Politics

During his final hours in office, US President Joe Biden issued a number of pre-emptive pardons to prevent what he called "unjustified... politically motivated prosecutions".

The pardons were for public officials including Anthony Fauci - who led the American response to Covid-19 - and people who investigated the riot at the US Capitol building in 2021.

Biden said this did not imply any "wrongdoing" by the group, but they faced the threat of baseless investigations as his rival Donald Trump returned to the US presidency.

Biden's pardons cover all members of the House Select Committee investigating the riot - which includes Liz Cheney - as well as their staff members and the officers who testified.

Biden also issued a pre-emptive pardon to Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, who last year described Trump as "fascist to the core".

Late last year, California passed a law against the possession or distribution of child sex abuse material (CSAM) that has been generated by AI. The law went into effect on January 1, and Sacramento police announced yesterday that they have already arrested their first suspect—a 49-year-old Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist named Darrin Bell.

The new law, which you can read here, declares that AI-generated CSAM is harmful, even without an actual victim. In part, says the law, this is because all kinds of CSAM can be used to groom children into thinking sexual activity with adults is normal. But the law singles out AI-generated CSAM for special criticism due to the way that generative AI systems work.

"The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims," it says, "revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity."

Edit: Bolded out certain parts to clarify why they're doing it.

I'm locking this thread because I won't have time to watch it.

ProPublica decided to create a Private School Demographics database, which we launched this week, that anyone, anywhere can use to look up a school and view the years of data we were relying on for our reporting.

The story behind this new tool began with our need to understand how many segregation academies still operate — and where. We wanted to focus only on those that continue to create segregating forces in their communities, not the ones whose student bodies had come to reflect their local areas.

It signals no immediate change for its more than 500,000 beneficiaries, who can renew temporary permits to live and work in the United States. But the federal government cannot take new applications, leaving an aging and thinning pool of recipients.

A top Supreme Court lawyer who co-founded a popular blog about the high court was indicted Thursday in Maryland on federal tax evasion charges that allege he failed to declare millions of dollars in poker winnings and used his law firm’s money to pay his gambling debts.

SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein, who is also charged with making false statements to two mortgage lenders, has appeared before the Supreme Court more times than nearly any other attorney in private practice in modern times.

The indictment alleges that for the tax years 2016 through 2021, Goldstein willfully failed to pay more than $5.3 million in taxes he owed the IRS.

But what matters, legal experts say, is what Biden didn’t do: He didn’t order the archivist of the United States to formally publish the amendment. And he didn’t direct the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to withdraw its written opinion that the deadline for ratification expired long ago.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) said that, as of Wednesday morning, 1,116 incarcerated people were embedded with the state’s other firefighters to help slow the spread of the infernos that have killed at least 25 people and devastated neighborhoods across LA county.

More than 20 incarcerated crews have been deployed over the last week, dressed in orange uniforms and working in perilous conditions. They primarily use hand tools to cut fire lines and remove fuel by structures.

Some on the frontlines are incarcerated youth aged 18 to 25. A CDCR spokesperson said 55 youth participants had been deployed to LA as of Monday, but the numbers have fluctuated daily. The Anti-Recidivism Coalition, a nonprofit that supports participants with re-entry, has been fundraising for 30 imprisoned youth on the frontlines.

The jobs are voluntary and highly coveted, as participants get to leave the traditional prison environment, get meaningful training and get their sentences shortened in exchange for service.

But the program has also faced intense scrutiny. Incarcerated firefighters make between $5.80 and $10.24 daily, and an additional $1 hourly while responding to emergencies. This week, some are working 24-hour shifts, where they can earn $29.80 to $34.24 a day, and then have 24-hour rest periods.

A lawsuit that aims to restrict nationwide access to abortion pills can proceed, a federal judge in Texas ruled on Thursday, months after the US supreme court rebuked an earlier version of the lawsuit over a legal technicality.

The US judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is allowing the attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri to continue a case that takes aim at the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone, a drug typically used in medication abortions. Joe Biden’s department of justice had asked for the case to be dismissed, arguing that the attorneys general had no real link to Kacsmaryk’s court in the northern district of Texas.

President Joe Biden announced Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, using his final days in office on a flurry of clemency actions meant to nullify prison terms he deemed too harsh.

The recent round of clemency gives Biden the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. The Democrat said he is seeking to undo “disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today under current law, policy, and practice.”

According to the complaint filed by the FTC and Colorado, these hidden fees have cost consumers living in Greystar properties hundreds of millions of dollars since at least 2019, and consumers often have not discovered the fees until after they have signed a lease or moved in.

“The FTC is suing Greystar for deceptively advertising low monthly rents only to later saddle tenants with hundreds of dollars of hidden junk fees,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC should continue its work taking on corporate landlords that use illegal tactics to jack up rent, exploit tenants, and deprive Americans of safe and affordable housing.”

Experts say that money is only a drop in the bucket of what’s needed. A recent analysis from Texas 2036, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that Texas will need to spend $154 billion on water infrastructure over the next 50 years, including $59 billion to access new water supplies and another $95 billion to fix deteriorating drinking water systems and broken wastewater infrastructure.

Perry said his yet-to-be-filed plan wouldn’t address groundwater regulation, which some experts say has contributed to water scarcity by allowing overpumping. Outside of the state’s 98 groundwater management districts, property owners are free to pump as much groundwater water as they like. And many groundwater districts lack the resources to enforce pumping restrictions — or deny permits and risk litigation.

TikTok has lost its Supreme Court appeal in a 9–0 decision and will likely shut down on January 19, a day before Donald Trump's inauguration, unless the app can be sold before the deadline, which TikTok has said is impossible.

During the trial last Friday, TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco warned SCOTUS that upholding the Biden administration's divest-or-sell law would likely cause TikTok to “go dark—essentially the platform shuts down" and "essentially... stop operating." On Wednesday, TikTok reportedly began preparing to shut down the app for all US users, anticipating the loss.

But TikTok's claims that the divest-or-sell law violated Americans' free speech rights did not supersede the government's compelling national security interest in blocking a foreign adversary like China from potentially using the app to spy on or influence Americans, SCOTUS ruled.