An Ohio attorney whose career has since been overshadowed by criminal allegations was accused of trying to shoot his ex-wife as her family and startled restaurant patrons looked on.

Matthew Exton, 43, was convicted Friday of attempted murder and two counts of felonious assault tied to the April 11, 2025, confrontation.

Exton, an attorney with law offices in Sylvania, Ohio, and Traverse City, Michigan, was captured on surveillance video aiming a gun at his ex-wife, Kayda Valone, while she ate with relatives at Sabira, a new restaurant in downtown Toledo.

Before the encounter, Exton had been drinking at Souk, the restaurant connected to Sabira. After seeing Kayda seated with her parents, Charles and Jeanne Valone, he ordered a drink to be delivered to their table.

Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates said Exton, who had also worked as a county prosecutor in northern Michigan, abruptly charged toward Kayda and drew a firearm. The weapon did not discharge because the safety was engaged.

‘Stop! Gun, gun, gun,’ people screamed as his ex-wife threw herself on the floor and a brave waiter tackled Exton to the ground, video showed.  

Several patrons, including his ex-wife and her parents, then surrounded Exton, screaming in terror. 

At the time, the gun had one round in the chamber and seven more in the magazine, Bates said, according to WTOL 11. 

‘Nothing in their training and soft openings at the restaurant could have prepared the staff for what walked through the door,’ Bates told the court.

‘The defendant did not come with the intention of having a meal. He came with anger in him and with the intention to commit a public execution of his ex-wife at the restaurant that day.’ 

She went on to praise the employees for their quick thinking and called them heroes.  

It is unclear why Exton and Valone split, but according to him, he was a ‘homosexual attorney,’ and Kayda was aware of that, he said on the stand. 

Exton told the court that he has worked on cases involving family law, gun law, bankruptcy, and more. 

He also stated that he has been married twice and has one child, a teenager, with his first wife.

Exton said that his first marriage ended after just ‘a couple years.’ He went on to marry Kayda in March 2017. 

She knew he was gay, but his first wife did not, Exton stated. 

When asked how he would describe his marriage to Kayda, Exton said: ‘It had its ups and downs. It was tumultuous, but also good. 

‘So we had periods of time when we were separated; we had periods of time where we rose to the challenges together, and it was great,’ he said as he donned a blue suit and tie. 

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He added: ‘There was no judgment on anything until it ended.’ 

Exton said that they both filed for divorce around the same time in February 2024. They officially got divorced in January 2025, he detailed. 

He said the divorce was not amicable, describing it to the jury as ‘terrible’ and ‘painful.’

Exton also admitted to going back into the restaurant that day with his gun. 

‘I pulled out my Colt Defender and I pointed it right at [the victim],’ he testified. 

‘I wanted her to know that I was serious about her following the court order to give the house proceeds to me as soon as possible, cause I needed it. I needed it. I was hurt.’ 

Although he confessed to pointing the weapon at Kayda, he maintained that he never aimed it at her parents. He also said he never removed the safety or pulled the trigger. 

He then reacted to how the waiter took him down that day. 

‘The waiter came over, and he punched me, he tackled me, and then they tried to get the gun from me,’ he recalled. ‘I thought I was toast!’ 

Tensions grew high when prosecutors cross-examined him on the stand, as Exton claimed that the victim was laughing at him before the attempted shooting. 

‘They knew what they were doing to me. I didn’t want them to die, but I was fighting for my life,’ he said. 

While prosecutors delivered their closing arguments on Friday, they said that Exton’s emotions on the stand were ‘crocodile tears.’

Exton then interrupted and screamed: ‘Gun!’ 

He grew increasingly angry as the prosecution presented evidence in the case, and stood up to object to one of her statements and continued to scream ‘Gun!’ 

The jury was then excused before Exton got up and said: ‘My lawyer, Mr. Wingate, has indicated to me that he would like for me to be quiet, and I will, but how can I do that and exercise all the infractions to all of my constitutional rights that have been violated through these proceedings if I can’t speak?’ 

Exton then asked prosecutors to charge the waiter with attempted murder, and positioned his fingers into the shape of a gun and pointed it at one of them, according to CourtTV. 

He continued to interrupt the court and was eventually taken to another room where he could access video and audio feeds of the proceedings.  

While the jury found Exton guilty of attempted murder and the two counts of felonious assault, they determined he was not guilty on the remaining count of felonious assault.

He is set to be sentenced on September 21. Exton faced up to 25 years in prison.  

The Daily Mail contacted Exton’s attorney and the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office for comment. 

Nearly 10 years after young Australians were famously urged to give up smashed avocado if they wanted a foothold in the property market, celebrity auctioneer Damien Cooley has brought the divisive argument back into the spotlight.

Cooley says many aspiring first-home buyers are undermining their savings goals by spending heavily on restaurants, cafés and entertainment rather than putting more money aside for a deposit.

The “smashed avocado” debate has since become a symbol of the wider generational clash over housing affordability, particularly between younger Australians struggling to buy and Baby Boomers who entered the market under very different conditions. The phrase took hold after demographer Bernard Salt used it in a 2016 column.

“I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more,” Mr Salt wrote in The Australian at the time.

“I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn’t they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out?”

Speaking at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit on Tuesday, Mr Cooley echoed that sentiment, saying many young Australians should be staying home and saving for a deposit.

‘What are first home buyers doing to help themselves? It’s a question that I honestly say to young people all the time. A lot of these kids are out spending a fortune on going out for dinner, going out with their friends and spending so much money when they actually should be home,’ he said.

‘Perhaps their parents have helped them also to a degree, but it’s teaching them lessons on saving. ‘You save half, we’ll put in half. You save two thirds, we’ll put in a third.’ That’s a really encouraging thing for first home buyers.’

Mr Cooley, who has appeared on Nine’s popular home renovation program The Block, said first home buyers should purchase in more affordable regional areas such as Maitland in the Hunter Valley rather than set their sights on Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

‘I guess one of the concepts of the budgetary changes was to hopefully make properties affordable for first home buyers,’ he said.

‘But to be honest, I feel like that’s probably one of the strongest sections of the market right now.

‘It’s more challenging for a first home buyer to get something than it is for anybody else. All that’s really happened is that we’ve just stripped wealth off all those people who have worked really hard to build wealth over that time.’

New data released by the Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA) on Wednesday showed first-home buyer activity increased during the quarter, with 30,129 new loan commitments recorded, up 11 per cent from the March quarter.

First-home buyers accounted for 36.3 per cent of all owner-occupier commitments.

Their average loan decreased by 0.6 per cent over the quarter to $610,063, but remained 10 per cent higher than in the June quarter of 2025.

REIA president Jacob Caine said the results were recorded during a period of significant change in Commonwealth housing and taxation policy.

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     While first-home buyer participation increased, he warned broader affordability challenges remained.

‘Measures intended to improve opportunities for first home buyers and direct investment towards new construction must also be assessed against their impact on rental supply, investor confidence, and new housing delivery,’ he said.

‘Stable and predictable investment settings are essential, particularly while higher interest rates are already increasing financing costs for households and housing projects.’

Federal Housing Minister Clare O’Neil, also speaking at the summit, defended Labor’s housing tax changes, saying they were designed to help first-home buyers achieve what she called a ‘virtual rite of citizenship’.

‘The intention of the tax changes is to put first home buyers on a level playing field for the first time,’ she said.

‘If we fast forward three or four years, we are going to wonder how we left it so long that the young people are being taxed to subsidise investors to buy a second, third, fifth, sixth property when they’re unable to get into a position to buy their first home.’

Property prices were already falling before the May budget after the Reserve Bank of Australia lifted interest rates three times this year.

However, Labor’s decision to wind back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions accelerated the downturn, with home values now falling faster and across 93 per cent of suburbs.

The latest Westpac Home Ownership Report found 55 per cent of Australians agree the recent changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions will have a positive impact for aspiring homebuyers, with Gen Z respondents (70 per cent) the most optimistic about the reforms.

However, affordability pressures are continuing to reshape buyer behaviour, with three-quarters of first-home buyers willing to purchase in a location they had not originally considered.

Last week, Cotality reported home value declines had spread across Australia’s housing market during winter, with values falling across 93 per cent of capital city suburbs over the past three months.

Sydney continues to lead the pace of declines, with home values sitting 7.1 per cent below their February peak, taking the median house price to $1.5million. 

Research director Tim Lawless said the figures showed the downturn was no longer confined to select markets or higher-value segments with a clear reduction in buyer demand.  

‘What started as a more concentrated easing across higher-value segments has now become a much more generalised softening, with the vast majority of capital city suburbs recording some level of decline,’ he said.  

‘Longer selling times, larger vendor discounting and persistently low auction clearance rates all point to a buyer’s market, yet buyers are lacking the confidence to transact at the moment.’

Passengers caught up in widespread flight cancellations and delays following a major technical fault across Britain’s airports are “unlikely” to qualify for compensation, the UK Civil Aviation Authority has cautioned.

More than 300,000 travellers were reportedly affected yesterday after a problem with National Air Traffic Services’ flight processing system triggered significant disruption across the aviation network.

The failure caused chaos at some of the country’s busiest airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick and Birmingham, leaving passengers stuck in terminals, delayed at gates and stranded on aircraft waiting on runways.

British Airways said it alone had been forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights, a move the airline said affected “tens of thousands of customers”.

However, travellers have now been told that the air traffic control technical failure is expected to fall under “extraordinary circumstances” in passenger rights rules, meaning compensation is unlikely to be paid.

The British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said this evening: ‘Although passengers should be looked after by airlines, they are unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident.’

The CAA confirmed it has launched an investigation to understand what exactly caused the fault after NATS chief Martin Rolfe admitted last night that the service did ‘not yet have an idea’. 

Mr Rolfe faced calls to resign from a host of airlines following the ordeal and met with Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander this morning. 

Alexander made clear she did not believe the shambles was ‘unavoidable’, though Mr Rolfe will not be ousted immediately while he retains the confidence of Downing Street. 

He was, however, branded an ‘overpaid failure’ yesterday after a similar issue caused chaos at British airports only last year.

Effectively pleading for his survival in a broadcast interview this morning, Mr Rolfe confirmed that a cyber attack was not responsible for the carnage. 

He promised there would be a ‘very, very thorough investigation’ into the issue – but also argued that such incidents were ‘inevitable’.

Tens of thousands of passengers were caught up in the travel mayhem after a system issue hit NATS, which provides air traffic control services to 15 UK airports.

Chaos continued today with more cancellations and delays as airlines deal with the knock-on impacts at hubs including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted.

Aviation analytics company Cirium said as of 3pm, more than 300 flights had been cancelled or not taken off today, with more than 2,000 affected over the past two days.

British Airways said the fault had forced it to cancel almost 550 of its flights, which had impacted more than 85,000 passengers.

The airline said it was ‘incredibly sorry’ to its customers and that the issue had been ‘entirely out of our control’.

Mr Rolfe told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘We will be doing a very, very thorough and full investigation. We have at this point ruled out cyber, we don’t believe it was a cyber attack.

‘My focus and that of the team has been on both getting our system operating back up normally, which it is now, but there’s obviously a huge tail to the disruption and we’ll be working on that through the course of today.

‘And then our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened in this particular incident. What I will say is I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.’

Mr Rolfe also apologised for the disruption, adding: ‘Inevitably, things do go wrong in complex systems. We never want them to. We always hope they won’t, but we absolutely plan for them to and make sure we handle them properly.

‘I would say the UK has one of the best reputations in the world for its air traffic control service, both from a safety perspective and from a resilience perspective.

‘NATS was actually a partial privatisation 25 years ago, and since that point, it’s had access to funding. We’ve invested way more than a billion in technology over that time, our service has consistently improved. Our safety is consistently improved from a very good base.

‘But all of those things don’t detract from the fact that when these things happen, it is disappointing and upsetting, for which I apologise.’

Discussing the response to yesterday’s incident, Mr Rolfe said: ‘We had everybody on site, everybody was in the right place. We had all the engineers in place. We had our various partners from software industries and so on all on hand.

‘So this was resolved as quickly as it could be, but within the limits of making sure that it all stayed safe.’

Ms Alexander told MPs this afternoon that she did not believe the air traffic control problems that have caused chaos for passengers were ‘unavoidable’.

She said in the Commons: ‘A four-hour air traffic outage yesterday left hundreds of thousands of passengers facing cancellations, diversions and delays. I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to passengers for this disruption.

‘We often take for granted the way in which our aviation system just works, but yesterday that was not the case. Safety must remain air traffic controllers’ overriding priority and this morning I have spoken to NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe, who informed me this outage was due to a technical issue at their Swanwick site.

‘So, while my understanding from NATS is that we can rule out a cyber attack on this occasion, I do not believe this issue was unavoidable.

‘We also spoke this morning about how NATS responded to resolve and minimise the disruption as quickly as possible, and I am grateful to the airports and airlines who responded straight away.

‘But I am clear that passengers should not have to face this disruption. I have therefore asked the CAA to conduct an independent review to establish cause and ensure that our air traffic control systems can get passengers to where they need to be and this … review will report to me within six months.’

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The managing director of Wizz Air UK, Yvonne Moynihan, said it should be a case of ‘three strikes and you’re out’.

‘I’m very surprised at that and it would seem like an easy pass for him after a number of own goals,’ she told Times Radio. 

‘There have been three distinct and three separate incidents over three summers, particularly in August, September time, which is very busy period for airlines. 

‘So the question is not whether failures can happen. The question is whether enough has been done since the previous incidents to prevent another nationwide disruption. 

‘We’ve used the phrase three strikes and you’re out. It seems from the airlines’ and the industry’s point of view that three failures is unacceptable and passengers and airlines want to understand why would there be confidence in a public system that continues to fail.’ 

Ryanair chief operating officer Neal McMahon also insisted that Mr Rolfe should go.

‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome,’ he told Times Radio. 

‘We had the same flight planning processing issue in 2023… yet here we are less than three years later…’

He added: ‘We understand the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, is going to meet with Martin Rolfe today, and we think she should ask him to resign.’ 

Mr McMahon said the airlines had invested ‘hugely in resilience’, in contrast to NATS.

The problem is that they have a crap system and they don’t invest in it,’ he said.

‘And instead of investing in the system, they pay big bonuses to management and they pay huge dividends to the shareholders.’

Earlier, Mr Rolfe said that he ‘always accept(s) full responsibility’ when asked if he was considering his position after the incident.

He told Sky News: ‘I am the CEO of a piece of critical infrastructure, so it is my job to take responsibility for that.

‘What I absolutely take responsibility for is keeping people safe and delivering the best service we possibly can on a day like today.

‘You will understand my focus is entirely about how we actually resolve this issue, get things back to normal, help our airlines, our airport customers and the travelling public.’

This morning, Heathrow advised travellers to check their flight status before heading to the airport.

‘Following yesterday’s NATS technical issue, flights are operating today, but some disruption may continue as airlines reposition aircraft and crew,’ it said in a statement on social media.

‘Please check your flight status with your airline before travelling to the airport and only travel if your flight is confirmed to be operating.

‘We apologise to those affected and have extra colleagues across our terminals to support passengers while we work with NATS and airline partners to restore normal operations as quickly as possible.’

Gatwick also said flights had resumed but disruption was likely to continue.

Its statement said: ‘We still anticipate that it will take time for our operations to fully return to normal. Passengers should continue to check with their airlines for more information regarding their flights.’

Luton Airport confirmed early this morning that the airport was ‘open and operational’, but said: ‘Some flights may still be subject to disruption and passengers are advised to check their flight status directly before travelling to the airport.’

Travel journalist Simon Calder said the knock-on effects today were ‘going to be horrible’.

He told Sky News: ‘There are going to be dozens of cancellations in the morning of flights coming into Heathrow because, basically, the flights didn’t go out tonight.’

Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its passengers had been disrupted and it had cancelled more than 50 scheduled flights.

British Airways (BA) said it was forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights on Tuesday which had affected ‘tens of thousands of customers’.

Mr Rolfe has been under fire from Wizz Air and Ryanair after the latest issue which saw some passengers trapped on planes on runways for hours.

Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s chief operating officer, called on Mr Rolfe to resign, saying: ‘How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure NATS CEO Martin Rolfe accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?

‘Over three years after NATS’ catastrophic 2023 system meltdown, it’s clear that nothing has changed, with UK passengers once again suffering avoidable ATC (air traffic control) delays of up to eight hours today due a critical NATS ATC system failing’.

Last night, NATS said on X: ‘Work is continuing to assist airlines and airports recover from today’s disruption.

‘This has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover.

‘We apologise again for the disruption caused. Passengers should check with their airline on the status of their flight tonight or tomorrow.’

Ms Alexander is set to speak with Mr Rolfe today before she addresses MPs in the Commons for the second reading of the Civil Aviation Bill.

Among the thousands facing disruption yesterday was Josie Donoghue, who had to get off her flight to Ireland after spending three hours on the runway at Gatwick.

Ms Donoghue said: ‘Getting through that airport was like trying to get out of Alcatraz. We were trapped in there. We were told we couldn’t get out until the flights were cancelled, and then eventually they allowed us to get out.

‘It’s just an absolute nightmare down there, it’s the only word I can use to describe it.’

Have you been affected? Email lettice.bromovsky@dailymail.co.uk 

A nearly century-old painting has gone viral again, reigniting online claims that it may contain evidence of time travel.

The 1937 artwork, titled ‘Mr Pynchon and the Settling of Springfield,’ appears to show an Indigenous man from the 17th century holding what some viewers insist looks strikingly like a smartphone as if he is posing for a selfie.

In the foreground of the painting, the figure is seen gripping the lower portion of a dark rectangular object with a pale or metallic-looking edge, while staring toward its upper section in a way that modern audiences associate with using a phone.

Because such a device would have been impossible in both the colonial-era scene depicted and the 1930s period in which the painting was created, the unusual detail has fueled years of speculation that the artist may have hidden a time-travel clue in the well-known work.

Reacting to the image online, one person wrote: ‘Now that one actually looks like a cell phone.’ Another viewer wondered: ‘Is that an iPhone?’

While believers and skeptics have clashed over what the item could be, historians have leaned towards the handheld device actually being a mirror, which the Indigenous man would have obtained in a trade with English colonist William Pynchon.

The 1937 work is one of several paintings, sculptures and photographs which have allegedly captured an object which was centuries ahead of its time.

Moreover, multiple individuals have given viral interviews where they claimed without evidence that they were not only time travelers from the future, but that widespread use of time travel would begin as soon as 2028.

The controversial mural by Italian-born artist Umberto Romano is said to be one of six New Deal-era murals showing the history of Springfield, Massachusetts – where Romano grew up.

This particular image depicted Pynchon, the founder of Springfield, trading with natives, likely from the Pocumtuc tribe in western Massachusetts around the 1630s, when the settlement was established.

Unlike the other individuals in the painting, including two men appearing to be punished by being whipped and placed in the wooden stocks, no one else was seen holding anything that looked like it came from the future.

That included depictions of Pynchon’s group trading goods and animals with the Native Americans.

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This has led historians, including Daniel Crown in 2017, to call the mysterious item a painting of a European trade mirror.

Mirrors were common trade goods in that era. The man’s pose – holding up the object and looking at it – matches someone examining their own reflection, possibly for the first time using a polished mirror.

Despite heavy skepticism that the painting was only showing a mirror, ‘Mr Pynchon and the Settling of Springfield’ adds to a growing theory that ancient art has been documenting incidents in which time travelers have visited the past.

A similar painting from the 19th century called The Expected One by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller depicted a woman walking along a path while looking down at an unknown object she was clutching with both hands.

Although the small, square device could have been a book, conspiracy theorists noted that the woman in the painting looked exactly like how present-day individuals walk while distracted by their smartphones.

Even a sculpture from 100 BC has been repeatedly claimed to be evidence of time travel. Called Grave Naiskos of an Enthroned Woman with an Attendant, the ancient Greek statue allegedly includes a laptop, complete with two USB ports.

At the same time as Romano’s painting has resurfaced, viral interviews online have allegedly documented the confessions of ‘time travelers’ who said the US government already had the ability to travel to the past or the future.

In one recording by a masked man who identified himself as Alexander Smith, the self-proclaimed time traveler said he was a former member of the CIA from 1981 who was recruited to journey to the year 2118.

Smith also claimed that time travel technology had existed for decades before the public knew about it and predicted it would become available ‘beginning in the year 2028’ for both commercial and non-commercial uses.

He further alleged that 2028 is also ‘the same year in which the government discloses the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials,’ claiming authorities had possessed knowledge of aliens ‘for some time previous’ to the announcement.