Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company whose cameras are installed in more than 5,000 communities in the U.S., is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches to jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person, allowing police to much more easily identify and track the movements of specific people around the country without a warrant or court order, according to internal Flock presentation slides, Slack chats, and meeting audio obtained by 404 Media.The news turns Flock, already a controversial technology, into a much more invasive tool, potentially able to link a vehicle passing by a camera to its owner and then more people connected to them, through marriage or other association. The new product development has also led to Flock employees questioning the ethics of using hacked data as part of their surveillance product, according to the Slack chats. Flock told 404 Media the tool is already being used by some law enforcement agencies in an early access program.Do you know anything else about Nova or similar tools? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.Flocks new product, called Nova, will supplement license plate data with a wealth of personal information sourced from other companies and the wider web, according to the material obtained by 404 Media. You're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR to person and understand what that context is, link to other people that are related to that person [...] marriage or through gang affiliation, et cetera, a Flock employee said during an internal company meeting, according to an audio recording. Theres very powerful linking. One Slack message said that Nova supports 20 different data sources that agencies can toggle on or off.

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the visual effects studio that practically invented the field as we know it today, revealed how it thinks it will use generative AI in the future, and that future looks really bad.Much of what we understand today as special effects in movies was born at Industrial ILM, which was built to produce many of the iconic shots in Star Wars: A New Hope. Since 1977, through the ages of miniature models, puppeteering, and the bleeding edge of computer generated images, ILM has remained at the forefront of making the impossible come alive on movie screens.

We start this week with Jason and Matthew's story about an AI avatar that testified in court. It might be a sign of things to come. After the break, well, well, well, Meta is developing facial recognition for its smart glasses. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us all about AI in baseball.Listen to the weekly podcast onApple Podcasts,Spotify, orYouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player. 'I Loved That AI:' Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage IncidentWell, Well, Well: Meta to Add Facial Recognition To Glasses After AllThe Simulation Says the Orioles Should Be Good

Nature, Published online: 15 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01514-0Why is recruitment often speedier in industry? Julie Gould investigates what the two sectors can learn from each other in the race to source top talent.

Nature, Published online: 15 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01518-wDirected evolution in the laboratory creates an editing tool that outperforms classic CRISPR systems.

Nature, Published online: 15 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01496-zTreatment seems to have been effective, but it is not clear whether such bespoke therapies can be widely applied.

Nature, Published online: 15 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01590-2The highs and lows of looking for the one during a PhD. Plus, mice with a human gene grow bigger-than-usual brains and reptiles might have evolved 35 million years earlier than we thought.

Nature, Published online: 15 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01498-xThe sacs grew to roughly 2 centimetres wide and could be used to study early pregnancy.

If you make a single mistake against Temwa Chawinga and the Current, you're likely to get punished. That and more in ESPN's NWSL Power Rankings.

Ajax manager Francesco Farioli has said he has no regrets despite his side finishing as runners-up in the Eredivisie in one of the biggest title collapses in history.

Marco Reus scored twice, including the game-tying free kick in the 87th minute as the LA Galaxy earned a 2-2 tie with rival LAFC on Sunday night in Carson, California.

Inter Miami CF captain Lionel Messi urged the team to stay strong and remain united after losing 3-0 to in-state rival Orlando City SC at Chase Stadium on Sunday night.

The Oklahoma City Thunder rolled into the Western Conference finals after beating the Nuggets 125-93 in Game 7 on Sunday.

by Tim Golden Leer en espaol. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. In what could be a significant escalation of U.S. pressure on Mexico, the Trump administration has begun to impose travel restrictions and other sanctions on prominent Mexican politicians whom it believes are linked to drug corruption, U.S. officials said.So far, two Mexican political figures have acknowledged being banned from traveling to the United States. But U.S. officials said they expect more Mexicans to be targeted as the administration works through a list of several dozen political figures who have been identified by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as having ties to the drug trade.The list includes leaders of President Claudia Sheinbaums governing party, several state governors and political figures close to her predecessor, former President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, the U.S. officials said. They insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive policy plans.The governor of the Mexican state of Baja California, Marina del Pilar vila, confirmed that she and her husband, a former congressman, were told their U.S. visas were revoked because of a situation involving her husband. The fact that the State Department has cancelled my visa does not mean that I have committed something bad, she said at a news conference on Monday.Sheinbaum said her government had asked U.S. officials to explain why vila was stripped of her visa but had been told that such matters are private and no further information was given. The visa actions represent the latest political challenge for the new Mexican leader and her leftist National Regeneration Movement, known as Morena. Despite the countrys historic sensitivity to any hint of U.S. meddling, Sheinbaum has thus far bolstered her support at home by asserting Mexicos sovereignty in discussions with President Donald Trump while also moving to meet his demands for action against the biggest traffickers.Mexican journalists reported that U.S. immigration officials also pulled the visa of another border-state governor, Amrico Villarreal of Tamaulipas, an assertion that the governors spokesperson dismissed as unconfirmed. (Villarreal has been frequently accused of having ties to drug trafficking, which he has denied.) Last month, the mayor of that states second-largest city, Matamoros, was stopped from crossing the border into Brownsville, Texas, but he, too, insisted he had not been formally stripped of his visa. A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that visa records are confidential under U.S. law.Three U.S. officials said the visa actions will likely in some cases be accompanied by Treasury Department sanctions that block individuals from conducting business with U.S. companies and freeze financial assets they have in the United States. vila said that she did not have any U.S. bank accounts and faced no such sanction.A spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment on the sanctions plan. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller (Tom Brenner/The Washington Post/Getty Images) When the administration imposed tariffs on Mexico in early March, it asserted that the countrys government had granted safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.As part of what it has described as an all-out fight against fentanyl and other illegal drugs, the administration has designated some of the biggest Mexican trafficking gangs as terrorist organizations and explored the possibility of unilateral U.S. military actions against them, officials said.The review of Mexican drug corruption was initiated by a small White House team that requested information from law enforcement agencies and the U.S. intelligence community about Mexican political, government and military figures with criminal ties.Officials said the group has been shaping the administrations security policy with Mexico under the leadership of a deputy White House homeland security adviser, Anthony Salisbury. It is overseen by the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment in response to questions about the groups role in initiating the travel sanctions.One official familiar with the teams list said it overlaps with a file of about 35 Mexican officials that was compiled by Drug Enforcement Administration investigators in 2019, after Lpez Obrador began shutting down Mexicos cooperation with the United States in counterdrug programs. That earlier effort sought to identify Mexican government figures who could be criminally prosecuted for aiding drug traffickers. It led to the 2019 indictment in the U.S. of the countrys former security chief, Genaro Garca Luna, and his conviction on drug charges five years later in a New York federal court.The two former DEA officials in Mexico City who oversaw the compilation of the 2019 list, Terrance Cole and Matthew Donahue, also proposed that the State Department cancel the U.S. visas of some of the Mexican political figures named on it. Senior U.S. diplomats rejected that proposal.Cole is now awaiting Senate confirmation as the Trump administrations new DEA administrator.Some current and former U.S. officials expressed concerns about the latest White House-led plan. They noted that the standard of proof required for both visa cancellations and Treasury sanctions is well below that of a criminal trial, which could encourage proponents of the measures to act on what might be less-than-solid information.Officials said the visa actions were being taken under Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which stipulates that noncitizens can be found ineligible for entry to the United States if the government knows or has reason to believe that the foreigner is or has been a knowing aider, abettor, assister, conspirator or colluder with others in the illicit trafficking of illegal drugs. The law also allows the State Department to cancel the visas of relatives of a sanctioned official who may have benefited from their illicit gains. One U.S. official said that while the visa withdrawals might send a powerful signal of the United States new willingness to challenge Mexican corruption, they could also stir new conflict between the two governments.We should be using all the resources of the government to go after these people, the official said, referring to corrupt Mexican officials. But the bigger question is: Does this work with President Sheinbaum? Are you going to lose an opportunity now with a Mexican government that has been very compliant on the drug front?A former Mexican ambassador to Washington, Arturo Sarukhaan, said further visa actions against prominent figures in Sheinbaums party would make it hard for her to continue claiming a good relationship with the United States despite Trumps often openly confrontational tone.But at the same time, Sarukhaan added, it gives her a nationalistic president with a very chauvinistic party behind her a perfect excuse to say that everything bad thats happening in Mexico with the economy and everything else is because of U.S. imperialism.Lpez Obrador, who came to power in 2018, had promised to fight corruption as never before. Instead, he presided over an administration that denied having any corruption problem in its own ranks even as journalists produced report after report that officials close to the president and even his own sons were engaged in profiteering and graft.Sheinbaum has struck a different tone. In a message to a Morena party congress on May 4, she warned the faithful about the dangers of cronyism, nepotism and corruption.All members of Morena should conduct themselves with honesty, humility and simplicity, she said. There cannot be any collusion with crime whether organized or white collar. Correction May 16, 2025: This story originally misstated how much time elapsed between Genaro Garca Lunas indictment and his conviction. They were five years apart, not three.

by Jesse Coburn ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Kennell Staten saw Walker Courts as his best path out of homelessness, he said. The complex had some of the only subsidized apartments he knew of in his adopted hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, so he applied to live there again and again. But while other people seemed to sail through the leasing process, his applications went nowhere. Staten thought he knew why: He is gay. The property manager had made her feelings about that clear to him, he said. She said I was too flamboyant, he remembered, that its a whole bunch of older people staying there and they would feel uncomfortable seeing me coming outside with a dress or skirt on.So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someones sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. I went through pure hell just to get turned away, Staten said. (The property manager disputed Statens account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.) Statens complaint is one of hundreds impacted by a major retreat in the federal governments decadeslong fight against housing discrimination and segregation, according to interviews with 10 HUD officials. Those federal staffers, along with state officials, attorneys and advocates across the country, described a dismantling of federal fair housing enforcement, which has been slowed, constrained or halted at every step. The investigative process has been hobbled. The agency is withholding discrimination charges that HUD officials say should already have been issued. Those accused of housing discrimination appear newly emboldened not to cooperate with the agency. And at least 115 federal fair housing cases have been halted or closed entirely since Trump took office, with hundreds more cases in jeopardy, HUD officials estimate. These changes raise questions about the future of one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement, which advocates see as urgently needed today amid a historic housing shortage and rising complaints about housing discrimination. Itll give free rein to companies, to states, to governments to take advantage of people, to refuse to respect their rights, without fear of response from the government. They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want, said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. The civil rights laws that people marched for and fought for and died for, that Congress passed and at least sensibly expects to be enforced, thats just not happening right now. Its not happening. And people are really being harmed by it.Asked to comment on the findings in this story, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement: HUD is committed to rooting out discrimination and upholding the Fair Housing Act. ProPublica continues to cherry pick examples to further an activist narrative rather than report the facts. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want, said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. (Alyssa Schukar for ProPublica) For many victims of housing discrimination, HUDs Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has long been the best path to winning justice. Recent investigations by the office and its state and local partners have led to millions of dollars in relief for victims and reforms from landlords, mortgage lenders and local governments. When a California city began requiring property owners to evict tenants if the county sheriffs department said they had engaged in criminal activity regardless of whether they were convicted it was a HUD investigation that led to a nearly $1 million settlement and a repeal of the ordinance. (The city did not admit liability.) The agency also secured a $300,000 settlement for a mother, daughter and the daughters boyfriend in Oklahoma who were allegedly harassed and assaulted by neighbors because the boyfriend was Black, to which the landlord responded by trying to evict the mother. (A representative for the property ownership company said company leadership has changed since the allegations.)Such victories may be rare in the next four years.We are being gutted right now, said one agency official, who, like others, requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. And it feels like its not even the beginning. The Fair Housing Offices staff of roughly 550 full-time employees is set to fall by more than a third through the administrations federal worker buyout program, according to a HUD meeting recording obtained by ProPublica. Internal projections that have circulated widely among HUD staffers suggest far deeper cuts could follow.Those accused of housing discrimination seem to have taken notice. HUD officials described an increase in defendants ignoring correspondence from investigators or even copying Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency in their communication with HUD, seemingly in hopes the cost-cutting department will take their side.For them to face a consequence, they will need to be brought through a litigation process, which requires expenditure of litigation from the department, and they know that we dont have those resources anymore, one HUD official said. They also feel emboldened that this administration will not consider the things that they are doing to be illegal.Some defendants have been more explicit about this. In one case, a midwestern city which had allegedly allowed local politicians to block affordable housing in white neighborhoods asked HUD officials if the agency still had the backing to pursue the case if the city walked away from the negotiating table, one official said. In another case, a public housing authority, also in the Midwest, rescinded a six-figure settlement it had offered two days prior, citing Trumps newly issued executive order attacking disparate-impact liability. The housing authority had allegedly favored white applicants and denied applicants with even modest criminal records. HUD spent years building the case; it crumbled in 48 hours. (HUD officials shared details on these and other cases on the condition that ProPublica not name the parties or locations, as the deliberations are private.)Without the support of agency leadership, HUD is in a weaker negotiating position, dimming the prospects of major settlements or reforms. In another case involving a public housing authority, this one on the East Coast, HUD is considering settling for no monetary penalty although it would not have accepted less than $1 million under the prior administration, officials said. HUD found the housing authority excluded disabled applicants and that some of its buildings had tenants who were disproportionately white (which the authority has denied).When settlement negotiations collapse, HUD regularly issues charges of discrimination, akin to filing a lawsuit. Four months into Joe Bidens presidency, the agency had charged at least eight cases and announced major steps in another four. In the second Trump presidency, HUD has not filed a single charge of housing discrimination, officials said.Its not for a lack of credible complaints, HUD officials say. There are dozens stuck in limbo at the agencys Office of General Counsel, HUD officials estimated, including several where officials had conducted lengthy investigations and determined a civil rights law had been violated. One such complaint involves a New York woman who said she was sexually harassed for years by a maintenance worker in her building. The worker allegedly grabbed her breasts and told her that to receive repairs she would have to call him after hours allegations that HUD officials found to be credible. But Trump appointees have not allowed them to file a charge, officials said.Lovett, the HUD spokesperson, said that the Department is preparing multiple charges that will be issued within the next week against individuals who we believe violated the Fair Housing Act. She did not respond to a request for details about those charges.Many of the cases halted by HUD involve claims of housing discrimination because of someones sexual orientation or gender identity. Those appear to have been undermined by Trumps defending women executive order, issued on his first day in office, which eliminated executive branch recognition of transgender people. Another executive order declaring English the countrys official language has paralyzed cases involving the requirement that housing providers who receive federal funds try to reach people with limited English proficiency. Other cases now in peril involve environmental justice, like disputes over the construction of pollution-emitting factories in poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. Race-based discrimination cases could be next on the chopping block, given the administrations campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, some HUD officials fear.Previously there were many channels through which the public could file housing discrimination complaints to HUD. In March, the agency shut down all but one of them (with limited exceptions), citing staffing reductions. Now complaint hotlines and inboxes go unmonitored, with answering machines informing callers: The number you reached is no longer in use.Investigations have been thwarted. Staffers can no longer travel to look for witnesses, as staff credit cards now have $1 spending limits. Agency attorneys must seek approval from a Trump appointee for basic tasks, such as issuing subpoenas, taking depositions, assisting with settlement discussions and even merely speaking to other attorneys in and outside government. As that approval seems to rarely come, investigations languish, HUD officials said. Even routine settlements now require approval from a political appointee, exacerbating the case backlog and delaying relief for victims, officials said.The dysfunction has at times taken more mundane forms. For around two weeks in March, the Fair Housing Offices work slowed to a crawl after DOGE canceled, without notice, a contract that had enabled staffers to quickly send certified mail to people involved in cases, according to officials and federal contracting data. It was a crucial resource the office mails tens of thousands of documents each year, and regulations require some correspondence to be certified. Without the contract, staff had to spend their days stuffing envelopes themselves. The contract was worth only around $220,000. In recent years, HUDs annual discretionary budget has topped $70 billion.Compliance reviews and discretionary investigations have also been affected. Typically that involves examining the policies and practices of developers, public housing authorities and other recipients of HUD funding to ensure that they abide by civil rights laws. Officials said such efforts have all but ceased, including an investigation into a housing authority that appeared to have a disproportionately low number of Latino tenants and applicants compared to the surrounding area. Larger, systemic investigations are similarly on ice.The apparent retreat in fair housing enforcement extends beyond HUD. At the Department of Justice, which prosecutes many fair housing cases, staffers received a draft of the housing sections new mission statement, which omitted any mention of the Fair Housing Act. (The DOJ declined to comment.) At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump appointee Russ Vought has sought to vacate a settlement with a company called Townstone Financial, which CFPB alleged had effectively discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. The agency is now proposing to return the settlement funds to the company. CFPB abused its power, used radical equity arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them, Vought has said to explain the decision. (CFPB did not respond to a request for comment. Townstones CEO said that he welcomed the move to vacate the settlement and that the prior allegations were meritless.)The federal governments fair housing efforts are supported by a broad ecosystem of local nonprofits. They, too, have been destabilized. In February, HUD and DOGE canceled 78 grants to local fair housing organizations, saying each one no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. The funding represented a minuscule fraction of HUDs budget but was essential to grant recipients. That includes groups like Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Greater Cincinnati, which was forced to pause investigations into racist mortgage lending practices and apartment buildings that may flout accessibility laws, according to Executive Director Elisabeth Risch. Four of the organizations filed a class-action lawsuit, arguing HUD and DOGE had no authority to withhold funding approved by Congress. The litigation is ongoing.Many states do not have their own substantial fair housing laws, leaving little recourse for housing discrimination victims in large swaths of the country if HUDs retreat continues. In the state of Missouri, HUD was it for housing protections, said Kalila Jackson, an attorney in St. Louis. Its a terrifying situation.Fighting housing discrimination was once seen as so imperative that President Lyndon Johnson described the Fair Housing Act as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. With this bill, the voice of justice speaks again, he said when signing the legislation. It proclaims that fair housing for all all human beings who live in this country is now a part of the American way of life. But advocates and HUD officials say that ambition never became a reality. The fair housing laws were never fully implemented, said Erin Kemple, a vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance. If you look at segregation throughout the country, it is still very high in most places. And the Fair Housing Office has been chronically understaffed and underfunded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The office has long struggled to clear its docket. In recent years, segregation has been on the rise by some measures. One study found that most major metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than they had been in 1990. Another found that the Black homeownership rate is lower now than it was at the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And more housing discrimination complaints were filed in 2023 than in any other year since the National Fair Housing Alliance began tracking the figures three decades ago.Some advocates fear that a four-year federal retreat from the issue could send the country sliding back toward the pre-civil rights era, when landlords and mortgage lenders could freely reject applicants because of their race, and when federal agencies, local governments and real estate brokers could maintain policies that perpetuated extreme levels of segregation.HUD officials interviewed by ProPublica echoed those concerns, foreseeing a growing national underclass of poor renters suffering discrimination with little hope of redress. They can always file lawsuits, but, for those at the bottom of the housing market, costly litigation is hardly an option. Even if todays policies are undone by future administrations, there will be at least four years in which it may become easier for local zoning boards to block affordable housing, for mortgage lenders to retreat from nonwhite neighborhoods, and for developers to flout accessibility requirements in new buildings, HUD officials fear. The consequences of those changes could stretch far into the future. Housing cycles are long, one HUD official said. This decimation will set us back for another several decades.April is Fair Housing Month, when HUD usually announces high-profile cases and holds events celebrating the Fair Housing Act. This April came and went without fanfare. HUD Secretary Scott Turner did release a two-minute video, in which he vowed to uphold the Fair Housing Act so every American has the opportunity to achieve the American dream of homeownership. He added: A more fair and free housing market is truly part of President Trumps golden age of America.Beyond that, Turner has had little to say about housing discrimination or segregation, beyond weakening a measure known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. HUD even eliminated the Fair Housing Offices old website. The URL now redirects to HUDs homepage, which features a photo of a suburban cul-de-sac with a heavenly sunset behind it and a quote from Turner, a former NFL player and Baptist pastor.God blessed us with this great nation, it reads. Together, we can increase self-sufficiency and empower Americans to climb the economic ladder toward a brighter future.

by Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the countrys Cabinet ministers at his agencys headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk.Starlink, Musks satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambias communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the governments review of Starlinks license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbis office to intervene.Musks Department of Government Efficiency loomed over the conversation. The administration had already begun freezing foreign aid projects, and early in the meeting, Cromer, a Biden appointee, said something that rattled Gambian officials in the room. She listed the ways that the U.S. was supporting the country, according to two people present and contemporaneous notes, noting that key initiatives like one that funds a $25 million project to improve the electrical system were currently under review. Jabbis top deputy, Hassan Jallow, told ProPublica he saw Cromers message as a veiled threat: If Starlink doesnt get its license, the U.S. could cut off the desperately needed funds. The implication was that they were connected, Jallow said. In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under maximum pressure to yield.In mid-March, Cromer escalated the campaign by writing to Gambias president with an important request. That day, a contentious D.C. meeting between Musk employees and Jabbi had ended in an impasse. She urged the president to circumvent Jabbi and facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations, according to a copy of the letter obtained by ProPublica. Jabbi told confidantes he felt the ambassador was trying to get him fired. Lamin Jabbi, first image, head of Gambias communications ministry, and Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia (Via the Facebook pages of Gambias Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, and the U.S. Embassy in Banjul, Gambia) The saga in Gambia is the starkest known example of the Trump administration wielding the U.S. governments foreign policy apparatus to advance the business interests of Musk, a top Trump adviser and the worlds richest man.Since Trumps inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show.As the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, U.S. diplomats have pressed governments to fast-track licenses for Starlink and arranged conversations between company employees and foreign leaders. In cables, U.S. officials have said that for their foreign counterparts, helping Starlink is a chance to prove their commitment to good relations with the U.S.In one country last month, the U.S. embassy bragged that Starlinks license was approved despite concerns it wasnt abiding by rules that its competitors had to follow.If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption, said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. Because it is corruption. Helping U.S. businesses has long been part of the State Departments mission, but former ambassadors said they sought to do this by making the positive case for the benefits of U.S. investment. When seeking deals for U.S. companies, they said they took care to avoid the appearance of conflicts or leaving the impression that punitive measures were on the table.Ten current and former State Department officials said the recent drive was an alarming departure from standard diplomatic practice because of both the tactics used and the person who would benefit most from them. I honestly didnt think we were capable of doing this, one official told ProPublica. That is bad on every level. Kenneth Fairfax, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the global push for Musk could lead to the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a form of crony capitalism.The Washington Post previously reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats to help Starlink so it can beat its Chinese and Russian competitors. Multiple countries, including India, have sped up license approvals for Starlink to try to build goodwill in tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, the Post reported.ProPublicas reporting provides a detailed picture of what that push has looked like in practice. After Gambias ambassador to the U.S. declined an interview about Starlink a topic seen as highly sensitive given Musks position ProPublica reporters traveled to the capital, Banjul, to piece together the events. This account is based on internal State Department documents and interviews with dozens of current and former officials from both countries, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.In response to detailed questions, the State Department issued a statement celebrating Starlink. Starlink is an America-made product that has been a game changer in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity, a spokesperson wrote. Any patriotic American should want to see an American companys success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors. Cromer and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the office of the president of Gambia. Jabbi made Jallow available to discuss the situation.During the Biden administration, State Department officials worked with Starlink to help the company navigate bureaucracies abroad. But the agencys approach appears to have become significantly more aggressive and expansive since Trumps return to power, according to internal records and current and former government officials.Foreign leaders are acutely aware of Musks unprecedented position in the government, which he has used to help rewrite U.S. foreign policy. After Musk spent at least $288 million on the 2024 election, Trump gave the billionaire a powerful post in the White House. In mere months, Musks team has directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, canceled billions of dollars in programs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which supported humanitarian projects around the world. African nations have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts.At the same time, Musk continues to run Starlink and the rest of his corporate empire. In past administrations, government ethics lawyers carefully vetted potential conflicts of interest. Though Trump once said that we wont let him get near conflicts, the White House has also suggested Musk is responsible for policing himself. The billionaire has waved away criticisms of the arrangement, saying Ill recuse myself if conflicts arise. My companies are suffering because Im in the government, Musk said.In a statement, the White House said Musk has nothing to do with deals involving Starlink and that every administration official follows ethical guidelines. For the umpteenth time, President Trump will not tolerate any conflicts of interest, spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email.Executives at Starlink have seized the moment to expand. An April State Department cable to D.C. obtained by ProPublica quoted a Starlink employee describing the companys approach to securing a license in Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in Africa that hosts an American military base: Were pushing from the top and the bottom to ram this through. The headquarters of Gambias Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, a Cabinet agency headed by Lamin Jabbi (Brett Murphy/ProPublica) Musk entered the White House at a pivotal moment for Starlink. When the service launched in 2020, it had a novel approach to internet access. Rather than relying on underground cables or cell towers like traditional telecom companies, Starlink uses low-orbiting satellites that let it provide fast internet in places its competitors had struggled to reach. Expectations for the startup were sky high. Bullish Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that by 2040, Starlink would have up to 364 million subscribers worldwide more than the current population of the U.S. Starlink quickly became a central pillar of Musks fortune. His stake in Starlinks parent company, SpaceX, is estimated to be worth about $150 billion of his roughly $400 billion net worth. Although the company says its user base has grown to over 5 million people, it remains a bit player compared to the largest internet providers. And the satellite internet market is set to become more competitive as well-funded companies launch services modeled on Starlink. Jeff Bezos Project Kuiper, a unit of Amazon, has said it expects to start serving customers later this year. Satellite upstarts headquartered in Europe and China arent far behind either.They want to get as far and as fast as they can before Amazon Kuiper gets online, said Chris Quilty, a veteran space industry analyst. In internal cables, State Department officials have said they are eager to help Musk get ahead of foreign satellite companies. Securing licenses in the next 18 months is critical for Starlink due to the growing competition, one cable said last month. Senior diplomats have written that they hope to give Musks company a first-mover advantage. Africa represents a lucrative prize. Much of the continent lacks reliable internet. Success in Africa could mean dominating a market with the fastest-growing population on earth. A technician mounts a Starlink satellite dish on a house in Niamey, Niger. (Boureima Hama/AFP/Getty Images) As of last November, Starlink had reportedly launched in 15 of Africas 54 countries, but it was beginning to spark a backlash. Last year, Cameroon and Namibia cracked down on Musks company for allegedly operating in their countries illegally. In South Africa where Starlink has so far failed to get a license Musk exacerbated tensions by publicly accusing the government of anti-white racism. Since Trump won the election, at least five African countries have granted licenses to Starlink: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho and Chad.Now Musks campaign of cuts has given him leverage inside the State Department. A Trump administration memo that leaked to the press last month proposed closing six embassies in Africa. The Gambian embassy was on the list of proposed cuts.An 8-year-old democracy, Gambias 2.7 million residents live on a sliver of land once used as a hub in the transatlantic slave trade. For two decades until 2017, the nation was ruled by a despot who had his opponents assassinated and plundered public funds to buy himself luxuries like a Rolls-Royce collection and a private zoo. When the dictator was ousted, the economy was in tatters. Today Gambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half the country living on less than $4 a day.In this fragile environment, the telecom industry that Jabbi oversees is vitally important to Gambian authorities. According to the government, the sector provides at least 20% of the countrys tax revenue. Ads for the countrys multiple internet providers are ubiquitous, painted onto dozens of public works parks, police booths, schools. Its unclear why Starlinks efforts in Gambia, a tiny market, have been so intense. Banjul, the capital of Gambia, during New Years celebrations (Muhamadou Bittaye/AFP/Getty Images) Cromers efforts on behalf of the company started under the Biden administration, as she documented last December in a cable sent back to Washington. Last spring, Starlink began the process of securing necessary approvals from a local utilities regulator and the Gambian communications agency. The utilities regulator wanted Starlink to pay an $85,000 license fee, which the company felt was too expensive. Cromer spoke to local officials, who then pressured the regulator to remove this unnecessary barrier to entry, the ambassador wrote.Gambian supporters of Starlink felt that its product would be a boon for consumers and for economic growth in the country, where internet service remains unreliable and slow. The ripple effects could be extraordinary, Cromer said in the December cable, contending it could enable telehealth and improve education. Opponents argued that local internet providers were one of Gambias few stable sources of jobs and infrastructure investments. If Starlink killed off its competition and then jacked up its prices in Nigeria, the company announced last year it would suddenly double its fees authorities could have little leverage to manage the fallout. When Musk refused to turn on Starlink in part of Ukraine during the war there, it heightened concerns about handing control of internet access to the mercurial billionaire, industry analysts said. One Musk tweet about foreign regulators ability to police his company caught the attention of Gambian critics: They can shake their fist at the sky, Musk said in 2021.The ultimate authority for granting Starlink a license lies with Jabbi, an attorney who spent years in the local telecom sector. Gambian telecom companies that dont want competition from Musk see Jabbi as an ally. Jallow, Jabbis top deputy, told ProPublica that the ministry is not opposed to Starlink operating in Gambia. But he said Jabbi is doing due diligence to ensure laws and regulations are being followed before opening up the country to a consequential change. After Trumps inauguration, Jabbis position pitted him against not only Starlink but also the U.S. government. In the weeks after the February meeting where Cromer reminded Jabbi about the tenuous state of American funding to his country, the ambassador told other diplomats that getting Starlink approved was a high priority, according to a Western official familiar with her comments.The stance surprised some of Cromers peers. Cromer had spent her career at USAID before President Joe Biden appointed her as ambassador. Her tenure in Gambia often focused on human rights and democracy building.In March, when Jabbi and Jallow traveled to D.C. to attend a World Bank summit, the State Department helped arrange a series of meetings for them. The first, on March 19, was with Starlink representatives including Ben MacWilliams, a former U.S. diplomat who leads the companys expansion efforts in Africa. The second was with U.S. government officials at the State Departments headquarters.The meeting with the company quickly became contentious. Huddled in a conference room at the World Bank, MacWilliams accused Jabbi of standing in the way of his nations progress and harming ordinary Gambians, according to Jallow, who was in the meeting, and four others briefed on the event. We want our license now, Jallow recalled MacWilliams saying. Why are you delaying it? The conversation ended in a stalemate. In the hours that followed, Starlink and the U.S. governments campaign intensified in a way that underscored the degree of coordination between the two parties. The company told Jabbi it would cancel his scheduled D.C. meeting with State Department officials because there was no more need, Jallow said. The State Department meeting never happened. Instead, 4,000 miles away in Gambias capital, Cromer would try an even more aggressive approach.That same day, Cromer had already met with Gambias equivalent of a commerce secretary to lobby him to help pave the way for Starlink. Then she was informed about the disappointing meeting Starlink had had in D.C., according to State Department records. By days end, Cromer had sent a letter to the nations president.I am writing to seek your support to allow Starlink to operate in The Gambia, the letter opened. Over three pages, the ambassador described her concerns about Jabbis agency and listed the ways that Gambians could benefit from Starlink. She also said the company had satisfied conditions set by Jabbis predecessor.I respectfully urge you to facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations in The Gambia, Cromer concluded. I look forward to your favorable response. In the weeks since, Jabbi has refused to budge. The U.S. governments efforts have continued. In late April, Gambias attorney general met in D.C. with senior State Department officials, according to a person familiar with the matter, where they again discussed the Starlink issue. Diplomats were troubled by how the pressure campaign could hurt Americas image overseas. This is not Iran or a rogue African state run by a dictator this is a democracy, a natural ally, said another senior Western diplomat in the region, noting that Gambia is a prime partner of the West in United Nations votes. You beat up the smallest and the best boy in the class.Gambia is not the only country being leaned on. Since Trump took office, embassies around the world have sent a flurry of cables to D.C. documenting their meetings with Starlink executives and their efforts to cajole developing countries into helping Musks business. The cables all describe a problem similar to what happened in Gambia: The company has struggled to win a license from local regulators. In some countries, ambassadors reported, their work appears to be yielding results. (The embassies and their host countries did not respond to requests for comment.)The U.S. embassy in Cameroon wrote that the country could prove its commitment to Trumps agenda by letting Starlink expand its presence there. In the same missive, embassy officials discussed the impact of U.S. aid cuts and deportations and cited a humanitarian official who was reckoning with Americas shifting foreign policy: They may not be happy with what they see, but they are trying to adapt as best they can. In Lesotho, where embassy officials had spent weeks trying to help Starlink get a license, the company finalized a deal after Trump imposed 50% tariffs on the tiny landlocked country. Lesotho officials told embassy staff they hoped the license would help in their urgent push to reduce the levies, according to Mother Jones. A major multinational company complained that Starlink was getting preferential treatment, embassy documents obtained by ProPublica show, since Musks firm had been exempted from requirements its competitors still had to follow. In cables sent from the U.S. embassy in Djibouti this spring, State Department officials recounted their meetings with the company and pledged to continue working with Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions. In Bangladesh, U.S. diplomats pressed Starlinks case early and often with local officials, partnered with Starlink to build an educational strategy for their counterparts and helped arrange a conversation between Musk and the nations head of state, according to a recent cable. The embassys work started under Biden but bore fruit only after Trump took office.Their efforts resulted in Bangladesh approving Starlinks request to do business in the country, the top U.S. diplomat there said last month, a sign-off that Musks company had sought for years. Do you have information about Elon Musks businesses or the Trump administration? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Brett Murphy can be reached at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org. Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.

by Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror This article was produced for ProPublicas Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Gary Hudson excitedly planned a fishing trip with his 4-year-old son and purchased a kids fishing pole in late 2019. He tossed it in the trunk of his Ford Taurus and parked on the street outside his Hartford, Connecticut, home.Within hours, his car was hauled away by a tow truck. Hudson couldnt afford to pay the more than $300 in towing and storage fees and asked if he could at least get into the car to collect his belongings the fishing pole and the safety vest and handcuffs he needed to work nights as a security guard. He said he offered to pay $20 but that Whiteys, a Hartford towing company, told him he had to pay the full amount. They would not budge, period, Hudson said. So I cant get my work equipment, and you expect me to make money to pay you? When Hudson couldnt afford to retrieve the car, he said, Whiteys sold it, and he lost his belongings. Whiteys has since closed, and its owner has died.The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica have heard repeatedly from people with similar stories. Inside their vehicles, they had work equipment, child car seats or personal mementos, and towing companies refused to give them back.Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles regulations say that vehicle owners can retrieve personal property which is essential to the health or welfare of any person. But that gives towing companies wide latitude in how they interpret the rule, and several people whose cars were towed said the companies used their belongings as leverage to get them to pay towing and storage fees. Past reporting by CT Mirror and ProPublica showed how Connecticuts laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of vehicle owners. Connecticut has one of the shortest windows in the country between when a car is towed and when tow companies can consider it abandoned and start the process of selling it companies have to wait just 15 days for vehicles worth less than $1,500. People with low incomes have been particularly impacted by these laws, the news organizations found.Some nearby states, like Rhode Island, have no law on the books about getting possessions from towed cars. But in those that do, the list of items owners must be allowed to retrieve is often broader than Connecticuts. Maine allows people to retrieve clothing, car seats, medications and mail. In New York, people can retrieve anything from the vehicle. A bill in the Massachusetts legislature would let its drivers do the same.In an interview last year, Michelle Givens, the Connecticut DMVs assistant legal director, said she couldnt say whether work equipment qualified as essential to health or welfare.Its broad, Givens said. I cant answer that and sit here and say, Yes, that will qualify. So I cant get my work equipment, and you expect me to make money to pay you? Gary Hudson, a security guard who was not allowed to get his belongings out of his towed car DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera said he thought car owners should file a complaint with the agency if they werent able to get their belongings out. The complaint process can take weeks, however, which is often longer than the period before a towing company is allowed to sell a car.Timothy Vibert, president of the industry association Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said people can generally retrieve medicine or tools, but he said that part of the law shouldnt apply if people wait months to get them. He added that when people dont pay the towing fees, it makes towers reluctant to return their belongings.If somebody owed you $800 and they called up and said they wanted to get something out of their car, he asked, its OK for them to waltz down here and take their things and then leave you with an $800 bill?Other towers say they are more lenient. Sal Sena, owner of Sena Brothers and Cross Country Automotive in Hartford, said if someone has keys to the vehicle or can prove its theirs, he lets them get stuff out of it regardless if they pay the fees.I dont care if you take stuff out, but I just want to make sure youre not putting my ass in a situation where Im gonna get in trouble, Sena said. You got the key? Then take what you want out of the car because then I can justify it.Connecticut lawmakers are looking to change the states towing laws. House Bill 7162, which was voted out of committee in March, would overhaul the law and allow owners to retrieve any personal property from a towed motor vehicle. The bill makes a strong effort to identify and correct abusive practices in the towing industry that have had a serious and detrimental effect on motor vehicle owners, legal aid attorney Rafie Podolsky said in public testimony.Tow company employees and owners have objected to the bill, saying it would make it harder for them to tow vehicles that are parked illegally or unsafely and that towers didnt have enough involvement in crafting the legislation.Transportation Committee co-chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, said during a March meeting that the importance of the issue hit home for her because of the number of folks who have told her they got towed and werent allowed to retrieve belongings from their vehicles.The people should certainly be made aware of their rights with respect to towed vehicles, she said.Hudson, who had planned the fishing trip, had to save up to replace his holster, mace and safety equipment for the security job, which he estimated cost him about $1,000. He canceled the fishing trip and said he failed his son by breaking a promise.It really, really hurt, Hudson said.Hudson is one of several people who told the news organizations they lost things they needed for work tools, chefs knives, even the draft of a movie script. Paul Boudreau, a carpenter and mechanic in Hamden, said he lost his entire carpentry tool set worth more than $1,500 when his Chevrolet Blazer was towed from his apartment complex in April 2021. The vehicle wasnt registered because it couldnt pass an emissions test, and his mechanic was waiting on a part that was hard to get during the supply chain crisis following the COVID-19 lockdown. The apartment complexs management gave him more time to get it registered, he said, so he was surprised when he looked out his window and saw a tow truck hooking up his vehicle. He said MyHoopty.com, a towing company in Watertown, told him it would cost more than $300 to get it back. With his wife recovering from cancer, his carpentry work scarce because of the pandemic and not a penny in cash, Boudreau realized he couldnt afford to retrieve his car. Still, he asked multiple times to retrieve his tools and was denied, he told the DMV in a complaint, which included an itemized list of tools. But MyHoopty owner Michael Festa said in an interview, At no point did anyone contact us or attempt to come down and retrieve any personal belongings that may have been in the vehicle.The Connecticut DMV found that MyHoopty committed no violations related to the tow but did not address the items Boudreau said were in the vehicle.Anybody we talked to was like, Theres nothing we can do, Boudreau said in an interview.After 18 days, MyHoopty submitted a form to sell the Blazer.The tows at his apartment complex led Boudreau to become a tenant union organizer. He said state legislators always tell him that when it comes to landlords, their property is sacred. Paul Boudreau, center, speaks at a Connecticut Tenants Union rally at the state Capitol last year. His experience having his car towed led him to become a tenant organizer. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror) Why isnt our property sacred? Why isnt our car sacred? Boudreau asked about tenants. Wealthy peoples property is always sacred, but poor peoples property doesnt mean a thing.Other drivers lost belongings that held sentimental value photographs, a sewing project, a prayer card from their fathers funeral.When Brandon Joyners Nissan Maxima was towed from the front of his Bridgeport home in 2017, he lost photos of his mother and aunt that had never been digitized, which hed traveled with since he got his license as a teenager. He also had shoes, clothing and a car seat for his nieces and nephews in the vehicle, he said.The car was towed because Joyner owed motor vehicle taxes on it. After a couple of weeks of saving, he paid the taxes. But when he asked for his car, he said he was told it had been sold.Everything was just gone, he said.It took him months to afford a new vehicle, in part because he was still paying down the old loan from the bank. When he told them he no longer had the vehicle and didnt want to pay on it, it damaged his credit score, making it harder to get a loan for a new car, he said.It was hurtful, because theres nothing you can really do, Joyner said. No matter how many people you talk to, you lose things, and its nobodys fault, nobody cares. Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate. Asia Fields contributed reporting.

by Robert Faturechi and Brandon Roberts ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media the same day that President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that caused the stock market to plummet, according to records obtained Wednesday by ProPublica.Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, fell 13% in the following days, before rebounding. Trumps Liberation Day press conference from the White House Rose Garden unveiling the tariffs came after the market closed on April 2. Bondis disclosure forms showing her Trump Media sales say the transactions were made on April 2 but do not disclose whether they occurred before or after the market closed. Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through work could violate the law. But cases against government officials are legally challenging, and in recent years judges have largely narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. Its unclear from the public record whether Bondi as attorney general would have known in advance any nonpublic details about the tariffs Trump was announcing that day. Trump, of course, publicly announced his plans to institute dramatic tariffs during the election campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, the market seemed to assume his campaign promises were bluster. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions about the trades.The disclosure forms do not include the specific amount of stocks sold or their worth but instead provide a rough range. The documents do not say exactly what time she sold the shares or at what price. The companys stock price closed on April 2 at $18.76 and opened the next morning, after the press conference, at $17.92 before falling more in the days ahead. In addition to selling between $1 million and $5 million worth of Trump Media shares, Bondis disclosure form shows she also sold between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of warrants in Trump Media, which typically give a holder the right to purchase the shares. Bondis ownership of Trump Media shares has previously been disclosed. Before she became attorney general, Bondi was a consultant for Digital World Acquisition Corp., the special purpose acquisition company that merged with Trump Media to take the presidents social media company public. As part of her ethics agreement, Bondi had pledged to sell her stake of Trump Media within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have allowed her until early May to sell the shares.On April 1, Trump Media filed a disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission with details about holdings of various top shareholders, including Trump and Bondi. The purpose of the filing is unclear, as is whether it relates to Bondis sales the next day. It appeared to reregister for sale shares held by several of the companys top shareholders. Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

The bombardment, which Ukrainian officials said mostly targeted Kyiv, came just a day before President Trump was expected to talk with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Top officials from Britain and the European Union will gather in London on Monday. Heres what to expect.

Tents, shelters for fighter jets and warehouses for military vehicles show increased Russian presence near one of NATOs newest members.

The cancer has metastasized to the bone, according to a statement from Mr. Bidens personal office.

While prognoses for prostate cancer patients were once measured in months, experts say that advances in treatment and diagnosis now improve survival by years.

NDIANAPOLISIn an effort to curb unauthorized traffic to adult websites within the state, Indiana lawmakers passed new legislation Thursday requiring all potential viewers of online pornography to register as sex offenders before they could access sexually explicit material.This law will ensure that no resident of Indiana encounters harmful, X-rated content on the internet without first providing proof that they are legally considered a sexual predator, said bill co-sponsor Sen. Liz Brown (R-Fort Wayne), explaining that under the new measure an unclosable pop-up window would send users to a third-party website where they would be prompted to verify their permanent status on the sex offender database, waive their right to a trial, and submit to a mugshot before any graphic content could be displayed.This is merely a fail-safe to ensure the only individuals accessing mature material online are those on record as being a depraved person in the eyes of the law, Brown continued. In addition, the community at large will be alerted to the presence of these perverts who regularly view pornography for their own pleasure. Similar measures have proven successful in Texas and Oklahoma, where internet users are required to go door to door and announce themselves as sex criminals to their friends and neighbors every time they wish to navigate to a website that may show genitals, kissing, or a womans nipple.Brown went on to state that users would need to register as repeat offenders for each additional category of pornography they intended to view.The post New Indiana Law Requires All Porn Viewers To Register As Sex Offenders appeared first on The Onion.

The post Any Deport In A Storm appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTONSitting in the front row and snapping his fingers in time to the 1980 musicals overture, President Donald Trump rehearsed his Cabinet for a Kennedy Center performance of Les Misrables amid an escalating boycott by the shows usual cast, sources reported Friday. Marco, I want you in there as Jean Valjean, and give us your full energy on Look Downremember, chest voice, not head voice! Youre a prisoner, for goodness sake, not Patti LuPone, said the visibly anxious president, who, after glancing at a list of Broadway actors who had departed from the production out of protest, turned to JD and Usha Vance, telling the vice president and second lady to don bicorne hats, scarves, and aprons for the roles of Madame and Monsieur Thnardier. Relax, JD! Master Of The House doesnt need you to hit any high notes. Just keep up that bawdy energy of yours, and youll win over the audience. Now, places people! Were going to nail the choreography on the barricade sequence if it kills me. At press time, Trump was overheard ordering a weeping Attorney General Pam Bondi to take I Dreamed A Dream from the top and to please stay in tune this time.The post Trump Casts Cabinet In Les Misrables Amid Kennedy Center Boycott appeared first on The Onion.

NEW YORKAfter months of closing in on the former news anchors legendary record, Michael Strahan surpassedDiane Sawyer on Friday asGood Morning Americas all-time sack leader. Throughout his career on GMA, Strahan has led the show in tackles, forced fumbles, interceptions, and, most importantly, sacks, saidproducer Greg Emerson, adding that Strahans speed, strength, and ability to penetrate the offensive line and rush the passer had also earned him the title of ABCs Defensive Anchor of the Year. Many people said Diane Sawyer was, and always would be, the undisputed queen of the blitz. But despite suffering a pectoral injury and being put on the IR broadcasting list, Michael Strahan was able to recover, tackle George Stephanopoulos during an in-studio cooking segment, and beat Sawyers long-standing record of 140 career sacks. At press time, Strahan had reportedly been traded to CBS Mornings in exchange for CBS all-time pass rusher Gayle King and CBS return specialist/backup wide receiver Nate Burleson.The post Michael Strahan Surpasses Diane Sawyer As Good Morning Americas All-Time Sack Leader appeared first on The Onion.

Cannes Film Festival issued an updated red carpet dress code that effectively bans full nudity and voluminous ensembles, citing decency reasons. What do you think?Look, they never said where my black tie was supposed to go.William Alidor, Cone PlacerGood. Cannes is about late-career vanity projects, not smut.Isaiah Suarez, Cactus PrunerSurely this rule has a Stanley Tucci exemption clause.Kathy Blomster, Library SanitizerThe post Cannes Bans Nudity On Red Carpet appeared first on The Onion.

The backsplash is inspired by Morocco.READ MORE...

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While other social media sites and streaming services rush to scrub Kanye Wests pro-Nazi song from their platforms , the curious or the enthused can find memes, remixes, and unedited audio of Wests new song, Heil Hitler, all over Instagram.Nazism is one of the only groups that Meta calls out by name in its own rules. In the current version of its community standards policy regarding Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, the company says it will remove any content that promotes Nazis. Weremove content that Glorifies, Supports or Represents ideologies that promote hate, such as nazism and white supremacy.404 Media found dozens of Instagram reels that featured the song and several of them had been viewed more than a million times. One reel, which has been viewed 1.2 million times, declared it the song of the summer. How we all bumpin Kanyes New song This summer, it says over footage of people dancing.Another reel with more than 40,000 views shows Hasidic Jews dancing over the song under the caption Amazing things are happening.A third depicts a white dude in khaki pants dancing to the song in front of a glowing and spinning swastika. White dads getting turnt to Kanyes new song at the summer barbecue , reads the caption. Its been viewed more than 700,000 times. The account that shared it describes itself as a race realist and meme guy in the bio. Much of its content is memed-up clips of avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes.Heil Hitler is the latest single from Kanye Wests forthcoming album Cuck. In the song he talks about how the world has been cruel to him. Man, these people took my kids from me / Then they froze my bank account / I got so much anger in me, Ye raps. It is these tribulations, he sings, that made him a Nazi.The video for the song racked up millions of views on X and is still up. It was also briefly available on major streaming platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud before getting pulled. Even the Genius page for the song was pulled."We recognize that users may share content that includes references to designated dangerous organizations and individuals in the context of social and political discourse," a Meta spokesperson told us in an email. "Thisincludes content reporting on, neutrally discussing or condemning dangerous organizations and individuals or their activities." None of the videos we've seen were "reporting on" the song. Some were arguably making fun of it, but most of of them were just sharing or celebrating it. We have reported many stories about Metas inability or unwillingness many types of content on Instagram that goes against its own rules, including accounts that face swap models that make them look like they have down syndrome, AI-generated accounts that pretend to be real people, accounts advertising illegal drugs and firearms on the site, and accounts promoting various scams.In theory these videos should be relatively easy to find, remove, or even prevent people from uploading to begin with. Internet platforms like YouTube and Twitch have technology that automatically detects audio to flag content that may violate copyright. The same method can also be used to flag certain audio and prevent users from uploading it. Additionally, one reason we were able to find so many of these videos so quickly is that, like TikTok, Instagram has a feature that shows users what other videos were uploaded to the platform using the exact same sound.Update: This article has been updated with comment from Meta.

Game engine company Unity is threatening to pull the licenses for RocketWerkz, the studio founded by DayZ developer Deal Hall, for reasons Hall told me are unfounded.Hall first posted about this situation to the Reddit game development community r/gamedev on Friday, where he said Unity is currently sending emails threatening longtime developers with disabling their access completely over bogus data about private versus public licenses.According to the initial email from Unity, which was provided to me by Hall, Unity claimed that RocketWerkz is mixing Unity license types and demanded that the studio take immediate action to fix this or Unity reserves the right to revoke the developers access to existing licenses on May 16. Essentially, Unity is accusing RocketWerkz of using free Personal licenses to work on commercial products that Unity says require paid Pro licenses. Hall says this is not true. If the companys licenses are revoked, RocketWerkz will not be able to keep updating and maintain Stationeers, a game it released in 2017, and continue development on its upcoming project Torpedia.Hall told me that one of his concerns is not just that Unity is threatening to pull its licenses, but that its not clear how it collected and used the data to make that decision.How is Unity gathering data to decide whether a company has enough pro licenses? he told me in an email. It appears to me, they are scraping a lot of personal data and drawing disturbing conclusions from this data. Is this data scraping meeting GDPR requirements?Unity has a variety of plans developers can use, ranging from a free Personal version and an up to $4,950 a year Industry version. The more expensive plans come with more features and support. More importantly, games with revenue or funding greater than $200,000 in a 12-month period have to at least pay for a Unity Pro license, which costs $2,200 a year per license. Unity infamously outraged the games industry when it tried to add additional fees to this pricing scheme in 2023, a strategy that was so disastrous for the company it reversed course and dumped its CEO.According to Halls Reddit post, RocketWerkz pays for multiple licenses which it has spent about $300,000 on since the company was founded in 2014. He also shared an invoice with me showing the company paid $36,420 for 18 Unity Pro Licenses in December of 2024, which are good until December of 2025. Game developers need to buy a license for each of their employees, or one license per seat or person who will be using it. Paying for monthly or annual access to software, instead of buying, owning, and using software however you like, is increasingly common. Even very popular consumer software like Adobe and Microsoft Office have shifted to this model in recent years.According to an email Unity sent to RocketWerkz after it asked for clarification, which I have viewed, Unity claims that there are five people at the studio who are using Personal licenses who should be using Pro licenses. Unity lists their emails, which show two @Rocketwerkz.com emails and three emails with domain names obscured by Unity.Hall says that of those people, one is a RocketWerkz employee who has a Personal Unity account but does not work on a Unity project at the studio and one is a RocketWerkz employee who the company currently pays for a Pro license for. Another email belongs to a contractor who did some work for RocketWerkz in 2024, and who the company paid for their Pro license at the time, and the other two belong to two employees at different companies, which like RocketWerkz are also based in New Zealand. These two employees never worked at RocketWerkz. One works at Weta workshop, the visual effects company that worked on Lord of the Rings. Hall also shared an image of the Unity dashboard showing its currently paying for Pro licenses for the employees Unity says are using Personal licenses.There is a lot of unknowns here, and I don't have much to go on yetbut I do wonder if there are serious data violations going on with Unityand they appear to be threatening to use this data to close down developer accounts, Hall told me. How will this affect users who don't have the clout I do?Essentially, its not clear how Unity, which can see what RocketWerkz is paying it, what for, and who is using those licenses, is determining that the studio doesnt have enough licenses. Especially since Unity claims RocketWerkz should be paying for licenses for people who never worked at the studio and are seemingly not connected to it other than being located in the same country.Unity did not respond to a request for comment.On Reddit, Hall said that on one hand he feels vindicated that Unitys recent strategies, which have been hostile to game developers, lead to bad business outcomes, but that many small developers rely on it and that will be bad for them also.They will take with them so many small studios. They are the ones that will pay the price. So many small developers, amazing teams, creating games just because they love making games, Hall said. One day, after some private equity picks up Unity's rotting carcass, these developers will to login to the Unity launcher but won't be able to without going through some crazy hoops or paying a lot more.

The Baltimore Orioles should be good, but they are not good. At 15-24, they are one of the worst teams in all of Major League Baseball this season, an outcome thus far that fans, experts, and the team itself will tell you are either statistically improbable or nearing statistically impossible based on thousands upon thousands of simulations run before the season started.Trying to figure out why this is happening is tearing the fanbase apart and has turned a large portion of them against management, which has put a huge amount of its faith, on-field strategy, and player acquisition decision making into predictive AI systems, advanced statistics, probabilistic simulations, expected value positive moves, and new-age baseball thinking in which statistical models and AI systems try to reduce human baseball players into robotic, predictable chess pieces. Teams have more or less tried to solve baseball like researchers try to solve games with AI. Technology has changed not just how teams play the game, but how fans like me experience it, too.Some of the underperformance that weve gotten, I hope is temporary. This is toward the extreme of outcomes, Orioles General Manager Mike Elias said last week when asked why the team is so bad. So far in a small sample this year, it just hasnt worked. And then weve got guys that have been hitting into tough luck if you kind of look at their expected stats weve got a record that is not reflective of who we believe our team is, that I dont think anyone thought our team was.Embedded in these quotes are current baseball buzzwords that have taken over how teams think about their rosters, and how fans are meant to experience the game. The extreme of outcomes refers to whatever probabilistic statistical model the Orioles are running that suggests they should be good, even though in the real world they are bad. Small sample is analogous to a poker or blackjack player who is making expected value positive moves (a statistically optimal decision that may not work out in a small sample size) but is losing their money because of the statistical noise inherent within not playing for long enough (another: markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent); basically, the results are bad now but they shouldnt stay that way forever. Tough luck is the reason for the bad performance, which can be determined via expected stats, which are statistical analyses of the expected outcome of any play (but crucially not the actual outcome of any play) based on how hard a ball was hit, where it was hit, the balls launch angle, exit velocity, defender positioning, etc. Elias has repeatedly said that the Orioles must remain consistent with your approach and that they should not change much of anything, because their process is good, which is what poker players say when they are repeatedly losing but believe they have made the statistically correct decision. Before the season, a model called the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm (PECOTA), which simulates the season thousands of times before and during the season, projected that the Orioles would win 89 games; they are on pace right now to win barely 60. The PECOTA projections simulations did not show the Orioles being this bad even in its worst-case preseason simulations. A Redditor recently ran an unscientific simulation 100,000 times and estimated that there was only a 1.5 percent chance that the Orioles would be this bad.The likely range of outcomes for the Orioles as predicted by Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA before the season started. The Orioles actual winning percentage so far.385, is not represented on this chart.Right now, none of this is working out for the Orioles, who in recent years have become industry darlings based on their embrace of this type of statistical thinking. The last two years the simulations have suggested the Orioles should be near the top of the league, and in the millions of simulations run for these projections they have surely won thousands of simulated World Series. But under Elias they have not even won a single real life playoff game.Here is how the fanbase is taking this years underperformance:The team has been so bad that for several days the Orioles subreddit began to talk only about the actual Baltimore Oriole bird and not the baseball team.The Orioles obsession with simulations training and treating their players like robots has become a constant punchline. On the popular Orioles Hangout forums, which I have lurked on for 25 years, posters have started calling the team the Expected Stat All Stars but real-life losers. The Orioles are my favorite team in the only sport I care about. I have been a daily lurker on the popular orioleshangout.com forums since my posting account was banned there in 2003 for a beef I got into in high school with the sites owner. I listen to podcasts about the Orioles, read articles about the Orioles, and, most importantly, watch as many Orioles games as I can. I listen to the postgame press conferences, follow all of the beat reporters. When I cannot watch the game, I will follow it on MLB Gameday or will, at the least, check the score a few times then watch the highlights afterwards.The Orioles have not won a World Series since 1983, five years before I was born. They were good in 1996 and 1997, when I was eight years old and simulated heartbreaking playoff games in my backyard pitching the ball into a pitchback rebounder as Armando Benitez blew a critical save or as Jeffrey Maierthe most hated child in DC-Baltimore Metropolitan Arealeaned over the scoreboard and fan-interfered a home run for Derek Jeter and the hated Yankees in the 1996 ALCS. They were good again from 2012-2016. Besides that, they have been laughingstocks for my entire life.The Orioles of the late 2010s, after a very brief 2016 playoff appearance, were known for ignoring advanced statistics, the kinds made popular by the Oakland Athletics in Moneyball, which allowed a small-market team to take advantage of overlooked players who got on base at a high rate (guys with high on base percentage) and to eschew outdated strategies like sacrifice bunting to achieve great success with low payrolls. Teams like the As, Cleveland Guardians, Houston Astros, and Tampa Bay Rays eventually figured out that one of the only ways to compete with the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers of the world was to take advantage of players in the first few years they were in the big leagues because they had very low salaries. These teams traded their stars as they were about to get expensive and reloaded with younger players, then augmented them over time with a few veterans. Ill gloss over the specifics because this is a tech site, not a baseball blog, but, basically the Orioles did not do that for many years and aspired to mediocrity while signing medium priced players who sucked and who did not look good by any baseball metrics. They had an aging, disinterested, widely-hated owner who eventually got very sick and turned the team over to his son, who ran the team further into the ground, sued his brother, and threatened to move the team to Nashville. It was a dark time.The teams philosophy, if not its results, changed overnight in November 2018, when the Orioles hired Mike Elias, who worked for the Houston Astros and had a ton of success there, and, crucially, Sig Mejdal, a former NASA biomathematician, quantitative analyst, blackjack dealer, and general math guy, to be the general manager and assistant general manager for the Orioles, respectively. The hiring of Elias and Mejdal was a triumphant day for Orioles fans, a signal that they would become an enlightened franchise who would use stats and science and general best practices to construct their rosters.Under Elias and Mejdal, the Orioles announced that they would rebuild their franchise using a forward-thinking, analytics-based strategy for nearly everything in the organization. The team would become data driven and invested in various technology tools Edgertronic cameras, Blast motion bat sensors, Diamond Kinetic swing trackers and others. They recently entered a partnership with the 3-D biofeedback company K-Motion they hope further advances those goals, according to MLB.com. The general strategy was that the Orioles would trade all of their players who had any value, would tank, for a few years (meaning, essentially, that they would lose on purpose to get high draft picks), and would rebuild the entire organizational thinking and player base to create a team that could compete year-in and year-out. Fans understood that we would suck for a few years but then would become good, and, for once in my life, the plan actually worked.The Orioles were not the only team to do this. By now, every team in baseball is data driven and is obsessed with all sorts of statistics, and, more importantly, AI and computer aided biomechanics programs, offensive strategies, defensive positioning, etc. Under Elias and Mejdal, the Orioles were very bad for a few years but drafted a slew of highly-rated prospects and were unexpectedly respectable in 2022 and then unexpectedly amazing in 2023, winning a league-high 103 games. They were again good in 2024, and made the playoffs again, though they were swept out of the playoffs in both 2023 and 2024. Expectations in Baltimore went through the roof before the 2024 season when the long-hated owner sold the team to David Rubenstein, a private equity billionaire who grew up in Baltimore and who has sworn here wants the team to win.Because of this success, the Orioles have become one of the poster children of modern baseball game theory. This is oversimplifying, but basically the Orioles drafted a bunch of identical-looking blonde guys, put them through an AI-ified offensive strategy regimen in the minor leagues, attempted to deploy statistically optimal in-game decisions spit out by a computer, and became one of the best teams in the league. (Elias and Mejdals draft strategy suggests that position players should be drafted instead of pitchers because pitchers get injured so often. Their bias toward drafting position players is so extreme that it has become a meme, and the Orioles have, for the last few years, had dozens of promising position players and very few pitchers. This year they have had so many pitching injuries that they sort of have no one to pitch and lost one game by the score of 24-2 and rushed back Kyle Gibson, a 37-year-old emergency signing who promptly lost to the Yankees 15-3 in his first start back).Behind this young core of homegrown talent (Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Jackson Holliday, Colton Cowser, Jordan Westburg, Heston Kjerstad, etc.), the Orioles were expected and still are expected to be perennial contenders for years to come. But they have been abysmal this year. They may very well still turn it around this yearlong season, baseball fans love to sayand they will need to turn it around for me to have a bearable summer.Mejdals adherence to advanced analytics and his various proprietary systems for evaluating players means that many Orioles fans call him Sigbot, as a term of endearment when the team is playing well and as a pejorative when it is playing poorly. Rather than sign or develop good pitchers, the Orioles famously decided to move the left field wall at Camden Yards back 30 feet and raise the wall (a move known as Walltimore), making it harder to hit (or give up) home runs for right handed batters. The team then signed and drafted a slew of lefties with the goal of hitting home runs onto Eutaw Street in right field. Because of platoon splits (lefties pitch better to left-handed hitters, righties to right-handed hitters), the Orioles lefty-heavy lineup performed poorly against lefties. So, this last offseason, the team moved the wall back in and signed a bunch of righties who historically hit left-handed pitchers well, in hopes of creating two different, totally optimized lineups against both lefties and righties (this has not worked, the Orioles have sucked against lefties this year).Orioles fans have suggested all these changes were made because Sigbots simulations said we should. When the Orioles fail to integrate a left-handed top prospect into the lineup because their expected stats against lefties are poor, well, thats a Sigbot decision. When manager Brandon Hyde pulls a pitcher who is performing well and the reliever blows it, they assume that it was a Sigbot decision, and that the team has essentially zero feel for the human part of the game that suggests a hot player should keep playing or that a reliever who is performing well might possibly be able to pitch more than one inning every once in a while. The Orioles have occasionally benched the much-hyped 21-year-old Jackson Holliday, who is supposed to be a generational talent, against some lefties because he is also left handed in favor of Jorge Mateo, a right-handed 29-year-old journeyman who cannot hit his way out of a wet paper bag. The fans dont like this. Sigbots fault.Fans will also argue that much of the Orioles minor league and major league coaching staff is made up of people who either did not play in the major leagues or who played poorly or briefly in the major leagues, and that the team has too many coachesvarious offensive strategy experts, and things like thisrather than, say, experienced, hard-nosed former star players.Baseball has always been a statistically driven sport, and the beef between old school players and analysts who care about back of the baseball card stats like average and home runs versus sabermetrics like on base percentage, WAR (wins above replacement), OAA (outs above average, a defensive stat) is mostly over. The sport has evolved so far beyond Moneyball that to even say oh, like Moneyball? when talking about advanced statistics and ways of playing the game now makes you a dinosaur who doesnt know what theyre talking about.The use of technology, AI simulations, probabilistic thinking, etc is not just deployed when compiling a roster, making in-game decisions, crafting a lineup, or deciding a specific strategy. It has completely changed how players train and how they play the game. Advanced biomechanics labs like Driveline Baseball use slow-motion cameras, AI simulations, and advanced sensors to retrain pitchers how to throw the baseball, teaching them new pitch shapes that are harder to hit, have elite spin rates, meaning the pitch will move in ways that are harder to hit, and how to tunnel different pitches, which means the pitches are thrown from the same arm slot in the same manner but move differently, making them harder to detect and therefore hit. The major leagues are now full of players who were not good, went to Driveline and used technology to retrain their body how to do something exceptionally well, and are now top players.Batters, meanwhile, are taught to optimize for exit velocity, meaning they should swing hard and try to hit the ball hard. They need to make good swing decisions, meaning that they only swing at pitches they can hit hard in certain quadrants of the plate in specific counts. They are taught to optimize their swing plane for launch angle, meaning the ball should leave between a 10 and 35-degree angle, creating a higher likelihood of line drives and home runs. A ball hit with an optimal launch angle and exit velocity is barreled, which is very good for a hitter and very bad for a pitcher. Hard-hit and barreled balls have high xBA (expected batting average), meaning the simulations have determined that, over a large enough sample size, you are likely to be better. Countless players across the league (maybe all of them, at this point) have changed how they hit based on optimizing for expected stats.Prospects with good raw strength and talent but a poor hit tool are drafted, and then the team tries to remake them in the image of the simulation. Advanced pitching machines are trained on specific pitchers arsenals, meaning that you can simulate hitting against that days starting pitcher. Players are regularly looking at iPads in the dugout after many at bats to determine if they have made good swing decisions.Everything that occurs on the baseball field is measured and stored on a variety of websites, including MLBs filmroom to Baseball Savant, which is full of graphs like this:Everything that happens on the field is then fed back into these models, which are freely available, are updated constantly, and can be used for in-game analysis discussion, message board fodder, and further simulations.So now, the vast majority of baseball discourse, and especially discourse about the Orioles, is whether good players are actually good, and whether bad players are actually bad, or if there is some unexplained gulf between their expected stats and their actual stats, and whether that difference is explained by normal variance or something that is otherwise unaccounted for. Baseball is full of random variance, and it is a game of failure. The season is long, the best teams lose about 60 times a year, and even superstars regularly go 0-4. Expected stats are a way to determine whether a player or teams poor results is a result of actual bad play or of statistical noise and bad luck. We are no longer discussing only what is actually happening on the field, but what the expected stats suggest should be happening on the field, according to the simulations. Over the last few years, these stats have been integrated into everything, most of all the broadcasts and the online discourse. It has changed how we experience, talk about, and should feel about a player, game, season, and team.Sugano's Baseball Savant page. Red is good, blue is bad.Rather than celebrate bright spots like when a pitcher like Tomoyuki Suganoa softish-throwing 35-year-old Japanese pitcher the Orioles signed this yearpitches a gem, fans hop over to Baseball Savant and note that his whiff rate is only 13th percentile, his expected batting average against is 13th percentile, and his K percentage is unsustainable for good pitchers. His elite walk and chase percentage offer some hope and we should happy he played well, but they surmise based on his Baseball Savant page that he will likely regress. Fans break down the pitch shapes, movement, and velocity on closer Felix Bautistas pitches as he returns from Tommy John (elbow) surgery, looking for signs of progression or regression, and comparing what his pitches look like today versus in 2023, when he was MLBs best pitcher. The fact that he remains a statistically amazing and imposing pitcher even with slightly lesser stuff is celebrated in the moment but is cause for concern, because the simulations tell us to expect lesser results in the future unless his velocity ticks up from only 98 MPH to 99-100 MPH.Felix Bautista's statistics on Statcast. These aren't even the complicated charts.We rail against Eliass signing of Charlie Morton, a washed-up 41-year-old who has been the worst pitcher in the entire league while collecting a whopping $15 million. The Orioles are 0-10 in games Morton has pitched and are 15-14 in games he has not pitched, meaning that in the simulated universe where we didnt sign Morton or perhaps signed someone better we wouldnt be in this mess at all; can we live in that reality instead? Even Mortons expected stats are up for debate. He should merely be pretty bad and not cataclysmically bad according to his pitch charts; Morton speaks in long, philosophical paragraphs when asked about this, and says that he would have long ago retired if he felt his pitch shapes and spin rate were worse than they currently are: It would be way easier to go, You know what, I dont have it anymore. I just dont have the physical talent to do it anymore. But the problem is I do it would be way easier if I was throwing 89-91 [mph] and my curve wasnt spinning and my changeup wasnt sinking and running he said after a loss to the Twins last week. There are just the outcomes and the results are so bad there will be times just randomly in the day Ill think about it. Ill think about how poorly Ive pitched and Ill think about how bad the results are. And honestly, it feels like its almost shocking to me.MASN, the Orioles-owned sports network, speculated that perhaps Mortons horrible performance thus far can be boiled down to bad luck because of what the simulations suggest: When these sorts of metrics are consistent with past years but the results are drastically different, were left with an easier takeaway to swallow: perhaps theres nothing wrong with the pitch itself, and Morton has just run into some bad luck on the offering in a small sample size.Adley Rutschman, meanwhile, our franchise catcher who has been one of the least valuable players in all of Major League Baseball for nearly a calendar year, has just been unlucky because he is swinging the bat harder, has elite strike zone discipline, 98th percentile squared up percentage, and good expected stats (though absolutely dreadful actual stats). The discourse about this is all over the place, ranging from carefully considered posts about how, probabilistically, this possibly cannot last to psychological and physiological explanations that suggest he is broken forever and should be launched into the sun. On message boards, Rutschman is either due for a breakout because his expected stats are so good, or he sucks and will never get better, is possibly hiding an injury, is sad because he and his girlfriend broke up, perhaps he is not in good shape. We then note that Ryan Mountcastles launch angle on fastballs has declined every year since 2022, wonder if trying and failing to hit the ball over Walltimore psychologically broke him forever, and decry Heston Kjerstads swing decisions and lackluster bat speed, and wonder if its due to a concussion he had last summer. On message boards, these playersand Im guilty of it myselfare both interchangeable robots that can be statistically represented by thousands of simulations and fragile humans who arent living up to their potential, are weak, have bad attitudes, are psychologically soft, etc.The umpires, too, are possibly at fault. Their performance is also closely analyzed, and have been biased against the Orioles more than almost any other team, leading to additional expected runs for their opponents (and sometimes real runs) and fewer for the Orioles, which are broken down every day on Umpire Scorecard. The Orioles have the second worst totFav in the league, a measure of The sum of the Total Batter Impact for the team and Total Pitcher Impact for the team, and a statistic that I cannot even begin to understand. If only we had that expected ball, which would lead to an expected walk, which would lead to an expected run, which would lead to an expected win, which could have happened in reality, we would have won that game.What an "Umpire Scorecard" looks like. Image: umpscorecards.comAll of this leads to discussions among fans that allow for both unprecedented levels of cope and distress. We can take solace in a good expected outcome at-bat, say the team has just been unlucky, or, when they win or catch a break, suggest the exact opposite. Case in point: On Sunday, Rutschman hit a popup that an Angels player lost in the sun that is caught almost every time (xBA: .020) and went for a triple. Later in the game, he crushed a ball over the center field fence that an Angels player made an amazing catch on (xBA: .510). Fans must now consider all of this when determining whether a player sucks or not, and hold it in their mental model of the player and the team.(Also, the Orioles have had a lot of injuries so far this season, which can explain a lot of the underperformance by the team but not from individual players.)This has all led to widespread calls for everyone involved to be fired, namely manager Brandon Hyde, hitting coach Cody Asche, and possibly Elias and Mejdal, too. So, what is actually wrong?Last August, The Athletic wrote an article called Whats the Orioles secret to developing great hitters? Rival teams have theories. The article surmised that the Orioles were optimizing for VBA, which is Vertical Bat Angle, as well as they draft guys with present power and improve their launch angle and swing decisions they teach better Vertical Bat Angle to reduce ground-ball rates. Swing decisions plus better VBA equals power production when those top-end exit velocities exist. The Athletics article was written at a time when the Orioles lineup was very feared, and when Mike Elias and Sigbot were considered by many in the sport as the smartest guys in the room. What they had done with the Orioles and, especially, with its lineup, was the envy of everyone.I am not a baseball reporter but I do watch tons of baseball, and this makes sense to me. What it means, essentially, is that they have been training all of their players to swing very hard, with an upward arc, and to try to swing at pitches that they think they can do damage with. This intuitively makes sense: Hitting the ball hard is good, hitting home runs is good.But something has changed so far this year, and its still not clear whether we can chalk it up to injuries, random underperformance, small sample size, or the fragility of the human psyche. But so far this season, the Orioles cannot hit. They cannot hit lefties, they cannot hit with runners in scoring position, and often, they simply cannot hit at all. It is as though the game has been patched, and the Orioles are continuing to play with the old, outdated meta.The Athletic explains that optimizing for things like VBA and swinging hard often leads to more swing-and-miss, and therefore more strikeouts. Growing up playing baseball, and watching baseball, we were taught situational hitting, which maybe means yes, swing for the fences if youre ahead in the count. But also: choke up, foul pitches off, and just put the ball in play with a runner on third and less than two outs. The Orioles hitting woes this year feel like they are swinging for the fences and striking out or popping up when a simple sacrifice fly or ground ball would do; rather than fouling off close pitches with two strikes, they are making good swing decisions by taking pitches barely off the plate and getting rung up for strike three by fallibly human umpires, etc. Either this is random variance at the beginning of a long season, the Orioles players are not nearly as good as their track record and the simulations have shown them to be, or some hole in the Orioles approach has been identified and other teams are taking advantage of it and the Orioles have yet to adjust.Bashing analytics has become a worn-out trope among former players and announcers, and yet, it is as though much of the Orioles team has suddenly forgotten how to hit. Watching the games, the Orioles are regularly missing or fouling off pitches thrown right down the middle and are swinging for the fences (and missing) on pitches that are well outside the strike zone. Former Oriole Mike Bordick, known for his fundamentals but not necessarily his bat, ranted on the radio the other day that this obsession with advanced pitching and hitting statistics is what he sees wrong with the team: Charlie Morton stood there and said My spin rate is better than its ever been, my fastball velocity is better than its ever been, and for some reason its just not working for me. Therein lies the problem. If were thinking about our spin rates and velocities, which carries over to offensive performance too, Bordick said. Theyre chasing these [advanced analytical] numbers, and theyre not chasing competition. Putting the barrel on the ball, and throwing strikes. I mean, what are we doing? You cant rely on bat speed and exit velocity if you cant put the barrel on the ball.Old-man-yells-at-cloud is a time-honored sports tradition, and despite writing this article, I am mostly all for the new, optimized version of baseball, as it adds a lot of strategy and thinking to a game that has always been dominated by statistics. But I am sick of losing. I do not know how to explain, when my partner asks me if the Orioles are winning or how the game is going, that not good actually often means the delta between Adley Rutschman's xBA and actual BA is wildly outside the statistically expected probabilities and its pissing me off. But, unless the Orioles figure out something soon, they will be one of the simulated best teams in Major League Baseball, and one of the worst teams in real life. A simulated World Series championship, unfortunately, doesnt bring me any real-life joy.

Somewhere in Warsaw, Poland, two actors are pretending to have sex. Its not the most intimate of environments. The mood lighting, if you can call it that, is fluorescent bulbs burning overhead, making the sterile, white walls look even brighter than they actually are. In lieu of a bed or couch, the actors fit tightly into a makeshift tanka technical mockup that's more pipes and bars than any sort of vehicleto capture an intimate scene between Cyberpunk 2077 mercenaries V and Panam Palmer.The actors are wearing stretchy black one piece bodysuits designed for motion capture scenessomething not dissimilar from a diving wetsuitadorned with velcro markers strategically placed all over their bodies. Sometimes, when the velcro bits touch, you can hear the riiiiip of the actors getting stuckand unstuckfrom each other as they climb back-and-forth between seats and each other.When theres too much contact, the markers on mo-cap suits start to fall off and break, CD Projekt Red creative director Igor Sarzyski told me. Its really difficult to both create an authentic, intimate atmosphere between the actors and get something through in this performance in this very technical setup. Its complex and sometimes a little bit awkward.

Nature, Published online: 15 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01427-yThe consumption and investments of the wealthiest 10% contribute disproportionately to the emissions that drive heat waves and drought.

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Nature, Published online: 15 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01500-6When LLMs are grouped together, they exhibit similar characteristics to human societies.

Nuggets interim coach David Adelman earned praise across the board for his performance during these playoffs and is considered a strong candidate to take over on a permanent basis.

Young and the New York Knicks have engaged in a rivalry since the 2021 NBA postseason.

In his first season with Florida, forward Brad Marchand became the first player in NHL history to defeat the same opponent in at least five winner-take-all games, as his Panthers crushed the Toronto Maple Leafs 6-1 in Game 7 of the second round on Sunday.

The WNBA is looking into allegations of "hateful fan comments" directed at Angel Reese after an incident involving Caitlin Clark and Reese in Saturday's Sky-Fever game.

Liberty beat No. 1 Texas A&M 6-5 on Sunday night to win the Bryan-College Station Regional and eliminate the top-seeded Aggies.

by Jake Pearson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. One of Elon Musks employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musks biggest companies, according to court records and a financial disclosure report obtained by ProPublica. Ethics experts said Christopher Youngs dual role working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is duplicative. Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain. Court records show Young, who works for a Musk company called Europa 100 LLC, was involved in the Trump administrations efforts to unwind the consumer agencys operations and fire most of its staff in early February.Youngs arrangement raises questions of where his loyalty lies, experts said. The dynamic is especially concerning, they said, given that the CFPB which regulates companies that provide financial services has jurisdiction over Musks electric car company, Tesla, which makes auto loans, and his social media site, X, which announced in January that it was partnering with Visa on mobile payments.The worlds richest man has in turn made no secret of his desire to do away with the bureau, posting just weeks after Donald Trumps election victory, Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies. Musk clearly has a conflict of interest and should recuse, said Claire Finkelstein, who directs the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. And therefore an employee of his, who is answerable to him on the personal side, outside of government, and who stands to keep his job only if he supports Musks personal interests, should not be working for DOGE. Young, a 36-year-old Republican consultant, has been active in political circles for years, most recently serving as the campaign treasurer of Musks political action committee, helping the tech titan spend more than a quarter billion dollars to help elect Trump. Before joining Musks payroll, he worked as a vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade association representing the pharmaceutical industrys interests, his disclosure shows. He also worked as a field organizer for the Republican National Committee and for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the New York Times reported. Young was appointed a special governmental employee in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on Jan. 30 and dispatched to work in the CFPB in early February, according to court records and his disclosure form. Someone with his position could be making as much as $190,000 a year in government salary, documents obtained by Bloomberg show. At the same time, Young collects a salary as an employee of Musks Texas-based Europa 100 LLC, where, according to his disclosure report, his duties are to advise political and public policy.Beyond that description, its not clear what, exactly, Young does at Europa 100 or what the companys activities are.It was created in July 2020 by Jared Birchall, a former banker who runs Musks family office, Excession LLC, according to state records. The company has been used to pay nannies to at least some of Musks children, according to a 2023 tabloid report, and, along with two other Musk entities, to facilitate tens of millions of dollars in campaign transactions, campaign finance reports show.As a special government employee, Young can maintain outside employment while serving for a limited amount of time. But such government workers are still required to abide by laws and rules governing conflicts of interest and personal and business relationships.Cynthia Brown, the senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the administration to produce a range of public records documenting DOGEs activities, said that Youngs government work appears to benefit his private sector employer.Which hat are you wearing while youre serving the American people? Are you doing it for the interests of your outside job? she asked.In addition to his role at Europa 100, Young reported other ties to Musks private businesses. He affirmed in his disclosure form that he will continue to participate in a defined contribution plan sponsored by Excession, the Musk home office, and that he has served since February as a vice president of United States of America Inc., another Musk entity organized by Birchall, where he also advises on political and public policy, the records show. While he lists the latter among sources of compensation exceeding $5,000 in a year, the exact figure is not disclosed.Young did not return a call and emails seeking comment. The CFPB, DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. Musk didnt respond to an email seeking comment, and Birchall didnt return a call left at a number he lists in public formation records. A lawyer who helped form United States of America Inc. hung up when reached for comment and hasnt responded to a subsequent message. Asked about how his business interests and government work may intersect, Musk said in a February interview that, Ill recuse myself if it is a conflict.The revelation of Youngs apparent violation of federal standards of conduct follows a series of ProPublica stories documenting how another DOGE aide helped carry out the administrations attempts to implement mass layoffs at the CFPB while holding as much as $715,000 in stock that bureau employees are prohibited from owning actions one expert called a pretty clear-cut violation of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute. The White House has defended the aide, saying he did not even manage the layoffs, making this entire narrative an outright lie. A spokesperson also said the aide had until May 8 to divest, though it isnt clear whether he did and the White House hasnt answered questions about that. These allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGEs critical mission, the White House said. Following ProPublicas reporting, the aides work at the CFPB ended. On Monday, a group of 10 good government and consumer advocacy groups, citing ProPublicas coverage, sent a letter to the acting inspector general of the CFPB, asking him to swiftly investigate these clear conflicts of interest violations of Trump Administration officials acting in their own personal financial interest. ProPublica has identified nearly 90 officials assigned to DOGE, though its unclear how many, if any, have potential conflicts. Government agencies have been slow to release financial disclosure forms. But Finkelstein said the cases reported by ProPublica call into question the motivation behind DOGEs efforts to undo the consumer watchdog agency.It matters because it means that the officials who work for the government, who are supposed to be dedicated to the interests of the American people, are not necessarily focused on the good of the country but instead may be focused on the good of themselves, self enrichment, or trying to please their boss by focusing on enriching their bosses and growing their portfolios, she said.Unionized CFPB workers have sued the CFPBs acting director, Russell Vought, to stop his attempts to drastically scale down the bureaus staff and its operations. Since taking office, the Trump administration has twice attempted to fire nearly all of the agencys employees, tried canceling nearly all of its contracts and instituted stop-work mandates that have stifled virtually all agency work, including investigations into companies, ProPublica previously reported. The parties will appear before an appeals court this Friday for oral arguments in a case that will determine just how deeply Vought can cut the agency while still ensuring that it carries out dozens of mandates Congress tasked it with when lawmakers established the bureau in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The court records produced in the litigation offer a window into the role Young played in gutting the CFPB during the administrations first attempt to unwind the bureau beginning in early February. He was dispatched to the CFPBs headquarters on Feb. 6, just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, then the agencys acting director, told the staff and contractors to stop working. The following day, Young and other DOGE aides were given access to nonclassified CFPB systems, court records show. That same day, Musk posted CFPB RIP with a gravestone emoji. On Feb. 11 and 12, Young was included on emails with top agency officials. One of those messages discussed the cancellation of more than 100 contracts, an act that a contracting officer described in a sworn affidavit as including all contracts related to enforcement, supervision, external affairs, and consumer response. Another message involved how to transfer to the Treasury Department some of the more than $3 billion in civil penalties that the bureau has collected from companies to settle consumer protection cases, a move that could deny harmed consumers compensation. A third discussed the terms of an agreement that would allow for the mass layoff of staffers, court records show.In his financial disclosure form, which he signed on Feb. 15, Young listed his employment by Musks Europa 100 as active, beginning in August 2024 through the present. Then, in early March, as the legal fight over the administrations cuts played out before a federal judge, Young sent the CFPBs chief operating officer a message about forthcoming firings, known as a reduction in force, or RIF, in government parlance. In the email, he asked whether officials were prepared to implement the RIF if the judge lifted a temporary stay, according to a March district court opinion that has for the moment stopped most of the administrations proposed cuts. In addition to his employment, Youngs disclosure presents another potential conflict.He also lists owning as much as $15,000 in Amazon stock, a company that is on the bureaus Prohibited Holdings list. Agency employees are forbidden from having such investments, and ethics experts have said that participating in an agency action that could boost the stocks value such as stripping the CFPB of its staff constitutes a violation of the criminal conflict-of-interest statute. Young hasnt responded to questions about that either. Al Shaw contributed reporting and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. It started with a call. A man identifying himself as a federal immigration agent contacted a Venezuelan father in San Antonio, interrogating him about his teenage son. The agent said officials planned to visit the familys apartment to assess the boys living conditions. Later that day, federal agents descended on his complex and covered the doors peephole with black tape, the father recalled. Agents repeatedly yelled the fathers and sons names, demanded they open the door and waited hours before leaving, according to the family. Terrified, the father, 37, texted an immigration attorney, who warned that the visit could be a pretext for deportation. The agents returned the next two days, causing the father such alarm that he skipped work at a mechanic shop. His son stayed home from school. Department of Homeland Security agents have carried out dozens of such visits across the country in recent months as part of a systematic search for children who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border by themselves, and the sponsors who care for them while they pursue their immigration cases. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the childrens care and for screening their sponsors, has assisted in the checks.The agencys welfare mission appears to be undergoing a stark transformation as President Donald Trump seeks to ramp up deportation numbers in his second term, a dozen current and former government officials told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. They say that one of the clearest indications of that shift is the scale of the checks that immigration agents are conducting using information provided by the resettlement agency to target sponsors and children for deportation. Trump officials maintain that the administration is ensuring children are not abused or trafficked. But current and former agency employees, immigration lawyers and child advocates say the resettlement agency is drifting from its humanitarian mandate. Just last week, the Trump administration fired the agencys ombudsman, who had been hired by Democratic President Joe Bidens administration to act as its first watchdog.Congress set up a system to protect migrant children, in part by giving them to an agency that isnt part of immigration enforcement, said Scott Shuchart, a former official with Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trumps first term and later under Biden. The Trump administration, Shuchart said, is trying to use that protective arrangement as a bludgeon to hurt the kids and the adults who are willing to step forward to take care of them.Republicans have called out ORR in the past, pointing to instances of children working in dangerous jobs as examples of the agencys lax oversight. Lawyers, advocates and agency officials say cases of abuse are rare and should be rooted out. They argue that the administrations recent changes are immigration enforcement tools that could make children and their sponsors more susceptible to harmful living and working conditions because they fear deportation. Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint to reshape the federal government, called for moving the resettlement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, arguing that keeping the agencies separate has led to more unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally. Although Trump publicly distanced himself from the overall plan during his reelection campaign, many of his actions have aligned with its proposals. During Trumps first term, he required ORR to share some information about the children and their sponsors, who are usually relatives. That led to the arrests of at least 170 sponsors in the country illegally and spurred pushback from lawmakers and advocates who said the agency shouldnt be used to aid deportation. Immediately after starting his second term in January, Trump issued an executive order calling for more information sharing between the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the resettlement agency, and Homeland Security. Now, current and former employees of the resettlement agency say that some immigration enforcement officials have been given unfettered access to its databases, which contain sensitive and detailed case information.Data sharing for the sole purpose of immigration enforcement imperils the privacy and security of children and their sponsors, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, wrote in a February letter to the Trump administration. In a March response to Wyden, Andrew Gradison, an acting assistant secretary at HHS, said the resettlement agency is complying with the presidents executive order and sharing information with other federal agencies to ensure immigrant children are safe. Wyden told the news organizations that he plans to continue pressing for answers. On Tuesday, he sent another letter to the administration, stating that he is increasingly concerned that ORR is sharing private information beyond the scope of what is allowed and exposing already vulnerable children to further risks. Two advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit last week in Washington, arguing that the Trump administration unlawfully reversed key provisions of a 2024 Biden rule. Those provisions had barred ORR from using immigration status to deny sponsors the ability to care for children. They also had previously prohibited the agency from sharing sponsor information for the purpose of immigration enforcement. Undoing the provisions has led to the prolonged detention of children because sponsors are afraid or cant claim them because they are unable to meet requirements, the lawsuit alleges. The government has not responded to the lawsuit in court.In conjunction with those changes, Trump tapped an ICE official to lead ORR for the first time. That official was fired two months into her job because she failed to implement the administrations changes fast enough, her successor for the position, Angie Salazar, an ICE veteran, said in a March 6 recording obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune. Some of these policy changes took too long. Three weeks is too long, Salazar told staff without providing specifics. Salazar said that she would ramp up an effort to check on immigrant children and strengthen screenings of their sponsors. She told staff that, in nearly two weeks, ICE investigators had visited 1,500 residences of unaccompanied minors. Agents had uncovered a handful of instances of what she said were cases of sex and labor trafficking. Salazar did not provide details but said identifying even one case of abuse is significant. Those are my marching orders, Salazar told staffers. While I will never do something outside the law for anybody or anything, and while we are operating within the law, we will expect all of you to do so and be supportive of that.Salazar said she expected an increase in the number of children taken from their sponsors and placed back into federal custody, which in the past has been rare. Boxes packed with clothing and household goods in the Venezuelan familys San Antonio home. The family started keeping many of their belongings boxed up and ready to ship out of fear of deportation. (Chris Lee for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) Since Salazar took charge, ORR has instituted a raft of strict vetting rules for sponsors of immigrant children that the agency argues are needed to ensure sponsors are properly screened. Those include no longer accepting foreign passports or IDs as forms of identification unless people have legal authorization to be in the U.S. The resettlement agency also expanded DNA checks of relatives and increased income requirements, including making sponsors submit recent pay stubs or tax returns. (The IRS recently announced that it would share tax information with ICE to facilitate deportations.) ORR said in a statement that it could not respond to ongoing litigation and did not answer detailed questions about Salazars comments or about the reasoning for some of the new requirements. Its policies are intended to ensure safe placement of unaccompanied minors, and the agency is not a law enforcement or immigration enforcement entity, the statement read. Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, also declined to comment on pending lawsuits. But he criticized how the agency within his department was run under Biden, saying it failed to protect unaccompanied children after they were released to sponsors while turning a blind eye to serious risks. Jen Smyers, a former ORR deputy director, disputed those claims, saying the Biden administration made strides to address longstanding concerns that included creating a unit to combat sponsor fraud and improving data systems to better track kids. Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary, did not respond to detailed questions but said in a statement that her agency shares the goal of ensuring that unaccompanied minors are safe. She did not answer questions about the Venezuelan family in San Antonio. She also declined to provide the number of homes the agents have visited across the country or say whether they found cases of abuse or detained anyone for the purpose of deportation. An April email obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune shows for the first time the scale of the operation in the Houston area alone, which over the past decade has resettled the largest number of unaccompanied immigrant children in the country. In the email, an ICE official informed the Harris County Sheriffs Office that the agency planned to visit more than 3,600 addresses associated with such minors. The sheriffs office did not assist in the checks, a spokesperson said. An internal ICE memo obtained last month through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Immigration Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, instructed agents to find unaccompanied children and their sponsors. The document laid out a series of factors that federal agents should prioritize when seeking out children, including those who have not attended court hearings, may have gang ties or have pending deportation orders. The memo detailed crimes, such as smuggling, for which sponsors could be charged. In the case of the San Antonio family, the father has temporary protected status, a U.S. permit for certain people facing danger at home that allows him to live and work here legally. The news organizations could not find a criminal record for him in the U.S. His son is still awaiting an immigration court hearing since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone a year ago. The father stated in his U.S. asylum application that he left Venezuela after receiving death threats for protesting against President Nicols Maduros government. The father, who declined to be identified because he fears ICE enforcement, said in an interview that his son later fled for the same reason.Meanwhile, the avenues for families, like that of the Venezuelan man and his son, to raise concerns about ORRs conduct are shrinking. The Trump administration reduced staff at the agencys ombudsmans office. Mary Giovagnoli, who led the office, was terminated last week. An HHS official said the agency does not comment on personnel matters, but in a letter to Giovagnoli, the agency stated that her employment does not advance the public interest. Giovagnoli said the cuts curtail the offices ability to act as a watchdog to ensure the resettlement agency is meeting its congressionally established mission. Theres no effective oversight, she said. There is this encroachment on ORRs independence, and I think this close relationship with ICE makes everyone afraid that theres going to come a point in time where you dont know where one agency stops and the next begins. Doris Burke contributed research.

by Margaret Coker, The Current This article was produced for ProPublicas Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Current. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Last summer, as political debate swirled over the future of Georgias experiment with Medicaid work requirements, Gov. Brian Kemp held a press conference to unveil a three-minute testimonial video featuring a mechanic who works on classic cars.Luke Seaborn, a 54-year-old from rural Jefferson, became the de facto face of Georgia Pathways to Coverage, Kemps insurance program for impoverished Georgians. In a soft Southern drawl, Seaborn explained how having insurance had improved his life in the year that he had been enrolled: Pathways is a great program that offers health insurance to low-income professionals like myself.Kemp lauds Pathways as an innovative way to decrease the states high rate of uninsured adults while reining in government spending, holding the program up as an example to other Republican-led states eager to institute Medicaid work requirements. But in the nine months since Seaborns video testimonial was released, his opinion of Pathways has plummeted. His benefits have been canceled twice, he said, due to bureaucratic red tape. I used to think of Pathways as a blessing, Seaborn recently told The Current and ProPublica. Now, Im done with it. Rather than an enduring symbol of success, Seaborns experience illustrates why the program struggles to gain traction even as the state spends millions of dollars to burnish Pathways brand. The Current and ProPublica previously reported that many of the approximately 250,000 low-income adults potentially eligible for the health insurance program struggle to enroll or maintain coverage. The politics of Pathways were not on Seaborns mind when he received a phone call last summer from an insurance executive who handles Pathways clients. One of the first Georgians to enroll in the program in 2023, Seaborn had written a letter thanking his insurance provider for covering a procedure for his back pain. The executive from Amerigroup Community Care wanted to know: Would he take part in a promotional video for Pathways? Seaborn, a supporter of the governor, said yes without hesitation. Soon afterward, Kemps press secretary, Garrison Douglas, arrived at his auto repair shop, located a few miles from the governors hometown, and spent hours filming in the garage filled with vintage Ford and Chevy trucks and handpainted gas station signs. A trained chemical engineer, Seaborn had quit his corporate job to embrace his dream of repairing classic cars. But the realities of being a small business owner made that path difficult, Seaborn said, especially when it came to shouldering the cost of health insurance for himself and his son. Pathways eased the way, he said.Seaborn said he was surprised when the governor called him out by name weeks later at the press conference during which his testimonial video was released. He wasnt expecting to be the singular face of Pathways. By November, though, Seaborn encountered some of the problems that other Georgians say have soured their opinion on Pathways. Seaborn said he had logged his work hours into the online system once a month as required. But his benefits were canceled after he failed to complete a new form that he said the state had added without adequate warning. Seaborn said the form asked for the same information he had been submitting every month, just in a different format. The states Medicaid agency did not respond to questions about Seaborns experience or the new form. He said he called the same insurance executive who had asked him to take part in the testimonial. She told him she would be lunching with one of Kemps aides that day and promised to help, he recalled. Within 24 hours, Seaborn said, his benefits were restored, and a representative from Georgias Division of Family and Children Services, which administers federal benefits programs, called to apologize.Douglas said the governors office had no involvement in Mr. Seaborns case. The insurance company did not respond to requests for comment. Pathways enrollees must submit paperwork every month proving they had completed the requirements necessary for coverage: 80 hours of work, study or volunteering. But the state says it is not verifying the information on a monthly basis only during enrollment and upon annual renewal. Seaborn said that after his coverage was restored, his insurance company told him he would no longer have to file his work hours monthly; the next time he would need to submit such documentation would be during his annual reenrollment. Nevertheless, Seaborn said he signed up for text and email notifications from the Pathways program so that he wouldnt be caught off guard if requirements changed again. Even so, technical glitches and more red tape caused him to lose his coverage once more, he said. He stopped receiving texts from the Pathways program in February. When he logged in to the digital platform in early March to make sure everything was in order, a notice informed him that his benefits would be terminated on April 1. The reason: he had missed filing an annual income statement. He said the surprise requirement had popped up on the digital platform even though his coverage was not up for renewal. My head exploded, he said. I didnt get a text or an email. I did what I was supposed to, but that wasnt good enough.Seaborn said he went ahead and filed the information, although it was late. He tried to call his insurance provider again for an explanation and help. He reached out to the Division of Family and Children Services as well. This time, however, he said no one called him back. In April, Seaborn paid out of pocket for his and his sons prescription medications, an extra $40 that he said is difficult for him to afford. Ellen Brown, a spokesperson for Georgias Division of Family and Children Services, would not say why Seaborns benefits were terminated. We are sorry to hear this happened and are looking into how we can better serve our customers and resolve communication gaps in the future, Brown said in a written statement Friday. Every Georgian that seeks our services is important, and we take these matters very seriously. Meanwhile, Seaborn received a phone call that day from the same Division of Family and Children Services representative who had apologized to him after he was kicked off Pathways last fall. He said she told him she would make sure he got his coverage back. The representative did not respond to a request for comment from The Current and ProPublica.On Monday evening, Seaborn received a text message to alert him to a notification in the Pathways digital platform. He logged on: A notice confirmed that he had been reenrolled, a change of fortune that he credited to The Current and ProPublicas questions to state officials about his predicament because he had already given up on contacting people for help.I am so frustrated with this whole journey, Seaborn said. Im grateful for coverage. But what I dont understand is them leaving me like a mushroom in the dark and feeding me nothing, no information, for more than a month.