Battle Goes Nuclear As Musk Calls for Trump's Impeachment, Invokes Jeffrey Epstein
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Congress members trying to see ICE detainees at MDC Brooklyn jail barred from entry
NEW YORK — Officials at MDC Brooklyn barred three Democrat members of Congress from conducting an oversight visit of the jail's ICE detention operation, sparking a brief lockdown that led to cancelled legal visits for inmates seeing their defense lawyers. The Congress members, Reps. Adriano Espaillat, Nydia Velazquez and Dan Goldman, showed up at the notorious Sunset Park jail Wednesday morning, but were blocked at the door, then were briefly trapped between the iron gate in front of the jail and its entrance doors. Inside, about 20 defense attorneys visiting their clients abruptly had those visits cut short, multiple lawyers told the Daily News. Jail staff recalled those inmates back to their housing units, and wouldn't let their lawyers leave the MDC for about a half hour as the drama unfolded outside, the attorneys said. Those lawyers included Marc Agnifilo, who represents Sean 'Diddy' Combs and alleged healthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione, both of whom are housed in MDC, sources said. Agnifilo did not return messages seeking comment Wednesday. 'We were trapped between the gate and the building,' Velazquez told The News. She said that the lawmakers entered the gate and approached the place's front door, and Espaillat asked a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent outside to show his face. 'He [the agent] immediately jumped in front of the gate and locked us inside, and then went upstairs, climbed the steps for the federal building and locked the door so we could not get out to the street,' Velazquez said. 'We couldn't get into the building.' New York Immigration Coalition President Murad Awawdeh, who accompanied the lawmakers, said the ICE agent immediately confronted them, asking for ID, then triggered a lockdown and disappeared into the building. 'It was a circus that the federal prison bureau created,' he said. 'Why is the federal government going so far out of its way to prohibit anyone from seeing what's happening inside their facilities?' Eventually, an assistant to the warden came out, 'and he said what we knew he would say, that we have to request seven days in advance for a permit to allow us to go inside,' Velazquez said. That's against federal law, which gives Congress members the right to make unannounced visits, she said. Starting in June, MDC Brooklyn began holding more than 100 ICE detainees as part of an interagency agreement between ICE and and the Bureau of Prisons to use eight federal facilities across the country to hold immigrants ensnared in Donald Trump's mass deportation machine. 'Denying Members of Congress access to a federal detention facility is outrageous and unacceptable,' Espaillat said in a statement later Wednesday. 'MDC Brooklyn has a well-documented record of abuse. ICE should not be allowed to expand its reach through backdoor deals with federal prisons. This contract must be terminated now.' BOP spokeswoman Randilee Giamusso said Wednesday that the prison system would be happy to accommodate Congress member visits if they give advance notice. 'However, as a law enforcement entity, we must prioritize the safety of our staff, inmates and our facilities. We remain committed to working with our congressional partners,' Giamusso said. 'With proper notice, the BOP is happy to accommodate a request for a site visit from any congressional member.' Espaillat and several other Congress members sued the Trump administration last week, arguing that federal law specifically prohibits immigration detention facilities from requiring prior notice before members of Congress can make oversight visits. 'The Trump administration's lawless efforts to defy that constitutional authority are a gross abuse of power,' Goldman said, 'and we're taking them to court in defense of that principle and to find out what they're hiding.' _____
Yahoo
5 minutes ago
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Apple set to dodge bulk of India tariffs
Apple (AAPL) is set to largely escape the Trump administration's upcoming promise of 50% tariff on goods made in India destined for the US. A White House official confirmed Wednesday that Apple's semiconductor-powered devices, which include its iPhone, will be unaffected by Trump's 25% 'reciprocal' tariffs set to go into effect Thursday. The same goes for an upcoming promise of an additional 25% levy related to India's use of Russian oil that is set to be in place in about 3 weeks' time. IPhones and other similar products will be subject to a separate tariff authority which has not yet been unveiled. Apple said during its most recent earnings call that it made the majority of its US-bound iPhones in India. The news comes after The White House announced that Apple will announce an additional $100 billion investment in US manufacturing during a 4:30 pm ET press event Wednesday. That's in addition to the $500 billion Apple said earlier this year it would invest in the country. Trump has criticized Apple's decision to move manufacturing from China to India and not the US, saying during his May trip to the Middle East that he had a 'little problem' with CEO Tim Cook. Other Trump administration officials have also lambasted Apple for not producing its phones in the US, with trade adviser Peter Navarro calling it the 'longest-running soap opera in Silicon Valley,' during a July interview with CNBC. But according to experts, it would take years for Apple to stand up a smartphone supply chain base in the US. What's more, there are no phone manufacturers in the country and not enough workers to fill the necessary roles. Todd Weaver, developer of Purism's Liberty Phone, a privacy-centric smartphone that uses US-built electronics, says it took his company years to set up the facilities and source the necessary components to ensure the phone's processing and communications features all come from America. Even so, he explained, the phone's body is still made overseas. Apple began expanding its supply chain beyond China following the lockdowns and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But it started specifically concentrating US iPhone manufacturing in India to avoid Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods. Apple hasn't been entirely immune from the impact of tariffs, though. In Q3, the company said it took an $800 million hit from Trump's levies and it expects an additional $1.1 billion in charges in the fourth quarter. While Apple might be able to dodge tariffs on goods out of India, the company isn't entirely out of the woods. The Trump administration is expected to unveil the results of its Section 232 investigation into semiconductor tariffs, which could impact everything from smartphones to automobiles. The exact timing for the tariff announcement is still up in the air, but Trump has said he could reveal them as soon as next week. Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@ Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
5 minutes ago
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Grok, is that Gaza? AI image checks mislocate news photographs
This image by AFP photojournalist Omar al-Qattaa shows a skeletal, underfed girl in Gaza, where Israel's blockade has fuelled fears of mass famine in the Palestinian territory. But when social media users asked Grok where it came from, X boss Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot was certain that the photograph was taken in Yemen nearly seven years ago. The AI bot's untrue response was widely shared online and a left-wing pro-Palestinian French lawmaker, Aymeric Caron, was accused of peddling disinformation on the Israel-Hamas war for posting the photo. At a time when internet users are turning to AI to verify images more and more, the furore shows the risks of trusting tools like Grok, when the technology is far from error-free. Grok said the photo showed Amal Hussain, a seven-year-old Yemeni child, in October 2018. In fact the photo shows nine-year-old Mariam Dawwas in the arms of her mother Modallala in Gaza City on August 2, 2025. Before the war, sparked by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Mariam weighed 25 kilograms, her mother told AFP. Today, she weighs only nine. The only nutrition she gets to help her condition is milk, Modallala told AFP--and even that's "not always available". Challenged on its incorrect response, Grok said: "I do not spread fake news; I base my answers on verified sources." The chatbot eventually issued a response that recognised the error -- but in reply to further queries the next day, Grok repeated its claim that the photo was from Yemen. The chatbot has previously issued content that praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and that suggested people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate. - Radical right bias - Grok's mistakes illustrate the limits of AI tools, whose functions are as impenetrable as "black boxes", said Louis de Diesbach, a researcher in technological ethics. "We don't know exactly why they give this or that reply, nor how they prioritise their sources," said Diesbach, author of a book on AI tools, "Hello ChatGPT". Each AI has biases linked to the information it was trained on and the instructions of its creators, he said. In the researcher's view Grok, made by Musk's xAI start-up, shows "highly pronounced biases which are highly aligned with the ideology" of the South African billionaire, a former confidante of US President Donald Trump and a standard-bearer for the radical right. Asking a chatbot to pinpoint a photo's origin takes it out of its proper role, said Diesbach. "Typically, when you look for the origin of an image, it might say: 'This photo could have been taken in Yemen, could have been taken in Gaza, could have been taken in pretty much any country where there is famine'." AI does not necessarily seek accuracy -- "that's not the goal," the expert said. Another AFP photograph of a starving Gazan child by al-Qattaa, taken in July 2025, had already been wrongly located and dated by Grok to Yemen, 2016. That error led to internet users accusing the French newspaper Liberation, which had published the photo, of manipulation. - 'Friendly pathological liar' - An AI's bias is linked to the data it is fed and what happens during fine-tuning -- the so-called alignment phase -- which then determines what the model would rate as a good or bad answer. "Just because you explain to it that the answer's wrong doesn't mean it will then give a different one," Diesbach said. "Its training data has not changed and neither has its alignment." Grok is not alone in wrongly identifying images. When AFP asked Mistral AI's Le Chat -- which is in part trained on AFP's articles under an agreement between the French start-up and the news agency -- the bot also misidentified the photo of Mariam Dawwas as being from Yemen. For Diesbach, chatbots must never be used as tools to verify facts. "They are not made to tell the truth," but to "generate content, whether true or false", he said. "You have to look at it like a friendly pathological liar -- it may not always lie, but it always could." dou-aor/sbk/rlp
