Politics

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Longtime Republican U.S. Rep. Kay Granger of Texas is having “unforeseen health challenges” that have worsened in the final months of her more than two decades in Congress, a statement from her office said Monday.

Granger, 81, has not cast a vote in Washington since July. In a statement provided by her office, Granger said she has been “navigating some unforeseen health challenges over the past year” but did not specify or elaborate.

“However, since early September, my health challenges have progressed making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable,” the statement said.

Granger’s office did not immediately respond to questions emailed Monday about her condition or why they did not publicly disclose her health status earlier. Messages left with Granger’s family also were not immediately returned.

Granger announced in 2023 that she would not seek reelection, saying at the time that it was time for a new generation of leaders to step up. Granger also announced in March that she would step down as chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

First elected to Texas’ 12th Congressional District in 1996, Granger was the first Republican woman elected to represent the state in the U.S. House. Before that, she was the mayor of Fort Worth.

Her seat will be filled in January by Republican Craig Goldman, a former Texas House member, who was elected to the district that includes parts of Fort Worth, western Tarrant County and most of neighboring Parker County.

source

By Ross Kerber

(Reuters) – The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee is seeking information from some 60 U.S. asset managers about their involvement with an investor climate group, adding pressure against environmental efforts by large investors.

Letters sent on Friday to members of the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, or NZAM, were signed by committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Representative Thomas Massie. They made claims in line with a committee report released on Dec. 13 that Republicans say showed fund firms colluded to cut emissions. The committee’s Democrats have dismissed such claims, and big fund firms have denied similar charges.

Representatives for companies that received the letter including BlackRock, State Street and JPMorgan Asset Management did not immediately comment when contacted late on Friday.

Republicans previously have taken credit for prompting those three fund managers to step back from another investor group, the Climate Action 100+.

NZAM says it is an international group with more than 325 signatories managing $57.5 trillion, according to its website. Members pledge to support the goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, using influence such as how they vote their proxies at corporate meetings.

The letters from Jordan and Massie state that companies’ efforts with NZAM and the affiliated Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero “may violate U.S. antitrust law,” citing the earlier report. They ask for information such as how companies’ participation in NZAM changed their stewardship strategies.

Mindy Lubber, CEO of Boston-based environmental advocacy group Ceres, an organizing partner of NZAM, said in an interview that the letters were “consistent with other efforts to suggest that investors ought not to consider climate risk, when of course they should be aware of climate risk as part of their fiduciary duty.”

(Reporting by Ross Kerber; Editing by Leslie Adler)

source

(Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday said he was appointing Bo Hines, who previously ran to represent a North Carolina district in Congress, as executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets that will be chaired by incoming crypto czar David Sacks.

(Reporting by Costas Pitas; editing by Diane Craft)

source

WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday he would nominate billionaire investor Stephen Feinberg to serve as deputy secretary of defense.

Feinberg is the co-chief executive of Cerberus Capital Management LP, a private equity firm that has invested in defense contractors. He served on an intelligence advisory board during Trump’s 2017-2021 White House term.  

Feinberg would serve as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon under Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host who faces questions about allegations of alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct. Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing.

Trump also nominated Elbridge Colby to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy, the No. 3 position at the Pentagon. Colby, known as a China hawk, served as a senior Pentagon official during Trump’s first term. 

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Leslie Adler and Diane Craft)

source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday named Katie Miller, who served in Trump’s first administration and is the wife of his incoming deputy chief of staff, as one of the first members of an advisory board to be led by billionaire allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that aims to drastically slash government spending, federal regulations and the federal workforce.

Miller, wife of Trump’s designated homeland security adviser Stephen Miller, will join Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an informal advisory body that Trump has said will enable his administration to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

“Katie Miller will soon be joining DOGE! She has been a loyal supporter of mine for many years, and will bring her professional experience to Government Efficiency,” Trump posted in a message on his social media platform Truth Social.

Musk and Ramaswamy recently revealed plans to wipe out scores of federal regulations crafted by what they say is an anti-democratic, unaccountable bureaucracy, but have yet to announce members of the DOGE team. Musk has said he wants to slash the number of federal agencies from over 400 to 99.

Katie Miller had served in the first Trump adminstration as deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and as press secretary for former Vice President Mike Pence.

She is currently a spokesperson for the transition team for Trump’s designated Health and Human Services secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr.

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Leslie Adler)

source

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden announced Monday that he is commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment mere weeks before President-elect Donald Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office.

The move spares the lives of people convicted in killings, including the slayings of police and military officers, people on federal land and those involved in deadly bank robberies or drug deals, as well as the killings of guards or prisoners in federal facilities.

It means just three federal inmates are still facing execution. They are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.

“I’ve dedicated my career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” Biden said in a statement. “Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole. These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”

The Biden administration in 2021 announced a moratorium on federal capital punishment to study the protocols used, which suspended executions during Biden’s term. But Biden actually had promised to go further on the issue in the past, pledging to end federal executions without the caveats for terrorism and hate-motivated, mass killings.

While running for president in 2020, Biden’s campaign website said he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.”

Similar language didn’t appear on Biden’s reelection website before he left the presidential race in July.

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden’s statement said. “But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vice president, and now president, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”

He took a political jab at Trump, saying, “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

Indeed, Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has spoken frequently of expanding executions. In a speech announcing his 2024 campaign, Trump called for those “caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts.” He later promised to execute drug and human smugglers and even praised China’s harsher treatment of drug peddlers. During his first term as president, Trump also advocated for the death penalty for drug dealers.

There were 13 federal executions during Trump’s first term, more than under any president in modern history, and some may have happened fast enough to have contributed to the spread of the coronavirus at the federal death row facility in Indiana.

Those were the first federal executions since 2003. The final three occurred after Election Day in November 2020 but before Trump left office the following January, the first time federal prisoners were put to death by a lame-duck president since Grover Cleveland in 1889.

Biden faced recent pressure from advocacy groups urging him to act to make it more difficult for Trump to increase the use of capital punishment for federal inmates. The president’s announcement also comes less than two weeks after he commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and of 39 others convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.

The announcement also followed the post-election pardon that Biden granted his son Hunter on federal gun and tax charges after long saying he would not issue one, sparking an uproar in Washington. The pardon also raised questions about whether he would issue sweeping preemptive pardons for administration officials and other allies who the White House worries could be unjustly targeted by Trump’s second administration.

Speculation that Biden could commute federal death sentences intensified last week after the White House announced he plans to visit Italy on the final foreign trip of his presidency next month. Biden, a practicing Catholic, will meet with Pope Francis, who recently called for prayers for U.S. death row inmates in hopes their sentences will be commuted.

Martin Luther King III, who publicly urged Biden to change the death sentences, said in a statement issued by the White House that the president “has done what no president before him was willing to do: take meaningful and lasting action not just to acknowledge the death penalty’s racist roots but also to remedy its persistent unfairness.”

Donnie Oliverio, a retired Ohio police officer whose partner was killed by one of the men whose death sentence was converted, said the execution of “the person who killed my police partner and best friend would have brought me no peace.”

“The president has done what is right here,” Oliverio said in a statement also issued by the White House, “and what is consistent with the faith he and I share.”

___

Weissert reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.

source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday he will nominate billionaire Houston Rockets pro basketball team owner Tilman Fertitta to be his administration’s ambassador to Italy.

Fertitta is the chairman and owner of Landry’s, which operates a large collection of restaurants, hotels and casinos throughout the United States.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump lauded the 67-year-old Texas native as an “accomplished businessman” and philanthropist.

(Reporting by Brad Heath; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

source

Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk’s X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner’s support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta’s Threads and its algorithms.

The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter’s core mechanic. That’s unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky’s growth trajectory — with a user base that has more than doubled since October — could make it a serious competitor to other social platforms.

But with growth comes growing pains. It’s not just human users who’ve been flocking to Bluesky but also bots, including those designed to create partisan division or direct users to junk websites.

The skyrocketing user base — now surpassing 25 million — is the biggest test yet for a relatively young platform that has branded itself as a social media alternative free of the problems plaguing its competitors. According to research firm Similarweb, Bluesky added 7.6 million monthly active app users on iOS and Android in November, an increase of 295.4% since October. It also saw 56.2 million desktop and mobile web visits, in the same period, up 189% from October.

Besides the U.S. elections, Bluesky also got a boost when X was briefly banned in Brazil.

“They got this spike in attention, they’ve crossed the threshold where it is now worth it for people to flood the platform with spam,” said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a member of Issue One’s Council for Responsible Social Media. “But they don’t have the cash flow, they don’t have the established team that a larger platform would, so they have to do it all very, very quickly.”

To manage growth for its tiny staff, Bluesky started as an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. That period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other distinctive features to attract new users, such as “starter packs” that provide lists of topically curated feeds. Meta recently announced that it is testing a similar feature.

Compared to the bigger players like Meta’s platforms or X, Bluesky has a “quite different” value system, said Claire Wardle, a professor at Cornell University and an expert in misinformation. This includes giving users more control over their experience.

“The first generation of social media platforms connected the world, but ended up consolidating power in the hands of a few corporations and their leaders,” Bluesky said on its blog in March. “Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires unilaterally making decisions over what we see. On an open social network like Bluesky, you can shape your experience for yourself.”

Because of this mindset, Bluesky has achieved a scrappy underdog status that has attracted users who’ve grown tired of the big players.

“People had this idea that it was going to be a different type of social network,” Wardle said. “But the truth is, when you get lots of people in a place and there are eyeballs, it means that it’s in other people’s interests to use bots to create, you know, information that aligns with their perspective.”

Little data has emerged to help quantify the rise in impersonator accounts, artificial intelligence-fueled networks and other potentially harmful content on Bluesky. But in recent weeks, users have begun reporting large numbers of apparent AI bots following them, posting plagiarized articles or making seemingly automated divisive comments in replies.

Lion Cassens, a Bluesky user and doctoral candidate in the Netherlands, found one such network by accident — a group of German-language accounts with similar bios and AI-generated profile pictures posting in replies to three German newspapers.

“I noticed some weird replies under a news post by the German newspaper ‘Die Ziet,’” he said in an email to The Associated Press. “I have a lot of trust in the moderation mechanism on Bluesky, especially compared to Twitter since the layoffs and due to Musk’s more radical stance on freedom of speech. But AI bots are a big challenge, as they will only improve. I hope social media can keep up with that.”

Cassens said the bots’ messages have been relatively innocuous so far, but he was concerned about how they could be repurposed in the future to mislead.

There are also signs that foreign disinformation narratives have made their way to Bluesky. The disinformation research group Alethea pointed to one low-traction post sharing a false claim about ABC News that had circulated on Russian Telegram channels.

Copycat accounts are another challenge. In late November, Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, found that of the top 100 most followed named individuals on Bluesky, 44% had at least one duplicate account posing as them. Two weeks later, Mantzarlis said Bluesky had removed around two-thirds of the duplicate accounts he’d initially detected — a sign the site was aware of the issue and attempting to address it.

Bluesky posted earlier this month that it had quadrupled its moderation team to keep up with its growing user base. The company also announced it had introduced a new system to detect impersonation and was working to improve its Community Guidelines to provide more detail on what’s allowed. Because of the way the site is built, users also have the option to subscribe to third-party “Labelers” that outsource content moderation by tagging accounts with warnings and context.

The company didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Even as its challenges aren’t yet at the scale other platforms face, Bluesky is at a “crossroads,” said Edward Perez, a board member at the nonpartisan nonprofit OSET Institute, who previously led Twitter’s civic integrity team.

“Whether BlueSky likes it or not, it is being pulled into the real world,” Perez said, noting that it needs to quickly prioritize threats and work to mitigate them if it hopes to continue to grow.

That said, disinformation and bots won’t be Bluesky’s only challenges in the months and years to come. As a text-based social network, its entire premise is falling out of favor with younger generations. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only 17% of American teenagers used X, for instance, down from 23% in 2022. For teens and young adults, TikTok, Instagram and other visual-focused platforms are the places to be.

Political polarization is also going against Bluesky ever reaching the size of TikTok, Instagram or even X.

“Bluesky is not trying to be all things to all people,” Wardle said, adding that, likely, the days of a Facebook or Instagram emerging where they’re “trying to keep everybody happy” are over. Social platforms are increasingly splintered along political lines and when they aren’t — see Meta’s platforms — the companies behind them are actively working to de-emphasize political content and news.

___

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

source

By Alexandra Ulmer

PHOENIX, Arizona (Reuters) – U.S President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday he will launch a new anti-drug advertising campaign to show the physical impact of taking drugs like fentanyl and repeated his threat to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

“We’re going to advertise how bad drugs are for you. They ruin your look, they ruin your face, they ruin your skin, they ruin your teeth,” Trump said at a conference of the conservative group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona.

Trump gave few concrete details about the ad campaign, which he does not appear to have mentioned before and that he likened to running a political campaign. He said his administration would spend “a lot of money” on the program but that it would be a “very small amount of money, relatively.”

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for further information.

Trump’s plan has echoes of the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, led by Republican former first lady Nancy Reagan in the 1980s to encourage young Americans to refuse drugs.

Between 50,000 and 60,000 Americans are projected to die from synthetic opioid overdoses this year, most from taking fentanyl or closely related drugs.

The fentanyl crisis featured heavily in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, even though synthetic opioid deaths more than doubled under his 2017-2021 administration.

Trump on Sunday also revived a campaign vow to designate Mexico’s drug cartels as terrorist groups.

“I will immediately designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,” Trump said.

While in office in 2019, Trump shelved such a plan at the request of Mexico’s then-President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said he wanted U.S. cooperation on fighting drug gangs, not intervention.

Some U.S. officials had also privately expressed misgivings that the measure could damage relations with Mexico and hinder the Mexican government’s fight against drug trafficking.

Trump’s official election platform says that when he takes office he will order the Pentagon to use “special forces, cyber warfare, and other covert and overt actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”

(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Ross Colvin and Mark Porter)

source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday he had selected the producer of his long-running reality television show, “The Apprentice,” to be his administration’s special envoy to the United Kingdom.

Mark Burnett, 64, created the show, which made Trump internationally famous for firing a succession of contestants vying for roles in his businesses. The British native also created or produced “Survivor,” “Shark Tank” and other shows and was the chairman of MGM Worldwide Television Group.

Trump had previously selected businessman Warren Stephens to be his ambassador to the UK. Britain’s government on Friday named Peter Mandelson as its new ambassador to the U.S. with a mission of wooing Trump, avoiding a trade war and keeping the two countries aligned over Ukraine.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said Burnett will “work to enhance diplomatic relations” and would focus on “trade, investment opportunities and cultural exchanges.”

(Reporting by Brad Heath; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

source