Body parts found in a freezer earlier this year after a Colorado home was sold have been identified as those of the 16-year-old daughter of the home’s previous owner, authorities said Friday.
The death of Amanda Leariel Overstreet is being investigated as a homicide and an investigation is ongoing, the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office said.
The grim discovery was made in January, after the home near Grand Junction had been sold to a new owner, and after that owner offered a freezer that had been left behind for free, the sheriff’s office said.
Inside the freezer there was a head and forearms with hands attached. Deputies were called on Jan. 12 after the person who claimed the freezer made the discovery.
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The last time Amanda had been seen or heard from was in April 2005, the sheriff’s office said.
“The circumstances surrounding her disappearance remain under investigation, as well as ongoing forensic testing of evidence,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement about the case. “There is no record that Amanda Overstreet was ever reported missing.”
The Mesa County coroner’s office said Friday that the remains had been identified and that the manner of death was being investigated as homicide. The rest of the her body has not been found.
The coroner’s office did not list a cause of death but said there is an active investigation and no further details would be released. DNA analysis helped to confirm the identification, the office said.
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Amanda lived in the Grand Junction and Harris County, Texas, areas, the coroner’s office said.
The sheriff’s office stressed again Friday that the home is under new ownership, and the current owner of the home is “completely unrelated to the previous case.”
“The house was purchased, fully remodeled, and sold to the current owner,” the sheriff’s office said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Does Starbucks want its own beans, as well as baristas? The chain, which has owned one Costa Rican coffee farm since 2013, is getting more into the growing business, purchasing farms in Guatemala and Costa Rica and investing in other “coffee belt” regions in Africa and Asia.
Vertical integration, especially into raw materials, has enjoyed bouts of popularity for at least a century. Car titan Henry Ford, an early proponent, even owned sheep farms to supply the wool for car seat covers. The baristas, however, are unlikely to serve up a true revival.
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Globalisation and free trade unpicked the fashion to weave together suppliers with producers. Failures have been frequent and dismantling is costly and messy. Bowmar, possibly the biggest calculator maker in the world in the industry’s early 1970s heyday, bought into a plant to make its own integrated circuits as prices for its devices fell — and collapsed a year later. Chemicals group DuPont, partially playing white knight, acquired Conoco for its steady supply of feedstock in 1979 but the two parted ways a couple of decades later.
In certain sectors, geopolitics may be creating a modern variant. In chips, the advent of the “fabless” chip company, and the huge cost of semiconductor plants had dented tech’s appetite to own their own supply. But Chinese tech conglomerate Alibaba and its peers began forging into developing advanced chips as US-China tensions prompted a US crackdown on semiconductor exports.
Meanwhile, technical demands are prompting big companies to take design (if not manufacturing) back in-house. Apple began ditching Intel chips in favour of homegrown in 2020. “Integrating hardware and software is fundamental to everything we do,” said boss Tim Cook at the time. The advent of generative AI has prompted Meta and Google to push further into custom silicon, based in the latter’s case on Arm CPUs.
Investor tolerance for vertical integration varies with the times — but this type of control isn’t the Ford-variant of old. The same is true at Starbucks: its farms are small beans for a 38,000-plus store chain which buys some 3 per cent of global coffee supply. The holdings allow Starbucks to experiment, while ticking useful boxes around responsible agriculture and farmer empowerment.
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Similarly Ingka Group, the biggest Ikea franchisee, boasts a portfolio of 320,000-plus hectares — think four New York Cities — of forest across seven countries. Again, this is about reforestation, not integration: just 5 per cent or so of harvested wood goes back into Ikea products, and via the open market.
That is for the best. Farming — whether sheep, beans or trees — is a very different business to retailing, whether flat-pack furniture or a caffeine fix.
BEIJING (Reuters) -China urged the European Union on Saturday not to conduct separate negotiations over the price of China-made electric vehicles sold in the EU, warning that this would “shake the foundations” of bilateral tariff negotiations.
“If the European side, while negotiating with China, conducts separate price commitment negotiations with some companies, it will shake the foundation and mutual trust of the negotiations … and be detrimental to advancing the overall negotiation process,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said in comments published on its website.
It didn’t cite any evidence for the EU carrying out these separate talks beyond saying there had been “relevant reports”.
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The comments come days after Brussels rejected a Chinese proposal for EVs made in China to be sold within the bloc at a minimum price of 30,000 euros ($32,000), a move Beijing hoped would avert EU tariffs being imposed next month.
Various manufacturers including European-owned companies in China have authorized the China Chamber of Commerce for Machinery and Electronics to propose a price commitment plan that represents the overall position of the industry, the commerce ministry said.
“This is the basis for the current China-EU consultations,” it added.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by William Mallard and David Holmes)
After mocking Vice President Kamala Harris over her teleprompter use, Donald Trump’s rally in Reno, Nevada, ground to a halt as he was was forced to fix his on-stage after a campaign sign fell on it.
“Thank god I don’t use teleprompters too much,” Trump told rallygoers after the sign fell on the teleprompter, causing the script to stop being projected. “I look at the teleprompter, it’s totally gone. I say ‘What the hell happened.’ The sign fell on top of it.”
Former president Donald Trump removed signage that fell on top of his teleprompter at a rally in Reno, Nevada (AP)
The irony of the incident comes to light when reflecting on the number of times the former president has accused Harris of relying on a teleprompter and mocking her for it.
Trump told supporters on Friday he would “level” with them, and admitted to his teleprompter usage, yet still asserted Harris uses one more.
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“Isn’t it nice to have a guy that doesn’t need a teleprompter, a president, a potential president that doesn’t need a teleprompter?” Trump asked supporters moments after fixing his teleprompter.
He went on to, again, falsely accuse Harris of using one during her town hall with Univision on Thursday.
Both the Harris campaign and Univision have confirmed to CNN that the vice president did not use a teleprompter during her town hall. A teleprompter that was seen in a photo from the event was in Spanish and meant for the moderator, not Harris.
Trump and his allies have previously accused Harris of using a teleprompter in interviews when she did not. In instances where the vice president has used a teleprompter, they have mocked her and insinuated she needs one because she is not intelligent.
Similarly, Trump told supporters on Friday night that “there’s something wrong with [Harris]” for using teleprompters.
He added: “I don’t use them that much. The concept I use but I don’t like it.”
He then embarked on a hard-to-follow rant about making speeches.
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“When you can’t get up and make a speech, like, normally, like – when all the work we do, you’d think you could for 40 minutes – well she makes very short speeches too. Have you ever noticed they’re like 10 minutes,” he told the crowd at Reno.
Wall Street strategists who spoke with Yahoo Finance believe the bull can keep running wild. Barring any unexpected shocks, the path higher appears to be clear, with earnings growth expected to keep accelerating and the economy on seemingly solid footing as the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates.
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A bull market for the S&P 500 was officially declared in June 2023 when the index rose 20% from its recent bear market low. History says this bull market still has legs. At two years, the bull market is well shy of the average run of 5.5 years. And the total return thus far, about 60%, is a far cry from the average 180% gain, per research from Carson Group chief market strategist Ryan Detrick.
In the past few weeks, several Wall Street equity strategists have made the case for the benchmark index to rise further into both year-end and into 2025, supported by accelerating earnings for the S&P 500.
“We continue to be surprised by the strength of market gains and decided yet again that something more than an incremental adjustment was warranted,” BMO Capital Markets chief investment strategist Brian Belski wrote in a September note when raising his year-end price target for the S&P 500 to a Street high of 6,100 from a previous target of 5,600.
On Oct. 4, Goldman Sachs boosted its year-end target to 6,000 and initiated a 12-month target of 6,300. Goldman Sachs chief equity strategist David Kostin did note, though, that already high valuations could limit the upside for how far the index can reach in 2025.
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Risks to the rally
Strategists who spoke with Yahoo Finance agreed with Kostin that already stretched valuations present a challenge to how much higher stocks can go. Charles Schwab senior investment strategist Kevin Gordon noted that dating back to the mid-1960s, the only time valuations have been this stretched on a trailing 12-month price-to-earnings ratio were 2021 and the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
“This would tell you that the bull is much older or somewhat near the end of this life,” Gordon said.
But strategists often warn that a high valuation itself isn’t a proper tool for calling the end of a bull market. Stocks can trade at what are considered to be expensive valuations for longer than expected. What that does tell investors is that much of the good news that could push stocks higher might’ve already been priced in.
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“If you look at what the market’s discounting right now, we’d say front and center, a big chunk of what’s being priced in is a soft landing sentiment,” Citi equity strategist Scott Chronert told Yahoo Finance.
Charging Bull statue by Arturo Di Modica is seen in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York, on July 4, 2024. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Piper Sandler chief investment strategist Michael Kantrowitz noted that high valuations themselves aren’t why bull markets end. There needs to be a catalyst. He explained there are two common reasons market drawdowns happen: a spike in interest rates or a rise in the unemployment rate.
With inflation well off the boil of 2022 and the recent increase in unemployment stalling out, neither of the two downside catalysts are clearly in view.
There could, of course, be a surprise no one sees coming. But “it’s a little bit harder to see where the shock comes from,” Chronert said. “If things continue to play out incrementally, investors can handle a little bit of a change [to the economic narrative] here, a little bit of a change there … It’s when you get a more immediate unraveling, and it’s hard to really say that immediate unraveling is going to come.”
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This sets the market up for a narrative shift. To Kantrowitz, the currently expensive valuations show that the bull market is likely moving from a macro-driven environment, where factors like inflation falling and other signs of economic resilience have pushed stocks higher, to one that is more based on the fundamentals.
“For this market to continue moving higher, and particularly to determine what stocks lead, it’s going to be all about earnings,” Kantrowitz said.
The bar for earnings remains high. Consensus estimates project earnings to grow nearly 10% in 2024 and almost 15% in 2025. The key for investors remains finding which sectors are seeing earnings growth accelerate rather than just staying steady.
Chronert, who said his team is still a holder of the “Magnificent Seven” tech cohort, doesn’t doubt that the AI narrative will continue to manifest itself in the market. But after significant gains seen in those tech stocks over the past two years amid large earnings growth, focus may continue to shift to the broadening impact of AI on companies that aren’t making the AI chips or the cloud servers operating the new technology.
For AI to continue to have broader impact on the market and keep pushing earnings growth for the index above expectations, “you’ve got to have more companies delivering on the AI promise via margins [and] profitability metrics,” Chronert said.
He added, “It would be that sort of thesis that has to play out, and that’s going to take two to five years.”
Josh Schafer is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X @_joshschafer.
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