Miami Beach man coerces 15-year-old neighbor with drugs and money for sex: cops
The man would give the 15-year-old $100 for sex, an arrest report read.
A 29-year-old Miami Beach man used drugs and money to attract a 15-year-old neighbor and coerce her into sex multiple times, cops say. He was cuffed on Saturday.
On May 17, the 15-year-old’s parents called Miami Beach police, reporting their daughter had been sexually abused by Christian Gonzalez Lopez, a neighbor, an arrest report read.
An interview with the young teen revealed that a few months ago, Gonzalez Lopez approached her while she was walking in the neighborhood and asked for her Instagram, which she gave, the report read.
That same day, he sent her pictures of lingerie and asked if she’d take pictures in them for money — she ignored him.
Sometime later, she messaged him asking for the drug Tusi, a type of cocaine, the report read. Gonzalez Lopez said he agreed to provide it, but not only for money — sex, too. This exchange happened several times.
Police noted the teen had a “drug dependency” and on some other occasions, he would give her $100 to have sex. In one instance, she told detectives she thought he would record her during the sexual abuse.
On Saturday, the teen confirmed Gonzalez Lopez was the man who was giving her money for sex over several months, the report read. He was promptly arrested on an unrelated disturbance call that day.
He was charged with human trafficking, seduce a child to commit any illegal act, lewd and lascivious battery on a child, induce a child to perform an act that causes a child to become dependent and illegal delivery of controlled substances to minors.
Gonzalez Lopez was taken to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where he remained as of Wednesday night.
Judge delays Miami trial of five men accused of plotting assassination of Haiti’s president
The Miami trial of five men accused of plotting the killing of Haiti’s president has dragged on for years.
The Miami trial of five men accused of plotting the assassination of Haiti’s president has again been delayed, this time to March 2026 — almost five years after the fatal shooting of Jovenel Moïse at his suburban home outside Port-au-Prince.
U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra said at a recent hearing that she was not happy about delaying the federal trial, which was originally set for March and then postponed until September of this year.
Becerra said she had no choice but to push it back again because of the massive volume of evidence, including more than 2.5 million text messages, emails and other records, that federal prosecutors are still turning over to the defense lawyers — a basic discovery issue that has turned into a sore point for the judge.
“I do not take it lightly in any way that this case has been delayed,” Becerra told the five defendants, who were arrested and taken into federal custody in the months after the July 7, 2021, assassination of Moïse. “This is not a delay that I am at all happy with.”
Compounding the run-up to the Miami trial: Armed gangs have been terrorizing Haiti, a country in free fall without a political leader, making it unsafe for the defense lawyers in Miami to go there and question ex-Colombian soldiers jailed in Port-au-Prince on Haitian charges of assisting in the slaying of the president.
As a result, Judge Becerra granted the defense team’s request to take video depositions of five of the Colombians, who represent about one-third of the former commandos in jail.
“Although the difficulties of traveling to Haiti to conduct these depositions should not be understated, there appears to be no reason why the depositions could not take place over video conference,” Becerra ruled after the May 19 hearing on the trial date and other issues.
Despite the judge’s approval of these critical depositions, there is one potential Haitian witness whom the defense lawyers in Miami won’t be able to question: Former Haitian Superior Court Judge Windelle Coq Thélot, who died in January.
Haitian authorities considered Thélot a key suspect in the investigation of Moïse’s killing. But she took to the grave unanswered questions about her alleged role in the assassination plot and whether she indeed promised immunity to the defendants in Miami who are accused of directing it.
According to prosecutors in Miami, Thélot gained the support of the suspected plotters in South Florida as a replacement for Moïse in June 2021, when they decided that Christian Sanon, a Haitian priest and physician, “was not a viable option to take over” the presidency.
Thélot’s “apparent signature” appeared on a written request for assistance to arrest Haiti’s president that “purported to provide Haitian immunity” to the conspirators in South Florida, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. One of the suspects, Haitian-American maintenance worker James Solages, traveled from Haiti to Miami on June 28, 2021, to deliver the document to another suspect, Antonio “Tony” Intriago,” the owner of a security business.
On July 1, Solages traveled back to Haiti and five days later met with several conspirators at a house near Moïse’s residence. Solages “falsely told those gathered that it was a ‘CIA Operation, and, in substance, said that the mission was to kill President Moïse,” the FBI affidavit stated.
Solages and other suspects drove in a convoy to the president’s home on the night of July 7, the assassination date. Once inside the residence, Solages declared they were involved in a “DEA Operation” to ensure “compliance from” Moïse’s security team, the affidavit stated. Some of the ex-Colombian soldiers recruited for the mission were assigned to find and kill the president.
Suspect knew about assassination plan: FBI
On July 22, federal agents questioned Solages while he was in Haitian custody. After he was read his Miranda rights, Solages admitted that by mid-June 2021, “he knew that the plan was to ultimately assassinate President Moïse,” according to the FBI affidavit.
To date in the U.S. case, five of the 11 defendants have pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill Haiti’s president, resulting in life sentences that they hope to get reduced with their cooperation. Among those convicted: two ex-Colombian commandos, a former Haitian senator, a Haitian-American man who worked as an informant for the DEA, and a previously convicted Haitian drug trafficker.
A sixth defendant, a Tampa businessman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges involving the smuggling of bulletproof vests that were illegally exported to Haiti for the group of ex-Colombian soldiers who carried out the deadly attack.
The remaining five defendants are charged with conspiring in South Florida to kidnap or kill Haiti’s leader and related charges, including recruiting the Colombian commandos. The conspiracy charge carries up to life in prison.
The defendants facing trial are: Intriago, the head of a Miami-area security firm, CTU; Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, a former FBI informant who joined Intriago at CTU; Walter Veintemilla, a Broward County financier; Solages, the Haitian American; and Sanon, who was initially seen by the group as a successor to Moïse as Haiti’s president. All five defendants are being held in a federal lock-up before trial.
Of the five remaining defendants, Sanon was the only one who told the judge at the hearing this month that he opposed delaying the trial until March of next year.
But Judge Becerra, while showing sympathy for his pre-trial detention over nearly four years in Haiti and Miami, said holding one trial for him and another for the others was not practical for several reasons.
“Given the complexity of the case, the government wants all the defendants tried together,” Becerra told Sanon. “I am not inclined to try your case in September and all the other defendants in March [2026].”
In February 2024, Sanon was charged with the others with conspiring to kill Haiti’s leader, after first being accused of trying to carry out a military expedition against a foreign country. It was the fifth superseding indictment filed by prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Justice Department. Since then, most of the team has been replaced with new prosecutors.
On Iran and Gaza, Trump Should Avoid the Mistakes of Obama and Biden
President Trump’s first-term record of steadfast support for Israel and “maximum pressure” against Iran has earned him a fair degree of benefit of the doubt when it comes to Middle East policy. But as his envoy Steve Witkoff pursues nuclear diplomacy with Iran and another cease-fire deal in Gaza, there are troubling signs that Trump may be going down the same failed path of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
On Wednesday, Trump confirmed that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Iran’s nuclear program, saying, “I don’t think it’s appropriate” while talks are ongoing. “Right now, I think they want to make a deal,” Trump said. “And if we can make a deal, I’d save a lot of lives.” Holding off on striking Iran now risks squandering a crucial window, with Iran’s anti-aircraft defense systems still damaged from Israel’s retaliatory strike against the terrorist regime last October.
In his first term, Trump rightly recognized that Iran was not a negotiating partner to be trusted. He tore up Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal, under which Iran obtained tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief while retaining its ability to enrich uranium and grow its ballistic missile program. Also, that deal did not address any other malign behavior by Iran (from its sponsorship of terrorism to other destabilizing actions throughout the region, including its targeting of U.S. military personnel and assets).
But now, unfortunately, Trump is pursuing a deal that sounds in many ways like the failed Obama agreement, with its promise of inspections and its avoidance of fully dismantling the nuclear program, akin to the deal the U.S. struck with Libya in 2003. Witkoff, a few weeks ago, said that Iran would be allowed to enrich uranium at 3.67 percent (the Obama deal limit), but more recently he has said that the U.S. “red line” was that Iran would not be permitted any enrichment. Iran, for its part, has said it would never accept that limitation. With Trump so eager for a deal, it’s fair to be concerned that the U.S. will let this red line shift.
Iran doves within the administration and their allies are making the same disingenuous arguments that John Kerry and the gang made during the Obama administration — that the only alternative to a deal is a world war. In reality, an Israeli-led strike on Iran’s nuclear program would not trigger another world war, nor is it akin to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It is likely to be closer to the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Trump should understand this. In 2020, when he rightly ordered the strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, the reactions were so hysterical that the terms “Franz Ferdinand” and “World War III” were trending online, and yet Iran avoided a major escalation that it could ill afford. The same calculation would be likely to hold this time.
Meanwhile, Israel is currently making significant progress in its campaign against Hamas. Israelis recently killed Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar (the October 7 architect who was killed by Israel last October). And perhaps more importantly, there are signs that the people of Gaza are starting to feel more emboldened to defy the terrorist group that has ruled the area with an iron grip for nearly 20 years.
The U.S. and Israel have worked together with contractors to create a new mechanism for distributing aid directly to Gazans, unlike the United Nations effort that allowed Hamas to steal the aid. Before the distribution began, Hamas issued a warning to Gazans not to participate in the U.S.-backed effort. Yet Gazans ignored the warning, and hundreds of thousands of meals were distributed in the first day of operation. In a further sign that Hamas, which has been controlling the flow of food and supplies, is losing its grip, a mob broke into a warehouse in central Gaza to take flour.
Unfortunately, by pushing for another cease-fire when Israel has the momentum, the U.S. could end up tossing Hamas a lifeline.
Unfortunately, even though Trump has some great people on his foreign policy team with stellar records on Middle East policy, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, everything seems to be dictated by Witkoff, a real estate developer with little background in foreign diplomacy and with a significant conflict of interest: His troubled Park Lane hotel investment was bailed out by the Qatar Investment Authority last year to the tune of $623 million, and Qatar is a benefactor of Hamas and key ally of Iran. In March, Witkoff admitted in a television interview that he was “duped” by Hamas during earlier negotiations.
Supreme Court Clears Trump Administration to Revoke Parole for 500,000 Migrants, Begin Deportations
The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.
The Court, in an unsigned order, lifted a lower court order that kept a Biden-era humanitarian parole program in place. Humanitarian parole allows migrants from countries facing instability to enter the U.S. and secure work authorization as long as they have a private sponsor.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, arguing the majority had not properly considered “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
They argued the Court’s order will “have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
The order means the parole protections will not be in place as the case proceeds; it now heads back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston.
The decision comes after the Court previously allowed the Trump administration to revoke deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who were allowed to remain in the U.S. under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.
Both rulings are wins for the Trump administration, which is working to make good on the president’s campaign promise to carry out mass deportations.
Republicans have argued the humanitarian parole program allowed immigrants who would otherwise not have qualified to enter the country, to remain in the country legally.
The Biden administration opened up humanitarian parole to Venezuelans in 2022 and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in January 2023.
At the time, several red states sued the Biden administration looking to block the parole program, though the courts upheld its legality.
President Trump ordered an end to the humanitarian parole programs on his first day in office, leading migrants to challenge Trump’s directive in court. Attorneys for the migrants argued that the end of the humanitarian and other immigration parole programs was “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious.”
The lawsuits resulted in a temporary pause of the Trump administration’s order in March, after a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Nome lacked the authority to revoke the parole for more than 500,000 people without providing case-by-case reviews.
Instead, we live in a time of technological marvels, and the unemployment rate is 4.2 percent. Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation points out that the average unemployment rate in the United States hasn’t changed much over the last century, despite an increase in productivity — the ability to produce more with the same inputs — by almost ten times.
Technology increases productivity, driving down costs and making it possible to invest and spend on other things, creating new jobs that replace the old. This is the process of a society becoming wealthier, and it’s why nations that innovate are better off than those that don’t.
The rise of personal computers collapsed the demand for typists and word processors. These positions were often held by women. Did this decimate the economic prospects of women in America? No, they got different, and frequently better, jobs.
AI will end up augmenting many jobs — helping workers become more efficient — and there will be a limit to how much it can encroach on human work.
It’s hard to imagine, say, Meta ever giving over its legal representation in an antitrust case to artificial intelligence. Lawyers handling such a case will, however, rely on AI for more and more support, diminishing the need for junior lawyers.
This will be a significant disruption for the legal profession, yet legal services will also become cheaper and more widely available, in a benefit to everyone else.
There’s no doubt that the changes wrought by technology can be painful, and it’s possible that artificial intelligence eventually gets so good at so many tasks that people have no ready recourse to new, better jobs, as has always happened in the past.
The potential upside, though, is vast. After strong productivity growth for about a decade beginning in the mid-1990s, we shifted into a lower gear in the mid-2000’s. It will be a boon if artificial intelligence puts us on a better trajectory. An era of high productivity growth will, among other things, make it easier to deal with the budget deficit and the fiscal strain of retiring Baby Boomers.
Like anything else, AI will have its downsides, but it’s not an inherent threat any more than were computers or the internet.
!summarize #michelleobama #barack #podcast
Miami Beach man coerces 15-year-old neighbor with drugs and money for sex: cops
The man would give the 15-year-old $100 for sex, an arrest report read.
A 29-year-old Miami Beach man used drugs and money to attract a 15-year-old neighbor and coerce her into sex multiple times, cops say. He was cuffed on Saturday.
On May 17, the 15-year-old’s parents called Miami Beach police, reporting their daughter had been sexually abused by Christian Gonzalez Lopez, a neighbor, an arrest report read.
An interview with the young teen revealed that a few months ago, Gonzalez Lopez approached her while she was walking in the neighborhood and asked for her Instagram, which she gave, the report read.
That same day, he sent her pictures of lingerie and asked if she’d take pictures in them for money — she ignored him.
Sometime later, she messaged him asking for the drug Tusi, a type of cocaine, the report read. Gonzalez Lopez said he agreed to provide it, but not only for money — sex, too. This exchange happened several times.
Police noted the teen had a “drug dependency” and on some other occasions, he would give her $100 to have sex. In one instance, she told detectives she thought he would record her during the sexual abuse.
On Saturday, the teen confirmed Gonzalez Lopez was the man who was giving her money for sex over several months, the report read. He was promptly arrested on an unrelated disturbance call that day.
!summarize #marvel #hollywood #films #boxoffice
He was charged with human trafficking, seduce a child to commit any illegal act, lewd and lascivious battery on a child, induce a child to perform an act that causes a child to become dependent and illegal delivery of controlled substances to minors.
Gonzalez Lopez was taken to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where he remained as of Wednesday night.
!summarize #Timeshares #vacationclubs #travel #economics
!summarize #anthropic #jobs #ai
Judge delays Miami trial of five men accused of plotting assassination of Haiti’s president
The Miami trial of five men accused of plotting the killing of Haiti’s president has dragged on for years.
The Miami trial of five men accused of plotting the assassination of Haiti’s president has again been delayed, this time to March 2026 — almost five years after the fatal shooting of Jovenel Moïse at his suburban home outside Port-au-Prince.
U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra said at a recent hearing that she was not happy about delaying the federal trial, which was originally set for March and then postponed until September of this year.
Becerra said she had no choice but to push it back again because of the massive volume of evidence, including more than 2.5 million text messages, emails and other records, that federal prosecutors are still turning over to the defense lawyers — a basic discovery issue that has turned into a sore point for the judge.
“I do not take it lightly in any way that this case has been delayed,” Becerra told the five defendants, who were arrested and taken into federal custody in the months after the July 7, 2021, assassination of Moïse. “This is not a delay that I am at all happy with.”
!summarize #2028 #olympics #losangeles #budget #gavinnewsom #money
Compounding the run-up to the Miami trial: Armed gangs have been terrorizing Haiti, a country in free fall without a political leader, making it unsafe for the defense lawyers in Miami to go there and question ex-Colombian soldiers jailed in Port-au-Prince on Haitian charges of assisting in the slaying of the president.
As a result, Judge Becerra granted the defense team’s request to take video depositions of five of the Colombians, who represent about one-third of the former commandos in jail.
“Although the difficulties of traveling to Haiti to conduct these depositions should not be understated, there appears to be no reason why the depositions could not take place over video conference,” Becerra ruled after the May 19 hearing on the trial date and other issues.
Despite the judge’s approval of these critical depositions, there is one potential Haitian witness whom the defense lawyers in Miami won’t be able to question: Former Haitian Superior Court Judge Windelle Coq Thélot, who died in January.
Haitian authorities considered Thélot a key suspect in the investigation of Moïse’s killing. But she took to the grave unanswered questions about her alleged role in the assassination plot and whether she indeed promised immunity to the defendants in Miami who are accused of directing it.
According to prosecutors in Miami, Thélot gained the support of the suspected plotters in South Florida as a replacement for Moïse in June 2021, when they decided that Christian Sanon, a Haitian priest and physician, “was not a viable option to take over” the presidency.
!summarize #taylorswift #extortion #blakelively #deadpool #hollywood
Thélot’s “apparent signature” appeared on a written request for assistance to arrest Haiti’s president that “purported to provide Haitian immunity” to the conspirators in South Florida, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. One of the suspects, Haitian-American maintenance worker James Solages, traveled from Haiti to Miami on June 28, 2021, to deliver the document to another suspect, Antonio “Tony” Intriago,” the owner of a security business.
On July 1, Solages traveled back to Haiti and five days later met with several conspirators at a house near Moïse’s residence. Solages “falsely told those gathered that it was a ‘CIA Operation, and, in substance, said that the mission was to kill President Moïse,” the FBI affidavit stated.
Solages and other suspects drove in a convoy to the president’s home on the night of July 7, the assassination date. Once inside the residence, Solages declared they were involved in a “DEA Operation” to ensure “compliance from” Moïse’s security team, the affidavit stated. Some of the ex-Colombian soldiers recruited for the mission were assigned to find and kill the president.
Suspect knew about assassination plan: FBI
On July 22, federal agents questioned Solages while he was in Haitian custody. After he was read his Miranda rights, Solages admitted that by mid-June 2021, “he knew that the plan was to ultimately assassinate President Moïse,” according to the FBI affidavit.
!summarize #tuckercarleson #megynkelly #patrickbetdavid #newmedia
To date in the U.S. case, five of the 11 defendants have pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill Haiti’s president, resulting in life sentences that they hope to get reduced with their cooperation. Among those convicted: two ex-Colombian commandos, a former Haitian senator, a Haitian-American man who worked as an informant for the DEA, and a previously convicted Haitian drug trafficker.
A sixth defendant, a Tampa businessman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges involving the smuggling of bulletproof vests that were illegally exported to Haiti for the group of ex-Colombian soldiers who carried out the deadly attack.
The remaining five defendants are charged with conspiring in South Florida to kidnap or kill Haiti’s leader and related charges, including recruiting the Colombian commandos. The conspiracy charge carries up to life in prison.
The defendants facing trial are: Intriago, the head of a Miami-area security firm, CTU; Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, a former FBI informant who joined Intriago at CTU; Walter Veintemilla, a Broward County financier; Solages, the Haitian American; and Sanon, who was initially seen by the group as a successor to Moïse as Haiti’s president. All five defendants are being held in a federal lock-up before trial.
Of the five remaining defendants, Sanon was the only one who told the judge at the hearing this month that he opposed delaying the trial until March of next year.
But Judge Becerra, while showing sympathy for his pre-trial detention over nearly four years in Haiti and Miami, said holding one trial for him and another for the others was not practical for several reasons.
!summarize #bitcoin #scarcity #crypto
!summarize #disney #bobiger #starwars #hollywood
!summarize #tesla #tsla #ai #elonmusk #doge
“Given the complexity of the case, the government wants all the defendants tried together,” Becerra told Sanon. “I am not inclined to try your case in September and all the other defendants in March [2026].”
In February 2024, Sanon was charged with the others with conspiring to kill Haiti’s leader, after first being accused of trying to carry out a military expedition against a foreign country. It was the fifth superseding indictment filed by prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Justice Department. Since then, most of the team has been replaced with new prosecutors.
On Iran and Gaza, Trump Should Avoid the Mistakes of Obama and Biden
President Trump’s first-term record of steadfast support for Israel and “maximum pressure” against Iran has earned him a fair degree of benefit of the doubt when it comes to Middle East policy. But as his envoy Steve Witkoff pursues nuclear diplomacy with Iran and another cease-fire deal in Gaza, there are troubling signs that Trump may be going down the same failed path of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
On Wednesday, Trump confirmed that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Iran’s nuclear program, saying, “I don’t think it’s appropriate” while talks are ongoing. “Right now, I think they want to make a deal,” Trump said. “And if we can make a deal, I’d save a lot of lives.” Holding off on striking Iran now risks squandering a crucial window, with Iran’s anti-aircraft defense systems still damaged from Israel’s retaliatory strike against the terrorist regime last October.
!summarize #tesla #robotaxi #autonomy
In his first term, Trump rightly recognized that Iran was not a negotiating partner to be trusted. He tore up Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal, under which Iran obtained tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief while retaining its ability to enrich uranium and grow its ballistic missile program. Also, that deal did not address any other malign behavior by Iran (from its sponsorship of terrorism to other destabilizing actions throughout the region, including its targeting of U.S. military personnel and assets).
But now, unfortunately, Trump is pursuing a deal that sounds in many ways like the failed Obama agreement, with its promise of inspections and its avoidance of fully dismantling the nuclear program, akin to the deal the U.S. struck with Libya in 2003. Witkoff, a few weeks ago, said that Iran would be allowed to enrich uranium at 3.67 percent (the Obama deal limit), but more recently he has said that the U.S. “red line” was that Iran would not be permitted any enrichment. Iran, for its part, has said it would never accept that limitation. With Trump so eager for a deal, it’s fair to be concerned that the U.S. will let this red line shift.
!summarize #usda #foodstamp #fraud #crime
Iran doves within the administration and their allies are making the same disingenuous arguments that John Kerry and the gang made during the Obama administration — that the only alternative to a deal is a world war. In reality, an Israeli-led strike on Iran’s nuclear program would not trigger another world war, nor is it akin to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It is likely to be closer to the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Trump should understand this. In 2020, when he rightly ordered the strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, the reactions were so hysterical that the terms “Franz Ferdinand” and “World War III” were trending online, and yet Iran avoided a major escalation that it could ill afford. The same calculation would be likely to hold this time.
Meanwhile, Israel is currently making significant progress in its campaign against Hamas. Israelis recently killed Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar (the October 7 architect who was killed by Israel last October). And perhaps more importantly, there are signs that the people of Gaza are starting to feel more emboldened to defy the terrorist group that has ruled the area with an iron grip for nearly 20 years.
!summarize #iphone #robots #technology
The U.S. and Israel have worked together with contractors to create a new mechanism for distributing aid directly to Gazans, unlike the United Nations effort that allowed Hamas to steal the aid. Before the distribution began, Hamas issued a warning to Gazans not to participate in the U.S.-backed effort. Yet Gazans ignored the warning, and hundreds of thousands of meals were distributed in the first day of operation. In a further sign that Hamas, which has been controlling the flow of food and supplies, is losing its grip, a mob broke into a warehouse in central Gaza to take flour.
Unfortunately, by pushing for another cease-fire when Israel has the momentum, the U.S. could end up tossing Hamas a lifeline.
!summarize #joebiden #coverup #cognition #president
Unfortunately, even though Trump has some great people on his foreign policy team with stellar records on Middle East policy, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, everything seems to be dictated by Witkoff, a real estate developer with little background in foreign diplomacy and with a significant conflict of interest: His troubled Park Lane hotel investment was bailed out by the Qatar Investment Authority last year to the tune of $623 million, and Qatar is a benefactor of Hamas and key ally of Iran. In March, Witkoff admitted in a television interview that he was “duped” by Hamas during earlier negotiations.
Supreme Court Clears Trump Administration to Revoke Parole for 500,000 Migrants, Begin Deportations
The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.
The Court, in an unsigned order, lifted a lower court order that kept a Biden-era humanitarian parole program in place. Humanitarian parole allows migrants from countries facing instability to enter the U.S. and secure work authorization as long as they have a private sponsor.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, arguing the majority had not properly considered “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
They argued the Court’s order will “have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
The order means the parole protections will not be in place as the case proceeds; it now heads back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston.
The decision comes after the Court previously allowed the Trump administration to revoke deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who were allowed to remain in the U.S. under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.
Both rulings are wins for the Trump administration, which is working to make good on the president’s campaign promise to carry out mass deportations.
Republicans have argued the humanitarian parole program allowed immigrants who would otherwise not have qualified to enter the country, to remain in the country legally.
!summarize #youtube #streaming #disney #media
!summarize #senate #spending #tax #congress #trump #bill #politics
The Biden administration opened up humanitarian parole to Venezuelans in 2022 and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in January 2023.
At the time, several red states sued the Biden administration looking to block the parole program, though the courts upheld its legality.
President Trump ordered an end to the humanitarian parole programs on his first day in office, leading migrants to challenge Trump’s directive in court. Attorneys for the migrants argued that the end of the humanitarian and other immigration parole programs was “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious.”
The lawsuits resulted in a temporary pause of the Trump administration’s order in March, after a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Nome lacked the authority to revoke the parole for more than 500,000 people without providing case-by-case reviews.
Instead, we live in a time of technological marvels, and the unemployment rate is 4.2 percent. Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation points out that the average unemployment rate in the United States hasn’t changed much over the last century, despite an increase in productivity — the ability to produce more with the same inputs — by almost ten times.
Technology increases productivity, driving down costs and making it possible to invest and spend on other things, creating new jobs that replace the old. This is the process of a society becoming wealthier, and it’s why nations that innovate are better off than those that don’t.
The rise of personal computers collapsed the demand for typists and word processors. These positions were often held by women. Did this decimate the economic prospects of women in America? No, they got different, and frequently better, jobs.
AI will end up augmenting many jobs — helping workers become more efficient — and there will be a limit to how much it can encroach on human work.
It’s hard to imagine, say, Meta ever giving over its legal representation in an antitrust case to artificial intelligence. Lawyers handling such a case will, however, rely on AI for more and more support, diminishing the need for junior lawyers.
This will be a significant disruption for the legal profession, yet legal services will also become cheaper and more widely available, in a benefit to everyone else.
!summarize #facebook #trump #lawsuit #settlement #markzuckerberg
!summarize #space #earth #stars
!summarize #marvel #hollywood #avengers #movies
There’s no doubt that the changes wrought by technology can be painful, and it’s possible that artificial intelligence eventually gets so good at so many tasks that people have no ready recourse to new, better jobs, as has always happened in the past.
The potential upside, though, is vast. After strong productivity growth for about a decade beginning in the mid-1990s, we shifted into a lower gear in the mid-2000’s. It will be a boon if artificial intelligence puts us on a better trajectory. An era of high productivity growth will, among other things, make it easier to deal with the budget deficit and the fiscal strain of retiring Baby Boomers.
Like anything else, AI will have its downsides, but it’s not an inherent threat any more than were computers or the internet.