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ATLANTA — An earthquake of 4.1 preliminary magnitude was reported Saturday morning in Tennessee and was felt in Atlanta, Georgia, and western North Carolina, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and local news reports.

The website for USGS said the earthquake originated shortly after 9 a.m. EDT about 12 miles from Greenback, Tennessee, which is about 30 miles south of Knoxville.

Meteorologists at television news stations serving Georgia and North Carolina reported feeling the tremors as well.

This is a developing story. Please check back for more.

Sean “Diddy” Combs was once the life of the party. He was known for hosting lavish and exclusive gatherings in the Hamptons, having seemingly countless celebrity pals and toasting to the good life with powerful allies in the music industry.

Yet a question remains as opening statements approach next week in his federal sex-trafficking trial: Why haven’t more of his famous friends come to his defense?

“The music industry is fickle,” said Ramal “The Hometown Heat” Brown, a former hip-hop disc jockey at 105.3 KJAMZ in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Everyone wants to be around when you’re on top.”

But when a video of Combs beating his former girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura was aired by CNN last year, “nobody wanted to be around because it could tarnish their image and name,” he said. “Being around Diddy could get you implicated in the case.”

After the video aired, Combs apologized publicly, saying his behavior in it was “inexcusable” and that he took full responsibility for his actions.

Combs is charged in a five-count indictment with sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty and faces 10 years to life in prison if convicted.

Opening statements in the federal trial in Manhattan are expected to begin next week.

The government’s case centers on allegations that Combs forced women to participate in drug-fueled sexual encounters with male sex workers that he directed and filmed. He called the sex parties “freak offs,” prosecutors said.

In addition to the federal charges, Combs has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct in more than 50 civil lawsuits, including one filed by Ventura in 2023 that was privately settled within a day.

His attorney said the settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing, and Combs has vehemently denied the allegations in the pending civil suits.

The past year has seen a stark turn of events for the hitmaker, who has been nominated for 14 Grammy Awards over three decades while turning unknown musicians, such as Ma$e, Total and Carl Thomas, into platinum-selling recording artists.

During jury selection last week, as the magnitude of the moment began to mount, Combs appeared to nervously look around the courtroom and asked U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian for a bathroom break.

No celebrity supporters have shown up in court during jury selection. Being associated with Combs and his federal case is risky and can only tarnish the burnished images of A-list celebrities, music experts said.

“People aren’t speaking out because they don’t want any level of implication,” said Gerrick Kennedy, a freelance journalist and culture critic based in Los Angeles. 

Madison Gray, a former website editor for Black Entertainment Television, said he thinks many of Combs’ associates have distanced themselves because of the heinous acts he’s accused of.

“Celebrity friends and powerful friends scatter. Nobody wants to be attached,” said Gray, pointing to similar scenarios when Bill Cosby and R. Kelly faced legal battles. “When things are good, the parties are great, the liquor is flowing. But as soon as something goes wrong, friendships are fleeting.”

Rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been one of Combs’ staunchest celebrity supporters leading up to the trial, defending him online on multiple occasions and accusing Ventura, who was once signed to Combs’ record label, of attempting to pressure him for money.

Ye accused Ventura of attempting to extort Combs in a since-deleted post on X on March 18.

Ventura responded the next day by resharing a post from the culture website Shade Room showing a screenshot of rapper Playboi Carti telling Ye to shut up. Ventura’s attorney, Douglas Wigdor, declined to comment this week.

Ye’s comments came amid controversy over a slew of posts on X in which he made hate-filled remarks about the Jewish community and said “I love Hitler” and “I’m a Nazi.”

Former in-house Bad Boy Records producer Stevie J has also expressed support for Combs, calling many of the civil lawsuits filed against his ex-boss “bogus” and saying he prays for Combs and his family every day.

“I never knew of an instance where you’ll be guilty before you even go to f—–g court,” he told the entertainment YouTube channel VladTV. “I’m never going to stop being there for someone I consider to be a friend. I’m not going to turn my back. I’ve been scrutinized just by being a friend. I guess someone has never had a true friend before.”

Singer Ray J has acknowledged attending Combs’ parties in multiple interviews but said he never saw any freak offs or orgies.

“I can guarantee you most of the celebrities that went to Diddy’s parties never even heard of a freak off,” he told News Nation host Chris Cuomo in November. “In the beginning it sounded really interesting and entertaining, I would say, but when you look back, where were the freak offs? From my knowledge, I’ve never seen a freak off.”

Ventura is expected to take the stand once the trial begins, but a witness list has not been released. Potential jurors this week received a list of places and names that might be mentioned during the trial, including celebrities such as Michael B. Jordan, Mike Myers and Ye, none of whom are implicated in the case.

Business travel’s four-year crawl out the pandemic was on track to continue this year, but the U.S. trade war has scrambled that outlook.

“The big word is uncertainty,” said Suzanne Neufang, CEO of the Global Business Travel Association, which had forecast worldwide spending to surge to $1.64 trillion in 2025, up from an expected $1.48 trillion in 2024. Last year’s estimated total, if preliminary data bears out, would mark the first time the sector surpassed its pre-Covid levels.

But pessimism has risen sharply amid President Donald Trump’s deep cuts to the government workforce and a dizzying range of tariffs. Now, about 29% of U.S. corporate travel managers and an equal share abroad expect business travel to decline this year due to government actions, according to a recent GBTA survey. The expected pullbacks could dent business trips by as much as 22%, the group found.

Industry experts caution that souring expectations so far haven’t translated to a collapse in bookings, despite signs of cooler demand.

Business travel “hasn’t fallen off a cliff,” said Jonathan Kletzel, a travel, transportation and logistics leader at the consulting firm PwC. “It is definitely constrained right now, but will people stop traveling? Probably not. If you’re a sales-heavy organization and you’re not out in the market meeting with your clients, your competitors are.”

Still, growing concerns around business travel coincide with corporate leaders’ warnings that U.S. trade policies have injected fresh uncertainty into an economy that just months ago looked on track to build on its strengths.

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC last month that the carrier has had to check its expectations for what was shaping up to be the “best financial year in our history.” Travel demand was growing about 10% at the start of the year but has since slowed, he said, partly due to companies rethinking business trips and cuts to the federal workforce. Other airlines have flagged similar concerns, in some cases adjusting their growth plans or scaling back capacity.

Hotel operators and booking platforms are feeling it, too. Expedia said Friday that U.S. travel demand is cooling. Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton have each reduced their financial forecasts in recent weeks, with the first of those hospitality giants warning investors of “an expected continuation of declines in U.S. government demand.”

Since retaking office, Trump has overseen mass firings and spending reductions across the federal bureaucracy, with many of the changes led by multibillionaire adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project. While some of the cuts have been halted in court, travel bookers for government contractors have weathered a hectic few months.

Global Travel Associates, a Washington, D.C.-area agency that mainly serves government contractors, said travel sales slid 20% in the first quarter. Several had funding tied to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration gutted this spring, and those accounts are down by 75%-90%, Managing Director Tom Ollinger estimated.

Some of GTA’s clients switched to buying only refundable plane tickets; others canceled scheduled meetings or halted any new travel plans indefinitely, he said. In some cases, those with staffers on long-term assignments overseas were told to drop everything and head back to home base. “The organization provided them one-way tickets to return,” Ollinger said.

“Government groups are not happening,” said Jan Freitag, national director for market analytics at the real estate data firm CoStar. But many business meetings are still taking place, and while individual business travel is a bit softer, “that could just be people not booking as much ahead,” he said.

However, Freitag cautioned, “should [more] tariffs hit and corporations have less sense of where their costs are going, they’ll start looking to cut costs. And the easiest place to control costs is travel and training.”

Navan, a corporate travel management service based in Palo Alto, California, said bookings were up in the first four months of the year from the same period in 2024, despite a slight slowdown in April.

“There’s certainly this feeling of waiting for another shoe to drop,” said Rich Liu, Navan’s CEO of travel. While CEOs are telling him they’re “feeling the squeeze” from new import taxes and other policy moves, “they still have businesses to run,” Liu said.

Individual business travelers seem to be getting anxious. The online travel insurance comparison site Squaremouth saw a 223% annual surge in searches for “cancel for work reasons” travel coverage last month, with purchases of those policies jumping 53%.

“That tells us that travelers are feeling uneasy,” said Squaremouth CEO Rupa Mehta. “In uncertain economic times, they want to understand the cost and value of flexible coverage before committing.”

The current outlook is “a mixed bag,” said Lorraine Sileo, founder of Phocuswright, a global travel research firm. At the moment, “it looks like leisure travel will be impacted more than business travel,” she said, adding that “it will take longer for corporations to feel the pinch of an economic downturn” than it will for vacationers.

“We need to take a wait-and-see approach” to see how business trips fare, Sileo said, “but there are indications that it will be a slow year for all types of travel for the U.S. market in 2025.”

For James Antaki, a biomedical engineering professor at Cornell University, the $6.7 million government grant meant babies would be saved. Awarded by the Department of Defense on March 30, it would allow his team at Cornell to ramp up production and testing of PediaFlow, a device that boosts blood flow in infants with heart defects.

A week later, that all changed.

The Defense Department sent Antaki a stop-work order on April 8 informing him that his team wouldn’t get the money, intended to be distributed over four years. Three decades of research is now at risk, and Antaki said he has no idea why the government cut off funding.

“I feel that it’s my calling in life to complete this project,” he said Friday, in his first news interview since losing funding. “Once a week, I go through this mental process of, ‘Is it time to give up?’ But it is not my prerogative to give up.”

Neither the Defense Department nor the White House press office responded to requests for comment.

Antaki is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of academics nationwide who’ve lost funding in a variety of fields since President Donald Trump came to office, due to a mix of new executive orders limiting what government money can support and the sweeping grant cancellations ordered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

One in 100 babies in the U.S. are born with heart defects, and about a quarter of them need surgery or other procedures in their first year to survive, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Worldwide, it’s estimated that 240,000 babies die within their first 28 days due to congenital birth defects.

An infant’s heart is about the size of a large walnut. When a baby is born with a hole between the chambers of the heart, it can be a life-threatening condition. Antaki’s creation is a AA battery-sized device that uses a rotating propeller on magnets to increase blood flow, helping them to survive surgery or live at home with their family until a donor heart is available, if needed.

The new round of funding Antaki expected would have supported further testing of the prototype, including placement in an animal to ensure it won’t harm humans, and completion of the mountain of paperwork needed to move through the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory process.

The device has received several grants over the years from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense without issue, Antaki said.

Antaki began work on the technology in 2003. He was already developing a similar technology for adults at the University of Pittsburgh when the National Institutes of Health issued a call for proposals on a pediatric heart assist system.

He had already been trying, without success, to interest private companies in a pediatric device. They may have declined, he speculates, because the market is smaller for children’s medical devices than for adult ones.

After Antaki arrived at Cornell in 2018, he secured research funding from the Defense Department to keep the project moving forward. He submitted a 300-page proposal last June for the next cash infusion he needed, and the Defense Department notified his team in March that it was approved, before reversing course in April, he said.

A copy of the stop-work order, reviewed by NBC News, does not specify a reason why the government canceled the grant beyond that it was “at the direction of the Administration.”

Dr. Evan Zahn, a pediatric interventional cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who is not involved with PediaFlow, said cutting funding for Antaki’s research is a step backward for children’s health care because there are few commercially available solutions for babies with heart defects.

“Technology specifically designed for our children, particularly babies across the board, is desperately needed, so losing funding for something like that is a real loss,” Zahn said.

If funding isn’t restored within 90 days, Antaki said, he and his team will need to begin laying off lab staff and Ph.D. students will have to change their research focus.

In the grand scheme of what the government funds, he said, “it’s a small amount of money that could do so much good for so many people, and it’s just the right thing to do. It just it kind of speaks for itself.”

A growing number of red states have expanded their school voucher programs in recent years, a trend that is likely to only spike further amid a push led by President Donald Trump’s administration to return education “back to the states.”

Conservative education activists have long lauded such programs as a way to give greater control to parents and families. But public education advocates warn that the expansion of these voucher programs presents further risk to the broader school system as it faces peril from Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education.

“Many states came into this administration with a track record of trying to privatize education, and I think they see this move to dismantle and defund the Department of Ed and President Trump’s support of school privatization as a green light to be more expansive in their approach moving forward,” said Hilary Wething, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who closely studies the impact of voucher programs on public education.

Just last week, Texas enacted a statewide private school voucher program, becoming the 16th state to offer some form of a universal school choice program. In private school voucher programs, families can receive a certain amount of public money to use toward private K-12 school tuition or school supplies. In some states, such programs have previously come with limitations, including narrow eligibility, such as private schools that can accommodate families with children who have special needs or families that are below certain income levels.

Proponents of the program in Texas and others like it dub it a “universal voucher” program because it has no restrictions on who is eligible. Under the program, any family in the state may receive about $10,000 to pay for their children’s K-12 private school education. Texas’ program will launch in the 2026-27 school year.

Statewide voucher programs are far from a new phenomenon. But they have exploded in recent years amid a growing political effort by conservatives at the local, state and federal levels to boost “school choice” — the notion that parents should have far more options than only their neighborhood public schools.

Sixteen states offer at least one voucher program that has universal eligibility, while another 14 offer voucher programs with eligibility requirements, according to the Education Law Center, a public education advocacy group that is critical of voucher programs.

At least three states, Texas, Idaho and Tennessee, have enacted their universal programs this year, while in another eight states, attempts by conservative lawmakers to create new voucher programs or expand existing ones stalled or failed, according to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

“Even though this is not a new explosion of voucher laws, this year continues the explosion of vouchers … and even though the USDOE [dismantling] isn’t necessarily the one driving force, it’s definitely connected,” said Jessica Levin, the litigation director at the Education Law Center, which is assisting with lawsuits challenging Trump’s moves to dismantle the Department of Education. “The bottom line is that this is a concerted strategy on the part of those who want to defund and dismantle public schools and privatize public education.”

The most prominent argument made by critics of voucher programs is that they take public money that would have otherwise been allocated to help fund public schools and deliver it to private schools.

Private schools, they note, do not face most of the accountability requirements that public schools do under federal laws. For example, private schools retain the ability to refuse admission to students, are not required to provide individualized education plans to children with learning disabilities and are not required under law to provide disabled students or students facing disciplinary measures certain protections or due process rights.

At the same time, funding formulas for public schools are predominantly based on enrollment numbers. So, as students flee public schools — even if in just small numbers — overall funding decreases.

“The students who remain in public schools lose resources,” Levin said, while “voucher students lose rights.”

Meanwhile, Levin explained, voucher-driven pupil departures from public school means “you’re now concentrating higher-need, higher-cost kids in public schools that now have less funding.”

Those situations are now compounded by Trump’s moves to wind down the Education Department, which experts have said will further upend civil rights enforcement in schools as well as the distribution of billions of dollars to help impoverished and disabled students.

U.S. Department of Education spokesperson Savannah Newhouse said in an email to NBC News that “President Trump and Secretary [Linda] McMahon believe that our nation’s students will thrive when parents are given the freedom to choose a school setting that best fits their child’s academic needs.”

Newhouse added that the administration “will provide states with best practices on how they can expand educational opportunities and empower local leaders to implement customized policy that will benefit their communities the most.”

While some states have had voucher-like programs allowing families to use public money for parochial education dating back more than 100 years, modern voucher programs have been around for about 30 years, having launched in large part in the 1990s amid a grassroots conservative movement to increase options for parents unhappy with their local public schools.

But the Covid-19 pandemic emerged as a flashpoint for conservative education activists, who utilized widespread anger among parents unhappy with school closings and remote learning as a launchpad for new and expanded voucher programs across the nation.

School voucher proponents say the programs maximize choice for parents, who can use the funds to subsidize the cost of expensive private schools, which, they argue, deliver better outcomes for students. Supporters have also touted the programs as offering a market-based approach that helps promote the best schools and have argued that they have the potential to benefit low-income families or families with uniquely few options for public school.

Tommy Schultz, the CEO of the American Federation for Children, a conservative group that advocates for school voucher programs, told Fox News this week that universal voucher programs like the one enacted in Texas give parents “education freedom.”

He praised a similar program that Florida expanded in 2023, claiming it had caused the state’s public schools to “have gotten better.” Schultz denied that Texas’ program, or ones like it, would result in fewer resources for public schools, calling that “the same argument for 30 years” by public education advocates.

Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, said in an email that the Republican “made education freedom a priority because no one knows the needs of their child better than a parent.”

“When it comes to education, parents matter, and families deserve the ability to choose the best education opportunities for their children,” Mahaleris added. “The Governor signing school choice into law is an unprecedented victory for Texas families, students, and the future of our great state.”

But critics point to examples showing that universal school voucher programs are disproportionately used by wealthy families whose children are already enrolled in private schools, or that children in rural areas with few schools have limited options to put the money to use. They also point to studies that refute the claim that private schools deliver better outcomes for students.

In addition, enrollment in private schools, even with a voucher to help cover the cost, can still be prohibitively expensive for low-income families, they said.

Wething, of the EPI, said analyses have shown that between 60% and 90% of students who take advantage of universal-eligibility voucher programs across the U.S. were already enrolled in private school when they participated in the programs.

She warned of the harms she said programs like the one in Texas posed.

“As soon as you get rid of income limits or carveouts for, say, only low-income families or only students with disabilities, you basically open the gates for students who are already attending private school, or who already have enough income to attend private school, to now use state funding to subsidize their private school,” she said. “It’s kind of the next step in what we think of as this voucher evolution.”

In the eyes of many LGBTQ Catholics, the late Pope Francis created a “seismic shift” toward acceptance. Now, as the world welcomes the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, these lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer faithful say they hope he will continue to move in the same direction.

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of the LGBTQ Catholic advocacy group DignityUSA, was in Rome on Thursday when Cardinal Robert Prevost, a 69-year-old Chicago native who holds both U.S. and Peruvian citizenship, became the new pontiff.

“I was actually quite excited to see that Cardinal Prevost had been elected as Pope Leo XIV and thrilled that he took the name of a pope rooted in social justice. I think what a clear signal to a hurting world that that’s where his energy is going to be focused,” she told NBC News in an interview Friday. “I also found a lot of hope in his remarks from the balcony … where he talked about God’s all-inclusive love without any condition, and where he talked about being a church for all of God’s people.”

Jason Steidl Jack, a gay Catholic and an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York, described his reaction to the election of Pope Leo, the first-ever American to lead the Holy See, as “cautiously optimistic.”

“I do see him continuing Pope Francis’ legacy, especially of dialogue and synodality,” Steidl Jack said, describing synodality as “this idea of journeying together” and “listening to one another.” However, he said the new pope’s election “doesn’t assuage all of the fears that I have as an LGBTQ Catholic.”

“The church’s teaching, even under Pope Francis, remains incredibly homophobic, and the church goes on inventing new ways of being transphobic as it really avoids learning about trans people and their experiences,” he said, adding, however, that the new pontiff seems “open to dialogue and inclusion” given his remarks on Thursday.

Chicago resident Greg Krajewski said he’s been a practicing Catholic his whole life and sings at his local parish every Sunday. However, he said, as a gay man, he’s “careful who I talk to and how I present myself.”

“There’s a few things in his opening speech that he gave that really give me a lot of hope,” he said of Leo. “The first thing is he said a couple of times, ‘God loves us without limits or conditions.’ I think this is a really big indication that even if he himself maybe has more reservations about the LGBTQ issues in the church, he is open to those discussions. He is open to bringing us in.”

Track record on LGBTQ issues

Leo’s past comments on LGBTQ issues are limited, though several LGBTQ Catholics expressed concern about remarks he reportedly made in an address to church leaders over a decade ago. During the 2012 Synod of Bishops, then-Father Prevost reportedly lamented the challenges presented to the Catholic Church due to sympathetic media portrayals of “alternative families.”

“Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of homosexual partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed on television programs and in cinema,” he told a group of bishops at the time, according to the Catholic News Service. “The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that the mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective.”

Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, which works to foster LGBTQ inclusion in the Catholic Church, called the remarks “disappointing.”

“We pray that in the 13 years that have passed, 12 of which were under the papacy of Pope Francis, that his heart and mind have developed more progressively on LGBTQ+ issues, and we will take a wait-and-see attitude to see if that has happened,” DeBernardo said in a statement.

Steidl Jack said Leo seemed to have a “culture warrior mentality” on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ representation in pop culture back in 2012, but he expressed hope that the new pope’s views have changed since then.

“A lot of the world has changed since 2012 — even Pope Francis changed a great deal over the course of his pontificate,” he said. “So I hope that Pope Leo has been listening to LGBTQ Catholics. I hope he’s been paying attention and growing, just as Pope Francis did, just as the rest of the world has been.”

Views on LGBTQ issues have shifted dramatically over the past decade, including the views of practicing Catholics. For example, the Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, which found 19% of U.S. adults identify as Catholics, found 70% of Catholics favor allowing same-sex couples to marry, up from 57% in 2014.

Michael O’Loughlin, the executive director of Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic organization, was in Rome for the announcement of the new pope. He said the 2012 comments were disappointing but that he was keeping an open mind.

“I’m willing to look at his wider message, which was one of peace and standing up for the marginalized,” he said. “The fact that he switched to Spanish to address his former community in Peru I thought was a nice sign that he’s a man of the people.”

After 2012, the future pope’s subsequent remarks on LGBTQ issues are sparse.

In 2017, when he was bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, and spokesman of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, he appeared to speak out against “gender ideology,” a term some people use to refer to transgender identities, telling local media that this ideology “seeks to eliminate biological differences between men and women.”

Then, in 2024, a year after Pope Francis formally approved allowing Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples, then-Cardinal Prevost said the subsequent pushback from bishops in Africa highlighted the need to give more doctrinal authority to local bishops, according to CBCPNews, the news service of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.

“The bishops in the episcopal conferences of Africa were basically saying that here in Africa, our whole cultural reality is very different. … It wasn’t rejecting the teaching authority of Rome, it was saying that our cultural situation is such that the application of this document is just not going to work,” Prevost said at the time, according to CBCPNews. “You have to remember there are still places in Africa that apply the death penalty, for example, for people who are living in a homosexual relationship. … So, we’re in very different worlds.”

Hopes for the future

When asked what she’d like to see from Leo’s papacy, Duddy-Burke said she hopes he can serve a “trusted moral voice.”

“The world is so broken at the moment in so many places — you know, this rise of nationalism, the increased xenophobia, so many wars that are very vicious happening around the world — I just hope that he can become a very clear and trusted moral voice in the world, and some of that means dealing with the inequities and failings within our own church as well,” she said.

Steidl Jack said he hopes Leo listens to Catholics with differing viewpoints.

“One of the gifts of Pope Francis’ papacy was that he encouraged church leaders to go outside of the church, to listen to people outside of the hierarchy, and that’s really what Pope Leo needs to do, especially regarding same-sex relationships and transgender experience,” he said.

DeBernardo, of New Ways Ministry, said in his statement that he hopes Leo continues to build upon the foundation that Francis laid out.

“Pope Francis opened the door to a new approach to LGBTQ+ people,” he said. “Pope Leo must now guide the church through that door.”

The conduct of a former Massachusetts state trooper who was fired over his handling of the Karen Read murder investigation took centerstage at her retrial this week as defense lawyers spent hours grilling the ex-officer’s supervisor.

Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Yuri Bukhenik acknowledged that he was also disciplined over misconduct allegations linked to Michael Proctor, the case agent who managed the investigation into the death of Boston police officer John O’Keefe. But the supervisor testified that the former trooper handled the probe with “honor and integrity.”

“I believe human beings all have biases,” Bukhenik said in a courtroom southeast of Boston. “Especially in this case, they did not affect the outcome of the investigation.”

Proctor, who was fired after Read’s defense team raised allegations of misconduct at her widely watched first trial, has not testified at her retrial. It is not clear if he will.

Read, 45, is charged with second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while driving under the influence and leaving the scene of a collision causing death.

The first trial, which spanned nine weeks and five days of jury deliberations, ended when the panel could not reach a unanimous verdict. This week marked the third in her retrial.

Prosecutors have alleged that Read was furious over her deteriorating relationship when she drunkenly backed her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years, and left him for dead outside the suburban home of a now-retired Boston police sergeant, Brian Albert.

O’Keefe, 46, was found unresponsive in Albert’s yard shortly after 6 a.m. Jan. 29, 2022. He was later pronounced dead. The medical examiner attributed his cause of death to hypothermia and blunt force trauma to the head.

Read has asserted her innocence. Her lawyers have claimed that she is the victim of a conspiracy — O’Keefe was likely beaten inside Albert’s home, bitten by the family’s German Shepherd and dragged outside, they have said — and a cover-up that sought to frame her in his death.

The defense lawyers have accused Proctor of manipulating evidence and conducting a biased investigation. He was dishonorably discharged in March after a review by state police officials found that he violated agency rules when he sent derogatory messages about Read to friends, family and others, and when he shared sensitive and confidential details about the case with non-law enforcement personnel.

At trial, Proctor acknowledged that his comments were “unprofessional” and “dehumanized” Read, but he said they did not affect the integrity of the investigation into O’Keefe’s death. Proctor has not commented on his termination, but his family said the decision to fire him “unfairly exploits and scapegoats one of their own, a trooper with a 12-year unblemished record.”

Bukhenik was among those who Proctor texted. While searching Read’s phone seven months after O’Keefe’s death, Proctor texted a group thread about one of Read’s lawyers, David Yannetti, and refered to Read with offensive language and said: “No nudes so far.”

In other messages that did not include Bukhenik, Proctor said he hoped Read died by suicide and he made disparaging comments about her medical condition. Read was diagnosed with Chron’s disease.

Bukhenik testified that he was working on an airport traffic detail when the message arrived on his Apple watch. Though Bukhenik responded with a thumbs-up emoji, he said, he did not look at the messages at the time.

Bukhenik was later disciplined over the accuracy of Proctor’s performance evaluation, he testified, and for failing to adequately supervise him. He lost five vacation days, he said, and remains a homicide investigator with the Massachusetts State Police.

Under questioning from defense lawyer Alan Jackson, Bukhenik said that while Proctor managed the investigation, he did not believe the former trooper played a major role because he was only one of several troopers assigned to the case and was not responsible for 51 percent or more of the work.

Asked if he believed Proctor’s involvement in the case tainted the investigation, Bukhenik said he did not.

“The investigation was done with honor and integrity and the evidence pointed in one direction,” he said.

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