Days before the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen made a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence about her alleged affair with the Republican presidential candidate. It did not quite go as planned. When Trump was in the White House, Daniels’s claims about their relationship (which Trump denies) went public. Years later, in May 2024, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to the payoff.

Trump has been trying to get his conviction thrown out or at least delay his sentencing (maybe forever). But we’ve already learned plenty of lurid details about the alleged relationship. So why would Trump make a second attempt to silence Daniels ahead of the 2024 election?

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported on Wednesday that Trump’s attorney recently made another offer to Daniels. In 2018, years before the Manhattan DA brought charges against Trump, Daniels filed a defamation suit over a Trump tweet attacking her for claiming that she was threatened by a stranger to stay quiet about their affair. A federal judge dismissed the suit months later, and Daniels was ordered to pay Trump’s legal fees. As of this summer, the two camps were still haggling over the final amount: Team Trump had asked for $652,000 at one point, while Team Daniels said it should be closer to $600,000, per Maddow. Then in July, Trump’s lawyer sent a letter to Daniels’s representative saying that a payment of $620,000 was too low, but that they would agree to it if Daniels signed a nondisclosure agreement. According to MSNBC, the letter said this:

We disagree that a payment of $620,000.00 would be in full satisfaction of the three judgement. However, we can agree to settle these matters for $620,000.00, provided that your client agrees in writing to make no public or private statements related to any alleged past interactions with president Trump, or defamatory or disparaging statements about him, his businesses and/or any affiliates or his suitability as a candidate for President.

Daniels’s lawyer rejected the offer. Eventually, Trump’s attorney said that after speaking to “my client and co-counsel,” they would agree to $635,000 — with no mention of Daniels remaining silent. Daniels’s attorney said they eventually settled on $627,500 with no NDA.

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With the Federal Emergency Management Agency reeling from major staffing and funding shortages amid the impact of Hurricane Helene, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refused on Sunday to commit to reconvening the House before Election Day to aid recovery efforts. In response to a letter from President Biden urging congressional leaders back to replenish federal disaster loan funding, Johnson said during a Fox News Sunday interview that he’d only do so after the election—all but ensuring the funds will run out.

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The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant is pursuing a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee to help finance its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft to power data centers, according to details of the application shared with The Washington Post. Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.

The taxpayer-backed loan could give Microsoft and Three Mile Island owner Constellation Energy a major boost in their unprecedented bid to steer all the power from a U.S. nuclear plant to a single company.

Microsoft, which declined to comment on the bid for a loan guarantee, is among the large tech companies scouring the nation for zero-emissions power as they seek to build data centers. It is among the leaders in the global competition to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, which consumes enormous amounts of electricity.

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PARIS (AP) — French far-right leader Marine Le Pen denied violating any rules as she and her National Rally party and two dozen others went on trial on Monday, accused of embezzling European Parliament funds, in a case that has the potential to derail her political ambitions.

Arriving at the court in Paris, Le Pen said she remained confident as “we have not violated any political and regulatory rules of the European Parliament” and vowed to present the judges with “extremely serious and extremely solid arguments.″

Le Pen and other National Rally members casually greeted each other before sitting down in the first three rows of the packed courtroom.

The nine-week trial will be closely watched by Le Pen’s political rivals as she is a strong contender in the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron when the next presidential election takes place in 2027.

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David Duke, former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, frequently posts videos on a website called Odysee. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also streams his podcast, “The Alex Jones Show,” on the site. It works a lot like YouTube and attracts millions of views each month.

Anti-hate groups say the site is a hotbed of extremism where users from around the world — including promoters of U.S.-designated terrorist group the Nordic Resistance Movement, Holocaust deniers and Proud Boys supporters — use Odysee’s data storage and financial features to spread their views and raise money. Users also take advantage of the forum’s near complete lack of content moderation. The site’s CEO said he’s dedicated to keeping the company “censorship resistant.”

The site also comes with strong New England ties. Odysee was created by a now-defunct New Hampshire cryptocurrency company and began with seed money from a downtown Boston-based venture capital firm called Pillar VC, financed by a diverse constellation of local investors.

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Bumbling US cops who raided a medical diagnostics center thinking it was a cannabis farm got a gun stuck to the powerful magnets of an MRI machine, a California lawsuit has alleged.

The owners of the facility are claiming damages against the Los Angeles Police Department for an operation their lawyers describe as "nothing short of a disorganized circus."

Their lawsuit details how a SWAT team swarmed Noho Diagnostic Center after the squad's leader persuaded a magistrate to issue a search warrant.

Officer Kenneth Franco drew on his "twelve hours of narcotics training" and discovered the facility was using more electricity than nearby stores, the lawsuit said.

"Officer Franco, therefore, concluded (the facility) was cultivating cannabis, disregarding the fact that it is a diagnostic facility utilizing an MRI machine, X-ray machine and other heavy medical equipment -- unlike the surrounding businesses selling flowers, chocolates and children's merchandise," the suit said.

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TROY, Mich.—Despite US dominance in so many different areas of technology, we're sadly somewhat of a backwater when it comes to car headlamps. It's been this way for many decades, a result of restrictive federal vehicle regulations that get updated rarely. The latest lights to try to work their way through red tape and onto the road are active-matrix LED lamps, which can shape their beams to avoid blinding oncoming drivers.

From the 1960s, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards allowed for only sealed high- and low-beam headlamps, and as a result, automakers like Mercedes-Benz would sell cars with less capable lighting in North America than it offered to European customers.

A decade ago, this was still the case. In 2014, Audi tried unsuccessfully to bring its new laser high-beam technology to US roads. Developed in the racing crucible that is the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the laser lights illuminate much farther down the road than the high beams of the time, but in this case, the lighting tech had to satisfy both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, which has regulatory oversight for any laser products.

The good news is that by 2019, laser high beams were finally an available option on US roads, albeit once the power got turned down to reduce their range.

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Money that was supposed to fund educational trips for children without homes instead paid for vacations that New York schools staffers took with their families around the country, including a visit to Disney World, according to a recently released investigative report.

Investigators recommended firing employees after finding that the head of the Queens Students in Temporary Housing (STH) program, meant to reward hardworking unhoused students with educational excursions, was telling her staff they could bring their families instead. (Temporary housing status is for students living in shelters, cars, parks or abandoned buildings, according to the New York City Public Schools website.)

Staff families weren’t joining the trips under a misunderstanding of the rules, independent investigators wrote. In one instance, STH Queens regional manager Linda Wilson allegedly told her staff: “What happens here stays with us.” She denies saying it. ...

Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the controversial jurist who tossed out the classified documents criminal case against Donald Trump in July, failed to disclose her attendance at a May 2023 banquet funded by a conservative law school.

Cannon went to an event in Arlington, Va. honoring the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, according to documents obtained from the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University. At a lecture and private dinner, she sat among members of Scalia’s family, fellow Federalist Society members and more than 30 conservative federal judges. Organizers billed the event as “an excellent opportunity to connect with judicial colleagues.”

A 2006 rule, intended to shine a light on judges’ attendance at paid seminars that could pose conflicts or influence decisions, requires them to file disclosure forms for such trips within 30 days and make them public on the court’s website.

It’s not the first time she has failed to fully comply with the rule.

In 2021 and 2022, Cannon took weeklong trips to the luxurious Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, for legal colloquiums sponsored by George Mason, which named its law school for Scalia thanks to $30 million in gifts that conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo helped organize.

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Big tech has made some big claims about greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. But as the rise of artificial intelligence creates ever bigger energy demands, it’s getting hard for the industry to hide the true costs of the data centers powering the tech revolution.

According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported.

Amazon is the largest emitter of the big five tech companies by a mile – the emissions of the second-largest emitter, Apple, were less than half of Amazon’s in 2022. However, Amazon has been kept out of the calculation above because its differing business model makes it difficult to isolate data center-specific emissions figures for the company.

As energy demands for these data centers grow, many are worried that carbon emissions will, too. The International Energy Agency stated that data centers already accounted for 1% to 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2022 – and that was before the AI boom began with ChatGPT’s launch at the end of that year.

AI is far more energy-intensive on data centers than typical cloud-based applications. According to Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search, and data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030. Goldman competitor Morgan Stanley’s research has made similar findings, projecting data center emissions globally to accumulate to 2.5bn metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19704884

A Purdue University student thought he kicked his way to a two-year car lease for making three field goals in a contest held during the Boilermakers’ season opener in West Lafayette. However, the dealership sponsoring the giveaway later reneged on the deal because of a technical. The final kick – a 40-yarder – left his foot just a split second too late on August 31. Car dealerships really cannot help but be bastards, can they?

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During a scorching, relentless wildfire season, Facebook has been flagging and removing dozens of posts containing links and screenshots from Watch Duty, a widely relied-upon wildfire alert app, as well as from federal and state agencies, according to interviews and Facebook conversations with nearly 20 residents, Facebook users and moderators, as well as employees from disaster response organizations. And it’s not happening just to people in Hutchinson’s rural and extremely fire-prone community 135 miles north of San Francisco but to volunteer responders, fire and sheriff departments, news stations and disaster nonprofit workers across California and in other states, according to screenshots.

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