JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A man charged with murder in the hanging of a Black woman in Mississippi pleaded not guilty Monday at his first court appearance.
The body of Tasia Fortune, 29, was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned home in the state's capital city, Jackson, on Aug. 3.
On Friday, police arrested 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff, who is also Black, on a murder charge after the state medical examiner deemed her death a homicide.
During Monday's brief hearing in Municipal Court, a judge denied bond for Ratliff, who told the court he's not guilty. Ratliff's attorney at the hearing left the courthouse without speaking to reporters.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
The case has attracted widespread attention because the manner of Fortune's death recalled lynchings in the Southern state, which has a tumultuous civil rights history stained by episodes of racial violence.
Police and prosecutors haven't given a suspected motive or said whether they think race played any role.
Police Chief RaShall Brackney said Friday that Ratliff, 51, had an “association” with Fortune, but she didn't elaborate. She also said additional arrests are expected in the case.
Prosecutors on Monday offered few new details in court, though they said Fortune had been hanged with a “black cable cord” and that Ratliff had tried to hide from officers in a vehicle the day of his arrest.
Brackney and other police officials who attended Ratliff's hearing Monday declined to comment afterward.
A Kentucky native, Fortune had a Black father and a white mother, though she identified as Black, said Christy Spivey, the dead woman's mother. Fortune had been living in Jackson for about 10 years, according to relatives. Fortune had four children, Spivey said, adding she rarely saw two of her grandchildren.
Spivey wasn’t sure where Fortune was living when she died, but she said her daughter had struggled with homelessness in recent years. She said Fortune had talked recently about starting a cleaning business and was trying to get her life in order.
Two other Mississippi hanging deaths over the past year — those of a Black student at Delta State University and a homeless white man in Vicksburg — also drew widespread attention. Both of those deaths were deemed to be suicides.
This story has been corrected to show that Spivey said she rarely saw two of Fortune's four children, not that Fortune rarely saw two of her own children.
Christy Spivey poses with a portrait of her late daughter Tasia Fortune, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026, in Marion, Ky. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
NEW YORK (AP) — Artificial-intelligence stocks are sliding worldwide Monday after leaders of the industry warned a slowdown is needed for the safety of humanity. Another jump in oil prices, meanwhile, briefly sent the bond market to its latest pressure-raising milestone as the yield on the 10-year Treasury touched 5% for the first time since 2023.
Despite all the downers for Wall Street, gains for many stocks outside AI helped limit the market's losses. So did a midday tempering of oil prices, and the S&P 500 fell a relatively modest 0.3% as more stocks rose within the index than fell.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 116 points, or 0.2%, as of 2:02 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% lower after clawing back most of an early loss of 1.3%.
AI stocks have been under pressure a while because of worries their prices shot too high in the frenzy around the technology. The concerns jumped to another level over the weekend after one of the industry’s leading voices, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, called for a deliberate and global slowdown in the development of AI.
He cited safety issues, including the risk that AI becomes capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet within six to 12 months.
Nvidia, whose profits have soared because its chips are helping to train AI models, sank 2.8% and was the heaviest weight on the market because of its massive size.
SpaceX, which gets a chunk of its business from AI, rose 0.4% after Elon Musk said over the weekend that he agrees with Amodei. Softbank Group, the Japanese giant that is a major investor of OpenAI, lost 10.7% in Tokyo after OpenAI’s Sam Altman likewise supported the concept of a slowdown.
Altman also said in an interview with Fortune published Saturday that OpenAI would likely wait until next year for a sale of its stock on Wall Street, potentially delaying a gusher of cash for Softbank and other early investors in OpenAI.
In South Korea, the Kospi index dropped 3.3% due to losses for its two most influential stocks, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
President Donald Trump played down the need for his administration to check the development of AI, saying he worried about ceding his country's edge over China in a global competition and that winning would help address the risks from the advancing technology.
Even with so many voices inside and outside the AI industry calling for a slowdown to protect humanity, Trump said on his social media network Monday that the only guardrail it needs “is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
Helping to limit Wall Street's losses on Monday were several software companies that tumbled earlier on worries AI-powered competitors would undercut their businesses.
Intuit, the company behind TurboTax and QuickBooks, rose 5%. Autodesk, whose software helps designers, climbed 8%, and Adobe added 4.7%.
Oil prices, meanwhile, continued to climb as fighting in the Middle East keeps squeezing the global flow of oil. The price for a barrel of Brent crude rose 1.1% to $105.76 after getting near $110 in the morning.
An important Saudi oil pipeline will mostly be out of service for weeks following an attack last week, two regional officials told The Associated Press. The pipeline offered a way for Saudi Arabia to shift exports to the Red Sea and avoid the Persian Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian attacks have stifled the movement of oil tankers.
Brent has jumped from less than $72 in early July as doubts rise that the United States and Iran can come to an agreement that would allow oil tankers to freely exit the Persian Gulf through the strait again.
While the prospect of a de-escalation of war in Iran may have dimmed, ING commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey wrote in a commentary on Monday that the situation is still fluid and “sizable” volumes of oil have still been moving through the strait.
So far, the jump in oil prices has sent the average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline across the country to nearly $4.32 from $4.08 a month ago and $3.18 a year ago, according to AAA.
Such upward pressure on inflation has much of Wall Street expecting the Federal Reserve will hike its main interest rate on Wednesday at the end of its next meeting.
That’s the traditional way the Fed tries to rein in high inflation. Such a move then filters out through the rest of the bond market, slows the overall economy and undercuts prices for investments. That hopefully would remove some of inflation’s fuel, though Trump has been lobbying for lower interest rates instead of higher.
Besides high inflation, worries about rising debt for the U.S. and other governments and other concerns have sent longer-term Treasury yields to their highest levels in years.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury breached the 5.00% level during the morning for the first time in nearly three years. That's up from 4.96% late Friday and just 3.97% before the war with Iran began in February.
But the 10-year yield later pulled back to 4.96% as oil prices came off their highs for the day.
The 10-year yield has not consistently remained above 5% since the turn of the millennium, and its jump has already made it more expensive for U.S. households and companies to borrow. That includes the highest average long-term mortgage rate in more than 14 months.
AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Michelle Chapman contributed to this report.
FILE - A general view shows the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, Aug. 7, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
A monitor shows the Nikkei 225 stock index in Tokyo Monday, Sept. 14, 2026. (Miyuki Saito/Kyodo News via AP)
