Author: Reporter

Racketeering and Corruption: Why a law used against mobsters is central to Trump’s criminal charges

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opened her investigation into Donald Trump after the release of a recording of a January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. Trump suggested during the call that Raffensperger, a Republican and the state’s top elections official, could help “find” the votes needed to overturn his narrow loss to Democrat Joe Biden. More than two years later, the indictment brought on August 14 by a grand jury went far beyond that phone call, alleging a web of crimes committed by Trump and others. Willis used Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced...

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Local Investment: President Joe Biden visits Milwaukee to highlight the success of his economic policies

President Joe Biden traveled to Wisconsin on August 15 to highlight his economic policies in a state critical to his reelection fortunes, just a week before Republicans descend on Milwaukee for the party’s first presidential debate. His arrival in Milwaukee came on the eve of the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, major economic legislation that he signed into law with great ceremony – but polls show that most people know little about it or what it does. Wisconsin is among the handful of critical states where President Biden needs to persuade voters that his policies are having a...

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Bidenomics: How a once-in-generation investment was successfully delivered to American communities

There are so many dots on the maps they blur into blobs — each one reflecting trillions of public and private dollars flowing in the U.S. this past year to build thousands of roads, bridges, and manufacturing projects in communities large and small, in states red and blue. They include an electric vehicle “battery belt” of manufacturing stretching from Michigan to Georgia, semiconductor fabrication plants in Arizona, Texas, Ohio, and New York and broadband coming to Appalachia. Taken together, they represent President Joe Biden’s ambitious attempt to use the levers of government to chart a new era of domestic...

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A criminal enterprise: Trump and 18 allies charged in scheme to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results

Donald Trump and 18 allies were indicted in Georgia on August 14 over their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, with prosecutors using a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers, and other aides of a “criminal enterprise” to keep him in power. The nearly 100-page indictment details dozens of acts by Trump or his allies to undo his defeat, including beseeching Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes for him to win the battleground state; harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud; and attempting to...

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Policy Violence: Civil Rights leaders decry DeSantis’ defense of whitewashed slavery curriculum

Civil rights activists cheered when Ron DeSantis pardoned four Black men wrongfully convicted of rape as one of his first actions as Florida’s governor. But four years later, as DeSantis eyes the presidency, their hope that the Republican would be an ally on racial justice has long faded. Instead, African American leaders decry what they call a pattern of “policy violence” against people of color imposed by the DeSantis administration that reached a low point after the recent release of an “anti-woke” public school curriculum on Black history. Specifically, Florida’s teachers are now required to instruct middle-school students that...

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FEC considers regulations to ban AI deepfakes from political campaign ads ahead of 2024 election

The Federal Election Commission has begun a process to potentially regulate AI-generated deepfakes in political ads ahead of the 2024 election, a move advocates say would safeguard voters against a particularly insidious form of election disinformation. The FEC’s unanimous procedural vote in August advances a petition asking it to regulate ads that use artificial intelligence to misrepresent political opponents as saying or doing something they didn’t — a stark issue that is already being highlighted in the current 2024 GOP presidential primary. Though the circulation of convincing fake images, videos or audio clips is not new, innovative generative AI...

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