Trump administration releases FBI records on MLK Jr. despite his family's opposition
The digital document dump includes more than 240,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
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Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Travis Hunter's father released from jail in Florida
The father of Jacksonville Jaguars rookie Travis Hunter is being released from jail in Palm Beach County, Florida, after the state of Florida decided at a court hearing July 24 to withdraw its allegation that he violated his probation there. Travis Hunter Sr., 39, was arrested July 22 after he allegedly violated his probation stemming from drug and gun charges in 2023. Advertisement His probation officer said he violated the 'community control' portion of his three-year probation sentence when there was an 11-minute lapse in tracking his whereabouts on his electronic monitoring device. Under community control, he is generally required to be confined to his home under monitoring from the device, which generated a 'bracelet gone' alarm for 11 minutes on the night of June 28, according to the officer's report. 'It was beeping for I think 10 or 11 minutes, and then it was plugged back in, and they verified that he's where he was supposed to be (at his home),' Hunter's attorney Bradford Cohen said via Zoom at a court hearing July 24. 'I don't know if it was a low battery.' As a result of the alleged violation, Hunter Sr. was taken into custody and held without bond until the hearing in court before Judge Howard Coates July 24. Hunter's attorney told the judge he was prepared to admit to the probation violation as part of an agreement with the state to release Hunter and reinstate the terms of Hunter's probation. But the judge advised that such an admission would require a guilty plea that could stack up against Hunter Sr. if he violated probation again. 'Once you get the violation, it's cumulative in this court,' the judge said at the hearing, which was also viewable via Zoom. 'The second violation will be dealt with more harshly.' Advertisement The attorney for the state then agreed to just withdraw the allegation instead and reinstate the terms of his probation as if it never happened. 'Mr. Hunter, you should be released forthwith,' the judge said. 'There will be an order entered reinstating your probation.' Travis Hunter's father in the spotlight more as son soars Hunter Sr. has been in the public eye recently after his son, the Heisman Trophy winner from Colorado, mentioned him in his speech at the Heisman ceremony in December. Hunter Jr. brought attention to his legal situation then when he mentioned his father couldn't be there then or at other times previously. Advertisement Travis Hunter's father arrested in Florida after alleged probation violation Then in recent months, Hunter Sr. has made special requests in court related to his son. He asked for the court's permission to attend the NFL draft with his son in Wisconsin in April and then attend his son's wedding in Tennessee in May. The judge granted both requests. But the judge denied his request to modify his probation so he could be with his son more frequently as he begins his rookie season in Jacksonville. Why Travis Hunter's father is on probation His probation stems from traffic stop in Lantana, Florida, in November 2023, after the police said he didn't have 'any lights for the tag' on his car, according to the police report. Police identified him as a habitual traffic offender with no driver's license and subjected him to a search that allegedly found drugs and a backpack with a pistol and loaded magazine, according to court records. Advertisement Hunter Sr., a former standout athlete in Palm Beach County, ended up being charged with illegally possessing a firearm as a convicted felon after a prior conviction in 2018 for 'sale or possession of heroin with intent to sell.' He reached a plea deal in 2024 that included a sentence of 90 days in jail. He got released on Dec. 5, just nine days before his son's Heisman ceremony in New York. He also was sentenced to three years of probation, including one year of community control supervision. Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Father of NFL rookie Travis Hunter freed from jail in Florida
Gizmodo
30 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
Jeff Bezos Reportedly Eyes Purchase of CNBC as Tech Billionaires Gobble Up Media
Jeff Bezos is thinking about buying the financial news network CNBC, according to a new report from the New York Post, which cites anonymous sources. Given the damage Bezos has already done to the Washington Post, anyone who values the information they get from CNBC should probably be worried. An unnamed source told the New York Post that Bezos buying CNBC would 'align well with his interests,' and it would remain a 'neutral voice.' CNBC is being offloaded by its parent company, Comcast, into a new publicly traded company called Versant by the end of 2025. The company's other cable TV networks, which include MSNBC, SYFY, the Golf Channel, USA Network, and E!, will also join Versant. The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that a source 'close to Bezos' told the news outlet that he's 'not considering a bid to buy CNBC,' but the man himself has not commented on the possibility yet. The Daily Beast denial is also just one line with no further explanation. Sources might insist to the New York Post that Bezos only wants CNBC as a 'neutral voice' in his media portfolio, but anyone who thinks Bezos is above tinkering with the editorial content of his media properties hasn't been paying attention. The 61-year-old Amazon founder purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million and, by all public accounts, didn't mess with the day-to-day direction of the newspaper. But that all changed shortly before the 2024 presidential election, when the Washington Post editorial board planned to endorse then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate who was running against current President Donald Trump. Bezos not only spiked the endorsement of Harris but set about purging the writing staff of liberal voices on the opinion pages. Recently, writers like liberal columnist Jonathan Capehart, TikTok guy Dave Jorgenson, and polling expert Philip Bump have left the paper, taking buyouts offered to people who don't want to be involved in the new era of Bezos meddling. Those kinds of changes are any newspaper owner's right, but the shift has set off a wave of anger and outrage among people who see Trump's presidency as a threat to the future of the United States as a liberal democracy. According to NPR, Bezos lost the newspaper about 250,000 subscribers in the span of a week after news broke about the Harris endorsement, and he reportedly lost 75,000 more as the billionaire announced that anyone who didn't adhere to his particular ideology of 'free markets and personal liberties' should leave the storied media institution. Bezos also cozied up to Trump, attending the president's inauguration in January and more recently meeting with the president at the White House last week, according to CNBC. The dude is apparently all-in on the MAGA agenda of competitive oligarchy. Rumors recently circulated that Bezos may be interested in buying Condé Nast, the media company that owns magazines like Vogue and Wired. There was speculation that Bezos might even just carve out Vogue for his new bride, Lauren Sanchez, whom he married last month in Venice, Italy, a wedding that was met by protesters who didn't appreciate his proximity to Trump. At this point, it's rumors and speculation. But sometimes rumors turn into reality. And if Bezos buys CNBC, there's a good chance it could become the latest political instrument of a man worth over $200 billion.
Fast Company
30 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Data nerds are banding together to preserve government information under attack by the Trump administration
The data nerds are fighting back. After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites in unprecedented ways after President Donald Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely. Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don't have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics. 'There are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring the integrity of the statistical system. And that gives me hope, even during these challenging times,' Mary Jo Mitchell, director of government and public affairs for the research nonprofit the Population Association of America, said this week during an online public data-users conference. The threats to the U.S. data infrastructure since January have come not only from the disappearance or modification of data related to gender, sexual orientation, health, climate change and diversity, among other topics, but also from job cuts of workers and contractors who had been guardians of restricted-access data at statistical agencies, the data experts said. 'There are trillions of bytes of data files, and I can't even imagine how many public dollars were spent to collect those data. … But right now, they're sitting someplace that is inaccessible because there are no staff to appropriately manage those data,' Jennifer Park, a study director for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said during the conference hosted by the Association of Public Data Users (APDU). 'Gender' switched to 'sex' In February, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's official public portal for health data, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau's most comprehensive survey of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was 'unavailable due to maintenance' before access was restored. Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been 'substantially altered,' with the majority having the word 'gender' switched to 'sex,' they wrote this month in The Lancet medical journal. One of the most difficult tasks has been figuring out what's been changed since many of the alterations weren't recorded in documentation. Beth Jarosz, senior program director at the Population Reference Bureau, thought she was in good shape since she had previously downloaded data she needed from the National Survey of Children's Health for a February conference where she was speaking, even though the data had become unavailable. But then she realized she had failed to download the questionnaire and later discovered that a question about discrimination based on gender or sexual identity had been removed. 'It's the one thing my team didn't have,' Jarosz said at this week's APDU conference. 'And they edited the questionnaire document, which should have been a historical record.' Among the groups that have formed this year to collect and preserve the federal data are the Federation of American Scientists' which monitors changes to federal data sets; the University of Chicago Library's Data Mirror website, which backs up and hosts at-risk data sets; the Data Rescue Project, which serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts; and the Federal Data Forum, which shares information about what federal statistics have gone missing or been modified — a job also being done by the American Statistical Association. The outside data warriors also are quietly reaching out to workers at statistical agencies and urging them to back up any data that is restricted from the public. 'You can't trust that this data is going to be here tomorrow,' said Lena Bohman, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project. Experts' committee unofficially revived Separately, a group of outside experts has unofficially revived a long-running U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee that was killed by the Trump administration in March. Census Bureau officials won't be attending the Census Scientific Advisory Committee meeting in September, since the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, eliminated it. But the advisory committee will forward its recommendations to the bureau, and demographer Allison Plyer said she has heard that some agency officials are excited by the committee's re-emergence, even if it's outside official channels. 'We will send them recommendations but we don't expect them to respond since that would be frowned upon,' said Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans. 'They just aren't getting any outside expertise … and they want expertise, which is understandable from nerds.'
