Latest news with #Brooklyn
USA Today
3 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Nets summer league player grades: Drew Timme has 24 in loss to Knicks
The Brooklyn Nets have not been earning the results they wanted through two games in the Las Vegas Summer League, but Tuesday presented another chance for them to notch their first win in the event. With a matchup against Tyler Kolek and the New York Knicks on tap, Brooklyn had the opportunity to show what they could do with more practice time, but the results remained the same. The Nets lost to the Knicks 97-93 on Tuesday to drop them to 0-3 thus far in the summer league, meaning that they likely have no shot of making to the playoffs within the event. Brooklyn lost the game despite center Drew Timme going off for 24 points, 10 rebounds, and four assists while forward Caleb Daniels dropped 16 points and nine rebounds in his first chance to start. The main reason that the Nets lost to the Knicks was due to guard Tyler Kolek and forward MarJon Beauchamp scoring 25 points each, showing how hard it was for Brooklyn to defend them over the course of the game. Here are the Nets player grades following Tuesday's loss to New York: Nolan Traore: D Traore got the chance to start this game with Egor Demin and Tyson Etienne being ruled out for the matchup, but this game following a trend for Traore in which he showed some positives and negatives. His overall shooting was lacking, especially at the rim, but him continuing to show that he's lightning-quick with the ball in his hands along with some nice passing should keep Nets fans encouraged. Ben Saraf: C+ Saraf, like Traore, got the opportunity to start in a summer league game with some players being held out of the game for various reasons and scoring efficiently was not his strong start. To be fair, this was the most aggressive that Saraf has been in Las Vegas and he did make some nice moves to get all the way to the rim. Saraf did a good job of keeping his head in the game and he had some active hands on the defensive end of the floor and came away with some steals as a result. Caleb Daniels: B+ Daniels drew the start and he made the most of it as he did a great job of scoring the ball while trying to spread the floor for players like Drew Timme and Ben Saraf. Daniels did a good job of scoring at all three levels and he was all over the boards with his rebounding. Daniels did in this game what every player looking for an NBA roster spot should be doing in the summer league and that's playing hard on every possession and hitting open shots. Grant Nelson: B- Nelson did a good job of scoring the ball when it came his way, but one would have liked to see him be more aggressive on the offensive end, especially when he got the ball near the rim. Nelson did a good job of rebounding and he was active on the defensive end on the perimeter and in the paint. Unfortunately, Nelson turned the ball over too much over the course of the game. Drew Timme: A- Timme had another chance to show what he could do in the Las Vegas Summer League as the starting center for the Nets and while he wasn't as efficient, he still proved his dominance. Timme did not make any of his three-point attempts, but other than that, he was efficient finishing around the basket. Timme did a great job of cleaning up the glass and passing the ball, showing his all-around game. TJ Bamba: C Bamba did a good job of scoring when the ball came his way as he found some success scoring in the paint using his frame to finish. Other than that, Bamba did not do much else on the offensive end of the floor and he seemed to pick up some fouls while trying to guard his man. Quincy Olivari: B Olivari had a good performance coming off the bench for the Nets as he scored the ball well overall even though he struggled shooting the ball from three-point land. Olivari found most of his success finishing in the restricted area and drawing fouls, showing that he is more than just his three-point shot. Olivari did pick up six fouls in his 27 minutes on the floor so that part was concerning.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
How the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files became a vehicle for QAnon
The release of the 'Epstein client list' has long been the holy grail for the Maga movement. Supposedly, this list, once released, would incriminate a veritable who's who of liberal elites complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's child sex-trafficking operation and expose the moral rot at the heart of the Democratic establishment. The mystery surrounding the Epstein files also became a vehicle for QAnon conspiracy theorists to push their ideas about a 'deep state' cover-up of a network of global pedophiles into the broader tent of the Maga movement. During his campaign, Donald Trump promised on several occasions to declassify the Epstein files, which would include the 'list'. Before they joined the government, Trump's FBI chief, Kash Patel, and deputy FBI chief, Dan Bongino, spent years on podcasts and TV appearances winking at QAnon and Epstein conspiracy theorists and demanding the files' release, even suggesting that the Biden administration was withholding them to protect its own. Then, on the heels of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, the justice department quietly dropped a bombshell in the form of a memo. A 'systematic review' of the Epstein files by justice department officials 'revealed no incriminating 'client list',' the memo stated, nor did they find evidence that Epstein blackmailed powerful figures. The memo also affirmed that Epstein died by suicide in his Brooklyn jail cell while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019. Since the memo's release, Maga has been in turmoil – and some of Trump's most loyal foot soldiers have been in open revolt against his administration, accusing it of now being part of a cover-up and calling for the resignation of the attorney general, Pam Bondi, over her handling of the Epstein files. On Truth Social, Trump offered a stern rebuke to his detractors, claiming that the Epstein files were actually a hoax, because they were written by 'Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration'. But not everyone's buying it. 'This is the worst response I've ever seen from President Trump,' said the rightwing commentator Benny Johnson. The disgraced former general Michael Flynn, considered a hero by the QAnon movement, wrote: '@realdonaldtrump please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR IS NOT GOING AWAY.' The rightwing commentator Matt Walsh called Trump's statement 'extremely obtuse', adding: 'We don't accept obvious bullshit from our political leaders.' Maga's obsession with the Epstein files is an indication of how the core ideas associated with the fringe QAnon conspiracy – that a shadowy cabal of government elites is working to cover up a global child sex-trafficking operation – have taken root in the broader pro-Trump movement. QAnon took a long tradition of antisemitic, 'deep state' and 'satanic panic' conspiracy theories, put them on steroids with a pro-Trump flavor, and assigned the enigmatic Q, supposedly a government official with top secret clearance and a penchant for posting on 8chan, at the helm of the movement. 'The unique thing about QAnon is that you had an anonymous poster on an anonymous chatroom putting out clues for people to try to solve,' said Joseph Uscinski, a political science professor at the University of Miami specializing in the study of conspiracy theories. When QAnon emerged in 2017, allegations against Epstein had been swirling for over a decade. Epstein's arrest in 2019 on federal charges was a boon for QAnon. The movement quickly sought to incorporate information about the case into their propaganda. The case also surfaced a trove of digital media that QAnon sleuths could pore over looking for 'clues' – such as photographs of Epstein with various public figures (including many with Trump), Epstein's flight logs and aerial images of his private island. 'Epstein engaged in crimes, but I think there's a whole fantasy lore surrounding it that goes far beyond any available evidence,' said Uscinski. Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University's program on extremism, told the Guardian that as 'QAnon and Maga have become increasingly intertwined in recent years, we have seen the embrace of increasingly fringe conspiracies and extremist narratives like 'Pizzagate' and 'Save the Children' by mainstream political figures.' These narratives turned out to be useful for Trump and his allies, who harnessed simmering suspicion of establishment figures and cast the former reality star as the only person brave enough to take on 'the deep state'. 'As Trump and other prominent Republican figures amplified QAnon content and used it as a political cudgel against Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, they were providing legitimacy and approval to the very same conspiracy theorists who are now decrying Pam Bondi and the justice department,' said Lewis. Tensions over the Epstein files have been building since February, when Bondi went on Fox News and said Epstein's client list was sitting on her desk 'right now for review.' A week later, at a press event at the White House, Bondi handed out binders that she promised contained 'declassified' Epstein records to two dozen Maga influencers. The influencers quickly realized there was basically no new information in them. In response to the ensuing backlash, Bondi said that the FBI had failed to disclose a tranche of Epstein files, and that she had ordered Patel to compile them. Months later, in June, Elon Musk – amid the dramatic feud with his former friend Trump – claimed without evidence that the reason the Epstein files hadn't been released in full was because the president was implicated in them. (Musk has since deleted the post.) The scale of the current Maga meltdown 'certainly shows the significance of Epstein conspiracies within the broader QAnon pantheon', said Lewis, and 'should lay bare just how deeply the disease of the QAnon movement has seeped into a Republican party which has welcomed its most conspiratorial, antisemitic, reactionary fringe into Congress and the executive branch with open arms'. The backlash Trump is facing is a leopards-eating-faces moment for the administration. 'This was a conspiracy that Donald Trump, Pam Bondi and these Maga extremists have been fanning the flames of for the last several years, and now the chickens are coming home to roost,' the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, told reporters Monday. Uscinski noted that's 'the interesting thing that happens when you use conspiracy theories to get into power'. 'Because conspiracy theories should be aimed at the people in power, right? They accuse powerful people of doing something wicked behind the scenes,' he added. In Trump's case, he 'spent the last 10 years building a coalition of largely conspiracy-minded people in the US', said Uscinski. 'So in order for him to keep these people engaged and donating and going to his speeches, and voting for him and voting for Republicans, he has to keep pressing the conspiracy theories.' But experts are skeptical that this current Maga meltdown will have any lasting impact. Trump's overall approval rating hasn't fluctuated dramatically over the past week. In fact, it's almost at exactly the same place it was at the same point in his first administration. '[Trump's supporters] are disgruntled, they're upset and they're going to express that on social media. But they're not going to abandon him, because he's the only game in town for them,' said Uscinski. He compared the current moment to the backlash Trump faced back in 2021. After courting favor from anti-vaxxers, Trump was booed when he announced during a live Bill O'Reilly interview that he had received his Covid-19 booster shot and urged Americans to get theirs. Despite the importance of the Epstein files to the Maga and QAnon movements, Lewis thinks that 'it's unlikely this outrage will last'. 'The culture war will move on to its next target … and the rage machine will follow with conspiracies and vitriol,' said Lewis. 'It's much easier to be angry at an immigrant than to wonder whether you've been lied to for the last eight years.'
Reuters
5 hours ago
- Business
- Reuters
Goldman Sachs finances $270 million affordable housing project in New York
NEW YORK, July 15 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs (GS.N), opens new tab will finance a $270 million affordable housing project to build 385 apartments in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York Governor Kathy Hochul's office said. The city's housing crunch and rising rents have become a key focus of Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's campaign. The project financed by Goldman's Urban Investment Group will include commercial space, the governor's office said in a statement. "This project is helping us fight the housing affordability crisis while also prioritizing improvements that will make the neighborhood more livable for families," Hochul said. Mamdani aims to invest public dollars to triple the city's production of permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes – constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years, according to his campaign website. His stunning victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo has drawn concerns from business leaders, including some on Wall Street, about the costs of his proposed policies. Goldman's Urban Investment Group has invested nearly $11 billion in affordable housing and other development projects across the state and $9 billion in New York City since 2001. "Our investment is a down payment on East New York's potential, creating thousands of high-quality, affordable homes and essential services that will fuel the economic vitality of the community," said Asahi Pompey, chairman of Goldman's Urban Investment Group.
CBS News
6 hours ago
- CBS News
Former Long Island sleep center worker who put cameras in bathrooms offered probation, no jail time
A former Long Island sleep center worker pleaded guilty Tuesday to secretly recording co-workers and patients, including a child, while they were using bathrooms at a Northwell Health facility. The judge offered him probation with no jail time. Sanjai Syamaprasad, a father from Brooklyn, installed Velcro dots in nine bathrooms at the Northwell Sleep Disorders and STARS Rehabilitation Center where he worked in Manhasset, and used the dots to position a spy camera disguised as a smoke detector in places where it could record the shower and toilet, prosecutors said. Northwell fired Syamaprasad last year after he was caught watching the videos at work, and alerted law enforcement. Prosecutors seized more than 300 videos that recorded body parts of hundreds of people, but based on who they could identify, they were only able to bring charges involving five victims, including a child. Syamaprasad pleaded guilty to unlawful surveillance and evidence tampering. Judge Meryl Berkowitz offered five years probation and sex offender registration, but no jail time, citing Syamaprasad's remorse and completion of a program. Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly had recommended one to three years behind bars for each count. "This case deserved jail time," she said. "It's not a one-off. It's not one time, one night he did this. It was night after night after night, victim after victim after victim." Donnelly says the plea deal sends the wrong message. "This was a massive, massive violation of people's privacy and rights," she said. After the hearing, Syamaprasad bolted out of the courthouse, refusing to answer questions. "It's just very ironic how he can film people sitting on the toilet and in the showers, and then he puts a mask and a hat on and runs out covering his face," former sleep center employee Brenda Pellettieri said. Pellettieri is one of potentially hundreds of victims whose private bathroom moments were secretly recorded. Victims are now part of class action lawsuits against both Syamaprasad and Northwell Health. "It's really destroyed my faith in humanity. You don't trust people," Pellettieri said. "My firm has spoken personally to hundreds and hundreds of victims, and I know they're going to be extremely disappointed that he's not going to be serving any jail time," said John Rubenstein, an attorney with German Rubenstein LLP. Sentencing will be formalized on Sept. 15, when all sides will have an opportunity to speak.
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
CIA historian Tim Weiner: ‘Trump has put national security in the hands of crackpots and fools'
It may seem perverse to pity the Central Intelligence Agency. The powerful spy organization's history is rich with failures and abuses – from the Cuban missile crisis to the post-9/11 torture program to its role in the overthrow of a long string of democratically elected leaders. But among the many consequences of Donald Trump's open hostility toward America's intelligence community is that no less a CIA critic than Tim Weiner now sounds like a defender. To understand why, Weiner – author of the unsparing history of the agency, the 2007 bestseller Legacy of Ashes – suggested a thought experiment in a recent interview: imagine spending years as an intelligence officer, working diligently to subvert the Kremlin, only to watch the US stand with Russia, Iran and North Korea, as it did in February when it voted against a UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine. In that moment, Weiner said: 'You come to the realization, if you hadn't already: 'My God, the president of the United States has gone over to the other side. He has joined the authoritarian axis.'' Weiner was sitting on the patio of his Brooklyn apartment, a sunny book-lined penthouse purchased with some of the proceeds of Legacy, the 700-page tome that, to his evident surprise, became one of the unlikeliest beach reads in recent memory. A former national security reporter for the New York Times, the author has spent nearly four decades laboring to unlock the agency's secrets. His latest book, The Mission, which is out on Tuesday, is something of a sequel, picking up where Legacy left off to examine the evolution of the CIA since 9/11. Based on interviews with numerous CIA officials (including, improbably, current deputy director for operations Tom Sylvester), it's the story of an organization purpose-built for a bygone era, still adrift more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, failing to spot the emergence of a formidable new adversary in Al-Qaida, and then playing a panicked and catastrophic game of catchup. The results included misbegotten intel about WMDs, the depraved and ineffective torture program, the failure to predict the Arab spring and other screwups. But it's the book's final chapters, which find the organization blindsided by Russia's influence operation on behalf of Trump's 2016 campaign for the presidency, that readers may find most striking. Weeks before the election, Russia's intelligence services, with an assist from WikiLeaks, began releasing a trove of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, dealing a devastating blow to Hillary Clinton's campaign. It was, as Weiner puts it in The Mission, 'an audacious act of political warfare [that] helped elect a demagogue president of the United States'. Weiner dismisses the theory that Trump is a Russian asset, but says it's beside the point. 'He's Russia's ally.' (That said, as Putin is discovering this week, the president's loyalties are somewhat fluid.) The CIA soon embarked on a delicate balancing act: working to neutralize the very force that worked to put their new commander-in-chief in office. Tom Rakusan, then newly installed as the chief of the clandestine service, called a meeting of senior officials. 'He told them, in so many word: 'The Russians stole our fucking election. How do we make sure this never happens again?'' Weiner recounted. Agents who had spent the last 15 years working on counter-terrorism would turn their attention back to the Russian threat. 'The call to arms proceeded, I'm quite confident, without his knowledge,' Weiner added, referring to Trump. Following two impeachments (and two acquittals), an insurrection and another election, Trump is back in the White House and bent on revenge. 'Donald Trump hates the CIA,' Weiner said, noting that Trump considers the agency the beating heart of a 'deep state' that he believes is working to undermine him. Consequently, the president has appointed 'a coterie of dangerously incompetent and servile acolytes to the highest positions of national security'. Weiner describes the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe – a former personal injury attorney, Maga congressman and, briefly, director of national intelligence in Trump's first term – as 'a spineless person who will do whatever Trump tells him to do'. Shortly after we spoke, Ratcliffe ordered a review that criticized the CIA's original report on Russia's pro-Trump influence operation, and the former CIA director John Brennan became the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI. The new director has also moved aggressively to implement a purge at the CIA's Langley, Virginia, headquarters. 'He's attempting to rid the CIA of its most experienced officers,' Weiner said, 'and to impose ideological purity tests. Ratcliffe said explicitly from the get-go that he aimed to align the leadership of the CIA with the president's view of the world. Since the president's view of the world is largely based on falsehoods and imaginary enemies, I think this will be an extremely difficult task.' Meanwhile, Ratcliffe dismissed hundreds of recently hired staffers and then sent their names to Elon Musk in an unclassified email that Weiner said was probably intercepted by the Russians and Chinese, who he posits are now presumably working to recruit them as spies. 'All they need to do is to find people who are either deeply resentful or who might have a financial or a drug problem to be exploited.' Trump's anti-diversity crusade will also have national security repercussions, Weiner predicted. In February, a judge allowed the administration to reassign the team responsible for diversifying the agency. 'For decades, the CIA has tried to hire people who don't look like they just got off the bus from Kansas on the very sound principle that if you want to spy in a nation like Somalia or Pakistan or China, it might be wise to have a workforce that is not made up exclusively of white guys, and who speak languages other than English,' Weiner said. 'Diversity was one of the CIA's few superpowers, and the mindless abolition of the effort to diversify the CIA's officers and analysts was one of the most stupid self-inflicted wounds that Ratcliffe could have delivered.' Meanwhile, as Politico recently reported, allies may now be reluctant to share sensitive information with the US, no doubt mindful of the 2017 incident in which the president gleefully handed the Russian foreign minister a highly classified Israeli tip. 'The CIA, to an extent that people rarely understand or appreciate, is really dependent on allied intelligence services,' Weiner explained. The appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, who oversees the CIA and 17 other intelligence agencies, only compounds the risk, Weiner said. Gabbard has never worked in the intelligence community and has been accused of parroting Russian propaganda. 'What ally would share secrets with a dangerously deluded person like that?' Weiner recognizes it might come as a surprise to some to hear him extolling the virtues of the agency he has previously skewered. 'I'm not known as a great defender of the CIA but neither am I a defender of willful ignorance,' he said of the Trump administration's seeming unconcern about the threats posed by foreign adversaries. 'I do think that the mission of intelligence to divine the secrets of the enemies in the United States is worthwhile. There's unfortunately no mechanism for defining the intentions of the president, and therein lies a danger. 'What keeps me up at night,' he continued, 'is the fact that Trump has put the instruments of American national security in the hands of crackpots and fools, and that their incompetence and ideological blinkers will blind them to a coming attack. If the United States gets hit again under Trump, he will destroy what is left of our democracy.' When I asked Weiner how he thought the CIA might respond to Trump's provocations, he chuckled. 'Is the CIA going to join the resistance? No,' he said flatly. That said, the spot where we sat was just blocks from the site where, weeks before, demonstrators had assembled for one of several thousand 'No Kings' protests – thought to be the largest mass demonstration in US history. 'We've learned, to our sorrow, that Robert Mueller is not going to save us,' Weiner said. 'Barack Obama is not going to save us. The supreme court is not going to save us. But the other day, several million Americans marched in the street to protest the Mad King. And just as only we can defeat ourselves, I think only we can save ourselves.' The Mission by Tim Weiner is available now on Mariner Books
