Politics

The world's nations are looking for any advantage in the increasingly contested area of space. Now, an effort is underway to change how the U.S. military is structured to handle space-related missions.

That solution would take current Air National Guard units — nine of them, in six different states — and move them to the U.S. Space Force. The proposal is not without controversy.

The National Guard Association of the United States argues that moving the Air National Guard units not only circumvents the authority of the state governors that oversee them but could also set a precedent for it to happen with other guard units.

For weeks now, more than ninety per cent of the Northeast has experienced abnormal dryness. In some places, such as New York and New Jersey, the deficit of rainfall is nine inches and soil moisture is ninety-five-per-cent below average. The result is that the Northeast has become extremely combustible. Typically, the region’s wildfire season is in April and May, but maps of recent fires in Maine, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island resemble maps of California in August, with hundreds of red dots. The Associated Press reported that Massachusetts typically has around fifteen wildland fires each October; this October, there have been about two hundred. Last week, the biggest wildfire in the country was in California, but the second biggest was a fire outside Sundown, New York. So far this year, around a hundred and forty thousand acres have burned across the East—roughly double the amount at this time in 2023.

For thousands of years, before European settlement, the Northeast burned frequently. Native Americans intentionally set many of these fires; colonizers said that the “sweet perfume” of forest fires could be smelled at sea long before the land itself was visible. The historic memory of these fires, as well as the folk traditions of past generations who burned for agriculture, hunting, and wild foods, has nearly vanished. But this year is a reminder that fire is not something that only happens in other, faraway places. “Historically, for as long as we have records, fire was always around,” Stephen Pyne told me. “So it’s not that the Northeast doesn’t burn. It’s just that we’ve eliminated the conditions and now we may be restoring some of those conditions.”

On Monday, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that top antitrust officials are planning to ask the court on Wednesday to order Google to sell off Chrome. In addition to banning Google's exclusive default deals, cutting off Google's control of the world's most popular browser may be necessary, sources suggested, to level the playing field for rivals.

Additionally, the DOJ intends to ask for a range of other remedies, Bloomberg reported, all of them discussed in a court filing last month. These include imposing data licensing requirements and requiring more transparency for advertisers on where their ads appear, as well as requiring "measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system," sources said. Those measures will likely stop Google from hoarding user data for both search results and AI products, with the DOJ seemingly paving the way for more users to opt their content out of AI training.

Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements.

By the end of 2021, United’s algorithm program had been deemed illegal in three states.

But that has not stopped the company from continuing to police mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, ProPublica found, after reviewing what is effectively the company’s internal playbook for limiting and cutting therapy expenses. The insurer’s strategies are still very much alive, putting countless patients at risk of losing mental health care.

Update:

Joel Leppard, a lawyer for the women, told ABC News that his clients testified to the House Ethics Committee that Gaetz paid twice for them to travel across states to have sex with him.

Leppard told ABC that Gaetz paid the women’s tickets to New York City in January 2019 for his appearance on Fox, with the promise of seeing a show afterward.

“They were asked to go and have sex with Rep. Gaetz, and then they could go out and see a show that they wanted to see that night,” Leppard said. “So essentially, take care of things, and then later on, they could have their fun.”

ABC News was able to verify that Gaetz was in the Fox News studio to appear on the show “Outnumbered” on January 4, 2019, while Pretty Woman, which is about a man who falls in love with a prostitute, was still playing on Broadway.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/matt-gaetz-allegedly-paid-women-to-have-sex-with-him-and-see-pretty-woman-the-musical/

“She testified [that] in July of 2017, at this house party, she was walking out to the pool area, and she looked to her right, and she saw Rep. Gaetz having sex with her friend who was 17,” Leppard told ABC News.

Leppard added that House investigators placed screenshots of Venmo payments on a screen during a hearing and asked his clients to give a reasoning for each payment. Leppard said they’d respond each time, “‘That was for sex.’”

“On more than one occasion, this individual was involved in sexual activities with several of the other girls,” Greenberg wrote in his confession, identifying Gaetz as “the congressman from Florida’s 1st Congressional District.”

Greenberg added, “From time to time, gas money or gifts, rent or partial tuition payments were made to several of these girls, including the individual who was not yet 18. I did see the acts occur firsthand and Venmo transactions, Cash App or other payments were made to these girls on behalf of the Congressman.”

At another point, Greenberg wrote that his lawyers “know he paid me to pay the girls” and “that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage.”

The outcry erupted after a single student created sexually explicit AI images of nearly 50 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaster Online reported.

Head of School Matt Micciche seemingly first learned of the problem in November 2023, when a student anonymously reported the explicit deepfakes through a school portal run by the state attorney’s general office called "Safe2Say Something." But Micciche allegedly did nothing, allowing more students to be targeted for months until police were tipped off in mid-2024.

Cops arrested the student accused of creating the harmful content in August. The student's phone was seized as cops investigated the origins of the AI-generated images. But that arrest was not enough justice for parents who were shocked by the school's failure to uphold mandatory reporting responsibilities following any suspicion of child abuse. They filed a court summons threatening to sue last week unless the school leaders responsible for the mishandled response resigned within 48 hours.

Republican U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin called on the House of Representatives on Sunday to share an unreleased ethics report into alleged sexual misconduct involving a 17-year-old girl by Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for attorney general.

In North Carolina alone, we identified 39 of these likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that have received voucher money. Of these, 20 schools reported student bodies that were at least 85% white in a 2021-22 federal survey of private schools, the most recent data available.

Those 20 academies, all founded in the 1960s and 1970s, brought in more than $20 million from the state in the past three years alone. None reflected the demographics of their communities. Few even came close.