A social media influencer known for posting viral videos of pranks has pleaded guilty to criminal impersonation in Arizona for posing as an employee of businesses in a Phoenix suburb and orchestrating brief but chaotic takeover attempts.

The outcome was welcomed by observers who said it could serve as a reminder to seekers of viral fame that stunts that cross the line legally can lead to serious ramifications.

Heston James Cobb, who posts as “Heston James,” was arrested in July 2025 after police in Tempe say he and others went into businesses posing as workers, entered employee-only areas and refused to leave when asked to do so. He entered his plea Friday.

In one video Cobb, wearing a Chipotle Mexican Grill shirt, told restaurant staff he was going to “clean house” before a group of men wearing dark shirts flooded into the eatery and ignored requests to leave. One man posing as an employee cleaned a tabletop with a mop.

Investigators said the videos had millions of views and potentially generated large amounts of income.

Vicki Lopez, an attorney representing Cobb, declined to comment Saturday. The Associated Press left a message with Cobb's TikTok account seeking comment.

Steve Chucri, president of the Arizona Restaurant Association, said he hopes Cobb's punishment is “severe” to deter copycats.

“There's no place for it,” Chucri said. “That's the last thing we need to put up with in the restaurant industry. The amount of money it takes to operate today is expensive.”

Chucri said the association does not offer any formal training or advice to restaurants on dealing with social media pranksters, and he hopes it does not come to that.

“We're a society of civility,” Chucri said. “We shouldn't have to.”

Matthew Pittman, a social media professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, hopes the arrest will be a warning to influencers about boundaries when creating prank or satirical content.

Pittman said he and others who teach aspiring content creators generally stress that “real world norms and laws” extend into the digital world.

“So doing something that is illegal in real life would also be illegal on social, even if you are doing it for content,” he said. “This is a clear case of going beyond what the law allows.”

Among the recent cases he cited was an influencer in Long Island, New York, who was arrested last year after a series of pranks. They included videos of him going to eateries; pouring food such as raw eggs or beans over his head; and then running off, leaving the mess to be cleaned by others.

“Every few years a YouTuber, influencer or prank content creator goes a little too far, gets in trouble, and reminds the rest of us creators that digital actions can have real world consequences,” Pittman said.

Cara Hawkins-Jedlicka, a communications professor at Washington State University who teaches about content creation, said it's not enough for influencers to stay within the law. They also need to have basic empathy.

“When is it pulling a prank, and when it is being cruel?” Hawkins-Jedlicka said. “Before anything else, this is truly kind of unkind. This influencer was really only thinking about himself and how can I take advantage of this community.”

As U.S. and Israeli forces pounded Iran, and Tehran and its affiliates retaliated by firing missiles at targets across the Mideast on Monday, the international legal order was caught in the crossfire.

At the heart of the post-World War II global order — United Nations headquarters in New York — Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council on Saturday that U.S. and Israeli airstrikes violated international law, including the U.N. Charter. He also condemned Iran's retaliatory attacks for violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations in the Mideast.

Officials in the Trump administration insist that the military campaign is a lawful measure to ensure Tehran does not build nuclear weapons. "It's a matter of global security. And to that end, the United States is taking lawful actions," Trump's U.N. ambassador, Mike Waltz, said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a letter to the U.N. on Sunday that the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "constitutes a grave and unprecedented breach of the most fundamental norms governing relations among States."

On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bullishly defended the U.S. military campaign. "No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don't waste time or lives," he said at the Pentagon.

The war with Iran comes less than two months after U.S. forces swooped into Caracas to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and fly him to New York to face justice.

David Crane, an American expert on international law and founding prosecutor of a United Nations court that prosecuted crimes in Sierra Leone, wrote in an analysis that U.S. attacks in Iran and Venezuela "highlight a dangerous trend: the normalization of unilateral force as a tool of foreign policy. Even when the outcome is positive, the violation of international law and constitutional limits sets a precedent that threatens global stability and undermines America's own legal foundations."

In Washington, many Democrats have called the strikes illegal. They argue that under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. They say the Trump administration failed to lay out its rationale or plan for the military strikes, and the aftermath.

Congress hurriedly scheduled a war powers debate for Monday over Trump's authority to bomb Iran.

A former school bus aide pleaded guilty Monday to assaulting three nonverbal students with autism who were unable to report the abuse.

Kiarra Jones, 30, entered guilty pleas to 12 charges under a plea agreement as she was about to go on trial in suburban Denver for abuse that was revealed in 2024 by bus surveillance video, according to prosecutors and court documents.

Jones is represented by lawyers from the public defender’s office, which does not comment to the media on its cases.

The abuse was discovered after Jessica Vestal, the mother of one of the nonverbal students, asked school officials to review the surveillance video to try to explain a series of injuries her son, then 10, suffered after going to school early last year, including bruises all over his body and a black eye.

“We are committed to making sure that he understands how deeply he is loved,” they said in statement released by the law firm representing them and the two other families, Rathod Mohamedbhai.

Jones pleaded guilty to 10 felony counts of third-degree assault of an at-risk child and two misdemeanor counts of child abuse, the office of 18th Judicial District Attorney Amy Padden said. She faces up to 15 years in prison for the felony counts at sentencing set for March 18.

A Virginia man pleaded guilty Friday in a federal case that accused him of stockpiling the largest number of finished explosives in FBI history and of using then-President Joe Biden’s photo for target practice.

Brad Spafford pleaded guilty in federal court in Norfolk to possession of an unregistered short barrel rifle and possession of an unregistered destructive device, according to court documents. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for December.

Federal authorities said they seized about 150 pipe bombs and other homemade devices last fall at Spafford’s home in Isle of Wight County, which is northwest of Norfolk.

The investigation into Spafford began in 2023 when an informant told authorities that Spafford was stockpiling weapons and ammunition, according to court documents. The informant, a friend and member of law enforcement, told authorities that Spafford was using pictures of then-President Joe Biden for target practice and that “he believed political assassinations should be brought back,” prosecutors wrote.

Two weeks after the assassination attempt of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2024, Spafford told the informant, “bro I hope the shooter doesn’t miss Kamala,” according to court documents. Former Vice President Kamala Harris had recently announced she was running for president. On around the same day, Spafford told the informant that he was pursuing a sniper qualification at the local gun range, court records stated.

Spafford stored a highly unstable explosive material in a garage freezer next to “Hot Pockets and frozen corn on the cob,” according to court documents. Investigators also said they found explosive devices in an unsecured backpack labeled “#NoLivesMatter.”

Spafford has remained in jail since his arrest last December. U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen ruled against his release last January, writing that Spafford has “shown the capacity for extreme danger.” She also noted that Spafford lost three fingers in an accident involving homemade explosives in 2021.

Spafford had initially pleaded not guilty to the charges in January. Defense attorneys had argued at the time that Spafford, who is married and a father of two young daughters, works a steady job as a machinist and has no criminal record.

Defense attorney Jeffrey Swartz said at Spafford’s January detention hearing that investigators had gathered information on him since January 2023, during which Spafford never threatened anyone.

“And what has he done during those two years?” Swartz said. “He purchased a home. He’s raised his children. He’s in a great marriage. He has a fantastic job, and those things all still exist for him.”

Investigators, however, said they had limited knowledge of the homemade bombs until an informant visited Spafford’s home, federal prosecutors wrote in a filing.

“But once the defendant stated on a recorded wire that he had an unstable primary explosive in the freezer in October 2024, the government moved swiftly,” prosecutors wrote.

Eight men deported from the United States in May and held under guard for weeks at an American military base in the African nation of Djibouti while their legal challenges played out in court have now reached the Trump administration’s intended destination, war-torn South Sudan, a country the State Department advises against travel to due to “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”

The immigrants from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan arrived in South Sudan on Friday after a federal judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to relocate them in a case that had gone to the Supreme Court, which had permitted their removal from the U.S. Administration officials said the men had been convicted of violent crimes in the U.S.

“This was a win for the rule of law, safety and security of the American people,” said Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin in a statement Saturday announcing the men’s arrival in South Sudan, a chaotic country in danger once more of collapsing into civil war.

The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the transfer of the men who had been put on a flight in May bound for South Sudan. That meant that the South Sudan transfer could be completed after the flight was detoured to a base in Djibouti, where they men were held in a converted shipping container. The flight was detoured after a federal judge found the administration had violated his order by failing to allow the men a chance to challenge the removal.

The court’s conservative majority had ruled in June that immigration officials could quickly deport people to third countries. The majority halted an order that had allowed immigrants to challenge any removals to countries outside their homeland where they could be in danger.

A flurry of court hearings on Independence Day resulted a temporary hold on the deportations while a judge evaluated a last-ditch appeal by the men’s before the judge decided he was powerless to halt their removals and that the person best positioned to rule on the request was a Boston judge whose rulings led to the initial halt of the administration’s effort to begin deportations to South Sudan.

By Friday evening, that judge had issued a brief ruling concluding the Supreme Court had tied his hands.

The men had final orders of removal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said. Authorities have reached agreements with other countries to house immigrants if authorities cannot quickly send them back to their homelands.

Financial markets welcomed a U.S. court ruling that blocks President Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law.

U.S. futures jumped early Thursday and oil prices rose more than $1. The U.S. dollar rose against the yen and euro.

The court found the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump has cited as his basis for ordering massive increases in import duties, does not authorize the use of tariffs.

The White House immediately appealed and it was unclear if Trump would abide by the ruling in the interim. The long term outcome of legal disputes over tariffs remains uncertain. But investors appeared to take heart after the months of turmoil brought on by Trump's trade war.

The future for the S&P 500 was up 1.5% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1.2%.

In early European trading, Germany's DAX gained 0.5% to 24,160.75. The CAC 40 in Paris jumped 0.9% to 7,860.67. Britain's FTSE was nearly unchanged at 8,722.63.

Japan's Nikkei 225 index jumped 1.9% to 38,432.98. American's largest ally in Asia has been appealing to Trump to cancel the tariffs he has ordered on imports from Japan and to also stop 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection technician examines overseas parcels after they were scanned at the agency's overseas mail inspection facility at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on Feb. 23, 2024.

The ruling also pushed the dollar sharply higher against the Japanese yen. It was trading at 145.40 yen early Thursday, up from 144.87 yen late Wednesday.

A three-judge panel ruled on several lawsuits arguing Trump exceeded his authority, casting doubt on trade policies that have jolted global financial markets, frustrated trade partners and raised uncertainty over the outlook for inflation and the global economy.

Many of Trump's double-digit tariff hikes are paused for up to 90 days to allow time for trade negotiations, but the uncertainty they cast over global commerce has stymied businesses and left consumers wary about what lies ahead.

"Just when traders thought they'd seen every twist in the tariff saga, the gavel dropped like a lightning bolt over the Pacific," Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.

The ruling was, at the least, "a brief respite before the next thunderclap," he said.

Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong's Hang Seng added 1.3% to 23,561.86, while the Shanghai Composite index gained 0.7% to 3,363.45.

Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.2% to 8,409.80.

In South Korea, which like Japan relies heavily on exports to the U.S., the Kospi surged 1.9% to 2,720.64. Shares also were helped by the Bank of Korea's decision to cut its key interest rate to 2.5% from 2.75%, to ease pressure on the economy.
Taiwan's Taiex edged 0.1% lower, and India's Sensex lost 0.2%.

On Wednesday, U.S. stocks cooled, with the S&P 500 down 0.6% but still within 4.2% of its record after charging higher amid hopes that the worst of the turmoil caused by Trump's trade war may have passed. It had been roughly 20% below the mark last month.

The Dow industrials lost 0.6% and the Nasdaq composite fell 0.5%.

Trading was relatively quiet ahead of a quarterly earnings release for Nvidia, which came after markets closed.

The bellwether for artificial intelligence overcame a wave of tariff-driven turbulence to deliver another quarter of robust growth thanks to feverish demand for its high-powered chips that are making computers seem more human. Nvidia's shares jumped 6.6% in afterhours trading.

Like Nvidia, Macy's stock also swung up and down through much of the day, even though it reported milder drops in revenue and profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its stock ended the day down 0.3%.

The bond market showed relatively little reaction after the Federal Reserve released the minutes from its latest meeting earlier this month, when it left its benchmark lending rate alone for the third straight time. The central bank has been holding off on cuts to interest rates, which would give the economy a boost, amid worries about inflation staying higher than hoped because of Trump's sweeping tariffs.