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Nex Benedict had nonlethal head trauma from school fight and left notes ‘suggestive of self-harm’ before death: autopsy
Nonbinary teen Nex Benedict left handwritten notes “suggestive of self-harm” before dying by suicide, according to the final autopsy result – which found “no lethal trauma” despite head injuries from a school fight a day earlier.
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nypost.com
Election 2024 latest news: Biden poised to raise $25 million at fundraiser with Obama, Clinton
Live updates from the 2024 campaign trail with the latest news on presidential candidates, polls, primaries and more.
9 m
washingtonpost.com
Prattle of sexes: How trash-talking men helped UCLA women reach the Sweet 16
UCLA relies on talented male scout team players to help the Bruins prepare for opponents and fuel their NCAA tournament run.
latimes.com
Zach Bryan doesn’t need country radio. He just needs your heartstrings.
The singer got famous on YouTube. Do his songs still travel in a concert arena?
washingtonpost.com
She made a fairy trail for her autistic son; now it’s a public destination
The tiny wonderland trail in Milburn, N.J., now has volunteers that tend to it, and even its own festival.
washingtonpost.com
Not every student needs algebra 2. UC should be flexible on math requirement
Data science is a worthwhile course for future college students, as is statistics. Such courses, with their real-life applications, make math more appealing.
latimes.com
South Africa’s strong relationship with the U.S. can withstand disagreements
Our history of friendship and cooperation is long, and our differences are principled. We must engage with each other in a constructive manner.
washingtonpost.com
California legislators push law change after ruling against family in Nazi looted art case
California lawmakers will introduce a bill to strengthen state law in favor of Holocaust survivors and others seeking to recover looted artwork and other property.
latimes.com
‘The Bachelor’s Joey Graziadei And Kelsey Anderson Share Their Favorite Happy Couple House Memory: “You’ve Got To Be Creative When You’re In A House”
The happily engaged couple looked back on their "beautiful love story" with Decider.
nypost.com
Rolly Romero loves being hated as boxing’s heel: ‘Makes people uncomfortable’
Love him or hate him, people tune in to watch Romero. 
nypost.com
AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning.
Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images The energy needed to support data storage is expected to double by 2026. You can do something to stop it. In January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its forecast for global energy use over the next two years. Included for the first time were projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. The IEA estimates that, added together, this usage represented almost 2 percent of global energy demand in 2022 — and that demand for these uses could double by 2026, which would make it roughly equal to the amount of electricity used by the entire country of Japan. We live in the digital age, where many of the processes that guide our lives are hidden from us inside computer code. We are watched by machines behind the scenes that bill us when we cross toll bridges, guide us across the internet, and deliver us music we didn’t even know we wanted. All of this takes material to build and run — plastics, metals, wiring, water — and all of that comes with costs. Those costs require trade-offs. None of these trade-offs is as important as in energy. As the world heats up toward increasingly dangerous temperatures, we need to conserve as much energy as we can get to lower the amount of climate-heating gases we put into the air. That’s why the IEA’s numbers are so important, and why we need to demand more transparency and greener AI going forward. And it’s why right now we need to be conscientious consumers of new technologies, understanding that every bit of data we use, save, or generate has a real-world cost. One of the areas with the fastest-growing demand for energy is the form of machine learning called generative AI, which requires a lot of energy for training and a lot of energy for producing answers to queries. Training a large language model like OpenAI’s GPT-3, for example, uses nearly 1,300 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, the annual consumption of about 130 US homes. According to the IEA, a single Google search takes 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, while a ChatGPT request takes 2.9 watt-hours. (An incandescent light bulb draws an average of 60 watt-hours of juice.) If ChatGPT were integrated into the 9 billion searches done each day, the IEA says, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt=hours a year — the amount consumed by about 1.5 million European Union residents. I recently spoke with Sasha Luccioni, lead climate researcher at an AI company called Hugging Face, which provides an open-source online platform for the machine learning community that supports the collaborative, ethical use of artificial intelligence. Luccioni has researched AI for more than a decade, and she understands how data storage and machine learning contribute to climate change and energy consumption — and are set to contribute even more in the future. I asked her what any of us can do to be better consumers of this ravenous technology. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Brian Calvert AI seems to be everywhere. I’ve been in meetings where people joke that our machine overlords might be listening. What exactly is artificial intelligence? Why is it getting so much attention? And why should we worry about it right now — not in some distant future? Sasha Luccioni Artificial intelligence has actually been around as a field since the ’50s, and it’s gone through various “AI winters” and “AI summers.” Every time some new technique or approach gets developed, people get very excited about it, and then, inevitably, it ends up disappointing people, triggering an AI winter. We’re going through a bit of an AI summer when it comes to generative AI. We should definitely stay critical and reflect upon whether or not we should be using AI, or generative AI specifically, in applications where it wasn’t used before. Brian Calvert What do we know about the energy costs of this hot AI summer? Sasha Luccioni It’s really hard to say. With an appliance, you plug it into your socket and you know what energy grid it’s using and roughly how much energy it’s using. But with AI, it’s distributed. When you’re doing a Google Maps query, or you’re talking to ChatGPT, you don’t really know where the process is running. And there’s really no transparency with regard to AI deployment. From my own research, what I’ve found is that switching from a nongenerative, good old-fashioned quote-unquote AI approach to a generative one can use 30 to 40 times more energy for the exact same task. So, it’s adding up, and we’re definitely seeing the big-picture repercussions. Brian Calvert So, in material terms, we’ve got a lot of data, we’re storing a lot of data, we’ve got language models, we’ve got models that need to learn, and that takes energy and chips. What kind of things need to be built to support all this, and what are the environmental real-world impacts that this adds to our society? Sasha Luccioni Static data storage [like thumb drives] doesn’t, relatively speaking, consume that much energy. But the thing is that nowadays, we’re storing more and more data. You can search your Google Drive at any moment. So, connected storage — storage that’s connected to the internet — does consume more energy, compared to nonconnected storage. Training AI models consumes energy. Essentially you’re taking whatever data you want to train your model on and running it through your model like thousands of times. It’s going to be something like a thousand chips running for a thousand hours. Every generation of GPUs — the specialized chips for training AI models — tends to consume more energy than the previous generation. They’re more powerful, but they’re also more energy intensive. And people are using more and more of them because they want to train bigger and bigger AI models. It’s kind of this vicious circle. When you deploy AI models, you have to have them always on. ChatGPT is never off. Brian Calvert Then, of course, there’s also a cooling process. We’ve all felt our phones heat up, or had to move off the couch with our laptops — which are never truly on our laps for long. Servers at data centers also heat up. Can you explain a little bit how they are cooled down? Sasha Luccioni With a GPU, or with any kind of data center, the more intensely it runs, the more heat it’s going to emit. And so in order to cool those data centers down, there’s different kinds of techniques. Sometimes it’s air cooling, but majoritarily, it’s essentially circulating water. And so as these data centers get more and more dense, they also need more cooling, and so that uses more and more water. Brian Calvert We have an AI summer, and we have some excitement and some hype. But we also have the possibility of things scaling up quite a bit. How might AI data centers be different from the data centers that we already live with? What challenges will that present from an ecological or environmental perspective going forward? Sasha Luccioni Data centers need a lot of energy to run, especially the hyperscale ones that AI tends to run on. And they need to have reliable sources of energy. So, often they’re built in places where you have nonrenewable energy sources, like natural gas-generated energy or coal-generated energy, where you flip a switch and the energy is there. It’s harder to do that with solar or wind, because there’s often weather factors and things like that. And so what we’ve seen is that the big data centers are built in places where the grid is relatively carbon intensive. Brian Calvert What kinds of practices and policies should we be considering to either slow AI down or green it up? Sasha Luccioni I think that we should be providing information so that people can make choices, at a minimum. Eventually being able to choose a model, for example, that is more energy efficient, if that’s something that people care about, or that was trained on noncopyrighted data. Something I’m working on now is kind of an Energy Star rating for AI models. Maybe some people don’t care, but other people will choose a more efficient model. Brian Calvert What should I think about before upgrading my data plan? Or why should I hold off on asking AI to solve my kid’s math homework? What should any of us consider before getting more gadgetry or getting more involved with a learned machine? Sasha Luccioni In France, they have this term, “digital sobriety.” Digital sobriety could be part of the actions that people can take as 21st-century consumers and users of this technology. I’m definitely not against having a smartphone or using AI, but asking yourself, “Do I need this new gadget?” “Do I really need to use ChatGPT for generating recipes?” “Do I need to be able to talk to my fridge or can I just, you know, open the door and look inside?” Things like that, right? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it with generative AI.
vox.com
Now Is the Time to Wrestle With Frantz Fanon
Does the patron saint of political violence have anything to teach us today?
theatlantic.com
Black voters, organizers in battleground states anxious about Biden enthusiasm
Black voters in battleground states say they're anxious about President Biden's level of support heading into the general election.
cbsnews.com
King Charles stresses ‘importance of friendship in times of need’ in poignant Easter message as Camilla attends service
The ailing monarch's pre-recorded audio message marks his first public comments since his daughter-in-law Kate Middleton revealed her cancer diagnosis last week.
nypost.com
Bikini-clad Katharine McPhee flaunts abs while celebrating 40th birthday on boat
"It’s been such a magical week! ... I guess turning 29 isn’t so bad," the "American Idol" alum jokingly captioned her bathing suit snaps.
nypost.com
DeSantis Takes Shots at Liberal States With Squatter Crackdown
Pedro Portal/Miami Herald via Getty ImagesFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law Wednesday aiming to crack down on residential squatters in his state by radically shortening the process by which homeowners request the removal of unauthorized people from property.“The squatter scam ends today with my signature on this piece of legislation and the state of Florida will be better for it,” DeSantis said, according to WTVJ. As well as making it simpler to evict squatters, HB 621 also “creates harsh penalties” for people who take part in squatting and “those who encourage squatting and teach others the scam,” DeSantis’ office said in a news release.The law, which comes into effect on July 1, means that homeowners will now be able to “fill out a form, give it to your local sheriff and the sheriff is instructed to go and remove the people who are inhabiting your dwelling illegally,” DeSantis said. Before the bill, squatters were afforded certain rights as tenants that meant a longer process was required to evict them.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
One person seriously injured in terrifying fire near Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC
One person was seriously injured in a terrifying blaze near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. Thursday morning, officials said.
nypost.com
Christine Quinn all smiles in glamorous first public appearance since estranged husband Christian Richard’s arrest
The "Selling Sunset" alum beamed as she posed for photos despite in a burgeoning legal war with the tech entrepreneur over his alleged domestic violence.
nypost.com
Easter shoppers get a bittersweet surprise in their baskets as global cocoa prices soar to 'record highs'
In the wake of unprecedented climate patterns in Africa, the global price of cocoa has soared to record highs, causing a sudden spike in the price of chocolate.
foxnews.com
Trump benefits from an unequal system. Still, he can’t outrun justice.
Yes, the former president has gotten some breaks — but not enough to dodge accountability.
washingtonpost.com
Tank complex that leaked, polluting Pearl Harbor's drinking water, emptied
The U.S. military says it's drained million of gallons of fuel from an underground tank complex that poisoned 6,000 people when it leaked jet fuel into Pearl Harbor's drinking water in 2021.
cbsnews.com
Diddy’s ex-girlfriend Yung Miami accused of transporting ‘pink cocaine’ for him
The City Girls rapper, also known as Caresha Rameka Brownlee, transported the drug known as “pink cocaine” for Combs in April 2023, according to Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones’ $30 million lawsuit against Combs — which was amended on Monday.
nypost.com
Kristin Juszczyk describes having 'imposter syndrome' as fashion designs took off
Kristin Juszczyk, the wife of the San Francisco 49ers fullback, recalled the "whirlwind of change" she underwent during the NFL playoffs as her fashion designs went viral.
foxnews.com
Significance of Michelangelo’s 'David' statue is being diminished by souvenirs, Italian curators say
Since its creation in 1504, Michelangelo's David has been a symbol of Italian culture. Curators are now voicing concerns about the commercialization of the statue.
foxnews.com
How the Yankees’ and Mets’ frugal plans actually could pay off this season
As Opening Day arrives, there’s reason to believe both teams can have strong seasons.
nypost.com
Stop Putin now, or the war is coming your way, Ukraine's leader warns
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells CBS News that without more U.S. help, Ukraine won't be able to stop Putin from pushing his war onto NATO soil.
cbsnews.com
China's Economic Slump Wipes 155 Billionaires off Global Rich List
Despite the slump, China remains top of the list with 814 billionaires, a new report says.
newsweek.com
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns Putin's war could spread to NATO territory
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells CBS News' Charlie D'Agata in an exclusive interview that, without more U.S. help "now," Ukraine won’t be able to stop Vladimir Putin from pushing his war onto NATO soil.
cbsnews.com
New image reveals "twisted" magnetic fields around black hole
Supermassive black holes are believed to have emerged very early in the universe but their creation remains a mystery.
cbsnews.com
Donald Trump, Meme Stock
How the ex-president’s social-media platform became the new Bed Bath & Beyond
theatlantic.com
The Sports Report: Rui Hachimura comes up big against Memphis again
Rui Hachimura, who had a key role in ousting Memphis from playoffs last season, has big game in Lakers' victory.
latimes.com
His job is to interpret the Constitution. Would he rather run the FDA?
Sam Alito is a Supreme Court justice. Why do I get the idea he’d rather run the FDA?
washingtonpost.com
The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse
Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by a cargo ship on March 26. | Scott Olson/Getty Images Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone. Line up a few years’ worth of tragedies and disasters, and the online conversations about them will reveal their patterns. The same conspiracy-theory-peddling personalities who spammed X with posts claiming that Tuesday’s Baltimore bridge collapse was a deliberate attack have also called mass shootings “false flag” events and denied basic facts about the Covid-19 pandemic. A Florida Republican running for Congress blamed “DEI” for the bridge collapse as racist comments about immigration and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott circulated among the far right. These comments echo Trump in 2019, who called Baltimore a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” and, in 2015, blamed President Obama for the unrest in the city. As conspiracy theorists compete for attention in the wake of a tragedy, others seek engagement through dubious expertise, juicy speculation, or stolen video clips. The boundary between conspiracy theory and engagement bait is permeable; unfounded and provoking posts often outpace the trickle of verified information that follows any sort of major breaking news event. Then, the conspiracy theories become content, and a lot of people marvel and express outrage that they exist. Then they kind of forget about the raging river of Bad Internet until the next national tragedy. I’ve seen it so many times. I became a breaking news reporter in 2012, which means that in internet years, I have the experience of an almost ancient entity. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge into the Patapsco River, though, felt a little different from most of these moments for me, for two reasons. First, it was happening after a few big shifts in what the internet even is, as Twitter, once a go-to space for following breaking news events, became an Elon Musk-owned factory for verified accounts with bad ideas, while generative AI tools have superpowered grifters wanting to make plausible text and visual fabrications. And second, I live in Baltimore. People I know commute on that bridge, which forms part of the city’s Beltway. Some of the workers who fell, now presumed dead, lived in a neighborhood across the park from me. The local cost of global misinformation On Tuesday evening, I called Lisa Snowden, the editor-in-chief of the Baltimore Beat — the city’s Black-owned alt-weekly — and an influential presence in Baltimore’s still pretty active X community. I wanted to talk about how following breaking news online has changed over time. Snowden was up during the early morning hours when the bridge collapsed. Baltimore’s X presence is small enough that journalists like her generally know who the other journalists are working in the city, especially those reporting on Baltimore itself. Almost as soon as news broke about the bridge, though, she saw accounts she’d never heard of before speaking with authority about what had happened, sharing unsourced video, and speculating about the cause. Over the next several hours, the misinformation and racism about Baltimore snowballed on X. For Snowden, this felt a bit like an invasion into a community that had so far survived the slow death of what was once Twitter by simply staying out of the spotlight. “Baltimore Twitter, it’s usually not as bad,” Snowden said. She sticks to the people she follows. “But today I noticed that was pretty much impossible. It got extremely racist. And I was seeing other folks in Baltimore also being like, ‘This might be what sends me finally off this app.’” Here are some of the tweets that got attention in the hours after the collapse: Paul Szypula, a MAGA influencer with more than 100,000 followers on X, tweeted “Synergy Marine Group [the company that owned the ship in question] promotes DEI in their company. Did anti-white business practices cause this disaster?” alongside a screenshot of a page on the company’s website that discussed the existence of a diversity and inclusion policy. That tweet got more than 600,000 views. Another far-right influencer speculated that there was some connection between the collapse and, I guess, Barack Obama? I don’t know. The tweet got 5 million views as of mid-day Wednesday. Being online during a tragic event is full of consequential nonsense like this, ideas and conspiracy theories that are inane enough to fall into the fog of Poe’s Law and yet harmful to actual people and painful to see in particular when it’s your community being turned into views. Sure, there are best practices you can follow to try to contribute to a better information ecosystem in these moments. Those practices matter. But for Snowden, the main thing she can do as her newsroom gets to work reporting on the impact of this disaster on the community here is to let time march on. “In a couple days, this terrible racist mob, or whatever it is, is going to be onto something else,” Snowden said. “ Baltimore ... people are still going to need things. Everybody’s still going to be working. So I’m just kind of waiting it out,” she said “But it does hurt.” A version of this story was published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
vox.com
Russian Flotilla Is a Sitting Duck for Ukraine, UK Says
The Dnieper River Flotilla could face the same Ukrainian drone strikes as the Black Sea Fleet, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said.
newsweek.com
Russia May Have Collected More Weapons From North Korea
A massive Russian Antonov An-12 is suspected of helping fuel Moscow's war effort in Ukraine.
newsweek.com
Sam Bankman-Fried faces decades in prison as he’s sentenced today for multi-billion-dollar fraud
The 32-year-old convicted fraudster will learn his fate at a Manhattan federal court hearing set for 9:30 a.m., capping an epic and swift fall from grace.
nypost.com
Stanford student called for Biden's assassination for advancing 'genocide' of Palestinians, classmate claims
Theo Baker, a student at Stanford University, revealed that the debate on campus over the Israel-Hamas war has become extremely hostile, even to President Biden.
foxnews.com
Map Shows Chinese Spy Plane's Pacific Flight Route
The intelligence-gathering aircraft flew the same route for the second time this month.
newsweek.com
Two injured after US Army exercises end in helicopter crash at Fort Carson in Colorado
An AH-64 helicopter with the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade, 4th Infantry Division crashed Wednesday evening during training at Fort Carson in Colorado, leaving two injured.
foxnews.com
Kenan Thompson breaks silence on ‘Quiet on Set’ documentary revelations
The "Saturday Night Live" star recalled his "tough" viewing experience while promoting Nickelodeon's "Good Burger 2" on the "Tamron Hall Show."
nypost.com
How Debit Cards For Migrants Compare to NYC Welfare Benefits
Migrants will get twice as much per week to spend on essential goods.
newsweek.com
Is Biden on track for defeat? The debate, explained
Ian Maule/Getty Images Should we take current polls seriously? Or are there good reasons to expect a Biden comeback? Is Joe Biden in deep reelection trouble, or is there good reason to think he’s headed for a comeback? The question has divided the political world for months. The case that Biden’s on track for defeat is pretty simple: He’s trailed Trump in a large majority of the national and swing state polls conducted since last September. That means it’s been six months with very little good polling news for Biden. If you take the polls seriously, he’s in trouble — and those who fear Trump’s return to power should be very worried indeed. The case for a Biden comeback, on the other hand, goes something like this: It’s still too early for the polls to tell us much, but there are a lot of reasons we might logically expect Biden to do better. After all, the economy has improved. Trump is headed to trial. Biden has a fundraising advantage. Democrats have been doing rather well in special elections, and they exceeded expectations in the 2022 midterms. And eventually, the general election will bring focus from the media and campaigns on a binary choice between Trump and Biden — which means more focus on Trump’s extremism and scandals. That all sounds convincing enough. But the Biden skeptics fire back: Aren’t you just coming up with excuses to explain away the unpleasant reality the polls are clearly showing? Aren’t you just reasoning backward from your belief that Biden should be winning — and ignoring the best evidence, which states that things look pretty dire for him? The case that Biden is in deep trouble Win McNamee/Getty Images President Joe Biden departs the White House March 22, 2024 in Washington, DC. Start with Biden’s low approval: According to FiveThirtyEight’s poll average, Biden has been deeply unpopular since late 2021 — his average approval rating has been in the high 30s or low 40s since then. Since the State of the Union address, Biden’s number has slightly improved — from 38.1 percent on March 7 to 39.3 percent as of March 27, per FiveThirtyEight. But that’s still a very bad approval rating. At this point in Trump’s term, his approval was about 45 percent — more than 5 points better. And, of course, he lost. Trump has led most national polls: An approval rating can’t tell you everything in a two-way race because your opponent may be deeply unpopular too. But the head-to-head poll numbers haven’t been comforting for Biden lately either, since they’ve shown Trump ahead for the past six months. (Biden very recently rose to about a tie in the Economist’s polling average, while Trump still leads by just over 1 point in RealClearPolitics’s average.) Trump leads most swing state polls: Of course, the presidency is decided by the Electoral College, not a national vote. And swing state polling for Biden has been very bad. In Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, Trump has led in every poll tracked by FiveThirtyEight since November, often by sizable margins. If he loses the three states above, Biden would need Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to win. Trump has led in most — but not all — polls in all three states in recent months. Other bad signs: Besides the polls, the skeptics believe there are other reasons to doubt whether Biden will be able to pull it off. Age: Voters have regularly said in polls that Biden’s age is a problem for them. Inflation: It has slowed recently, but voters still may resent hikes in prices and then interest rates that have occurred while Biden was president (even though much of the inflation was caused by factors out of Biden’s control, and he doesn’t directly control interest rates either). International comparisons: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are all extremely unpopular right now (even more so than Biden), suggesting it could just be a rough time to be an incumbent leader in a Western democracy. The case for Joe Biden being the Comeback Kid Win McNamee/Getty Images U.S. President Joe Biden departs the White House on March 19, 2024 in Washington, DC. Start with skepticism about early polls: With so much of the fear that Biden is doomed based on his bad polling, it’s worth noting that the election is still about seven months away. Polling from late March 2016 showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 11 points. Clearly things can change by quite a lot before election day. Instead of early polls, look at recent election results: In 2022, Democrats performed well in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The party held on to the Senate, and the House didn’t see the typical midterm blowout (the “red wave” many predicted) but instead a very close contest Republicans only narrowly won. Democrats have also done quite well in special elections over the past year. Now, don’t get too carried away with this. Democrats’ coalition is now heavily skewed toward college-educated high-engagement voters who are more likely to turn out in off-year elections. Skeptics argue that such an advantage will surely drop in a higher-turnout presidential year, when infrequent voters are more likely to show up. There’s another interesting wrinkle here. Because polls show Biden struggling badly among less-engaged voters, the topline results that he’s losing are effectively based on pollsters’ assumptions about how likely those less-engaged voters are to turn out. Are those assumptions solid? We won’t know until election day. Upcoming campaign and media dynamics may help Biden: Biden comeback believers contend that three main factors will likely help the president in the coming months. An improving economy: Voters have been negative about the economy for years, but their perceptions have improved somewhat in recent months. It’s true that that hasn’t seemed to helped Biden’s poll standing much yet, but perhaps it will take some time to sink in. Trump may become a felon: Trump’s indictments don’t seem to have hurt him up to this point, but polls have regularly shown many voters say they will reconsider supporting him if he’s actually convicted of a crime. His first criminal trial, in the New York hush money case, is set to begin April 15. More attention on Trump and Republicans’ extremism: As the election approaches, a well-funded Democratic campaign and outside group apparatus will spend heavily to remind voters about the threat Trump poses to American democracy and the threat the GOP poses to abortion rights — both issues that helped Democrats triumph in key 2022 races. The mainstream media will increasingly frame the choice before voters as “Trump vs. Biden” as well. Perhaps many of the disgruntled Democrats and tuned-out independents who currently say they won’t vote for Biden will eventually choose the lesser of two evils once Trump’s awfulness is hammered home to them. Can we already see the comeback in polls? Perhaps the strongest point made by the Biden skeptics is that the polls have been quite consistent for quite some time. Sure, they say, you can tell yourself that Biden will bounce back at some point — but those polls keep not budging, so when will it happen? Indeed, I wrote about Biden’s bad polls last April, last September, and last November, and evidence for any comeback in that time has been scant. But some now say we’re seeing our first signs in polls that the comeback is underway. As mentioned, Biden is currently tied with Trump in the Economist’s polling average — in recent months, he’s generally been down by 2 to 3 points. Polls released this week have shown some improvement for him in swing states and nationally, pointing toward a race that’s about tied, not one where Trump has a clear edge. Again, don’t get carried away. It’s too early to say whether this will prove to be a durable trend. But it’s worth keeping in mind that even when Trump has been polling best, the race hasn’t looked like a total blowout. Trump has had, on average, small single-digit leads both nationally and in key swing states. That’s the sort of lead that no candidate can really take for granted. The election was quite close in 2016 and 2020 — so close that any confident prediction about who would win was, in retrospect, overconfident. Given the repeat candidates, it’s reasonable to expect another close election this time around. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
vox.com
Mexico president says Baltimore bridge collapse shows migrants 'do not deserve to be treated as they are'
Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador says the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore shows migrants should be treated better.
1 h
foxnews.com
Judge Offers Skeptical Retort to Hunter Biden Lawyers’ Bid in Tax Case
Kevin Lamarque/ReutersHunter Biden’s legal defense team on Wednesday asked a judge to dismiss the federal tax case against him, arguing that the president’s son has been subjected to a politically motivated prosecution.At a hearing in Los Angeles, U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi pressed Biden’s attorneys to show evidence to support their claims. He said he would likely rule on the motions to dismiss by April 17.Biden was not in attendance at the hearing where his legal team—led by Abbe Lowell—argued that GOP lawmakers and former president Donald Trump had an improper influence on the case, leading to the unraveling of a plea deal last summer, according to the Los Angeles Times. Read more at The Daily Beast.
1 h
thedailybeast.com
Man sentenced to 11 months in prison for threatening phone calls to Pelosi and Mayorkas
A California man who left threatening voicemails to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been sentenced to 11 months in prison
1 h
foxnews.com
Ex-NBA star dismisses Caitlin Clark's chances of scoring in BIG3
Former NBA star Kenyon Martin dismissed any chance of Caitlin Clark being able to score if she decides to take up the BIG3 basketball league's offer.
1 h
foxnews.com
Diddy News Update as More Celebrities Speak Out
After Sean "Diddy" Combs' properties were raided on Monday, celebrities have weighed in—and old Usher interviews have resurfaced.
1 h
newsweek.com
Diddy Paid Instagram Model Jade Ramey as Sex Worker—Court Filing
An amended lawsuit filed against Sean "Diddy" Combs unveils a fresh batch of bombshell allegations.
1 h
newsweek.com