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      Tennessee toughens voting rules for people with felony convictions

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      Tennessee, already one of the strictest and most complicated states in the country for voting rights restoration, has enacted a new policy that makes it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to regain their right to vote.Tennessee has one of the highest rates of disenfranchisement in the United States. More than 9% of the voting age population, or around 471,600 Tennesseans, can’t vote because of a felony conviction, according to a 2022 estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. More than 21% of Black adults are disenfranchised.The vast majority of people who can’t vote have completed their criminal sentences but have outstanding court debt, including unpaid child support payments.Previously, someone with a felony who wished to vote again had to pay all debts and then get government officials to sign off on a form – called a certificate of restoration – affirming their eligibility to vote. The process was burdensome, especially compared to the automatic restoration that occurs in a majority of states upon release from prison or after a period of probation or parole.But on Friday, the state’s division of elections added another hurdle. It said that someone with a felony had to first successfully receive a pardon from the governor or have a court restore their full rights of citizenship. Once that is done, the person must then complete the certificate of restoration process to get their rights restored.Mark Goins, the state’s director of elections, said in a Friday memo the change was necessary because of a recent state supreme court decision in a case called Falls v Goins. In that decision, the state supreme court ruled that a man who had been convicted of a felony decades ago in Virginia and had his voting rights restored there still had to go through Tennessee’s process for restoring voting rights.The court read two different portions of Tennessee law, one from the 1980s and one from 2006, to say that there was a two step process for those with out of state convictions to become eligible to vote: first they had to receive clemency from the state where the conviction was, and then they had to go through the Tennessee process. The court made it clear that its ruling was narrow. “We limit the scope of our analysis to these facts and these facts only,” it said. But Goins interpreted the decision broadly, saying it applied to anyone with a felony conviction in Tennessee, even though the case did not address that issue.A representative for the secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“It’s very hard to get your restoration of citizenship – even harder than getting a Certificate of Restoration,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who has been involved in a number of lawsuits challenging Tennessee’s rules around felon disenfranchisement, including the Falls case.“The new process is more difficult than the procedures that existed before the legislature created Certificates of Restoration in 2006 and it puts Tennessee in the bottom of the barrel on rights restoration as one of the only states with a fully discretionary process, alongside Mississippi and Virginia.”In Virginia, anyone convicted of a felony is permanently barred from voting unless the governor restores their voting rights. In Mississippi, those with certain felony convictions must have an individualized bill approved by a supermajority of both chambers of the legislature and the governor before they can vote again. Very few people have successfully made it through that process, and Mississippi is the only state that disenfranchises more of its citizens than Tennessee.Tennessee’s confusing process for restoring voting rights has already come under considerable scrutiny. In 2022, a Memphis woman named Pamela Moses was sentenced to five years in prison for submitting a Certificate of Restoration when she was ineligible to vote. Moses said she believed she was eligible and a probation officer who filled out her form made a mistake and said she had completed her sentence.A judge overseeing the case overturned her conviction after the Guardian published documents that had not been turned over to Moses in which probation officials acknowledged the errors. More

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      Filthy Rich Politicians: journalist Matt K Lewis on Trump, ethics and money in Washington

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      When Covid-19 materialized as a serious threat, Richard Burr took action. As chair of the Senate intelligence committee, the North Carolina Republican had access to information on the pandemic that was unavailable to the American public. He unloaded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stocks, including investments in the hospitality industry that was likely to be hard-hit. Burr also contacted his brother-in-law, who made his own stock dump. After the trades were publicized, Burr resigned as chair of the intelligence panel. But he was not charged with a crime.For the reporter Matt K Lewis, the story is part of an ever-increasing problem: the outsized role of wealth in Washington. The Daily Beast journalist has written a book, Filthy Rich Politicians, that was published in the US this week. The extent of the problem is reflected by Lewis’s subtitle: The Swamp Creatures, Latte Liberals, and Ruling Class Elites Cashing In on America.“Rich people get elected, and people, when elected, tend to get richer,” Lewis says. “Over time, it has gotten worse.”The narrative is bipartisan and includes progressives and populists from members of the Squad to election deniers.“I think it’s just an irony that I wrote the book Filthy Rich Politicians in a moment when all the politicians in America … one thing almost all have in common is trying to position themselves as being populist outsiders attacking elites,” Lewis says.He is concerned by politicians bolstering their finances during moments of crisis, as Burr did during Covid.“That, I think, is one of the most interesting and disturbing parts of the book. Everybody kind of knows politicians are rich and some of what they do is sketchy. This, I think, most Americans don’t fully appreciate.”Whether regarding Covid or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lewis says, “These are the moments when it really pays off to have inside information.” He points out that the list of members of Congress who made advantageous stock purchases ahead of the Ukraine war included Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a Democrat, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a notorious hard-right Republican.The House of Representatives has become a flashpoint. In the lower chamber, where members are ostensibly closer to average Americans, incomes have climbed quite high. The average member of Congress is now 12 times wealthier than the typical US household.“In the last four decades, the gap has demonstrably widened between politicians and ‘We, the people,’” Lewis says.Causes range from insider trading to book deals to lobbying, family members and friends getting in on the action through paid positions as campaign or office staffers. Lewis cites numerous examples.The former Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, have netted millions from his stock deals, outperforming top investors including Warren Buffett while Nancy Pelosi fended off attempts at reform.In the annals of lobbying, there is Billy Tauzin, a former Republican congressman from Louisiana. On Capitol Hill, Tauzin helped then-president George W Bush pass a Medicare bill. His term done, Tauzin became a lobbyist for Big Pharma.Running for office is a perfect fit for high net-worth individuals. After all, it requires significant time off from work and enough campaign funds to draw in outside donations. It helps if you’re born into wealth, marry into it – or both.Lewis comes from a different background – though he notes that his wife, Erin DeLullo, is a political consultant who has worked with some of the Republicans he criticizes as self-proclaimed populists, despite their Ivy League degrees.Lewis’s father was a prison guard for three decades. The family never lacked for food on the table, but Lewis got a rude introduction to the wider world when he made his own foray into campaign politics. A $1,000 check was late to his bank account, giving him an impromptu lesson in how much it costs to be poor in Washington.Then, after becoming an opinion journalist at the Daily Caller, a conservative site, Lewis learned how rich people populate the DC landscape. One day, he was researching a tip that a prominent liberal family was polluting the environment with its penchant for boating. A family member contended otherwise, asking if Lewis knew anything about sailing or yachting. Lewis confessed he did not, asked his colleagues if they did, and saw a sea of hands.“For me, it really hit home that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, so to speak,” he recalls.Lewis planned his book as a survey of America’s 100 richest politicians. It evolved into a more substantive project, although the original idea is reflected by two lists in the appendix: the 25 wealthiest members of Congress and the 10 richest presidents.The Florida Republican senator Rick Scott – who before entering politics ran a company fined $1.7bn for Medicare fraud – leads the congressional list with more than $200m. Top of the presidential list is Donald Trump, whose net worth topped out at $3.1bn.“Putting money aside, [Trump] changed the game in many ways,” Lewis says. “It’s never going to be the same, and not primarily because of his wealth – he’s such a different type of human being and president than we’ve ever seen.”Ironically, Trump’s populist denunciations of corruption and the DC “swamp” resonated strongly with voters.Citing a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, Lewis says: “Three-quarters of Americans believed politicians were primarily selfish and interested in feathering their own nest. I don’t think it’s any surprise that one year later, Donald Trump was elected. He talked about how the game was rigged, he talked about elites and the establishment and the need to drain the swamp.”The Biden family has also been doing quite well for itself financially – not just the president’s scandal-embroiled son, Hunter, but Hunter’s uncles Frank and James.“There are a lot of ways politicians and their families can become enriched, sort of trading off the family relationship, name and access,” Lewis says.He mentions a story in the Atlantic about Joe Biden’s 1988 run for president: the campaign took in over $11m, with around 20% of that amount going either to the candidate’s family or to companies they worked for.“You have an example of other people’s money – in this case, campaign donors – being transferred to the family of Joe Biden,” Lewis says. “Given my druthers, I would make this illegal.”He offers more suggestions for limiting the influence of wealth in politics, including a counterintuitive proposal: raise congressional salaries.“I firmly believe in it,” Lewis says. “This will happen after we ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, after we impose a 10-year moratorium on the revolving door of lobbying, after we ban the ability to make millions from a book deal while you’re serving the country, after we ban the hiring of family for congressional offices and campaigns.“It’s not cheap to live in Washington DC. Once we have curtailed the ability to get rich from nefarious or certainly questionable means, I would compensate them even more so they could focus on the actual job.”
      Filthy Rich Politicians is published in the US by Center Street More

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      US third-party group mulls 2024 ticket – but would it merely help Trump?

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      On a small stage in New Hampshire this week, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and former Republican Governor Jon Huntsman sat together extolling the virtues of bipartisanship and talking very much like running mates. They were there on behalf of the centrist political advocacy organization No Labels, which is considering fielding a third-party ticket in the 2024 presidential election, and had enlisted the two men to debut its 67-page policy manifesto.Early on in the evening, the moderator asked the question looming over the event: were Manchin and Huntsman running for president? After a smattering of applause died down, Manchin deflected, saying they were simply there to “explain to you that we need options”. But Manchin’s refusal to announce whether he will seek re-election for the US Senate next year, and his presence at the town hall, has drawn speculation that he and No Labels may combine to upend the 2024 election.No Labels has been around since 2010, largely promoting centrist policies and occasionally working to elect moderate Democrats to Congress. Its recent ambitions are far grander, as it plans to raise $70m, get on the ballot in every state across the country, and build a third-party ticket for the presidency. The group has become a specter looming over the 2024 election for Democrats, with polls showing that a centrist third-party candidate would draw votes away from Joe Biden and tilt the race toward Donald Trump.The growing prominence of No Labels and its potential to run a third-party candidate has resulted in backlash from Democrats and more centrist Republicans as a result. Democratic representatives and political organizations such as MoveOn have mobilized to oppose the group, including holding briefings for congressional staffers on the risk of a third-party ticket. Democratic and Republican strategists additionally commissioned a poll that showed how an independent centrist candidate would act as a spoiler against Biden.But efforts to show that No Labels could take a significant portion of the vote and effectively hand Trump the presidency have only emboldened the group. No Labels’ chief pollster told Axios that the recent survey – which showed a moderate independent candidate would receive around 20% of the vote and shift the election to Trump – was proof that their strategy was sound and that they had a viable chance at the presidency.“The people who are spearheading this are not doing it cynically. They have convinced themselves that this is a unique historical moment and they intend to seize it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who co-founded No Labels in 2010 before leaving it earlier this year.Galston disagreed with the group’s decision in 2022 to focus on fielding a third-party candidate, he said, and after a year of offering arguments against the shift decided to quit the organization in April of this year. Although he still supports the group, he sees its current mission as misguided and has spoken out about how it’s likely to benefit Trump’s presidential hopes.“I could not go along with the formation of an independent ticket,” Galston said. “I saw no equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and feared that this ticket would, on net, draw support away from Biden’s candidacy.”No Labels, and its potential candidate Manchin, reject the notion that they will act as spoilers. The group has claimed it will not go ahead with its plans if it appears to shift the election to one party, though has been vague on its criteria for such a decision, and Manchin on Monday told the audience in New Hampshire that “if I get in a race I’m gonna win”.Undisclosed donorsAs No Labels moves forward with its fundraising and attempts to get on nationwide ballots, it has faced increased scrutiny over who exactly is backing their efforts. The group refuses to disclose its donors, which it is not obligated to do, but a Mother Jones investigation identified dozens of wealthy contributors affiliated with No Labels.Although it includes several major Democratic donors, many of the contributors favor conservative causes and Republican candidates. A separate investigation from The New Republic found that conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, most recently known for his close ties with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, donated $130,000 to the group between 2019 and 2021.No Labels officials have cited privacy concerns as the reason that the group will not release its donors, while chief executive Nancy Jacobson told NBC News this week that there is “nothing nefarious” about its fundraising. Galston brought up to Jacobson in the early days of the group’s operations that a lack of transparency might become an issue, he said, but she told him “in no uncertain terms” that was how things would be run.Jacobson and No Labels did not respond to a request for comment on this article.It is unclear just how much of its $70m goal No Labels has raised, although previous years and Jacobson’s status as veteran fundraiser show that it is able to draw large sums. No Labels’ 2021 tax forms, the most recent year publicly available, state that it took in just over $11.3m in revenue that year. The organization’s highest paid staffer was former political commentator Mark Halperin, according to the 2021 tax form, who made around $257,000 as No Labels chief strategist. The organization hired Halperin despite allegations from multiple women of sexual harassment and assault against the once-prominent journalist. Halperin, who has previously apologized for some of the harassment allegations against him while denying other allegations including physical assault, left No Labels in March of this year. He could not be reached for comment.The tax forms also show that No Labels paid top Democrat-run consulting firms for their advocacy and communications work. It gave around $946,000 in compensation to communications firm Rational 360 in 2021. Rational 360 did not respond to a request for comment on this article.The group has faced criticism from Democrats before, including when it endorsed an anti-LGBT, anti-abortion Illinois Congressman during the 2018 midterms. A Super PAC tied to No Labels spent aabout $1m backing the campaign, according to the Intercept. But previous backlash against the group is nothing compared to what it currently faces, with growing concern among Democrats that No Labels has the potential to lose them the White House.“It’s pretty clear that a No Labels candidate would help re-elect Donald Trump,” Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen told the Hill.No Labels has given itself until Super Tuesday – when a large number of states hold primaries in early March of next year – as a deadline for announcing whether or not it will run a third party. The group’s national co-chair Pat McRory stated on Monday that if Biden and Trump are the likely match-up by then and the group sees a path to victory, it will run a candidate. More

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      Top tech firms commit to AI safeguards amid fears over pace of change

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      Top players in the development of artificial intelligence, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, have agreed to new safeguards for the fast-moving technology, Joe Biden announced on Friday.Among the guidelines brokered by the Biden administration are watermarks for AI content to make it easier to identify and third-party testing of the technology that will try to spot dangerous flaws.Speaking at the White House, Biden said the companies’ commitment were “real and concrete” and will help “develop safe, secure and trustworthy” technologies that benefit society and uphold values.“Americans are seeing how advanced artificial intelligence and the pace of innovation have the power to disrupt jobs in industries,” he said. “These commitments are a promising step that we have a lot more work to do together.”The president said AI brings “incredible opportunities”, as well as risks to society and economy. The agreement, he said, would underscore three fundamental principles – safety, security and trust.The White House said seven US companies had agreed to the voluntary commitments, which are meant to ensure their AI products are safe before they release them.The announcement comes as critics charge AI’s breakneck expansion threatens to allow real damage to occur before laws catch up. The voluntary commitments are not legally binding, but may create a stopgap while more comprehensive action is developed.A surge of commercial investment in generative AI tools that can write convincingly human-like text and churn out new images and other media has brought public fascination as well as concern about their ability to trick people and spread disinformation, among other dangers.The tech companies agreed to eight measures:
      Using watermarking on audio and visual content to help identify content generated by AI.
      Allowing independent experts to try to push models into bad behavior – a process known as “red-teaming”.
      Sharing trust and safety information with the government and other companies.
      Investing in cybersecurity measures.
      Encouraging third parties to uncover security vulnerabilities.
      Reporting societal risks such as inappropriate uses and bias.
      Prioritizing research on AI’s societal risks.
      Using the most cutting-edge AI systems, known as frontier models, to solve society’s greatest problems.
      The voluntary commitments are meant to be an immediate way of addressing risks ahead of a longer-term push to get Congress to pass laws regulating the technology.Some advocates for AI regulations said Biden’s move is a start but more needs to be done to hold the companies and their products accountable.“History would indicate that many tech companies do not actually walk the walk on a voluntary pledge to act responsibly and support strong regulations,” said a statement from James Steyer, founder and CEO of the non-profit Common Sense Media.The guidelines, as detailed at a high level in a fact sheet the White House released, some critics have argued, do not go far enough in addressing concerns over the way AI could impact society and give the administration little to no remedies for enforcement if the companies do not abide by them. “We need a much more wide-ranging public deliberation and that’s going to bring up issues that companies almost certainly won’t voluntarily commit to because it would lead to substantively different results, ones that may more directly impact their business models,” said Amba Kak, the executive director of research group the AI Now Institute.“A closed-door deliberation with corporate actors resulting in voluntary safeguards isn’t enough,” Kak said. “What this list covers is a set of problems that are comfortable to business as usual, but we also need to be looking at what’s not on the list – things like competition concerns, discriminatory impacts of these systems. The companies have said they’ll ‘research’ privacy and bias, but we already have robust bodies of research on both – what we need is accountability.”Voluntary guidelines amount to little more than self-regulation, said Caitriona Fitzgerald, the deputy director at the non-profit research group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic). A similar approach was taken with social media platforms, she said, and it didn’t work. “It’s internal compliance checking and it’s similar to what we’ve seen in the FTC consent orders from the past when they required Facebook to do internal privacy impact assessments and they just became a box-checking exercise.”The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said he will introduce legislation to regulate AI. He has held a number of briefings with government officials to educate senators about an issue that’s attracted bipartisan interest.A number of technology executives have called for regulation, and several went to the White House in May to speak with Biden, vice-president Kamala Harris and other officials.Senator Mark Warner said the guidelines released on Friday are a start but that “we need more than industry commitments”.“While we often hear AI vendors talk about their commitment to security and safety, we have repeatedly seen the expedited release of products that are exploitable, prone to generating unreliable outputs, and susceptible to misuse,” Warner said in a statement.But some experts and upstart competitors worry that the type of regulation being floated could be a boon for deep-pocketed first-movers led by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, as smaller players are elbowed out by the high cost of making their AI systems known as large language models adhere to regulatory strictures.The software trade group BSA, which includes Microsoft as a member, said on Friday that it welcomed the Biden administration’s efforts to set rules for high-risk AI systems.“Enterprise software companies look forward to working with the administration and Congress to enact legislation that addresses the risks associated with artificial intelligence and promote its benefits,” the group said in a statement.Several countries have been looking at ways to regulate AI, including European Union lawmakers who have been negotiating sweeping AI rules for the 27-country bloc.The details of the European legislation are still being hashed out, but the EU AI Act contains robust regulations that would create significant consumer protections against the overreach, privacy violations and biases of certain types of high-risk AI models.Meanwhile conversations in the US remain in the early stages. Fitzgerald, of Epic, said while the voluntary guidelines are just one in a series of guidelines the White House has released on AI, she worries it might cause Congress to slow down their push to create regulations. “We need the rules of the road before it gets too big to regulate,” she said.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, recently said the United Nations was “the ideal place” to adopt global standards and appointed a board that will report back on options for global AI governance by the end of the year.The United Nations chief also said he welcomed calls from some countries for the creation of a new UN body to support global efforts to govern AI, inspired by such models as the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.The White House said on Friday that it had already consulted on the voluntary commitments with a number of countries.Associated Press contributed to this story More

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      Oppenheimer biographer supports US bill to bar use of AI in nuclear launches

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      A biographer whose Pulitzer prize-winning book inspired the new movie Oppenheimer has expressed support for a US senator’s attempt to bar the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear weapons launches.“Humans must always maintain sole control over nuclear weapons,” Kai Bird, author of American Prometheus, said in a statement reported by Politico.“This technology is too dangerous to gamble with. This bill will send a powerful signal to the world that the United States will never take the reckless step of automating our nuclear command and control.”In Washington on Thursday, Bird met Ed Markey, the Democratic Massachusetts senator who is attempting to add the AI-nuclear provision to a major defense spending bill.Markey, Politico said, was a friend of Bird’s co-author, the late Tufts University professor Martin J Sherwin.A spokesperson for the senator told Politico Markey and Bird “shared their mutual concerns over the proliferation of artificial intelligence in national security and defense without guardrails, and the risks of using nuclear weapons in south Asia and elsewhere.“They also discussed ways to increase awareness of nuclear issues among the younger set.”J Robert Oppenheimer was the driving force behind US development of the atomic bomb, at the end of the second world war.Bird and Sherwin’s book is now the inspiration for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster starring Cillian Murphy in the title role.The movie opens in the US on Friday – in competition with Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s film about the popular children’s doll.On Friday, Nolan told the Guardian: “International surveillance of nuclear weapons is possible because nuclear weapons are very difficult to build. Oppenheimer spent $2bn and used thousands of people across America to build those first bombs.“It’s reassuringly difficult to make nuclear weapons and so it’s relatively easy to spot when a country is doing that. I don’t believe any of that applies to AI.”Nolan also noted “very strong parallels” between Oppenheimer and AI experts now calling for such technology to be controlled.Nolan said he had “been interested to talk to some of the leading researchers in the AI field, and hear from them that they view this as their ‘Oppenheimer moment’. And they’re clearly looking to his story for some kind of guidance … as a cautionary tale in terms of what it says about the responsibility of somebody who’s putting this technology to the world, and what their responsibilities would be in terms of unintended consequences.”Bird and Sherwin’s biography, subtitled The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, was published in 2008.Reviewing for the Guardian, James Buchan saluted the authors’ presentation of “the cocktails and wire-taps and love affairs of Oppenheimer’s existence, his looks and conversation, the way he smoked the cigarettes and pipe that killed him, his famous pork-pie hat and splayed walk, and all the tics and affectations that his students imitated and the patriots and military men despised.“It is as if these authors had gone back to James Boswell, who said of Dr Johnson: ‘Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.’” More

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      ‘We’re done with the cover-up’: UFO claims to get their day in Congress

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      For decades, US politicians have been reluctant to get involved in the topic of UFOs and aliens.After a series of disclosures in recent months, however, Republicans and Democrats now appear to be lining up to inquire into the question of extraterrestrial life, as the world seems closer than ever to finding out whether we are alone in the universe.Next week, the House oversight committee will hold its first public hearing as part of its investigation into UFOs, weeks after a whistleblower former intelligence official went public with claims that the government has possession of “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles.David Grusch’s allegations about the government harboring alien craft – he has since suggested that the US has also encountered “malevolent” alien pilots – sparked the 26 July hearing, and beyond that, appear to have lit a fire under the Washington establishment.The Republican party has led the initial charge, with a series of claims about extraterrestrial life that, until recently, would have been seen as career-ending.Tim Burchett, the Republican congressman from Tennessee who is co-leading the UFO investigation, declared in early July that alien craft possess technology that could “turn us into a charcoal briquette”, while a Republican colleague suggested that extraterrestrial interlopers could actually be representatives of an ancient civilization.In a briefing on Thursday, Burchett said he and his co-investigator Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican member from Florida, had been “stonewalled” by federal officials when asking about UFOs, and prevented from accessing some “information to prove that they do exist”.“We’ve had a heck of a lot of pushback about this hearing. There are a lot of people who don’t want this to come to light,” he said.Burchett said the US had evidence of technology that “defies all of our laws of physics”, and angrily railed against a “cover-up” by military officials.He added: “We’re gonna get to the bottom of it, dadgummit. Whatever the truth may be. We’re done with the cover-up.”In recent days the government itself has joined the UFO discourse. A White House official claimed that aerial phenomena “have already had an impact on our training ranges”, while a bipartisan group of senators have proposed new legislation to collect and distribute documents on “unidentified anomalous phenomena”.The legitimization of UFO discussion has been propelled in part by claims from US military pilots of UFO encounters, along with leaked military videos showing inexplicable happenings in the sky.Following those revelations, in 2021 the Pentagon released a report on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the term some experts prefer, which found more than 140 instances of UAP encounters that could not be explained. Since then, politicians appear to have moved past some of the stigma around extraterrestrial life.“There’s a sort of critical mass building now,” said Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence (MoD).“And I think even though it’s easy to portray some of the politicians as mavericks, the fact that Republicans and Democrats are lining up, are united in their stance on this … I think we have crossed a line.”Grusch will appear at the hearing on Wednesday, along with David Fravor, a former navy commander who reported seeing a strange object in the sky while on a training mission in 2004, and Ryan Graves, a retired navy pilot who in 2021 told the 60 Minutes news show he had seen unidentified aerial phenomena off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”.As Burchett has investigated the accuracy of Grusch’s claims, he has begun to make some bold declarations of his own. On the Event Horizon podcast, Burchett was asked if had seen “compelling evidence” that the US was seeing things in the sky “that might not be of this earth”.“Oh, 100%. 100%. No question,” he said.Burchett went on to claim that the US has been hiding evidence of UFOs since 1947, and speculated that the extraterrestrial craft could be dangerous.“If they’re out there, they’re out there, and if they have this kind of technology, then they could turn us into a charcoal briquette,” Burchett said.“And if they can travel light years or at the speeds that we’ve seen, and physics as we know it, fly underwater, don’t show a heat trail, things like that, then we are vastly out of our league.”He is not alone.Days earlier, Mike Gallagher, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, hypothesized that UFO encounters “could actually be an ancient civilization that’s just been hiding here and is suddenly showing itself”.Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who, along with Democrats including Kirsten Gillibrand, has maintained a longtime interest in UAPs, has weighed in, as has the Donald Trump disciple Josh Hawley, who claims the US has “downplayed” the number of UFO sightings “for a long, long time”.On Thursday, Luna, the co-lead of the oversight committee investigation, echoed Hawley’s statements, alleging that “the Pentagon and the Department of the Air Force” had been particularly uncooperative.“When I take at face value the numerous roadblocks that we’ve been presented with, it leads me to believe that they are indeed hiding information,” she said.“I look forward to bringing this topic to light, and finding out the truth of what is really out there.”It is doubtful that the hearing on Wednesday will prove conclusively whether or not aliens exist. It is also unlikely the public will find out whether aliens, with their charcoal-briquette capable weaponry, have visited Earth.But still, the desire of politicians, of both sides, to wade into UFO discourse suggests that a corner has been turned, and Pope suggested Republicans’ and Democrats’ willingness to investigate could mean they are beginning to believe.“I think these politicians are doing it because they either know, or more likely strongly suspect that some of this is true,” Pope said.“I don’t think you would go all in – and they are going all in on this – if they weren’t pretty darn sure of themselves. Because the egg on the face if this all turns out to be drones – it would be staggering.” More

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      Journalist unrepentant over 2016 fracas with new Fox News host Jesse Watters

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      The US political journalist Ryan Grim broke the news of allegations against Brett Kavanaugh before his 2018 supreme court justice confirmation, and he was among the first to report on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s initial ascent to Congress.Still, to some, he remains known as the guy who got into a fight at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Jesse Watters, who debuted Tuesday as host of the coveted 8pm Fox News slot made available by Tucker Carlson’s firing.And Grim is OK with that, he said on Thursday, reiterating in an interview with the Guardian that the fisticuffs resulted from his standing up for a colleague whom Watters had previously targeted with an ambush-style, on-camera confrontation.“He’s a classic bully,” Grim said when asked to reflect on the highly publicized scuffle that broke out when – while recording video on a cellphone – he approached Watters to ask about his treatment of Amanda Terkel. “He’s a ‘dish it and can’t take it’ type of bully.“So I don’t mind at all.”At least in some national media circles, Watters’s selection as Fox News’s heir to the primetime broadcasting window once helmed by Carlson provided the occasion to revisit the altercation with Grim.The fight’s prelude dated back to 2009, when Terkel – in her role as then managing editor of ThinkProgress.org – authored a blog criticizing remarks that the star Fox News anchor at the time, Bill O’Reilly, had made about a young woman who was raped and murdered. O’Reilly had also just accepted an invitation to speak at a fundraiser for a rape survivors’ support group.Soon, O’Reilly responded by sending Watters, who served as his producer and comedy-sidekick of sorts, to conduct an ambush interview of Terkel while she vacationed in Virginia. Terkel later asserted that she felt harassed, describing how Watters followed her down the street shouting questions and asking why she had inflicted “pain and suffering” on rape victims as well as their families.Terkel and Grim were working together at HuffPost on the night of the White House dinner in 2016, which they and Watters attended. There, while filming on his cellphone, Grim asked Watters to apologize to Terkel over the episode in Virginia.Watters said he wouldn’t apologize but would greet her if she was brought to him.“She said some nasty shit, though,” Watters said on Grim’s video. “I had to call her out. I had to call her out.“I ambushed her ‘cause O’Reilly told me to get her, ‘cause she said some really bad shit. I know you’re getting video of this. She denigrated some victims, so we had to call her out. That’s what we do.”Grim mockingly replied: “That’s chivalrous of you. So in your chivalry … [you] went out to the middle of Virginia and cornered her.”At that point, Watters struck an incredulous tone as he asked whether Grim was “videotaping” him and told him to go away. Watters then grabbed the phone and threw it, and suddenly “there were a lot of fists flying,” Grim recalled.Bystanders separated the two tuxedo-clad men fairly quickly, but the fracas landed in the news after witnesses provided accounts to various outlets.Grim recalled that Watters went for his phone when he realized he had admitted on the record that “he had chased Terkel all the way out into deep Virginia at the behest of Bill O’Reilly”.“I think that’s the kind of admission that he is fine to make in private but didn’t realize he had accidentally made in public,” Grim said.Grim added that one of the highlights of the fight’s aftermath saw Shepard Smith – then another star anchor on the Republican-friendly Fox News – reach out with an offer of an exclusive interview.“I think that’s a signal that there are, or have been, elements even inside Fox that don’t approve of the direction that it was having,” Grim said.Grim continued that he “kind of like[s]” Watters as the face of Fox’s primetime coverage, “because he’s such a frat boy”.“It’s much harder for that wing of the Republican party to hide behind some salt-of-the-earth vision of itself when the face of it is, like, the lead crown in the frat.”Fox News and Watters have been asked for comment. Neither immediately responded to Grim’s remarks.Grim is now the Intercept’s Washington bureau chief.Watters’s promotion at Fox came after the network struck a $787.5m settlement agreement with Dominion Voting Systems to end a defamation suit over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about electoral fraud causing the former president’s defeat in the 2020 election.Fox has said the firing of Carlson, which opened the door for Watters’s primetime hosting gig, was unrelated to the settlement. Carlson has not commented.Meanwhile, O’Reilly was forced to resign from Fox in 2017 after a series of settlements involving him or the company that stemmed from harassment charges against him. More

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      Judge rejects Trump bid to move hush money case to federal court as legal challenges gather pace – as it happened

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      From 2h agoA judge has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to move his hush money criminal case to federal court, ruling that the former president had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction.US district judge Alvin Hellerstein’s decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season, AP reported.Manhattan prosecutors charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements made to his then fixer, Michael Cohen, for his role in paying $130,000 to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.Trump’s lawyers had argued that the case should be moved from New York state court to federal court because he was being prosecuted for an act under the “color of his office” as president.Judge Hellerstein scoffed at the defense claims, finding that the allegations pertained to Trump’s personal life, not presidential duties that would have merited a move to federal court. He wrote in a 25-page ruling:
      The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President – a cover-up of an embarrassing event.
      Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the President’s official duties.
      Here is a recap of today’s developments:
      The letter to Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith identifying him as a “target” in the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection reportedly listed the federal statutes under which the former president could be charged. The letter mentions three federal statutes: conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under color of law, and tampering with a witness, victim or an informant, according to several sources, citing sources familiar with the matter.
      Donald Trump sought to downplay his legal challenges while railing against special counsel Jack Smith and the justice department, after announcing he had received a letter naming him as the target of the DoJ’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “I didn’t know practically what a subpoena was and grand juries. Now I’m becoming an expert. I have no choice,” he said on Tuesday night. Trump could face a new indictment as early as the end of the week.
      A federal judge has rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in a civil case brought by E Jean Carroll, where a jury found that he sexually abused her and awarded her $5m in damages. US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ruled that the jury did not reach a “seriously erroneous result” and that the 9 May verdict was not a “miscarriage of justice”.
      A judge rejected Donald Trump’s bid to move his hush money criminal case to federal court, ruling that the former president had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction. The decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season.
      Allies of Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis are reportedly pressing for a shake-up of his campaign amid financial pressure and flagging poll numbers. His campaign manager, Generra Peck, is “hanging by a thread”, according to a DeSantis donor who is close to the campaign, after fewer than 10 staffers were laid off last week.
      Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report seen by the Guardian.
      Half a dozen House Republicans would reportedly support a measure to censure George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.
      The Republican-led House in Alabama approved a new congressional map that would increase the percentage of Black voters – but not by enough, said Black lawmakers who called the map an insult to Black Alabamians and the supreme court.
      Wesleyan University announced it would end legacy admissions, after the supreme court struck down affirmative action in the college admission process last month. A small number of schools have ended the practice of legacy admissions, including Johns Hopkins, MIT and Amherst college.
      The department of justice said that it is assessing the situation by the Texas-Mexico border following “troubling reports” that have emerged over Texas troopers’ treatment of migrants.
      The Republican-led House in Alabama approved a new congressional map on Wednesday that would increase the percentage of Black voters – but not by enough, said Black lawmakers who called the map an insult to Black Alabamians and the supreme court.The House of Representatives voted 74-27 to approve the GOP plan, which came after a supreme court opinion last month found lawmakers previously drew districts that unlawfully dilute the political power of its Black residents in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The bill now moves to the Alabama Senate.While Black people make up about 27% of Alabama’s population, only one of the state’s seven districts is majority-Black.The GOP plan does not establish the second majority-Black district sought by plaintiffs who won the supreme court case, instead it increases the percentage of Black voters to 42% in the district, AP reported.Representative Barbara Drummond, speaking during the floor debate, said:
      This is really a slap in the face, not only to Black Alabamians, but to the supreme court.
      “Once again, the state decided to be on the wrong side of history,” Representative Prince Chestnut said.
      Once again the (Republican) super majority decided that the voting rights of Black people are nothing that this state is bound to respect. And it’s offensive. It’s wrong.
      Half a dozen House Republicans would reportedly support a measure to censure George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.House Democrats unveiled a resolution on Monday to formally reprimand Santos for blatantly lying to voters about his life story.Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Anthony D’Esposito, Marc Molinaro, Nick Langworthy, and Max Miller have all said that they would support the Democrats’ resolution, according to an Axios report. With Republicans holding a 10-seat House majority, it could take as few as five GOP defections for the measure to pass.A banal dystopia where manipulative content is so cheap to make and so easy to produce on a massive scale that it becomes ubiquitous: that’s the political future digital experts are worried about in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI).In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, social media platforms were vectors for misinformation as far-right activists, foreign influence campaigns and fake news sites worked to spread false information and sharpen divisions.Four years later, the 2020 election was overrun with conspiracy theories and baseless claims about voter fraud that were amplified to millions, fueling an anti-democratic movement to overturn the election.Now, as the 2024 presidential election comes into view, experts warn that advances in AI have the potential to take the disinformation tactics of the past and breathe new life into them.AI-generated disinformation not only threatens to deceive audiences, but also erode an already embattled information ecosystem by flooding it with inaccuracies and deceptions, experts say.Read the full story here.A judge has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to move his hush money criminal case to federal court, ruling that the former president had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction.US district judge Alvin Hellerstein’s decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season, AP reported.Manhattan prosecutors charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements made to his then fixer, Michael Cohen, for his role in paying $130,000 to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.Trump’s lawyers had argued that the case should be moved from New York state court to federal court because he was being prosecuted for an act under the “color of his office” as president.Judge Hellerstein scoffed at the defense claims, finding that the allegations pertained to Trump’s personal life, not presidential duties that would have merited a move to federal court. He wrote in a 25-page ruling:
      The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President – a cover-up of an embarrassing event.
      Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the President’s official duties.
      The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to weigh in on whether Donald Trump should face charges over the January 6th insurrection.Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has also reportedly developed a relationship with her former boss Donald Trump’s rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.Sanders attended a retreat with prominent DeSantis donors last year, and Axios reports that she has become close to DeSantis’s wife, Casey, since their experiences with cancer in recent years.One senior Republican told the news website:
      Sarah reached out to Casey during her treatments and the same thing happened when Sarah had her experience.
      Sanders, 40, is the country’s youngest governor and her allies believe she is positioning herself for a possible presidency run in 2028 or 2032, the report says.Tensions between Donald Trump and his former press secretary, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have grown over her neutrality in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, according to an Axios report.The report outlines how Sanders’s team told the Trump campaign that she wouldn’t make endorsement until after her first legislative session in Arkansas. That session ended in May.Sanders is among several Republicans who have so far stayed neutral in the presidential primary, but Trump sees her in a different category because he hired her to be his press secretary and endorsed her when she ran for governor in 2021, the report writes.Trump reportedly asked Sanders for her endorsement in a phone call earlier this year and she declined, according to the New York Times. Trump denied the report in March, writing:
      I never asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders for an endorsement. I give endorsements, I don’t generally ask for them. With that being said, nobody has done more for her than I have, with the possible exception of her great father, Mike!
      Three weeks after the NYT story was published, Mike Huckabee, Sanders’s father, publicly endorsed Trump on his TV show.Donald Trump has reportedly been seething about the potential new indictment, as he reached out to his top allies to strategize how they could help defend him against potential criminal charges over his effort to overturn the 2020 election.Trump spoke with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik, according to sources, CNN reported.The former president’s call with Stefanik, who leads the House GOP’s messaging efforts, was described as a “long conversation” where the two went over plans to go on the offense on alleged weaponization of the federal government, the report says.Trump asked things like “Can you believe this?” and used vulgarities to vent his displeasure, Politico reported.Donald Trump’s rivals have largely shied away from criticizing his legal woes, with most of the Republican presidential candidates choosing instead to portray the former president’s pending prosecution as a perversion of justice.Besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, who have long made clear their view that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election should disqualify him from reelection, there was no discernible movement within the former president’s party against him, according to a NBC report.“This could be different,” said Terry Sullivan, who served as campaign manager for Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 GOP presidential bid.
      Now that being said, Mission Impossible 9 could be different than the first eight Mission Impossibles, but it’s unlikely. It’s likely to end the same way the first eight did.
      Trump’s rivals boxed themselves in on the former president, the January 6 insurrection and the criminal charges against him, the report continues.
      That won’t change unless there’s a massive shift in opinion among Republican primary voters, and Trump’s most prominent rivals are in no position to try to lead such a movement because they already have weighed in on the indictments and Jan. 6.
      A group of 200 lawmakers said they have agreed not to intervene if UPS workers go on strike, Reuters reports.The world’s biggest package delivery firm and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have until midnight on 31 July to reach a contract deal covering some 340,000 workers that sort, load and deliver packages in the United States.
      “We are hopeful that both sides can negotiate in good faith and reach a consensus agreement,” the lawmakers said, adding if no deal is reached they have committed to respect the rights of workers “to withhold their labor and initiate and participate in a strike.”
      UPS workers are currently calling for better pay, more full-time jobs and better workplace health and safety conditions.Despite UPS tentatively agreeing to make Martin Luther King Jr Day a holiday and to install ACs in more of its trucks as temperatures rise, the union for UPS workers said that the company had not agreed to all of its demands.Should a strike happen, Bloomberg estimates that the company could lose a staggering $170m a day.For further details on how likely a UPS workers strike is, click here:The department of justice said that it is assessing the situation by the Texas-Mexico border following “troubling reports” that have emerged over Texas troopers’ treatment of migrants.Speaking to CNN, DoJ spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa said, “The department is aware of the troubling reports, and we are working with DHS and other relevant agencies to assess the situation.”Earlier this week, the Houston Chronicle reported email exchanges between a trooper and a superior over alleged mistreatment of migrants crossing the border.The emails alleged that officers working along the border have been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande, and have also told to not give water to migrants, despite scorching temperatures.
      “Due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well,” the trooper wrote, adding, “I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane.”
      A statement released by Abbott’s office on Tuesday pushed back against the allegations, saying:“No orders or directions have been given under Operation Lone Star that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally.”Amid speculation about whether or not Rudy Giuliani has “flipped” on Donald Trump in the federal investigation of the former president’s election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, one former Trump White House insider had a somewhat…dry response.The former New York mayor turned Trump adviser and lawyer might have turned on his boss “Cause they don’t have happy hour up the river”, the former insider said in a message viewed by the Guardian.Reports of Giuliani’s fondness for alcohol are legion. “Up the river” is, according to Collins dictionary, an American idiom meaning to be sent “to or confined in a penitentiary”.Speculation about Giuliani flowered on Tuesday after Trump announced that he had received a letter naming him as a target in the investigation led by the special counsel Jack Smith.CNN said Giuliani “did a voluntary interview with special counsel investigators several weeks back” and “his lawyer does not expect him to be charged”.That lawyer, Ted Goodman, said: “Any speculation that Mayor Rudy Giuliani ‘flipped’ against President Donald Trump is as false as previous lies that America’s Mayor” – Giuliani’s post-9/11 nickname – “was somehow a Russian Agent.“In order to ‘flip’ on President Trump – as so many in the anti-Trump media are fantasising over – Mayor Giuliani would’ve had to commit perjury, because all the information he has regarding this case points to President Trump’s innocence.”Many observers pointed out that Giuliani, whose law licenses have come under review arising from his work for Trump, may not be out of the woods on the other investigation of Trump’s election subversion, in Fulton county, Georgia.Some further reading:The letter identifying Donald Trump as a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection could mean that the former president face a new indictment as early as the end of the week.“A third indictment appears to be forthcoming,” Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes posted on the Lawfare blog, adding:
      It’s reasonable to expect the grand jury to act as early as the end of this week.
      The Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, has announced he will not be running for re-election next year.Wesleyan University announced it would end legacy admissions, after the supreme court struck down affirmative action in the college admission process last month.In a statement on Wednesday, university president Michael Roth said legacies – a practice that favors relatives of alumni – had played a “negligible role” in the school’s admission process for many years. He added:
      Nevertheless, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding affirmative action, we believe it important to formally end admission preference for ‘legacy applicants’.
      Relatives of Wesleyan alumni will continue to be admitted to the school “on their own merits”, Roth said.Legacy admissions came under fire after the nation’s highest court ruled that schools could not give preferential treatment to applicants based on race or ethnicity.A small number of schools have ended the practice, including Johns Hopkins, MIT and Amherst college. More