ReportWire

Tag: southwestern united states

  • A bartender who found a place to shine. A non-profit worker with a ‘huge heart.’ These are the victims of the Colorado club shooting | CNN

    A bartender who found a place to shine. A non-profit worker with a ‘huge heart.’ These are the victims of the Colorado club shooting | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    As Colorado Springs residents and leaders wrap their arms around the 17 people injured and others traumatized in the Club Q shooting, loved ones are remembering five patrons who did not survive the attack on the beloved LGBTQ nightclub.

    The Colorado Springs Police Department identified the five victims as:

    • Raymond Green Vance (he/him)
    • Kelly Loving (she/her)
    • Daniel Aston (he/him)
    • Derrick Rump (he/him)
    • Ashley Paugh (she/ her)

    Some of the victims worked at Club Q, while others were there to enjoy the evening festivities.

    Here are their stories:

    Derrick Rump’s sister, Julia Kissling, confirmed his name to CNN and one of its affiliates.

    Rump – who was a bartender at Club Q – had “found a community of people that he loved really much, and he felt that he could shine there – and he did,” Kissling told CNN affiliate WFMZ. “He made a difference in so many people’s lives, and that’s where he wanted to be.”

    Tiara Kelley, who performed at the club the night before the incident, told CNN Rump and his coworker Daniel Aston were polar opposites in many ways, but worked well together.

    “They were just amazing, and every bar should have a Daniel and a Derrick,” Kelley said.

    Derrick Rump, left, and Daniel Aston worked the bar at Club Q, loved ones say.

    Aston’s parents confirmed his identity to The Denver Post. The 28-year-old was a bar supervisor at Club Q, said bartender Michael Anderson, who had known Aston for a few years and considered him a friend.

    The night of the shooting, Anderson saw the gunman and ducked behind the bar where he and Aston worked as glass rained down around him, he told CNN on Monday. He thought he was going to die, said a prayer and as he moved to escape the scene, he saw two people who he didn’t know beating and kicking the gunman, he said.

    Anderson was crushed to learn Aston hadn’t made it out of the bar, which Colorado Springs’ LGBTQ community considered a safe space.

    “He was the best supervisor anybody could’ve asked for. He made me want to come into work, and he made me want to be a part of the positive culture we were trying to create there,” Anderson said.

    He added that Aston was an “amazing person. He was a light in my life, and it’s surreal that we’re even talking about him in the past tense like this.”

    Aston moved to Colorado Springs two years ago to be closer to his mother and father, parents Jeff and Sabrina Aston told The Denver Post. The club was a few minutes from their home, and after one of Daniel’s friends told them he’d been shot, they rushed to the emergency room – only to find he’d never arrived.

    Daniel Aston was 4 when he told his mother he was a boy, and it was another decade before he came out as transgender, his mother told the newspaper. He thought himself bashful, but that wasn’t the case, she said. He never knew a stranger, even as a kid.

    “He had so much more life to give to us, and to all his friends and to himself,” she told The Post.

    “He always said, ‘I’m shy,’ but he wasn’t. He wrote poetry. He loved to dress up. He got into drama in high school. He’s an entertainer. That’s what he really loves.”

    Ashley Paugh was one of five people killed in Saturday's shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub.

    Ashley Paugh’s family released a statement on her behalf Monday saying they were “absolutely devastated.”

    “She meant everything to this family, and we can’t even begin to understand what it will mean to not have her in our lives,” the statement read.

    Paugh was a mother, and her daughter Ryleigh “was her whole world,” the statement read, adding that Paugh was big on family.

    “She loved her dad, her sister, and her family; Ashley was a loving aunt, with many nieces and nephews who are devastated by her loss,” the statement read.

    Paugh had “a huge heart,” which she was able to show through her work at Kids Crossing, a nonprofit that looks to help find homes for foster children, according to the statement.

    “She would do anything for the kids – traveling all over southeastern Colorado, from Pueblo and Colorado Springs to Fremont County and the Colorado border, working to raise awareness and encourage individuals and families to become foster parents to children in our community,” the statement read, adding that Paugh worked with the LGBTQ community to find welcoming foster placements.

    Paugh also loved the outdoors through activities like hunting, fishing and riding four-wheelers, the statement read.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What we know about the suspect in the Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub shooting | CNN

    What we know about the suspect in the Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub shooting | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The suspect in a shooting at a Colorado LGBTQ nightclub this weekend has been identified as 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, who police say walked into Club Q in Colorado Springs and immediately opened fire, killing five people and injuring 25 others.

    Investigators have yet to determine a motive, Police Chief Adrian Vasquez said Sunday, though they are considering whether the attack was a hate crime. Aldrich has yet to be formally charged.

    Here’s what we know about the suspected gunman.

    Police received several 911 calls about the shooting beginning at 11:56 p.m., according to police. Officers were dispatched at 11:57 p.m. and an officer arrived at Club Q at midnight. The suspect was detained at 12:02 a.m., police said.

    The shooting lasted only minutes because people inside the club were able to subdue the suspect, police said.

    “At least two heroic people inside the club confronted and fought with the suspect and were able to stop the suspect,” Vasquez said. “We owe them a great debt of thanks.”

    Matthew Haynes, one of the club’s owners, told The New York Times one of the customers “took down the gunman and was assisted by another.”

    “He saved dozens and dozens of lives,” Haynes said of the first patron. “Stopped the man cold. Everyone else was running away, and he ran toward him.”

    The suspect was taken into police custody and was being treated at a hospital Sunday, police said, adding officers did not shoot at the suspect.

    A long rifle was used in the shooting, according to the police chief. Two firearms were recovered at the scene.

    Two law enforcement sources told CNN records indicate the suspect purchased both weapons, an AR-style rifle and a handgun. CNN has not confirmed when those purchases were made.

    The gunman appeared heavily armed and wearing a military-style flak jacket as he arrived at the club, the club’s owners told the Times, citing their review of surveillance footage.

    Haynes said the gunman entered with “tremendous firepower,” the Times reported.

    Aldrich was arrested in June 2021 in connection with a bomb threat which led to a standoff at his mother’s home, according to a news release from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office at the time and his mother’s former landlord. Colorado Springs is in El Paso County.

    Two law enforcement sources confirmed the suspect in Saturday’s shooting and the bomb threat were the same person based on his name and date of birth.

    Video obtained by CNN shows Aldrich surrendering to law enforcement last year after allegedly making a bomb threat. Footage from the Ring door camera of the owner of the home shows Aldrich exiting the house with his hands up and barefoot, and walking to sheriff’s deputies.

    Sheriff’s deputies responded to a report by the man’s mother he was “threatening to cause harm to her with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition,” according to the release. Deputies called the suspect, and he “refused to comply with orders to surrender,” the release said, leading them to evacuate nearby homes.

    Several hours after the initial police call, the sheriff’s crisis negotiations unit was able to get Aldrich to leave the house, and he was arrested after walking out the front door. Authorities did not find any explosives in the home.

    Leslie Bowman, who owns the house where Aldrich’s mother lived, provided CNN with the videos. Aldrich’s mother rented a room in the house for a little over a year, Bowman said, and Aldrich would come visit his mother there. Attempts by CNN to reach Aldrich’s mother for comment were unsuccessful.

    It is not immediately clear how the bomb threat case was resolved, but the Colorado Springs Gazette reported the district attorney’s office said no formal charges were pursued in the case. The district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment from CNN.

    Aldrich’s arrest in connection to the bomb threat would not have shown up in background checks, according to the law enforcement sources who said records indicate he purchased the weapons, because the case was never adjudicated, the charges were dropped, and the records were sealed. It’s unclear what prompted the sealing of the records.

    Aldrich also called the Gazette in an attempt to get an earlier story about the 2021 incident removed from the website, the newspaper reported. “There is absolutely nothing there, the case was dropped, and I’m asking you either remove or update the story,” Aldrich said in a voice message, according to the Gazette.

    The revelation about the suspect’s run-in with law enforcement last year has raised questions about Colorado’s red flag law and whether it should have applied to Aldrich, or if it would have prevented the shooting at Club Q.

    Colorado, which has been the site of numerous high-profile mass shootings in the last two decades, passed its red flag law in 2019. It’s intended to temporarily prevent an individual in crisis from accessing firearms through a court order, triggered by the individual’s family, a member of their household or a law enforcement officer.

    It’s not clear if Aldrich had purchased firearms prior to his June 2021 arrest.

    Asked Monday if the red flag law should have been implemented in Aldrich’s case, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said it was “too early to make any decisions.”

    “It’s still a new tool that we are learning how to use,” Weiser said. “We know that each tragedy is a learning opportunity to ask what did we miss? What can we do better in the future?”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Is AI art really art? This California gallery says yes | CNN Business

    Is AI art really art? This California gallery says yes | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN Business
     — 

    As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly popular for generating images, a question has roiled the art world: Can AI create art?

    At bitforms gallery in San Francisco, the answer is yes. An exhibit called “Artificial Imagination” is on display through late December and features works that were created with or inspired by the generative AI system DALL-E as well as other types of AI. With DALL-E, and other similar systems such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, a user can type in words and get back an image.

    Steven Sacks, who founded the original bitforms gallery in New York in 2001 (the San Francisco location opened in 2020), has always focused on working with artists at the intersection of art and technology. But this may be the first art show to focus on DALL-E, which was created by OpenAI, and it is the first one Sacks has presented that concentrates so directly on work created with AI, he told CNN Business.

    Using technologies such as 3D printing and Photoshop is commonplace in art. But new text-to-image systems like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can pump out impressive-looking images at lightning speed, unlike anything the art world has seen before. In just months, millions of people have flocked to these AI systems and they are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers and images to illustrate news stories. Yet while these systems are gaining ground, they’re also courting controversy. For instance, when an image generated with Midjourney recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, it caused an uproar among artists.

    For Sacks, generative AI systems like DALL-E are “just another tool”, he said, noting that throughout history artists have used past work to create new work in various ways.

    “It’s a brilliant partner creatively,” he said.

    “Artificial Imagination” spans several mediums and many different styles, and includes artists known for using technology in their work, such as Refik Anadol, and others who are newer to it. It ranges from Anadol’s 30-minute video loop of a computer’s take on an ever-changing nature scene to Marina Zurkow’s bright image collages, created with the help of DALL-E, which almost feel reminiscent of Soviet propaganda mixed with old-fashioned storybooks.

    Sacks said the exhibit, which is being presented by bitforms and venture-capital firm Day One Ventures, is in many ways an educational show about the state of DALL-E and how artists are using AI.

    Marina Zurkow used DALL-E to help create her 2022 piece

    Many pieces are more straightforward in their use of AI, and DALL-E in particular, such as August Kamp’s 2022 print, “new experimental version, state of the art”, which looks like a close-up of a retro-futuristic stereo on a spaceship. Kamp said she began creating it by typing what she calls a primer — a series of words like “grainy”, “detailed”, “cinematic”, “movie still” — intended to evoke the aesthetic she’d like, which in this case was meant to look as if she was watching a movie and had just paused it, she said. Then she added words in hopes of generating electronic synthesizers that “looked as weird as they sound,” she said.

    The final piece is a combination of 30 or so different generated images, which were outpainted section by section — a process that uses AI to expand the image by adding more elements to it. Kamp also used Photoshop to tweak the overall image.

    Kamp pointed out that the general idea of art galleries give the sense that good art is scarce, but she sees generative AI tools like DALL-E as a way to get people to consider that art can be plentiful (such as by making it so anyone can wake up from a vivid dream, type in a description of what they were imagining, and generate an image expressing their thoughts).

    “To me art is and should be very abundant because I see it as an expression of love and feelings, which I think are abundant things,” she said.

    Alexander Reben, Ceci N'est Pas Une Barriere, 2020.

    Some of the pieces on display use AI in a more indirect (and perhaps silly) fashion, such as a 2020 sculpture by Alexander Reben called “Cesi N’est Pas Une Barriere.” Reben used AI as a sort of art director: He used text generator GPT-3 and a custom set of algorithms to generate a description of a non-existent artwork that hangs on bitforms gallery’s wall. It includes the title, a fictional artist’s name — Norifen Storgenberg, who is listed as “Swedish, born 1973” — and text such as “It has a very domestic feel, and yet it is very oppressive” and “The use of police issue handcuffs is striking. In the context of society, they are used to restrain prisoners, and yet here, they are used to create a barrier between the viewer and the work.”

    Reben built his sculpture, which also hangs on the wall, around the description, with elements including green roof shingles, a porch light, metal grab bars, and handcuffs.

    “I wanted to just put it out there: Here are a range of artists, here are really different ways of presenting this kind of work, living with this kind of work, connecting with this kind of work,” Sacks said. “I wanted people to ask questions about it.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes: A timeline | CNN Business

    The rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes: A timeline | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    More than three years after Elizabeth Holmes was first indicted and nearly four months after her trial kicked off, the founder and former CEO of failed blood testing startup Theranos was found guilty on four out of 11 federal fraud and conspiracy charges.

    The verdict comes after a stunning downfall that saw Holmes, once hailed as the next Steve Jobs, go from being a tech industry icon to being a rare Silicon Valley entrepreneur on trial for fraud.

    A Stanford University dropout, Holmes – inspired by her own fear of needles – started the company at the age of 19, with a mission of creating a cheaper, more efficient alternative to a traditional blood test. Theranos promised patients the ability to test for conditions like cancer and diabetes with just a few drops of blood. She attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, a board of well-known political figures, and key retail partners.

    But a Wall Street Journal investigation poked holes into Theranos’ testing and technology, and the dominoes fell from there. Holmes and her former business partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were charged in 2018 by the US government with multiple counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (Both pleaded not guilty.)

    Here are the highlights of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

    Holmes, a Stanford University sophomore studying chemical engineering, drops out of school to pursue her startup, Theranos, which she founded in 2003 at age 19. The name is a combination of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.”

    Balwani joins as chief operating officer and president of the startup. Balwani, nearly 20 years her senior, met Holmes in 2002 on a trip to Beijing through Stanford University. The two are later revealed to be romantically involved.

    A decade after first starting the company, Holmes takes the lid off Theranos and courts media attention the same month that Theranos and Walgreens announce they’ve struck up a long-term partnership. The first Theranos Wellness Center location opens in a Walgreens in Palo Alto where consumers can access Theranos’ blood test.

    The original plan had been to make Theranos’ testing available at Walgreens locations nationwide.

    Holmes is named to the magazine’s American billionaire list with the outlet reporting she owns a 50% stake in the startup, pinning her personal wealth at $4.5 billion.

    Theranos has raised more than $400 million, according to a profile of the company and Holmes by The New Yorker. It counts Oracle’s Larry Ellison among its investors.

    The FDA clears Theranos to use of its proprietary tiny blood-collection vials to finger stick blood test for herpes simplex 1 virus – its first and only approval for a diagnostic test.

    The Wall Street Journal reports Theranos is using its proprietary technique on only a small number of the 240 tests it performs, and that the vast majority of its tests are done with traditional vials of blood drawn from the arm, not the “few drops” taken by a finger prick. In response, Theranos defends its testing practices, calling the Journal’s reporting “factually and scientifically erroneous.”

    A day later, Theranos halts the use of its blood-collection vials for all but the herpes test due to pressures from the FDA. (Later that month, the FDA released two heavily redacted reports citing 14 concerns, including calling the company’s proprietary vial an “uncleared medical device.”)

    One week after the Journal report, Holmes is interviewed on-stage at the outlet’s conference in Laguna Beach. “We know what we’re doing and we’re very proud of it,” she says.

    Holmes speaking at a Wall Street Journal technology conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 21, 2015.

    Amid the criticism, Theranos reportedly shakes up its board of directors, eliminating Henry Kissinger and George Shultz as directors while moving them to a new board of counselors; the company also forms a separate medical board.

    Safeway, which invested $350 million into building out clinics in hundreds of its supermarkets to eventually offer Theranos blood tests, reportedly looks to dissolve its relationship with the company before it ever offered its services.

    Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sends Theranos a letter saying its California lab has failed to comply with federal standards and that patients are in “immediate jeopardy.” It gives the company 10 days to address the issues.

    In response, Walgreens says it will not send any lab tests to Theranos’ California lab for analysis and suspends Theranos services at its Palo Alto Walgreens location.

    CMS threatens to ban Holmes and Balwani from the laboratory business for two years after the company allegedly failed to fix problems at its California lab. Theranos says that’s a “worst case scenario.”

    Balwani departs. The company also adds three new board members as part of the restructuring: Fabrizio Bonanni, a former executive vice president of biotech firm Amgen, former CDC director William Foege, and former Wells Fargo CEO Richard Kovacevich.

    Theranos voids two years of blood test results from its proprietary testing devices, correcting tens of thousands of blood-test reports, the Journal reports.

    Forbes revises its estimate of Holmes’ net worth from $4.5 billion to $0. The magazine also lowers its valuation for the company from $9 billion to $800 million.

    Walgreens, once Theranos’ largest retail partner, ends its partnership with the company and says it will close all 40 Theranos Wellness Centers.

    CMS revokes Theranos’ license to operate its California lab and bans Holmes from running a blood-testing lab for two years.

    Holmes tries to move past recent setbacks by unveiling a mini testing laboratory, called miniLab, at a conference for the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. In selling the device, versus operating its own clinics, Theranos seeks to effectively side-step CMS sanctions, which don’t prohibit research and development.

    Theranos investor Partner Fund Management sues the company for $96.1 million, the amount it sunk into the company in February 2014, plus damages. It accuses the company of securities fraud. Theranos and Partner Fund Management settled in May, 2017, for an undisclosed amount.

    The company also lays off 340 employees as it closes clinical labs and wellness centers as it attempts to pivot and focus on the miniLab.

    Walgreens sues the blood testing startup for breach of contract. Walgreens sought to recover the $140 million it poured into the company. The lawsuit was settled August, 2017.

    Theranos downsizes its workforce yet again following the increased scrutiny into its operations, laying off approximately 155 employees or about 41% of staffers.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that Theranos failed a second regulatory lab inspection in September, and that the company was closing its last blood testing location as a result.

    Theranos settles with the CMS, agreeing to pay $30,000 and to not to own or operate any clinical labs for two years.

    Theranos also settles with the Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich over allegations that its advertisements misrepresented the method, accuracy, and reliability of its blood testing and that the company was out of compliance with federal regulations governing clinical lab testing. Theranos agrees to pay $4.65 million back to its Arizona customers as part of a settlement deal.

    The SEC charges Holmes and Balwani with a “massive fraud” involving more than $700 million from investors through an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”

    The SEC alleges Holmes and Balwani knew that Theranos’ proprietary analyzer could perform only 12 of the 200 tests it published on its patient testing menu.

    Theranos and Holmes agree to resolve the claims against them, and Holmes gives up control of the company and much of her stake in it. Balwani, however, is fighting the charges, with his attorney saying he “accurately represented Theranos to investors to the best of his ability.”

    Reporter John Carreyrou, who first broke open the story of Theranos for the Wall Street Journal, publishes “Bad Blood,” a definitive look at what happened inside the disgraced company. Director Adam McKay (who directed “The Big Short”) secures the rights to make the film, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes, by the same name.

    Holmes and Balwani are indicted on federal wire fraud charges over allegedly engaging in a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, as well as a scheme to defraud doctors and patients. Both have pleaded not guilty.

    Minutes before the charges were made public, Theranos announced that Holmes has stepped down as CEO. The company’s general counsel, David Taylor, takes over as CEO. Holmes remains chair of the company’s board.

    Former Theranos COO Ramesh

    Taylor emails shareholders that Theranos will dissolve, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Taylor said more than 80 potential buyers were not interested in a sale. “We are now out of time,” Taylor wrote.

    Alex Gibney, the prolific documentary filmmaker behind “Dirty Money,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” and “The Armstrong Lie,” debuts “The Inventor” on HBO, following the rise and fall of Theranos.

    A new court document reveals Holmes may seek a “mental disease” defense in her criminal fraud trial. Later, in August 2021, unsealed court documents reveal Holmes is likely to claim she was the victim of a decade-long abusive relationship with Balwani. The allegations led to the severing of their trials. His trial is slated to begin in 2022.

    Initially set to begin in July 2020, Holmes’ criminal trial is further delayed til July 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    News surfaces that Holmes’ is expecting her first child, once more further delaying her criminal trial. Holmes’ counsel advised the US government that Holmes is due in July 2021, a court document revealed. She gave birth in July.

    Holmes collects her belongings after going through security at the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building with her defense team on August 31, 2021 in San Jose, California.

    More than 80 potential jurors are brought into a San Jose courtroom for questioning over the course of two days to determine if they are fit to serve as impartial, fair jurors for the criminal trial of Holmes. A jury of seven men and five women is selected, with five alternatives.

    After three months of testimony from 32 witnesses, the criminal fraud case of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes makes its way to the jury of eight men and four women who will decide her fate. The jury would go on to deliberate for more than 50 hours before returning a verdict.

    Holmes is found guilty of one count of conspiracy to defraud investors as well as three wire fraud counts tied to specific investors. She is found not guilty on three additional charges concerning defrauding patients and one charge of conspiracy to defraud patients. The jury returns no verdict on three of the charges concerning defrauding investors. Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison as well as a fine of $250,000 plus restitution for each count.

    “The Dropout,” a scripted miniseries about Theranos produced by ABC, debuts on Hulu. Amanda Seyfried stars as Holmes and Naveen Andrews plays Balwani. Their romantic and professional relationship features prominently in the show.

    Following delays due to Holmes’ prolonged trial then a surge of Covid-19, jury selection for Balwani’s trial gets underway. On March 22, opening arguments are held and the government’s first witness, a former Theranos employee turned whistleblower, is called to the stand.

    After four full days of deliberations, a jury finds Balwani guilty of ten counts of federal wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Like Holmes, Balwani faces up to 20 years in prison as well as a fine of $250,000 plus restitution for each count of wire fraud and each conspiracy count.

    Holmes asks for a new trial after claiming that a key witness visited her house unannounced and allegedly said he “feels guilty” about his testimony.

    In a court filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Holmes’ attorneys said Adam Rosendorff, a former Theranos lab director who was one of the government’s main witnesses, arrived at her home on August 8 asking to speak with her. According to the filing, Rosendorff did not interact with Holmes but did speak to her partner Billy Evans, who recounted the exchange in an email to Holmes’ lawyers shortly after.

    “His shirt was untucked, his hair was messy, his voice slightly trembled,” Evans wrote about Rosendorff. According to Evans’ email, Rosendorff “said when he was called as a witness he tried to answer the questions honestly but that the prosecutors tried to make everybody look bad.”

    The former Theranos lab director also “said he felt like he had done something wrong,” Evans wrote.

    Rosendorff takes the stand again to address concerns from Holmes’ defense team and their claims he had shown up at her home after the trial concluded asking to speak with her and expressed regrets about his testimony.

    At the hearing, Rosendorff reaffirmed the truthfulness of his testimony at Holmes’ trial and said that the government did not influence what he said.

    A federal judge denies Elizabeth Holmes’ request for a new trial, according to court filings, paving the way for the founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos to be sentenced later in the month.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Mass shooting at LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs leaves at least 5 dead, 18 wounded | CNN

    Mass shooting at LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs leaves at least 5 dead, 18 wounded | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    An armed 22-year-old entered an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, just before midnight Saturday night and immediately opened fire, killing at least five people and injuring 18 others, before patrons stopped and disarmed him, police said Sunday.

    The suspect in the shooting at Club Q was identified as Anderson Lee Aldrich, according to Colorado Springs Police Chief Adrian Vasquez. He used a long rifle in the shooting, and two firearms were found at the scene, he said.

    At least two people inside the club confronted and fought the gunman and prevented further violence, Vasquez said. “We owe them a great debt of thanks,” he said.

    The incident lasted just minutes. Police received numerous 911 calls starting at 11:56 p.m., officers were dispatched at 11:57 p.m., an officer arrived at midnight and the suspect was detained at 12:02 a.m., police said. A total of 39 patrol officers responded in all, police said.

    Of the 18 people injured, several are in critical condition with gunshot wounds, though the exact number was unclear, officials said.

    The suspect is being treated at a hospital, police added. Officers did not shoot at him, police said.

    Police declined to speak about a possible motive in this latest shooting, though authorities noted Club Q’s relationship with the LGBTQ community.

    “Club Q is a safe haven for our LGBTQ citizens,” Vasquez said. “Every citizen has a right to feel safe and secure in our city, to go about our beautiful city without fear of being harmed or treated poorly.”

    The location of the shooting is reminiscent of the 2016 attack at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which a gunman who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State killed 49 people and wounded at least 53. Colorado has been the site of some of the most heinous mass shootings in US history, including the 1999 shooting in Columbine High School and the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora.

    In a statement on social media, Club Q said it was “devastated by the senseless attack on our community” and thanked “the quick reactions of heroic customers that subdued the gunman and ended this hate attack.”

    Club Q posted earlier in the day that its Saturday night lineup would feature a punk and alternative show at 9 p.m. followed by a dance party at 11. The club also planned to hold a drag brunch and a drag show on Sunday for Transgender Day of Remembrance. The club’s website now says it will be closed until further notice.

    Colorado Springs Fire Capt. Mike Smaldino said 11 ambulances responded to the scene after multiple 911 calls were received.

    “We will be here for many, many hours to come,” said Castro, adding that the FBI is on the scene and assisting.

    At least five patients are being treated at UCHealth Memorial Hospital Central, vice president for hospital communications Dan Weaver said.

    Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, the nation’s first openly gay governor, issued a statement calling the attack “horrific, sickening and devastating” and offered state resources to local law enforcement.

    “We are eternally grateful for the brave individuals who blocked the gunman likely saving lives in the process and for the first responders who responded swiftly to this horrific shooting,” he said. “Colorado stands with our LGTBQ community and everyone impacted by this tragedy as we mourn together.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Tosca Musk, Elon’s sister, has a business venture of her own — and it’s all about romance and female sexuality | CNN

    Tosca Musk, Elon’s sister, has a business venture of her own — and it’s all about romance and female sexuality | CNN

    [ad_1]


    Atlanta, Georgia
    CNN
     — 

    Tosca Musk strides onto the red carpet at a Regal Cinemas, statuesque in a white pant suit and glistening burgundy silk top.

    A hush comes over a group gathered outside the theater’s doors. Some whip out cell phones and start recording her every move.

    It’s a chilly October night in Atlanta, and the fans are here for the premiere of “Torn,” the second in a trilogy of romantic fantasy movies based on books by author Jennifer Armentrout. The group of mostly female fans range in age from their twenties to their seventies, and some flew in from Boston, Detroit and other cities.

    This is a big night for Musk and her five-year-old streaming service Passionflix, the backer of the movie. It’s their first public film premiere since the pandemic started.

    She floats from one group to another, chatting effortlessly with Passionflix’s superfans, known as Passionistas. Her older brother, Elon Musk, may be the most famous sibling in the family, but he’s not the only one who’s founded a company.

    Musk, 48, is the force behind Passionflix, which adapts romance novels into movies and streams them to a devoted niche audience. Romance novels are the most popular genre of books in the United States, and Musk is tapping into that market with stories about sultry, powerful female leads and handsome men with chiseled abs. She directs some of the films herself.

    “Passionflix focuses on adapting romance novels exactly as the fan and the author envision it,” Musk says in a separate CNN interview. “We focus on connection, communication and compromise – and remove the shame from sexuality, specifically for women, because it empowers women to both acknowledge and ask for pleasure.”

    Days earlier, on the set of a Passionflix movie, “The Secret Life of Amy Bensen,” Musk provides a few glimpses into life with her famous family.

    Perched on a navy blue couch in a room tucked inside a warehouse in suburban Atlanta, she chooses her words carefully when asked about her older brother, who was on the verge of his Twitter acquisition.

    The Musk children – Elon, Tosca and another brother, middle child Kimbal – were born in South Africa and spent time in Canada before coming to the United States. Their father, Errol, is an engineer and property developer, while their glamorous mother, Maye, is a model.

    From left to right: Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk, mother Maye Musk and Elon Musk at Maye's 50th birthday party in 1998.

    Tosca Musk attended film school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and moved to California after graduation. For three months, she worked for one of Elon Musk’s companies, Zip2.

    “I realized every time I stepped out of the film world, I was just not happy,” she says. “It just wasn’t my thing.”

    After a brief stint at the Los Angeles office of Canadian media company Alliance Atlantis, she began directing and producing films while still in her twenties.

    Musk produced romance films for the Lifetime and Hallmark channels and in 2005 launched a comic web series, Tiki Bar TV, which was hailed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as ahead of its time in the emerging field of vodcasts – or video podcasting.

    Then came Passionflix. Its origin story is a classic tale of when one door closes, another one opens.

    About five years ago, Musk got an email from a woman who wanted her to turn her script into a movie. Musk loved the script, but there wasn’t much interest from production companies.

    “People weren’t really that interested because it was too risque … It was an adult movie with a little bit of reincarnation, things like that,” she says. “It just wasn’t one of those things that regular network television wanted to do.”

    But Musk met the woman, Joany Kane, in Los Angeles, and they bonded over their shared passion for romance novels. During that conversation, Kane brought up the idea of turning romance novels into movies and creating a streaming platform for them.

    And with that, Passionflix was born – with Musk at the helm and Kane as a co-founder.

    “We had no investors. We had to go out and find every investor. So it was a matter of going out and pitching every single person,” Musk says. “We pitched every friend, every family member, everybody just for that small bit of angel investment. It was hard. The first money in is always the hardest money.”

    Kevin Joy on the red carpet at the premiere of Passionflix's

    Musk declines to say whether her brother Elon was one of her original investors. But she says she can always count on her two brothers, including restaurateur Kimbal Musk, to give her advice on her business ventures. She tries not to ask unless she really needs to.

    “I get advice from them to a certain degree when I ask for it. But no unsolicited advice,” she says. “If I ask for advice, I have no doubt that he (Elon) will give it to me. And then I have to take it, because he’s going to be right. So you have to really want to know what you want to ask. But most of the time when I’m with my family, we talk about family things.”

    So what does she think about her brother’s new role as CEO of Twitter – and the flurry of headlines surrounding it?

    No comment.

    Passionflix’s first film was “Hollywood Dirt,” based on a best-selling novel by Alessandra Torre about a Southern woman who finds romance with a Hollywood star when he comes to her small town to film a movie.

    “During that shooting of that movie, we were struggling,” Musk says. “Are we going to get money? Are we going to be able to finish it? We were not really sure. We basically were just sort of piecing the dollars together.”

    In May 2017, Musk played a trailer of the movie at a romance novel convention and asked attendees to prepay $100, as founding members, for a two-year Passionflix subscription. About 4,000 people signed up, Musk says, and she and Kane used that to show potential investors they were onto something.

    “Trying to raise money for a female-driven platform on romance was just not high on anybody’s priority list at the time,” she says. “But as soon as we showed there was that many people that would come on board, the investors just started flying in.”

    Fans take photos of people on the red carpet at the premiere of Passionflix's

    Passionflix has since produced more than two dozen feature-length and short films, according to the Internet Movie Database.

    The company remains lean – it has a core team of seven people who each wear a lot of hats. In addition to producing its own content, Passionflix also licenses films for its platform.

    “I think the biggest challenge for Passionflix is we can’t produce enough content to satiate the fans,” Musk says. “It’s a struggle with so many streaming platforms, when people want original content all the time.”

    With more than 200 streaming services now competing for viewers, such niche markets face a myriad of challenges, says Dan Rayburn, a streaming media expert and consultant.

    Creating, licensing and marketing content is very costly, he said. And while romance is the biggest-selling genre of books in the US, that doesn’t necessarily mean its popularity translates to movies.

    “That’s comparing apples to oranges. Books are different,” Rayburn says. “This business is beyond tough. It’s highly competitive and requires an absolute large sum of money.”

    Passionflix charges a subscription fee of $5.99 a month. The company does not disclose its subscriber numbers. Musk says subscribers are in the “six figures,” but declines to offer specifics.

    Rayburn says it’s hard to determine the company’s profitability without knowing its expenses, including production and licensing costs.

    “OK, if you don’t have subscriber numbers, what’s the usage? How many hours per month do people watch it? How much are you spending on content licensing?”

    A deep dive into Passionflix’s online movie catalog reveals a mix of contemporary romance, fantasy romance, paranormal romance, erotic fan fiction and related sub-genres.

    The films, which stream on the Passionflix site and on Amazon Prime Video, are rated on an escalating steaminess scale Musk calls a “barometer of naughtiness.”

    The five categories: Oh So Vanilla, for wholesome romcoms; Mildly Titillating; Passion and Romance; Toe Curling Yumminess; and NSFW (Not Safe for Work). The latter category has risque plot lines and more sex – think “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

    But Musk says that even the naughtiest Passionflix movies don’t reach the soft-core porn threshold.

    “When we first started Passionflix, somebody asked us if we’re going to rate using MPAA,” she says, referring to the Motion Picture Association of America’s movie ratings such as PG-13, R, etc. “I don’t actually like any of those ratings. They’re not specific to women. I wanted something that could rate our shows and create more of a tongue-in-cheek conversation.”

    Attendees watch the premiere of Passionflix's

    Musk says she’s a romantic at heart and is a big fan of the genre.

    “Love is amazing, it’s incredibly powerful. I love to tell stories of love, all kinds of love,” she says. “So parental love, friend love, family love, and love between any kind of couple.”

    That broad range of romantic genres, and its sexy content, are what sets Passionflix apart from channels such as Hallmark and Lifetime Movie Network, says romance novelist Tamara Lush. She believes the romance genre has been especially popular during the pandemic because people seek comfort in stories with happy-ever-after endings.

    “Hallmark is romance-centered but the stories are very, very sweet. Passionflix tells a wider range of stories, and the ones romance readers want to watch,” Lush says.

    “The popularity of ‘Bridgerton,’ ‘After’ and ’365 Days’ on Netflix should tell streaming services all they need to know: that romance is a lucrative and sure bet for viewers.”

    Passionflix’s original subscribers, known as founding members, get access to movie premieres and filming sets.

    Last month in Atlanta, about four dozen of them piled into the Regal theater for the premiere of “Torn.” Following the movie, Musk hosted a question-and-answer session with the lead actors, followed by an after-party at a bar across the street. Fans and actors mingled over drinks.

    Debbie Parziale, 67, says she flew in from Boston for the event. One of the founding members, she says she spent the pandemic years curled up on her couch, watching Passionflix movies.

    “I love Tosca’s premise of empowering women and making sex not such a taboo subject,” she says. “She’s so true to the romance novels. When you read a book and watch one of her movies, it’s the book you read.”

    Debbie Parziale, Deborah Thornton and Amanda Cromer, from left, at the premiere of

    Amanda Cromer, 32, says she signed up for Passionflix at a romance book convention. She loves the camaraderie that comes with being part of the Passionistas. The group has a virtual book club, called Passion Squad.

    As one of the original members, Cromer can visit sets and interact with the actors. Cromer, who lives in a suburb of Atlanta, says that during a visit to the set of “Torn” she became an extra in a cafe scene.

    “I love the empowerment the movies bring,” says Cromer, who attended last month’s “Torn” premiere with her mother.

    “They choose books with strong female leads. They’ve done such a good job of portraying the female persona as a strong independent female, and not a timid person.”

    Back on the set of her latest romance movie, Tosca Musk moves from one sparsely furnished room to another.

    Musk lives in suburban Atlanta with her two children, 9-year-old twins who were conceived through in vitro fertilization using an anonymous sperm donor.

    She’s getting ready to fly to Italy with the twins to film “Gabriel’s Redemption,” the third book in a series by Sylvain Reynard about a Dante scholar and his passionate affair with a younger graduate student. She says they plan to enjoy lots of gelato in Florence and visit Oxford, England, so the kids can see some of the locations where the Harry Potter movies were filmed.

    As a single mother, Musk says she marvels at the path that led her to a job she loves.

    Tosca Musk poses for a portrait in Fairburn, Georgia, on October 11, 2022.

    She hopes Passionflix will help convince the film industry’s big names that adopting romance novels into movies is a worthy investment.

    “The entertainment world is controlled mostly by men. At the end of the day, the decisions tend to sway toward the male audience as opposed to the female audience,” she says. “They also tend to be more about the victimization of women than they are about sexually free or sexually empowered stories about women.”

    And for Musk, there’s also a simpler reason for her filmmaking ventures.

    “I’m a storyteller at heart,” she says. “I just want to be able to tell stories.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Snow and thunderstorms could hinder holiday travel this week | CNN

    Snow and thunderstorms could hinder holiday travel this week | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    As millions of Americans gear up to travel during the Thanksgiving holiday week, many will have to deal with rain, snow, blustery winds and cold temperatures.

    Over 5 million people from Michigan to New York are under winter weather alerts as additional lake-effect snow is expected to fall Sunday.

    Meanwhile, rain and thunderstorms will be the main concern for some southern states.

    More than 2 feet of snow has fallen across portions of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota the past few days, and a blockbuster over 6 feet of snow has fallen in New York state. Since temperatures will barely exceed the low 40s the next few days, a lot of that snow will be sticking around.

    The cold temperatures after the snow ends can also be dangerous.

    “On a day where you have snow that quickly falls, you’re already almost blinded visibility-wise while driving,” Jonathan Guseman, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the National Weather Service in State College, Pennsylvania, tells CNN. “The snow melts on the highway and then the cold surge of air behind the snow squall freezes that melted snow and produces what we call a flash freeze, where it makes it almost impossible to keep traction and drive safely on the highway.”

    Get the travel forecast for where you are headed right here >>>>>

    This week more than 70% of the US population (over 230 million people) will see temperatures at or below freezing.

    Sunday will start with practically everyone east of the Mississippi River and most of Texas feeling more like January than November with temperatures 10 to 20 degrees below normal.

    St. Louis is forecast to have a high temperature on Sunday of only 40 degrees – that is their normal high temperature for January of 10 degrees.

    Cincinnati is forecast to have a high temperature on Sunday of only 32 degrees – 20 degrees colder than their normal high temperature of 52 degrees.

    Even a southern city like San Antonio isn’t much better. Their forecast to have a high temperatures on Sunday of only 49 degrees – their normal high temperature is 70 degrees.

    A series of storms will push into the Pacific Northwest bringing rain to the coast and valleys, and snow to the Olympic and Cascade mountains this week.

    “A weak weather system moves through the area late Sunday night or Monday morning, followed by a stronger one Tuesday,” the National Weather Service office in Portland said.

    CNN Weather

    The northern Rockies will also see precipitation chances on Tuesday through Wednesday with the frontal system passing through.

    Rain accumulation is not expected to be very high, with most areas picking up less than 1 inch through Wednesday.

    The southern US, however, will see slightly higher amounts of rain this week.

    A low pressure system in the Gulf of Mexico is allowing for rain showers across Texas Sunday, pushing into Louisiana Monday and Alabama and Georgia on Tuesday.

    Areas of Florida, however, have rain chances every day from Sunday through Wednesday, including Orlando, Miami, and Key West.

    In total rain accumulations across Texas and Louisiana will remain between 1-2 inches, but slightly higher along the east coast of Florida which could pick up as much as 3 inches through mid-week.

    The Weather Prediction Center (WPC) cautions that isolated flash flooding could be a concern across urban areas.

    The biggest weather concern this holiday week looks to take place starting Thursday across the middle of the country.

    For now, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York should be able to play out without rain, but by Friday you may need that umbrella in the Northeast for any Black Friday shopping.

    “A couple of low pressure systems including a possible Nor’easter could cause meaningful precipitation across eastern parts of the US late next week,” the WPC said this weekend.

    This could bring rain/snow and nasty travel conditions to many major cities east of the Mississippi River through Saturday.

    “Current forecasts indicate that wintry precipitation is a better possibility for the Interior Northeast while the metropolitan areas along the I-95 corridor are more likely to get rain,” the WPC said.

    But stay tuned to future forecasts this week as details like snow versus rain could change over the next few days.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Texas woman arrested after smuggling endangered spider monkey in box she claimed held beer | CNN

    Texas woman arrested after smuggling endangered spider monkey in box she claimed held beer | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Talk about monkey business.

    A Texas woman entering the US told border officials the wooden box in her car was filled with beer. In reality, it was an endangered spider monkey she planned to sell.

    The 20-year-old woman pleaded guilty to smuggling wildlife into the US without first declaring and invoicing it, and fleeing an immigration checkpoint, after a monthslong investigation, according to a news release from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    She attempted to enter the US from Mexico through the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville, Texas, on March 21, the release stated. Officers noticed a wooden box with holes inside her car, which she claimed contained beer she had bought in Mexico.

    However, when officers opened the box, they discovered a live spider monkey. Officers then referred the woman to a second inspection, but she sped off instead.

    Later that day, officers discovered online sales listings for the spider monkey with the woman’s phone number, according to the release.

    The woman turned herself in on March 28, according to the release. The monkey was recovered and placed in an animal shelter in Central Florida.

    The woman will be sentenced on January 25, 2023, the release noted.

    “Smuggling in endangered species for commercial gain is a tragic crime against nature’s precious resources,” said Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge at Homeland Security Investigations San Antonio, in the release. “HSI takes every opportunity to join our federal, private sector and international partners to share our knowledge, experience and investigative techniques designed to protect and preserve threatened and endangered species.”

    There are seven species of spider monkeys found across Central and South America, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Officials did not specify to which species the recovered spider monkey belonged.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Airbnb CEO on the tech downturn: ‘It’s like we’re all in a nightclub and the lights just came on’ | CNN Business

    Airbnb CEO on the tech downturn: ‘It’s like we’re all in a nightclub and the lights just came on’ | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    After years of seemingly unstoppable growth, the tech industry is now facing the “ultimate reality check” as it confronts broader economic uncertainty and waves of layoffs, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told CNN on Thursday.

    “It’s like we’re all in a nightclub and the lights just came on,” Chesky said in an interview on “CNN This Morning.” After a period of “exuberance and euphoria,” he added, “now we all have to, like, take a hard look at things.”

    His remarks come at a difficult moment for the tech industry. Facebook-parent Meta said last week it was cutting 11,000 jobs after nearly doubling its staff during the pandemic. Amazon confirmed this week that lay offs had begun in its corporate workforce, with reports saying it plans to cut 10,000 positions. And Twitter recently cut approximately 50% of its staff as new owner Elon Musk races to bolster its bottom line.

    Airbnb may be an exception. Chesky said the company is not undergoing layoffs at this time, and in fact is hiring. But that is due in large part to the company cutting 25% of its staff at the start of the pandemic as the travel industry was clobbered, and losing more employees by attrition after.

    “Two-and-a-half years ago, we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks,” Chesky said. “People were predicting we were going to go out of business.”

    “We just hunkered down,” he added. “We rebuilt the company from the ground up, and we stayed really lean.” Now, Chesky said, “we’re stepping on the gas, we’re not putting on the brakes.”

    While the reckoning hitting much of Silicon Valley is painful, Chesky appeared to suggest that a more sober reassessment of the industry could also provide an opportunity for the tech sector to rethink its place in society, after years of criticism for the impact its products can have on people.

    “I think Silicon Valley has done so many amazing things for the world, but we have to be careful having a fetishization of new technology, as if the new technology is going to solve all the problems that the last technology created,” Chesky said. “We need more diversity in Silicon Valley, but that diversity should not just be demographic diversity. We need artists, humanists in this industry.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What a Republican-controlled House could mean for Silicon Valley | CNN Business

    What a Republican-controlled House could mean for Silicon Valley | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN Business
     — 

    With Republicans projected to take control of the House as a result of the midterm elections, tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Meta, who’ve been in the crosshairs of Democrats in recent years, are soon set to face a very different — but no less hostile — political climate in Washington.

    Under the current Democratic-led Congress, top tech executives have been hauled before lawmakers to testify on everything from their companies’ market dominance to social media’s impact on teen mental health. Democrats have hammered away at online platforms’ handling of hate speech and white nationalism, while promoting legislation that could drastically affect the business models of big tech companies.

    In the lame duck session, Democratic lawmakers could renew their attempts at passing tech-focused antitrust legislation that the industry’s biggest players have spent millions lobbying against.

    Republicans aren’t likely to let up the pressure, policy analysts say. But a change in power in the House would likely mean renewed focus on some political priorities — primarily allegations of anti-conservative social media bias — and perhaps an increased emphasis on China and related national security risks, too.

    Here’s what the results of the midterm elections could mean for Big Tech and the push to regulate it.

    In general, tech companies may face more political noise with a Republican House but potentially less policy risk.

    “Republican gains would be good for megacap tech like Google and Apple,” said Paul Gallant, an industry analyst at Cowen Inc. “Republicans will hold hearings about content bias, but they’re not likely to pass antitrust legislation, which is the biggest threat the companies have faced in years.”

    Expect more of the uncomfortable ritual grillings that have made tech CEOs and their lieutenants a frequent sight in Washington, said one industry official who requested anonymity in order to speak more freely.

    “I think the content moderation debate will not just look at how companies make decisions on their platforms, but also how they’ve interacted with the Biden administration,” the official predicted. “The focus will be, ‘Are you too cozy with, and is your content moderation policy led by, feedback you get from the Biden administration?’”

    One company that may see a reprieve is Twitter, whose new owner, Elon Musk, has won plaudits from conservatives for suggesting he could restore former President Donald Trump’s banned Twitter account, among others, and has used his account to endorse voting for Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.

    The hearings could culminate in more sweeping proposals to roll back Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal law that grants tech platforms broad latitude to moderate online content as they see fit.

    In the past, Democrats have called for narrowing Section 230, thus exposing tech platforms to more lawsuits, for not removing hate speech and extremist content more aggressively. Republicans have called for expanding platform liability over allegations that social media companies unfairly remove conservative speech.

    Previous legislative proposals to scale back Section 230 have tended to run into constitutionality questions or failed to attract bipartisan support, and those hurdles still remain. But some digital rights advocates who have defended Section 230 aren’t taking anything for granted, saying that if they squint, they can still see a path forward for legislation that might curtail the law.

    “The thing I’m most worried about in the next Congress is a bad Section 230 bill that’s framed as being about ‘protecting kids’ or ‘stopping opioid sales’ or something that sounds non-controversial, but could have far-reaching negative effects” that may unintentionally result in more conservative speech being removed, not less, said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, a digital privacy group.

    Given President Joe Biden’s criticism of Section 230 — a position the White House reiterated as recently as September — he might even be willing to sign such a hypothetical bill. But that scenario is far too premature to consider right now, according to other analysts who point to the Supreme Court, not Congress, as the center of gravity on Section 230.

    There are two high-profile cases pending before the Court that could powerfully affect the law’s scope. The cases have to do with whether tech platforms can be sued in connection with federal anti-terrorism laws; if the Court finds that they can, it would effectively mean a significant narrowing of Section 230’s protections. And it could create openings for others to continue chipping away at the law.

    “Republicans in Congress certainly have their views on content moderation, but the big thing to look for is what the Supreme Court does,” said Andy Halataei, executive vice president of government affairs for the Information Technology Industry Council, a tech-backed advocacy group. “That will drive either the opportunity or the consensus for Congress to move forward.”

    Both parties have been hawkish on China, but expect Republicans to make it a pillar of their agenda. Within the first few days, Republicans could seek to establish a new select committee devoted to China and its impact on US supply chains, according to the industry official.

    The new committee would likely look at the economic leverage China may have over the United States and the national security risks that could pose, ranging from China’s dominance in the rare earth minerals market to agricultural products, the official said.

    And while Republicans would likely bring even greater scrutiny to businesses with links to China, including TikTok, they also would have a substantial impact on the semiconductor industry by exploring further ways to restrict Chinese access to US technology.

    “Republican gains wouldn’t be great for the chips and tools companies because the China hawks will gain power,” said Gallant.

    In a subsequent research note for investors, Gallant added: “For some China hawks — including likely House Foreign Affairs Chair Mike McCaul — Biden can’t go far enough,” suggesting Republicans could try to introduce even more restrictions on China exports through legislation.

    Multiple Congress-watchers told CNN that support for federal privacy legislation is still bipartisan and the area remains one of a handful where lawmakers could make progress in the next Congress.

    One proposal, known as the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, would enshrine the nation’s first-ever consumer data privacy right into US law. It was approved by a key House committee this year and policy analysts say it could see more opportunities to advance next year.

    The privacy issue is becoming more salient to consumers by the day, said Greer, as the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has made the security of location data, search histories and other personal information a critical safety matter.

    “Hot button tech policy fights like data privacy, antitrust, and content moderation have massive implications for core issues like abortion access, voting rights, racial justice, and LGBTQ+ protections,” Greer said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Border ‘invasion’ declaration panned as PR stunt | CNN Politics

    Border ‘invasion’ declaration panned as PR stunt | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]

    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up here.



    CNN
     — 

    America’s duct-taped immigration policy, which successive Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses have all failed to fix in a comprehensive way, is about to be ripped in yet another direction.

    • With CNN projecting Republicans will take control of the House in January, Democrats want to use the last gasp of their House majority to make good on a yearslong effort to give certainty to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children.
    • Some Republicans, meanwhile, are using the language of war and aiming to make the situation at the southern border a key part of their platform once their party seizes the megaphone of a House majority.
    • A federal judge invalidated a Covid-era policy left over from the Trump administration that has been used to expel migrants millions of times in recent years.
    • US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus was forced out of his role last week by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
    • The move will do little to quiet the criticism of Mayorkas by Republicans. They’ve promised to target him and his agency with scrutiny and investigations when they take the House majority next term.

    ‘Invasion.’ Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, fresh from a commanding election win in last week’s midterms and keen to be viewed as the border security governor, said he would invoke a clause of the US Constitution and declare an “invasion” at the southern border.

    While he has used the term “invasion” before, his tweet suggested he would do more to militarize his state’s response and step in where he says the Biden administration has failed.

    Former President Donald Trump also returned to that term – “invasion” – in announcing his latest run for the White House.

    “Our southern border has been erased,” he said falsely, “and our country is being invaded by millions and millions of unknown people.”

    Abbott argued his declaration would invoke a clause in the Constitution that gives states extraordinary power.

    That text, from Article I, Section 10, reads like this:

    No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

    That Abbott and others are equating a stream of unarmed migrants with an invading army is a case of major false equivalence. They also point to drugs that come across the border with Mexico and the drug cartels behind the illicit activity as a major problem.

    There is no invading army. Rather than marauding troops, CNN’s many profiles of migrants have found families fleeing poverty, climate change, persecution and violence, and approaching the US border after a treacherous trek, often on foot, across the Darien Gap linking South and Central America.

    The Biden administration, following in the Trump administration’s footsteps, has sought to deter migrants, particularly from Venezuela, who have increased exponentially in recent years.

    Judge ends Title 42. A federal judge on Tuesday ended a Trump-era Covid-19 policy, which had been maintained by the Biden administration, to expel many border crossers from the country. In response to a request from the administration, the judge stayed his ruling Wednesday for five weeks to allow the administration to prepare.

    The DC judge, Emmet Sullivan, called that policy “arbitrary and capricious” and said it was flawed from the get-go.

    CNN’s Catherine Shoichet has an in-depth look at the policy, which has been used to expel migrants nearly 2.5 million times under the two presidents over the past three years. That language is important – many of those expelled under the policy have been expelled more than once.

    Reporting from the Texas border. CNN’s Rosa Flores is based in Texas and has reported from the region.

    “We’ve covered stories on the Mexican side of the border where thousands of migrants have been waiting for Title 42 to lift,” she told me in an email. “The anxiety and angst have been building on the border for years now.”

    The uncertainty about US policy has only amplified the desperation of people trying to get into the US, Flores told me.

    “The net effect of the US immigration policy has been very dangerous for migrants/asylum-seekers,” she told me. “Thousands of them have been kidnapped, sexually assaulted or violently attacked, according to Human Rights First.”

    ‘PR stunt’. Even hard-line immigration activists, like the former Trump Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, who has pushed for this “invasion” declaration, called Abbott’s version of invoking the invasion clause inadequate since Abbott will not, apparently, be seizing federal authority to expel migrants from the country.

    It does, however, fit along with Abbott’s efforts to bus migrants out of Texas to cities like New York and Washington.

    “Saying you’re being invaded but not blocking the invaders from coming is a hollow shell,” Cuccinelli said, along with Russ Vought, president of the activist group Citizens for Renewing America. They dismissed Abbott’s move as a “PR stunt.”

    No obvious change. Flores pointed out it does not appear that Abbott’s declaration has changed the stance of the Texas Military Department nor its rules of engagement on the border. Abbott’s budget director said the announcement does not reflect a change in overall tactics.

    Back in February, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez traveled to the border and talked to National Guard members taking part in Abbott’s previous deployment of state forces to the border. She found some who said the mission was a waste of time and resources, since the power to enforce immigration policy and border security is held by the federal government.

    Not what the founders intended. Any more on the invasion clause from Abbott would be “flagrantly unconstitutional,” according to Joseph Nunn of the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, who pointed out Texas is not being invaded by an army.

    “The Founders foresaw such invasions being launched by ‘ambitious or vindictive’ foreign powers and groups, not unarmed migrants and asylum-seekers,” Nunn said in a Twitter thread.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Katie Hobbs will win Arizona governor’s race, CNN projects, defeating Trump favorite Kari Lake | CNN Politics

    Katie Hobbs will win Arizona governor’s race, CNN projects, defeating Trump favorite Kari Lake | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Democrat Katie Hobbs will win Arizona’s governor’s race, CNN projects, defeating one of the most prominent defenders of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

    Calling the 2020 election rigged, Republican Kari Lake had repeatedly said she would not have certified Joe Biden’s win in Arizona in 2020. Hobbs, as Arizona’s secretary of state, had rejected GOP lies about the election.

    Lake’s defeat follows the defeat of two other high-profile election deniers in the state – Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters and secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem.

    “Democracy is worth the wait,” Hobbs tweeted after the race was called Monday night. “Thank you, Arizona. I am so honored and so proud to be your next Governor.”

    Lake did not acknowledge Hobbs’ victory, instead tweeting, “Arizonans know BS when they see it.”

    The Republican nominee had already begun sowing doubts about the 2022 results. During an appearance on Fox News Monday before the race was called, Lake baselessly called the election “botched.”

    “I don’t believe that people of Arizona would vote for her and that she would win. But if that’s what happens at the end of the day, how could you certify an election that is this botched?” Lake said.

    During an appearance on right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s talk show Thursday, she said, “I hate that they’re slow-rolling and dragging their feet and delaying the inevitable. They don’t want to put out the truth, which is that we won.”

    There is no evidence that the election officials were delaying the reporting of results. At a news conference Thursday, Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, called out Lake’s comments. “It is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours,” Gates, a Republican, said, gesturing to the election workers who were involved in tallying the ballots behind him through a glass window.

    Lake had continued to stoke questions about the vote tabulation and Hobbs’ eventual role in certifying the vote as secretary of state hours before the race was projected for Hobbs. “Shouldn’t election officials be impartial,” Lake tweeted, a reference to the office that Hobbs holds. “The guys running the Election have made it their mission to defeat America First Republicans. Unbelievable.”

    Arizona Assistant Secretary of State Allie Bones refuted Lake’s suggestion that Hobbs should recuse herself from overseeing the election. In an interview with CNN Monday night, she noted that Arizona elections are “highly decentralized” and the “counties are responsible for administering the elections and tabulating the votes.”

    When pressed by CNN’s John King about exactly what the Arizona secretary of state’s role is in certifying the election, Bones said the process has worked the same way for years: all 15 counties will report their results to the secretary of state’s office, then the secretary’s office compiles those results and puts together the state-wide canvass. At that point “the secretary does sign off on that,” Bones said, but the governor, the attorney general and the chief justice of the state Supreme Court will also sign off on those final results.

    Lake, a former news anchor at Fox 10 in Phoenix, ascended quickly to become one of the most prominent Republicans in the 2022 cycle as she and Hobbs vied to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. The outgoing governor had endorsed Lake’s primary opponent, but then backed Lake in the general election.

    Hobbs, a former social worker who worked with victims of domestic violence before becoming a state lawmaker, ran a far more low-key and understated campaign, limiting her access to reporters and holding small, intimate events with supporters. She made democracy and abortion rights her central focus, portraying Lake as an “extreme” and “dangerous” figure who could jeopardize the sanctity of the 2024 presidential election by refusing to certify the results.

    She had help in the latter effort from GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, whose political action committee put $500,000 behind an ad urging Arizona voters to reject Lake and Finchem. Lake subsequently posted a sarcastic letter on Twitter thanking Cheney for her “in-kind contribution” – claiming the ad was actually helping her campaign. On Monday night when the race was called for Hobbs, Cheney responded to Lake’s October 28 tweet with a simple retort: “You’re welcome.”

    Barrett Marson, an Arizona GOP consultant who worked for Masters during the Senate primary, spoke to the wisdom of following Trump Monday night. “It’s over. The only thing Kari Lake should do now is graciously concede. This election tells us one thing: following Trump over the cliff will not win elections.”

    Lake hewed closely to the Trump playbook on more than just the 2020 election. She promised to declare an “invasion” at the border – in what she described as an effort to amass greater power for the governor’s office to address the migrant crisis – and she called for the arrest of both of Dr. Anthony Fauci and her Democratic opponent.

    Before announcing her bid, Lake left her anchor job in 2021 – stating that she didn’t like the direction that journalism was going – after becoming a household name in Phoenix. In one of her campaign videos, she said she was taking a sledgehammer to “leftist lies and propaganda,” as she destroyed television sets with the tool in stiletto boots.

    She dispatched her primary opponents with her forceful denunciations of Democratic leaders’ handling of the Covid-19 pandemic – blasting restrictions like masking as unnecessary and harmful to children. She welcomed comparisons to Trump all the way through the end of the campaign – professing at one event that she was delighted when one admirer called her “Trump in a dress.”

    Lake had painted Hobbs as a coward after Hobbs refused to debate her opponent this fall. Hobbs’ campaign argued that a debate with Lake “would only lead to constant interruptions, pointless distractions, and childish name-calling.”

    Hobbs noted in an interview with CNN that Lake had repeatedly called for her arrest and said that her rhetoric had led to “violent threats and harassment against me.” Lake, in turn, portrayed her opponent’s answers as weakness, arguing that if Hobbs wouldn’t agree to debate her, “she can’t stand up against the cartels.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Opinion: She had the most endangered seat in the US Senate. Here’s how she held onto it | CNN

    Opinion: She had the most endangered seat in the US Senate. Here’s how she held onto it | CNN

    [ad_1]

    Editor’s Note: Sheila Leslie, a long-term Nevada resident, served as a Democrat in the Nevada state legislature for 14 years. She is a columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal and a retired human services professional. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Of all the Senate Democrats said to be at risk of being engulfed by a Republican “red wave,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was widely viewed as the most vulnerable. And yet as we all now know, the incumbent senator from Nevada now will serve another six years, after being declared the projected winner this weekend over her Republican challenger.

    Cortez Masto’s crucial win, which doubters had insisted was unlikely at best, clinched Democratic control of the Senate for the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency.

    When the last large batch of ballot results were released from Democrat-leaning Clark County late Saturday, Cortez Masto took a decisive lead over her election-denying Republican challenger Adam Laxalt. And when she was pronounced the winner, progressives breathed a long sigh of relief. We’ve been waiting for years for the country to regain its sanity and repudiate the lies and misinformation from Trump and his acolytes.

    The full story has yet to be written about how she was able to wrest victory from Laxalt, but if you look at the vote percentages coming in for Cortez Masto from rural Nevada over the last few days, they are surprisingly high given the overwhelming Republican registration there. Those critically important rural votes, added to the urban vote, pushed her over the top.

    Simply put, Cortez Masto was able to siphon away just enough votes from Laxalt, former President Donald Trump’s 2020 Nevada campaign co-chair, by making forays into the MAGA-leaning, rural parts of her state, padding her wins in urban strongholds like Reno and Las Vegas.

    Nevadans are still adjusting to Covid-era election reforms that provide many early voting opportunities, universal mail-in ballots, drop-off boxes and same-day registration. Since much of the mail is counted in the days after the election, Republicans running statewide often see their leads slowly evaporate. It’s expected and explainable, although that doesn’t always stop MAGA Republicans from irresponsibly claiming election fraud when they lose.

    Cortez Masto campaigned vigorously throughout the Silver State, running a textbook campaign, even earning endorsements from high-profile Republicans throughout the state who praised her bipartisan leadership, work ethic and integrity. This was in contrast to Laxalt, who many viewed as a carpet-bagging Virginian, capitalizing on his grandfather’s sterling reputation in the state.

    (Adam Laxalt’s grandfather Paul Laxalt was a beloved former governor and US senator from Nevada, whose family emigrated from the Basque country in the 1920s to raise sheep in the high desert of Northern Nevada.)

    Aside from her outreach to moderate Republicans, Cortez Masto followed a tried-and-true campaign playbook, making fulsome use of the Nevada Democratic establishment’s vaunted get-out-the-vote ground game, honed and perfected by the late Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate Majority Leader.

    That ground game was bolstered by the influential Culinary Union members who reportedly knocked on over a million doors in a coordinated push to get Cortez Masto across the finish line. She also leaned in on abortion rights, an issue of great interest to voters across the political spectrum.

    The senator received ample support from a variety of progressive advocacy organizations and individual backers, including hundreds of volunteers from California, who streamed into Nevada, where their time and talents are more politically productive, to provide election help.

    And the week before the election, Third Act, a new national group targeting people over 60 to work on climate justice and protecting democracy, sent its celebrity founder, climate activist Bill McKibben to Nevada to meet with hundreds of older Nevadans. He was joined by renowned author Rebecca Solnit and Secretary of State candidate Cisco Aguilar at a “Defend Our Democracy” event in Reno.

    That event inspired scores to show up the next day to walk door-to-door for pro-democracy candidates, shining a bright spotlight on Aguilar who subsequently won a close race against a staunch election-denier, Jim Marchant. He had vowed to “overhaul the fraudulent election system” in Nevada.

    Marchant had a hand in organizing a false slate of “alternative” electors that was sent to Congress after the 2020 election. He indicated he would not have certified the vote in 2020 – and officials in Nevada fear he might not observe the election norms in 2024 if Trump is the Republican party’s presidential nominee.

    The Reid machine and grassroots efforts were not as successful for Gov. Steve Sisolak however. He was denied a second term by Sheriff Joe Lombardo, a Trump-endorsed candidate who was forced to dial back his characterization of Trump in a debate as merely a “sound president.”

    When the former president expressed grumpy displeasure at the comment, Lombardo proclaimed him “the greatest president” a few days later. Lombardo looked weak and beholden to Trump, but he pacified the MAGA crowd and maintained their support.

    Many factors played into Sisolak’s defeat, some of them outside his control, including the global pandemic, which devastated Nevada’s tourism industry for months. Sisolak, to his credit, prioritized public health measures and saving lives while absorbing anger and resentment from Nevadans who valued their mask-avoiding liberty over protecting their neighbors.

    In coordination with casino executives, he closed the Las Vegas strip for months, overwhelming the state’s unemployment system, which couldn’t keep up with the number of people suddenly unable to work.

    Sisolak’s reelection bid suffered from other challenges: He alienated progressives with vetoes of several key Democratic policy bills, including a death penalty abolition bill that certainly won’t resurface under Lombardo’s administration. Progressives likely still voted for him, but with little enthusiasm – complaining about his lack of vision and inaction on many priority concerns. Some undoubtedly chose the unique Nevada option of “none of the above” on their ballots, in a protest against both candidates.

    But aside from Sisolak being given a pink slip, it was a good election for Nevada’s Democrats. They kept their three congressional seats and added to their majorities in the state assembly and state senate, majorities which mean that they can limit any drastic budgetary or policy measures Lombardo may want to enact.

    And, importantly, they kept an election-denier out of the all-important post of secretary of state. In previous election years, that race would have been of back burner interest. But this year, flipping the seat into Democratic hands and away from meddling of the Republican challenger – QAnon-linked Marchant – was a top priority for many Democratic voters.

    The governor-elect will now get an opportunity to wrestle a severely underfunded state government into shape. He may be in for a shock when he discovers just how woefully underpaid the state workforce is and its astronomical vacancy rates.

    Now Nevadans will have to wait to see how Lombardo makes good on his promise to boost the economy by reducing regulations (as if that is what ails the state.) There’s a good reason why Nevada’s Republican governors never make good on their tired promises to cut taxes and ‘waste’ in state government. Lombardo is about to find out.

    If our newly-elected governor absorbs the national message of this election cycle, he’ll approach his new job with a post-MAGA attitude and get to work with the Democratic legislature on the many pressing issues facing Nevadans.

    Voters have shown us they’re exhausted by the political chaos and lack of civility. They want problem solvers, not flame throwers. With its mixed election results, Nevada may lead the way back to a democratic norm that we worried we might not see again.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • 6 dead after a pair of vintage military aircraft collided at a Texas air show | CNN

    6 dead after a pair of vintage military aircraft collided at a Texas air show | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Six people are dead after two World War II-era military planes collided in midair and crashed at Dallas Executive Airport during an airshow Saturday afternoon, killing all on board, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s office said Sunday.

    “We can confirm that there are six (fatalities),” a spokesperson for the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s office told CNN in a phone call.

    More than 40 fire rescue units responded to the scene after the two vintage planes – a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra – went down during the Wings Over Dallas airshow.

    In video footage of the crash that was described by Dallas’ mayor as “heartbreaking,” the planes are seen breaking apart in midair after the collision, then hitting the ground within seconds, before bursting into flames.

    Here are the latest developments as investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are due to arrive at the scene Sunday.

    The Federal Aviation Administration said the crash took place at around 1:20 p.m. Saturday.

    The Allied Pilots Association – the labor union representing American Airlines pilots – has identified two pilot retirees and former union members among those killed in the collision.

    Former members Terry Barker and Len Root were crew on the B-17 Flying Fortress during the airshow, the APA said on social media.

    “Our hearts go out to their families, friends, and colleagues past and present,” the union said. The APA is offering professional counseling services at their headquarters in Fort Worth following the incident.

    Terry Barker killed in the Dallas Saturday plane crash

    The death of Barker, a former city council member for Keller, Texas, was also announced by Keller Mayor Armin Mizani on Sunday morning in a Facebook post.

    “Keller is grieving as we have come to learn that husband, father, Army veteran, and former Keller City Councilman Terry Barker was one of the victims of the tragic crash at the Dallas Air Show,” Mizani wrote.

    “Terry Barker was beloved by many. He was a friend and someone whose guidance I often sought. Even after retiring from serving on the City Council and flying for American Airlines, his love for community was unmistakable.”

    A 30-year plus veteran of the Civil Air Patrol’s Ohio Wing, Maj. Curtis J. Rowe, was also among those killed in the collision, Col. Pete Bowden, the agency’s commander, said on Sunday.

    Rowe served in several positions throughout his tenure with the Civil Air Patrol, from safety officer to operations officer, and most recently, he was the Ohio Wing maintenance officer, Bowden said. Rowe’s family was notified of his death Saturday evening, the commander added.

    “I reach to find solace in that when great aviators like Curt perish, they do so doing what they loved. Curt touched the lives of thousands of his fellow CAP members, especially the cadets who he flew during orientation flights or taught at Flight Academies and for that, we should be forever grateful,” Bowden wrote in a Facebook post.

    “To a great aviator, colleague, and Auxiliary Airman, farewell,” he said.

    In a Saturday news conference, Hank Coates, president and CEO of the Commemorative Air Force, an organization which preserves and maintains vintage military aircraft, told reporters that the B-17 “normally has a crew of four to five. That was what was on the aircraft,” while the P-63 is a “single-piloted fighter type aircraft.”

    Debris from two planes that crashed during the airshow. The B-17 was one of about 45 complete surviving examples of the model, which was produced by Boeing and other airplane manufacturers during World War II.

    The Commemorative Air Force identified both aircraft as based in Houston.

    No spectators or others on the ground were reported injured, although the debris field from the collision includes the Dallas Executive Airport grounds, Highway 67 and a nearby strip mall.

    The B-17 was part of the collection of the Commemorative Air Force, nicknamed “Texas Raiders,” and had been kept in a hanger in Conroe, Texas, near Houston.

    It was one of about 45 complete surviving examples of the model, only nine of which were airworthy.

    The P-63 was even rarer. Some 14 examples are known to survive, four of which in the US were airworthy, including one owned by the Commemorative Air Force.

    More than 12,000 B-17s were produced by Boeing, Douglas Aircraft and Lockheed between 1936 and 1945, with nearly 5,000 lost during the war, and most of the rest scrapped by the early 1960s. About 3,300 P-63’s were produced by Bell Aircraft between 1943 and 1945, and were principally used by the Soviet Air Force in World War II.

    A frame from a video taken at the airshow shows smoke rising after the crash.

    The FAA was leading the investigation into the air show crash on Saturday, but the NTSB took over the investigation once its team reached the scene, the agency said at a news conference Sunday. The team dispatched by the NTSB consists of technical experts who are regularly sent to plane crash sites to investigate the collision, according to the NTSB.

    “Our team methodically and systematically reviews all evidence and considers all potential factors to determine the probable cause, NTSB member Michael Graham said.

    Investigators have started securing the audio recordings from the air traffic control tower and conducting interviews of the other formation crews and air show operations, according to Graham.

    Neither aircraft was equipped with a flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder, often known as the “black box,” he added.

    Investigators surveyed the accident site using both an NTSB drone and a photograph of the scene from the ground to document the area before the wreckage is moved to a secure location, Graham said. A preliminary accident report is expected four to six weeks, but a full investigation may last 12 to 18 months before a final report is released.

    Graham appealed to witnesses saying if anyone has any photos or videos of the incident, they should share them with the NTSB.

    “They’ll actually be very critical since we don’t have any flight data recorder data or cockpit voice recorders or anything like [those devices],” Graham said. “They’ll be very critical to analyze the collision and also tie that in with the aircraft control recordings to determine why the two aircraft collided and to determine, basically, the how and why this accident happened and then eventually, hopefully, maybe make some safety recommendations to prevent it from happening in the future.”

    According to Coates, the individuals flying the aircraft in CAF airshows are volunteers and follow a strict training process. Many of them are airline pilots, retired airline pilots or retired military pilots.

    “The maneuvers that they (the aircraft) were going through were not dynamic at all,” Coates noted. “It was what we call ‘Bombers on Parade.”

    “This is not about the aircraft. It’s just not,” Coates said. “I can tell you the aircraft are great aircraft, they’re safe. They’re very well-maintained. The pilots are very well-trained. So it’s difficult for me to talk about it, because I know all these people, these are family, and they’re good friends.”

    Mayor Johnson said in a tweet after the crash, “As many of you have now seen, we have had a terrible tragedy in our city today during an airshow. Many details remain unknown or unconfirmed at this time.”

    “The videos are heartbreaking. Please, say a prayer for the souls who took to the sky to entertain and educate our families today,” Johnson said in a separate tweet.

    The Wings Over Dallas event, which was scheduled to run through Sunday, has been canceled, according to the organizer’s website.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Silicon Valley’s greatest minds misread pandemic demand. Now their employees are paying for it. | CNN Business

    Silicon Valley’s greatest minds misread pandemic demand. Now their employees are paying for it. | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN Business
     — 

    In the early months of the pandemic, Facebook only grew bigger and more central to our lives. With lockdowns spreading, countless people began shopping, socializing and working on Facebook and other online platforms. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March 2020, usage was so high that the company was “just trying to keep the lights on.”

    Against that backdrop, Zuckerberg’s company went on a remarkable hiring spree. Facebook, which later rebranded as Meta, went from

    48,268     staffers in March 2020 to more than 87,000 as of September of this year. In other words, it hired another Facebook’s worth of staff. And it looked like the company would only keep hiring to support its ambitious plans to build a future version of the internet called the metaverse.

    On Wednesday, however, Zuckerberg reversed course and laid off more than 11,000 employees, marking the most significant cuts in the company’s history. In a memo to staff, Zuckerberg coughed up some of the hardest words in the English language. “I got this wrong,” he wrote, “and I take responsibility for that.”

    “At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

    Silicon Valley operates on many myths, but one of them is the idea of the founder as a visionary who can see key trends coming years if not decades out. But Zuckerberg is one of a growing list of prominent tech leaders who are cutting costs and issuing mea culpas after failing to anticipate a whiplash in the market between 2020 and 2022.

    The tech industry, already seemingly invincible in early 2020, only grew more dominant during the pandemic while other parts of the economy were upended. Consumers shifted spending online. The Federal Reserve maintained near-zero interest rates at the time, giving tech companies easier access to capital. And private and public market valuations for tech companies only seemed to go higher.

    As the world reopened, however, many consumers have returned to their offline lives. Meanwhile, high inflation and fears of a looming recession have cut into consumer and advertiser spending, disrupting the core businesses of many of the biggest names in tech, after years of rapid growth.

    Now the industry is cutting thousands of jobs.

    Last month, home fitness company Peleton — which had been embraced by investors during the pandemic — underwent its fourth round of layoffs in 2022. Last week, payment-processing giant Stripe said it was eliminating 14% of its staff. And Twitter recently announced widespread job cuts after its new owner Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion, funded in part by debt financing.

    While Musk was largely silent regarding the mass layoffs, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who ran the company until late 2021, said in a contrite thread that he takes responsibility for the situation. “I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that,” Dorsey wrote.

    Twitter headquarters is seen on Friday, October 28, 2022 the day after Elon Musk aquired Twitter for $44 billion.

    Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, one of the most valuable startups in the world, similarly told employees that leadership takes responsibility for the pandemic-era miscalculations that resulted in people losing their livelihoods.

    “For those of you leaving: we’re very sorry to be taking this step and John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it,” Collison wrote. “We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown.”

    Other big tech companies, including Amazon, Apple and Google, are now pausing or slowing hiring amid recession fears after a wave of expansion. Amazon, in particular, had seen breakneck growth during the pandemic, doubling its fulfillment centers in a two-year-period, only to shift earlier this year to focusing on “cost efficiencies.”

    The e-commerce giant is now freezing corporate hiring “for the next few months” and reportedly looking to cut costs in some of its unprofitable units. Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said senior leadership regularly reviews investment outlook and financial performance, adding, “As part of this year’s review, we’re of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs.”

    While there have been layoffs in Silicon Valley over the years, the latest wave of cost cuts appears to be hitting every corner of the industry, including the engineers and coders who were often considered untouchable. The tech bubble may not have burst, but the bubble on top of the bubble certainly has.

    Zuckerberg said Meta’s layoffs would be spread throughout the company, including impacting both its family of apps and the Reality Labs division that is tasked with helping build the metaverse. He noted that some teams — such as recruiting — will be affected more than others.

    With Musk at the helm, Twitter slashed half its staff, including on its ethical AI, marketing and communication, search and public policy teams.

    Roger Lee, a startup founder based in San Francisco, has been closely tracking layoffs in the tech industry since the onset of the pandemic via his website Layoffs.fyi. Initially, his goal was to informally keep track of staffing reductions to help look for potential candidates to recruit for his own company, a digital 401(k) provider for small businesses. Eventually, laid-off workers began submitting their own data and compiling spreadsheets for his website to attract the attention of recruiters.

    “I did not, unfortunately, anticipate the extent to which the layoffs were going to surge,” Lee told CNN Business. With nearly two months still left to go, he said the number of tech employees laid off in 2022 has already surpassed 100,000 based on his data.

    Lee said some of the biggest trends he’s been seeing recently are major job losses across recruiting, human resources, and sales teams. While “engineers are still in better shape relative to the other roles,” Lee said his data indicate even these positions have suffered cuts in recent months.

    “No one knows how long this current period is going to last,” he said.

    Already, there’s been a clear shift in the industry’s mood. Blind, a popular online forum that lets employees at major companies commune anonymously to share interview tips and brag about compensation packages, has emerged as a sobering forum where people are posting about layoffs rather then their jobs.

    Some laid-off workers are also banding together on social media and crowdsourcing spreadsheets for recruiters. These workers have created documents featuring hundreds of names and LinkedIn profiles (as well as visa statuses) of former Twitter and Meta workers.

    While some companies may be better equipped to weather the storm than others, it’s becoming apparent that no company is completely unaffected, said Nikolai Roussanov, a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

    “Tech has been clobbered so much precisely because it has been seen as very immune to fluctuations in the real economy, but in the end, nobody is immune,” Roussanov said. “And that realization, I think, is important and perhaps what contributed to these sky-high valuations coming down pretty quickly.”

    Meta’s market cap has fallen from a peak of more than $1 trillion last year to less than $300 billion. Amazon, meanwhile, has seen its market cap drop by $1 trillion from a peak last summer.

    Roussanov said current fears of a recession are not unwarranted, but in many ways, “there is a little bit of a self-fulfilling nature to this.” He added: “As these fears become more and more widespread, they slow down people’s consumption, they slow down firm investment, and that kind of snowballs on itself.”

    What’s going on in tech right now is “perhaps a taste of what’s yet to come” elsewhere, Roussanov said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Vintage military aircraft collide mid-air at Dallas air show | CNN

    Vintage military aircraft collide mid-air at Dallas air show | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra collided and crashed at the Wings Over Dallas airshow around 1:20 p.m. on Saturday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

    “At this time, it is unknown how many people were on both aircraft,” the FAA said in a statement.

    Authorities responded to the incident at Dallas Executive Airport, Jason Evans with Dallas Fire-Rescue told CNN on Saturday.

    There are currently more than 40 fire rescue units on scene, the agency’s active incidents page shows.

    The Commemorative Air Force identified both aircraft as being out of Houston.

    “Currently we do not have information on the status of the flight crews as emergency responders are working the accident,” a statement from the group said, adding it is working with local authorities and the FAA.

    The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the collision. The NTSB will be in charge and is expected to provide additional updates.

    The event, which was scheduled to run through Sunday, has been canceled, according to the organizer’s website.

    Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said in a tweet after the crash, “As many of you have now seen, we have had a terrible tragedy in our city today during an airshow. Many details remain unknown or unconfirmed at this time.”

    “The videos are heartbreaking. Please, say a prayer for the souls who took to the sky to entertain and educate our families today,” Johnson said in a separate tweet.

    Debris from the collision fell onto southbound Highway 67, according to a report from CNN affiliate WFAA. Southbound and northbound lanes of the highway were shut down after the incident, the Dallas Police Department said.

    The B-17 was part of the collection of the Commemorative Air Force, nicknamed “Texas Raiders,” and had been hangered in Conroe, Texas near Houston. It was one of about 45 complete surviving examples of the model, only nine of which were airworthy.

    The P-63 was even rarer. Some 14 examples are known to survive, four of which in the United States were airworthy, including one owned by the Commemorative Air Force.

    More than 12,000 B-17s were produced by Boeing, Douglas Aircraft and Lockheed between 1936 and 1945, with nearly 5,000 lost during the war, and most of the rest scrapped by the early 1960s. About 3,300 P-63’s were produced by Bell Aircraft between 1943 and 1945, and were principally used by the Soviet Air Force in World War II.

    This is a developing story.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What to know about the outstanding votes in Nevada and Arizona | CNN Politics

    What to know about the outstanding votes in Nevada and Arizona | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The razor-thin elections for Nevada’s Senate seat and Arizona’s governorship have yet to be called on Saturday as counties in both states work to whittle down the tens of thousands of ballots that still need to be counted.

    Democrat Katie Hobbs leads Republican Kari Lake by about 31,000 votes in the Arizona governor’s race as of Saturday morning, following the reporting of roughly 80,000 ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous. And as if Friday evening, Republican Adam Laxalt is holding onto a slim lead of just more than 800 votes over Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

    While those races remain in play, CNN projected Friday that Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly will defeat Republican Blake Masters in Arizona, and Republican Joe Lombardo will knock off Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak in Nevada.

    Kelly’s Senate win puts Democrats one seat away from maintaining control of the Senate, with just the Nevada race uncalled. If Cortez Masto wins, Democrats have at least 50 seats needed regardless of the outcome of the Georgia Senate runoff. If Laxalt wins, the Georgia run-off will determine Senate control, as it did in 2021.

    Control of the House, meanwhile, remains up in the air, with 21 races still uncalled. Democrats have won 203 seats so far, while Republicans have won 211 (218 seats are needed to control the House), according to CNN projections. Many of the uncalled House races are in California.

    Regardless of the ultimate makeup of both chambers next year, Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance has prompted a backlash against House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, while a handful of Senate Republicans are calling for a delay in next week’s scheduled leadership elections.

    Here’s what to know as Election Day turns to Election Weekend:

    In Clark County, Nevada’s largest, which includes Las Vegas, CNN estimates there are roughly 24,000 more mail-in ballots to be counted, along with about 15,000 provisional ballots and ballots that need to be cured.

    In Washoe County, Nevada’s second-most populous, there were about 10,000 ballots counted on Friday, and CNN estimates there are roughly 12,000 remaining.

    Clark County registrar Joe Gloria said Friday that the county expected to be largely finished with the remaining mail-in votes by Saturday. Those ballots are being inspected at the county’s counting board, Gloria said.

    State law allows for mail-in ballots to be received in Nevada through Saturday, though the ballots need to have been postmarked by Election Day to be valid.

    Political organizations, especially Democratic-leaning unions, that spent months urging people to vote in Nevada’s key Senate race are now turning their focus toward “curing” flawed mail-in ballots in the still-uncalled contest.

    “Curing” is a process in which voters correct problems with their mail ballot, ensuring that it gets counted. This can mean validating that a ballot is truly from them by adding a missing signature, or by addressing signature-match issues. The deadline for voters to “cure” their ballots in Nevada is Monday, November 14, according to state law.

    Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, reported about 80,000 more votes late Friday evening, which included many of the mail-in ballots that were dropped off at polling places on Election Day.

    There are about 275,000 ballots left to count in county, according to Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates.

    Gates said he expects that if they continue counting at the same pace – around 60,000 to 80,000 ballots a day – the county should be done counting by “very early next week.”

    Pima County, Arizona’s second-most populous and home to Tucson, is expected to have roughly 85,000 ballots left to count at the end of Friday, Constance Hargrove, elections director for the county, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and John King on Friday.

    Hargove said that she hopes by Monday that Pima County will have the majority of the remaining votes counted. She had previously told CNN that all the votes would be counted by Monday morning. On Friday night, however, she clarified that would no longer be the case due to a large batch of around 80,000 votes received from the recorder’s office earlier that day.

    Gates pushed back against allegations of misconduct from Masters, the Republican National Committee, and the Republican Party of Arizona on Friday night, saying they were “offensive” to the election workers.

    “The suggestion by the Republican National Committee that there is something untoward going on here in Maricopa County is absolutely false and again, is offensive to these good elections workers,” he said.

    On Friday night, the RNC and the Republican Party of Arizona tweeted a statement criticizing the county’s process, and demanding that it require “around-the-clock shifts of ballot processing” until all of the votes are counted, along with “regular, accurate public updates.” The groups also threatened that they would “not hesitate to take legal action if necessary.”

    Addressing the specific accusations from the RNC statement, Gates said: “I would prefer that if there are concerns that they have, that they communicate those to us here. I’m a Republican. Three of my colleagues on the board are Republicans. Raise these issues with us and discuss them with us, as opposed to making these baseless claims.”

    “They’re hyping up the rhetoric here, which is exactly what we don’t need to do,” he added.

    Responding to claims that the count is “taking too long,” Gates said the county’s pace is in line with previous years.

    “Over the past couple of decades, on average it takes 10 to 12 days to complete the count. That’s not because of anything Maricopa County has decided to do. That’s because of how Arizona law is set up, and that’s what we do here at Maricopa County, we follow the law to make sure that the count is accurate.”

    After suffering setbacks in court, Arizona officials who have sought to conduct a hand count audit of a rural county’s election results are considering a scaled-down version of their plan that could still inject chaos and delay into the process of certifying the state’s results.

    The confrontation in Cochise County has led to worries of potential delays in determining the winners in a state where key races remain too close to call. The current deadline for Arizona counties to certify results is November 28 – or 20 days after the final day of voting.

    Cochise County, home to roughly 125,000 Arizonans, had planned to audit 100% of ballots by hand, one of several places where there’s been a push to hand-count elections as a result of former President Donald Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

    On Thursday, a state appeals court made clear in a 2-1 vote that it would not be reversing a court order barring the full hand count in time for the plan to be revived for the midterms. But a lawyer for Cochise County Recorder David Stevens – a proponent of the hand audit – said that the county isn’t giving up on its efforts to conduct a hand conduct that goes beyond the usual procedures.

    Trump, who saw several key endorsed candidates fizzle out in the general election, is trying to cast blame on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and gin up opposition to the Kentucky Republican ahead of Senate GOP leadership elections next week, CNN reported Friday.

    While McConnell has locked down enough support to remain leader, he is facing calls from Senate Republicans to delay next week’s leadership contests – which several GOP sources said is unlikely.

    McCarthy, meanwhile, is facing new headwinds from the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus, who are withholding their support for McCarthy’s speakership bid and beginning to lay out a list of demands.

    If Republicans win the House, McCarthy’s task of becoming speaker is more complicated than McConnell’s because he needs 218 votes to win the gavel – not just a majority of Republicans.

    House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry met with McCarthy in his office Friday. He said afterward that the meeting “went well” but wouldn’t say if McCarthy has his – or the Freedom Caucus’ – support for speaker.

    “We’re having discussions,” Perry said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Sylvester Stallone tries to rewind the clock in Paramount’s ‘Tulsa King’ | CNN

    Sylvester Stallone tries to rewind the clock in Paramount’s ‘Tulsa King’ | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Building on the success of “Yellowstone,” Paramount+ and producer Taylor Sheridan have seemingly seized on a streaming strategy built around casting veteran movie stars, an available commodity in an industry known for ageism. Enter “Tulsa King,” a slim vehicle for Sylvester Stallone that’s a little too overtly designed as a mobster fish out of water.

    Stallone’s Dwight Manfredi (who says he was named after Eisenhower, no less) gets released back into the world after 25 years in prison, only to find that those running the mob in his old stomping grounds of New York – some of whom were “kids,” at least to him, when he went away to protect them – don’t want him around.

    “There’s nothing left for you here,” says the new boss (“The Wire’s” Domenick Lombardozzi), noting, “We can’t just rewind the clock.”

    Conceptually, though, that’s exactly what “Tulsa King” does, or at least tries to do, exiling Dwight to the dreary confines of Oklahoma. In short order, he quickly hires a driver (Jay Will) and sets about proving that he can continue earning even in the hinterlands, muscling into a business relationship with the local pot dispensary for starters.

    Dwight isn’t above punching people in the face when they deserve it, which can be helpful in negotiations, determined to demonstrate to the boys back home that if he can make it there, he’ll make it anywhere.

    “Tulsa King” turns out to be a rather odd mix of attributes, relying almost entirely on Stallone’s movie-star charisma as the show alternates between sitcom conventions and R-rated “The Sopranos”-flecked flourishes. When a woman meets him and later tells him she thought he was 55 (he cops to being 20 years older than that), it’s clear that a little ego stroking is also part of the formula.

    While Stallone holds the screen, some of the sitcom touches are weak and too obvious, with Dwight acting like he’s unfamiliar with anything that happened on the outside during the time he was behind bars, shaking his head at cellphones, credit cards and stores that don’t accept cash, his preferred means of transacting deals.

    As noted, streaming in general, and Paramount in particular, have become havens for older stars, with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren due in the “Yellowstone” prequel “1932” next month. After Stallone’s other recent streaming venture with the movie “Samaritan” on Amazon, the fact that the poster displays his name in big letters above the title makes clear what they’re selling here, and with streamers sparring for attention, it’s not a bad fight plan.

    In that sense, “Tulsa King” suggests maybe you can rewind the clock, just a little, even if you’re gonna fly a little bit lower now.

    “Tulsa King” premieres November 13 on Paramount+.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • States are counting votes with key races still in play. Here’s what to know | CNN Politics

    States are counting votes with key races still in play. Here’s what to know | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    New batches of votes were reported late Thursday evening in Arizona and Nevada – states with key races that will determine control of the Senate – but it’s still not clear when enough of the outstanding hundreds of thousands of ballots will be counted to call the Senate and gubernatorial contests in those states.

    Control of the House is also still in the balance as ballots are counted in states such as California. Republicans appear to be inching toward a majority, though they have not yet secured enough wins to take control as more than two dozen congressional races remain uncalled. The closer-than-expected contest for the House has added serious complications to GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be the next speaker.

    Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, is expected to begin reporting votes from the critical batch of roughly 290,000 early ballots turned in on Election Day – and the partisan composition of those votes could determine who wins the state’s Senate and governor’s races.

    More votes are expected to be reported on Friday as counting continues. Here’s what to know about where things stand:

    The biggest reason the vote counting is taking so long is the way that each state handles the ballots outside of those cast at polling places on Election Day, including both early votes and mail-in ballots.

    When races are within a percentage point or two, those outstanding ballots are enough to keep the election from being projected. Of course, the lag was anticipated – it took news organizations until the Saturday after Election Day in 2020 to declare Joe Biden the winner in the presidential race, following a massive increase in mail-in voting amid the pandemic.

    In Arizona, CNN and other news networks have yet to call the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters, or the governor’s race between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake.

    The CNN Decision Desk estimated there are roughly 540,000 ballots still to be counted, as of late Thursday evening. The majority of those, about 350,000 ballots, are in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.

    The biggest chunk of uncounted ballots, about 290,000, are votes that were dropped off at vote centers on Election Day. A top official told CNN late Thursday that Maricopa County expects to start releasing the first results from those outstanding ballots Friday evening.

    “We should start to see those tomorrow, I believe – we’ll start seeing those come in,” said Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

    Those ballots could be key in determining who will win the statewide races for governor and Senate. The mail-in ballots reported so far in Arizona lean heavily Democratic while Election Day ballots strongly favor Republicans – but it’s still too early to know which way the mail-in ballots turned in on Election Day will fall.

    In addition, Maricopa County has about 17,000 ballots that were not read by the tabulator on Election Day because of a printer error, and those ballots still need to be counted, too.

    Maricopa County updated an additional tranche of just over 78,000 ballots on Thursday night.

    In Pima County, Arizona’s second-most populous and home to Tucson, a new batch of 20,000 ballots was reported Thursday evening. Elections Director Constance Hargrove told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and John King that the county has been able to report batches of approximately 20,000 ballots per day, and anticipated another ballot drop of 20,000 on Friday.

    “We will be working through the weekend and get through most of those ballots – not all of those ballots – probably by no later than Monday morning,” Hargrove said.

    The delay in calling the races in Arizona have prompted criticisms and conspiracies – some of which are reminiscent of the wild and baseless allegations that were made in the state after the 2020 election, such as false claims about felt-tipped Sharpies.

    Elections officials in Maricopa County debunked false claims circulating on right-wing social media suggesting that a woman wearing glasses in the county’s counting facility livestream was Hobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee and current secretary of state.

    “Not every woman with glasses is Katie Hobbs,” the official Twitter account of Maricopa County tweeted in response Thursday evening. “We can confirm this was a party Observer. Please refrain from making assumptions about workers who happen to wear glasses.”

    Lake, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who has embraced former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen, said on Charlie Kirk’s right-wing talk show Thursday, “I hate that they’re slow-rolling and dragging their feet and delaying the inevitable. They don’t want to put out the truth, which is that we won.” There is no evidence that the election officials were deliberately delaying the reporting of results.

    At a news conference Thursday, Gates said, “Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours.”

    Gates explained why it takes longer for Arizona to count ballots than states such as Florida, which reported most of its results on election night. He pointed out that Florida does not allow for mail-in ballots to be dropped off on Election Day, while Arizona does. This slows down the process because the hundreds of thousands of ballots need to be processed and go through signature verification before they can be counted.

    Florida also closes early voting the Sunday before Election Day, while ballots can be dropped off through Election Day in Arizona.

    “We have so many close races that everyone is still paying attention to Maricopa County. Those other states like Florida, those races were blowouts. Nobody is paying attention anymore,” Gates said.

    In Nevada, the CNN Decision Desk estimated there were about 95,000 votes outstanding as of Thursday evening.

    In Clark County, the state’s largest, which includes Las Vegas, there are more than 50,000 ballots still to be counted, Clark County registrar Joe Gloria said Thursday.

    Nevada state law allows mail-in ballots to be received through Saturday, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, meaning counties are still receiving ballots to be counted. But many ballots now arriving are being disqualified because they were postmarked after Election Day.

    Jamie Rodriguez, interim registrar of votes for Washoe County, said the county disqualified 400 mail-in ballots on Thursday – about two-thirds of the mail-in ballots the county received – because they were postmarked late.

    Washoe County, which includes Reno, still has about 22,000 ballots left to count, Rodriguez said, and the county expects to get through most of them on Friday.

    Clark County added around 12,000 votes on Thursday night. The county says it will provide an update Friday on its remaining ballots to count.

    Key races in the Silver State, including the Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt and the governor’s race between Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and Republican Joe Lombardo, have not been called as of Friday morning.

    Control of the Senate – which will come down to Nevada, Arizona and possibly the December runoff in Georgia – was expected to be a toss-up going into Election Day. Republicans, however, anticipated winning the House, though the closer-than-expected contest for control of the chamber has made McCarthy’s quest for the speakership more difficult, even if Republicans do end up winning the majority.

    Members of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are withholding their support for McCarthy’s speakership bid and have begun to lay out their list of demands, CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju report, putting the California Republican’s path to securing 218 votes in peril if the party ultimately takes the House with a slim majority.

    McCarthy and his team are confident he will get the votes to be speaker. But conservative hard-liners are emboldened by the likelihood of a narrow House GOP majority and are threatening to force him to make deals to weaken the speakership, which he has long resisted.

    The ultimate makeup of the House is important for McCarthy because of the way the chamber elects a speaker: It requires a majority of the full House, or 218 votes, not just a majority of the party in control. If Republicans take power with a double-digit majority, McCarthy could afford to lose a few defectors. But a slim majority gives single members – and the Freedom Caucus – more power to make demands and threaten to withhold support.

    Many key House races have yet to be called, and some remain razor-thin and could head into recounts. One such race is in Colorado, where GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert was ahead by just 1,122 votes as of 9 a.m. ET Friday. Votes are still being counted in the district.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Paul Pelosi’s alleged attacker indicted by federal grand jury | CNN Politics

    Paul Pelosi’s alleged attacker indicted by federal grand jury | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A grand jury has returned a federal indictment charging David DePape, the man accused of violently attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in late October, with attempted kidnapping of a federal official and assault of an immediate family member of a federal official.

    “If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison for the assault count and 20 years in prison for the attempted kidnapping count,” the Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday.

    With the indictment, DePape is facing both federal and state charges, which include “attempted murder, residential burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder, as well as threats to a public official and their family,” according to San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins.

    DePape has already pleaded not guilty to all state charges during his initial appearance in San Francisco court, and he waived his right to a hearing within 10 days at his arraignment. He waived his appearance in court last week, where a status hearing was set for November 28 and a preliminary hearing was set for December 14.

    Depape is currently being held without bail.

    Jenkins has said that based on DePape’s statements, it appears the attack was “politically motivated.”

    “Yes, it appears as though this was, based on his statements and comments that were made in that house during his encounter with Mr. Pelosi, that this was politically motivated,” she said.

    The speaker’s husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco, and disturbing details have emerged about the incident, including that the alleged assailant told police he was on a “suicide mission” and had a list of other prominent targets.

    DePape, according to court documents, told police he planned to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage, calling her the “leader of the pack of lies” promoted by the Democrats.

    Following the attack, Paul Pelosi had surgery “to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Nancy Pelosi, said in an earlier statement.

    He has since been released from the hospital.

    “Paul remains under doctors’ care as he continues to progress on a long recovery process and convalescence,” Nancy Pelosi said after her husband’s hospital discharge. “He is now home surrounded by his family who request privacy.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

    [ad_2]

    Source link