in the rear courtyard of 2199 Cruger Avenue in the Bronx at around 9.15am on Saturday, cops and police sources said.
“There were signs in the apartment that indicated it wasn’t all Kumbaya, like they didn’t just decide to leave their kids behind and jump,” the source told the new york post.
The source wouldn’t provide any more details on the alleged “signs”.
Stream your news live & on demand with Flash. From CNN International, Al Jazeera, Sky News, BBC World, CNBC & more. New to Flash? Try 1 month free. Offer ends October 31, 2022 >
A suicide note was not left behind, according to the source.
Authorities are waiting for autopsy results to determine whether Mr Shehi suffered any injuries not indicative of a fall, the source said.
By late Tuesday morning, the city’s Medical Examiner’s (ME) Office had not made a determination on either Mr Shehi or Ms Belliu’s death.
“Both are pending while the ME awaits additional investigative information,” a spokeswoman said, adding that the signs could include “further testing of remains or investigatory material from the scene”.
Mr Shehi was caught on video plunging from the building’s sixth floor first and hitting the alleyway, with Ms Belliu landing seconds later, sources told the post a day after the couple’s deaths.
The couple moved into the building with their two young children about four months ago, and authorities never received reports of domestic violence related to the couple, according to police sources.
Neighbors told the post on Saturday that the pair were a “quiet couple” who “kept to themselves,” and were often seen taking walks – but also that Mr Belliu had been seen visibly angry Friday.
“I’ve seen them always buying things for the house, like every day together, with two kids together, we didn’t recognize there was something wrong,” said Shadie Perkaj, the wife of the building’s super.
She said Saturday was Mr Belliu’s birthday.
Mr Belliu’s pal Elona Caslli mourned her lost friend on Facebook.
“A multiple tragedy for which there is no word of consolation. God give strength to your children and parents,” Ms Caslli wrote in Albanian.
Ms Belliu was a graduate of the University of Arts in Tirana, Albania, and performed on TV and in the theater before moving to the US, EuroNews Albania reported.
As of two years ago, he was working on two books and a movie script he hoped to pitch to Netflix, the report said.
Police sources said he may have been recently working as a livery driver to help make ends meet.
This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has lashed China for its “completely over the top” reaction to Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip and has urged the Australian government to “provide a deterrent” for potential regional conflict.
China has ramped up military exercises in the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea following the US Speaker of the House’s visit to Taipei.
The People’s Liberation Army launched five high-powered missiles across the strait with one entering Japan’s exclusive economic zone over the weekend.
Mr Dutton said China’s recent ratcheting up of aggression could result in “conflict or war” and labeled Beijing’s actions as “quite phenomenal”.
Stream more global news with Flash. 25+ news channels in 1 place. New to Flash? Try 1 month free. Offer ends October 31, 2022
In the wake of the military build-up, Mr Dutton also welcomed the Albanese Government’s openness to purchasing nuclear-powered submarines to fill a potentially decades long capability gap.
“It’s absolutely essential that we acquire the capability to provide a deterrent,” Mr Dutton said.
“We’re an island nation in the middle of the pacific and we have a particular responsibility not just to our own country but to keep peace within our region as well.”
Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the government would prioritize “strategic need” over local manufacturing after Labor launched a major defense capability review last week.
Mr Marles told the Nine newspapers that acquiring the nuclear submarines early was an option, but the extent of the capability gap needed to be determined first.
“To the extent a capability gap exists when we determine how quickly we can get the nuclear-powered submarines, we need to be looking at every option about how we plug that gap,” he said.
“The point is that we must have an evolving and improving submarine capability in this country from this day forth. And that necessitates plugging the gap. And there are lots of ways one can do that.”
China launched its military drills on Thursday following Ms Pelosi’s visit to Taipei earlier in the week.
Beijing also sanctioned the US Speaker in response to what the government described as a “egregious provocation”.
Mr Dutton praised Ms Pelosi’s visit and said it exposed China’s “disproportionate” reaction.
“Yes, she should have (gone) and I’m pleased that she did because the reaction from China is completely over the top,” Mr Dutton said at a press conference in Brisbane on Monday.
“And it’s disproportionate to the visit by a Speaker of the House of Representatives in the world’s biggest democracy to visit an independent country.”
While supporting the speaker’s decision, Mr Dutton said he would not partake in a similar “political stunt” but warned that China’s military build-up was reminiscent of 1930s Europe.
“Nobody’s arguing for there to be a breaking of the current arrangement, but at the same time the Chinese government’s reaction under President Xi has been wildly disproportionate,” he said.
“This has been entirely predictable, China is amassing nuclear weapons and when we say that we’re in a period similar to the 1930s that is not made up, it’s not exaggerated.”
Adam Bandt could have rightly felt bemused as he was walking through federal parliament.
Barely a day earlier, he’d announced the Greens’ bolstered political ranks would back Labor’s climate change bill, giving the new Prime Minister the votes he needed for landmark laws to reduce carbon emissions.
Bandt cut a lonely figure as he walked alone behind a press gaggle the size you so often only see for major party leaders.
In front of the microphones were six women, all but one new faces in a parliament more diverse than any that came before it.
If success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, then Labor’s climate change bill was a child with more parents than it could poke a stick at.
“The climate wars are nearly over,” Zali Steggall cautiously said.
Zali Steggall is providing a mentor for the teal independents who have followed her into parliament. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)
pure political maths
In many ways, Labor and the crossbench have plenty to celebrate after this week.
Labor, once the legislation passes the Senate, will have enshrined laws in a policy area fraught with toppling prime ministers.
Bandt too has done what former leaders of his party baulked at.
Arguably, he’s transforming the Greens from a movement to a political party by adopting a pragmatic approach that gets something, even if it’s not as much as his party might have wanted.
And the teals were successful in making minor amendments, ensuring they could go back to their communities by selling a win.
But suggestions that Australian politics has been radically changed since the election are certainly premature.
“Teals get a win and we get a win” is how one in Labor dubbed it.
What was at play was pure political maths.
Labor knows that if the teals succeed, it all but consigns the Coalition to the opposition benches.
The teal amendments didn’t require the government to add anything it didn’t want to.
It was the Greens who delivered Labor the votes it needed, or at least will when the Senate considers the laws later this year.
It’s why Bandt could be forgiven if he was frustrated that the teals were attracting the credit at their press conference for what was, in fact, a gift his party had given the government.
Yet to just view this in purely political win-loss metrics perhaps misunderstands both the election and broader political movement.
The teal MPs have stuck closely together during the first sitting fortnight.(ABC News: Nick Haggarty)
Taking the ‘fight’ out
Zali Steggall led the teals to their press conference early on Thursday morning.
She’s not the first community-backed independent to arrive in Canberra but there’s no doubt she created the mold the teals have followed.
“Just a brief thank you to Zali Steggall, who worked tirelessly over the last three years for us to be in this position,” Sydneysider Sophie Scamps said at the press conference.
Steggall is proving not just a mentor among the teals but also a bridge between new and old members of the crossbench and with the government.
What unites these independents is they’re political newbies, leaders in their former lives, now setting their sights on doing politics differently.
Anne Aly happily entertained Lisa Chesters’ son Charlie during the climate change debate.(ABC News: Nick Haggarty )
You only had to hear Kylea Tink to get a sense that conventional political thinking is the last thing on her mind.
After a journalist quoted the Greens saying the “fight” was just beginning to force the government to be more ambitious, she argued that it was the wrong approach.
Tink said it should be the “planning” that starts now and that politicians across the political aisle needed to work together, rather than fight.
She also was quick to “reframe” a question being put to the crossbenchers.
“The comment you just made was that the government doesn’t need my vote as a crossbencher to get this legislation through,” Tink said.
“That may be the case but any government that seeks to lead the nation needs to take its people with it.
“What we’ve seen here is a government that recognizes that just because you don’t sit on a side on the government’s side doesn’t mean that your community’s voice doesn’t matter.
“If I wasn’t an independent, it wouldn’t have been heard.”
Adam Bandt’s Greens delivered the government the votes it needed to legislate an emissions reduction target.(ABC News: Matt Roberts)
‘The Liberals have disenfranchised people’
After the first sitting fortnight, some in the building have wondered if the teals are yet to regret entering politics.
At least a couple of moments from the week might have given them moments of doubt about their new career.
As bells rang for politicians to vote on the climate bills, Tink and Scamps were regularly spotted darting out of the chamber, returning minutes later before the bells stopped ringing.
Their distraction, it transpired, were pieces of toast being consumed outside the chamber. Finding time to eat in Canberra is no longer something you can do on a whim.
Victorian Monique Ryan, too, might have had pangs of doubt after one of her staff pulled down her mask during that press conference and pushed her fingers up the sides of her mouth, signaling for her boss to smile.
Being told to smile was arguably something she’d have never heard as she ran the neurology department of the Royal Children’s Hospital.
She didn’t need to be told to smile as she found her way to the microphone and took aim at the Liberals who refused to negotiate with the government over the emissions target.
“This is just the end of the beginning in our action on climate change,” Ryan said.
“To make progress, to be at the table you have to have a voice at the table and in taking themselves out of the discussion, the Liberals have disenfranchised the people in the electorates they represent.”
Tasmanian Liberal Bridget Archer likely agrees.
She again proved she’s willing to do what so often men in her party appear unable to follow through on — saying they’ll cross the floor on an issue and actually doing it.
Bridget Archer was the only Coalition MP to vote for the government’s climate bill.(ABC News: Nick Haggarty )
But it’s far from perfect
The teals arrived in Canberra after their communities turfed out the Liberals who had long dominated the electorates they now hold.
They’ve been pleasantly surprised at the spirit of collaboration that they’ve found in Labor — at least for now.
But no-one is saying parliament is anywhere near perfect.
“We’re still seeing in Question Time old-style politics play out,” Steggall says.
“I don’t think it impresses many of us and it certainly doesn’t impress the Australian public.”
There is now a recurring motif in Australian politics where you see a headline declaring a senator has done something idiotic, unspeakable or downright insane and then get mildly disappointed to discover it’s just Lidia Thorpe again.
This is of course the existential peril of the attention seeker – sooner or later people stop paying attention.
Whatever the latest outrageous thing Thorpe has said, it no longer merits any outrage simply because it is her saying it. She is the Pauline Hanson of the left.
And so when she did her silly swearing in stunt this week it carried all the weight of a crazed doomsayer on a sandwich board with scrawled inscriptions about the End of Days.
What Thorpe is useful as, however, is a totem pole – no, a shining beacon if you will – that serves to remind us all just how utterly crazy the Greens really are and why they should never be trusted with policymaking in this country.
And while it is obviously a national tragedy that they now have 12 senators in the upper house, it is also why Labor’s negotiation with the minor party over its climate change bill has all the hallmarks of a chainsaw negotiating with a porkchop.
As The Australian reported on its front page on Wednesday, the bill is now set to pass after the Greens supposedly secured concessions — although what those concessions were tellingly elusive.
More telling was the report’s shrewd observation that the government would only accept amendments “if they did not fundamentally change the intent, mandate or principles of the legislation”.
In other words as long as they didn’t effectively amend anything much at all.
Indeed the only thing that really matters is Labor sticking to its 43 per cent reductions target and the Greens do not have a hope in hell of changing that.
And the Greens will of course ultimately have no choice but to pass the legislation because otherwise they will again be seen as climate pariahs — victims of their wilful idiocy a decade ago.
And so despite holding the numbers, the Greens don’t actually hold the cards.
And even if they did the unthinkable and blocked it again it would be even better for Labor because it could force a double-dissolution and — based on this week’s Newspoll — get an even more thumping majority.
why?
Because far from caving in to the la-la left, Anthony Albanese has been the model of a strong, pragmatic and rationalist Labor Prime Minister.
He has been tough on China, tough on border protection, tough on the Teals and tough on the Greens.
His Treasurer Jim Chalmers is already reining in spending to drive down inflation and debt, his Defense Minister Richard Marles is strengthening the ADF, and his Government Services Minister Bill Shorten just delivered the woke brigade the sweetest smackdown in years by simply asserting that mothers give birth to children.
To invoke another piece of reproductive vernacular, Labor has finally got its balls back.
This is what good government looks like, and its color sure ain’t green.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has rejected claims his government’s flagship social housing policy was denying accommodation for thousands of Australians as he hit back at the Greens for blocking developments across the country.
Labor took a slate of housing policies to the election in a bid to bolster public accommodation for vulnerable families.
The platform is a key priority for the Prime Minister who has often spoken of his own experience living in social housing.
But newly elected Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather asked Mr Albanese if the government’s plan to establish 4,000 new dwellings a year for five years would see the “waitlist grow” and deny thousands of families the “same chance”.
“I indeed do understand the importance of having a secure roof over your head, and what that can do for the opportunity to advance in life. I know it because I have lived it,” Mr Albanese said.
Stream more on politics with Flash. 25+ news channels in 1 place. New to Flash? Try 1 month free. Offer ends October 31, 2022
“I know that the member’s political party has substantial representation in local government and what I’d encourage him to do is to actually encourage the Greens political party to back affordable housing rather than just oppose it.
“Because in my local area, when there’s been programs in Marrickville, they have been opposed.”
Demand for public housing is significantly outstripping supply with the waiting list increasing by more than 8,000 households in 2021 while less than 4,000 new dwellings came online in the same period.
The waiting list currently sits at 163,508, according to new data published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
The Albanese Government’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund will build up to 30,000 new properties for vulnerable Australians over the next five years.
Up to 10,000 of those dwellings will be provided to frontline workers, with the remaining 20,000 to be allocated for vulnerable families.
Mr Chandler-Mather said the waitlist would continue to grow if only 4,000 houses were made available a year when the list has grown by an average of 7,662 a year since 2018.
The Prime Minister said the Commonwealth was committed to the issue and would continue to work with state and local governments to bolster the supply of social housing.
“We also established a National Housing Supply and Affordability Council that will work with state and local government importantly to deliver increased housing, be it social housing or affordable housing, particularly through community housing organisations,” he said.
The government has also pledged $200 million for maintenance of existing housing in indigenous communities, $100 million for crisis accommodation for women and children and $30 million for veterans at risk of homelessness.
