Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto slammed Donald Trump for being “wrong” in his attempts to push misinformation and lies about the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton on Thursday.
“That kind of misinformation gets out there, and whether it’s perpetrated by a politician or someone you think is someone of note and authority, it is wrong and it is bull and it cannot be tolerated,” Cavuto said.
Cavuto, in a live interview with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, declared that there’s a “lot of misinformation” including the false claim that Republicans aren’t going to “get help” from the federal government while Democrats will.
The GOP nominee, in a post to his Truth Social platform just after Hurricane Helene’s devastating impact on the Southeast, baselessly referred to “reports” that the federal government as well as North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) were going “out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”
“I would imagine that does a huge disservice to people working together and scares the bejesus out of others when they believe it,” Cavuto said.
Buttigieg flagged his concerns over another false claim, pushed by the former president, that those impacted by Hurricane Helene would only be eligible for $750 in relief money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“You know, what if somebody hears that, they believe it and then they don’t apply for more aid that they could absolutely qualify for. So you know, there are real costs and real consequences to that misinformation,” said Buttigieg before praising those on both sides of the aisle who have criticized the claims.
“Donald Trump said that about North Carolina. Republicans not getting help. Democrats getting help. That was Donald Trump,” Cavuto later added.
Cavuto closed the interview by noting that the aid is not “a one-shot, that’s all” situation; its money FEMA provides upfront to survivors of the storms.
“It’s a way for people to get hands on cash they desperately need, not the only money they will ever get or hope to get,” said the anchor.
Cavuto’s criticism arrived on the same day that President Joe Biden called on Trump to “get a life, man” over his hurricane response lies including his FEMA aid claim.
Cavuto is the only honest news reporter left at Fox.
Former President Donald Trump held a third rally last month in Erie, Pennsylvania, which sits in the northwest corner of a swing state that could decide who wins the White House.
Like the two other times Trump has been to Erie to rev up his supporters, he left without paying the bill.
City officials haven’t yet tallied up what the Trump campaign owes Erie for public safety costs for his most recent rally in September.
But according to a city official, Trump owes the city more than $40,000 for the rallies he held there in 2018 and 2023.
Erie, whose bills were previously reported by the Erie Times-News, isn’t the only city that has hosted Trump rallies and not been paid by the campaign.
Including Erie, four cities and a county confirmed to NBC News that they’re still waiting for the Trump campaign to pay bills often associated with reimbursements for the costs of local law enforcement and other first responder personnel.
The final price tag is more than $750,000 for those five jurisdictions, with some bills dating back eight years.
At the same time, it’s not always clear cut whose legal responsibility it is to foot the bill.
Reached for comment, a Trump campaign official said in a text message that “questions related to local law enforcement and first responder costs should be directed to secret service.”
At least two municipalities seeking reimbursements said they didn’t have formal agreements with the Trump campaign about costs before the events.
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told NBC News that it’s the agency, not the campaign, that typically requests local assistance for such campaign activities.
However, the Secret Service “lacks a mechanism to reimburse local governments for their support during protective events,” he said.
Guglielmi added that the agency has “identified this as a critical need” and is working with Congress to make it possible in the future.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign declined to comment on how it handles costs for police and fire department personnel, as well as additional security measures provided by local governments.
The five localities that spoke to NBC News have sent their bills to the Trump campaign. One of the largest unpaid bills comes in at more than half a million dollars.
El Paso, Texas, is seeking more than $569,200 in expenses from 2019, according to an invoice provided by city spokesperson Laura Cruz Acosta. The initial bill for more than $470,000 ballooned when the city charged the campaign a late fee for nonpayment.
In 2020, the El Paso City Council hired a law firm to “advocate in the City’s interest in the collection of the outstanding invoices,” Cruz Acosta said. Four years later, the Trump campaign hasn’t paid.
The unpaid bills go back even further for Spokane, Washington, which wants the Trump campaign to pay for costs incurred in a May 2016 visit, before Trump officially became the Republican nominee for president. That bill amounts to more than $65,000, according to an invoice provided by city spokesperson Erin Hut.
Hut said the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns also still owe the city money from invoices that were issued in May 2016. The Sanders campaign owes about $33,000, and the Clinton camp owes a little less than $3,000, she said.
Representatives who previously worked with the campaigns didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
In Missoula County, Montana, government officials are seeking almost $13,000 for a Trump rally in 2018, according to an invoice the county provided to NBC News. The bulk of the bill — nearly $12,000 — is for police officers and 911 dispatchers, according to the invoice. County spokesperson Allison Franz confirmed that the county didn’t have an agreement with the campaign about the anticipated costs before the event.
In the crucial swing state Arizona, the city of Mesa is still waiting for the campaign to pay local law enforcement around $65,000 for Trump’s visit in October 2018 to Mesa-Gateway Airport, a city spokesperson confirmed.
The bill is for the Mesa Police Department’s work in providing officers for crowd control and traffic control, as well as the department’s rentals for barricades, towing and more, according to a 2018 letter to the campaign from attorney Nancy Sorensen on behalf of the city.
Ana Pereira, a city spokesperson, told NBC News in a statement that when the city “learned about the event and the conditions surrounding the venue, City officials took it upon themselves to implement any measures necessary to keep the public safe without first entering into an agreement with the campaign.”
However, she said that “the City calculated the public safety costs incurred from the campaign event the President attended.”
She said that while the campaign isn’t legally obligated to cover those costs, “[w]e believe the Trump 2020 campaign should reimburse our City for those taxpayer dollars, and we have invoiced the campaign accordingly.”
Similarly, Erie’s bills were to cover police, fire and public works personnel overtime, according to city spokesperson Rob Lee.
Trump addressed overtime pay during his latest Erie stop, just not in the way city officials may have hoped. Instead, he highlighted his no-taxes-on-overtime-pay proposal before he pivoted to his personal views on paying workers.
“I hated to give overtime. I hated it. I’d get other people,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.”
Trump and his campaign handlers are a bunch of deadbeats!
Vice President Kamala Harris, photographed at her official residence in Washington, DC, on October 7, 2024, wearing her own Gabriela Hearst suit and Tiffany earrings. Sittings Editor: Leslie Fremar. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, October 2024.
Dear Commons Community,
Kamala Harris is gracing the cover of the current edition of Vogue. It is an incredible image of her looking very much like a world leader. Here is the come-on for the article.
“Only rarely are individuals summoned for acts of national rescue, but in July, Vice President received one of those calls. With President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign, the world looked to Harris with hopes and doubts.”
Russia confirmed that Donald Trump sent the Kremlin sample Covid-19 tests in the early days of the pandemic, after revelations in veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book raised further questions about the former US president’s relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. As reported by CNN and ABC News.
The Trump administration “sent us several samples of test kits,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday, broadly supporting Woodward’s claim. His intervention comes after Trump denied the claims, telling ABC News they were “false.”
Woodward wrote in “War” that Trump “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.”
“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward. “I don’t care,” Trump replied. “Fine.”
“No, no,” Putin said. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”
Peskov did not confirm whether or not those tests were specifically for Putin’s own use, as Woodward writes.
The Kremlin’s press secretary said: “At that time, the pandemic was starting, and the situation was very difficult for all countries.
“Of course, initially, all countries tried to exchange aid shipments with each other,” he continued. “At that time, we sent a shipment of ventilators to the United States, and the Americans sent us several samples of test kits, as those were practically unique items. Many countries were doing the same.”
The Kremlin’s response seemingly contradicts Trump’s denial of Woodward’s claims.
“He’s a storyteller. A bad one. And he’s lost his marbles,” Trump told ABC News of Woodward on Tuesday. In a statement, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump gave Woodward “absolutely no access” for the book. “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true,” he said.
Citing a Trump aide, Woodward also reported that there have been “maybe as many as seven” calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left the White House in 2021. Peskov denied those claims, saying: “That is not true; it did not happen.” Trump also denied those claims to ABC News.
The frantic first weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic led to a diplomatic opening for Putin; the Trump White House was criticized at the time for purchasing medical supplies from Moscow, a move that was described by experts as a propaganda win for the Kremlin.
The Trump administration also spent $200 million sending thousands of ventilators around the world, starting weeks after the former president touted America as the “king of ventilators,” but without any established way to locate them, the Government Accountability Office found in a report. Russia was among the countries to receive those ventilators.
Woodward’s claims once again throw scrutiny on Trump’s relationship with Putin, weeks before the US presidential election.
They were quickly seized on by Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris, who said in an interview with Howard Stern: “People were dying by the hundreds. Everybody was scrambling to get these (test) kits … and this guy who was President of the United States is sending them to Russia? To a murderous dictator, for his personal use?”
“You’re getting played,” Harris said of Trump.
Trump has, for his part, continued to speak fondly of his relationship with Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made him a pariah among Western leaders.
“I got along well with him. I hope to get along well with him again,” Trump said during an interview on X with billionaire Elon Musk. Trump added that getting along well with strongmen world leaders “is a good thing.”
Retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, says Trump is a “total fascist” and “fascist to the core,” according to a forthcoming book by Bob Woodward, the Watergate journalist. As reported by The Huffington Post and The Guardian.
“He is the most dangerous person ever,” Milley told Woodward for his book “War,” according to The Guardian. “I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.”
“A fascist to the core,” Milley said.
Part of Milley’s warning about Trump revolves around the former president’s promise to get revenge on his perceived political enemies. Trump has frequently told his supporters on the campaign trail: “I am your retribution.” Milley, who clashed with Trump in the White House and who has since been publicly critical of the current Republican presidential nominee, told Woodward that he’s afraid of being recalled from retirement to be court-martialed if Trump wins the election next month.
According to the Guardian’s report on Woodward’s book, Milley warned his former colleagues in Washington that Trump was “a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” adding: “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”
Milley was pointing in particular to how Steve Bannon — who rose to White House strategist after chairing Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and who is now in jail for being found in contempt of Congress — has threatened him. “We’re gonna hold him accountable,” Bannon has said of Milley.
Woodward’s book also details a tense Oval Office discussion Milley had with Trump and his second secretary of defense, Mark Esper. Trump reportedly wanted to get revenge on, or potentially court-martial, William McRaven, the retired Navy admiral who led the 2011 mission in which al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed. Trump was enraged that the retired admiral publicly criticized him.
Milley told Woodward he was able to mollify Trump by saying he would “take care” of it but then warned McRaven and other former military commanders to keep off the “public stage” for a while and ease up on their criticisms of Trump.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a HuffPost request for comment about Milley’s reported comments to Woodward.
Milley’s stories about Trump in the White House are similar to recollections from other military figures, including retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff. As noted by The Guardian, Kelly said Trump reportedly insisted that generals should be “like the German generals” serving under Adolf Hitler during World War II, who were “totally loyal.” .
On the campaign trail this year Trump has said he’d be a “dictator” on his first day in office. He has also repeatedly used explicitly fascist rhetoric while talking about immigrants in the United States.
Milley is not alone in his assessment that Trump is a fascist.
Robert Paxton, considered one of the foremost scholars of fascism, initially declined to call Trump a fascist during his rise to the White House in 2016, but he changed his tune after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 removes my objection to the fascist label,” Paxton wrote at the time. “His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
Republican leadership needs to speak out against the fascist Trump and those around him!
Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.
Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.
“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce.
The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives,” said Ellen Moons of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton’s, told The Associated Press, “I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had.”
Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.
“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open call with reporters and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said.
“But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”
Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation instrumental in training machines how to “learn” by fine-tuning errors until they disappear. It’s similar to the way a student learns, with an initial solution graded and flaws identified and returned to be fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer matches the network’s version of reality.
Hinton had an unconventional background as a psychologist who also dabbled in carpentry and was genuinely curious about how the mind works, said protege Nick Frosst, who was Hinton’s first hire at Google’s AI division in Toronto.
His “playfulness and genuine interest in answering fundamental questions I think is key to his success as a scientist,” Frosst said.
Nor did he stop at his pioneering 1980s work.
“He’s been consistently trying out crazy things and some of them work very well and some of them don’t,” Frosst said. “But they all have contributed to the success of the field and galvanized other researchers to try new things as well.”
Hinton’s team at the University of Toronto wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That spawned a flurry of copycats and was “a very, very significant moment in hindsight and in the course of AI history,” said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.
“Many people consider that the birth of modern AI,” she said.
Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.
“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told the AP in 2019. “My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what you are doing is silly.”
Many of Hinton’s former students and collaborators followed him into the tech industry as it began capitalizing on AI innovations, and some started their own AI companies, including Frosst’s Cohere and ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Hinton said he uses machine learning tools in his daily life.
“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it’s a not-very-good expert. And that’s very useful.”
Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.
Just as Hinton came to the field from psychology, Hopfield stressed how cutting edge science comes from crossing the borders of scientific fields like physics, biology and chemistry instead of researchers staying in their lane. It’s why this prize is a physics prize, he said, pointing out that his neural network borrows from condensed matter physics.
With big complex problems in scientific fields, “if you are not motivated by physics, you just don’t tackle the class of problems,” Hopfield said.
While there’s no Nobel for computer science, Li said that awarding a traditional science prize to AI pioneers is significant and shows how boundaries between disciplines have blurred.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images and Brandon Bell/Getty Images.
Dear Commons Community,
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman yesterday explained why she believes former President Donald Trump trashed Detroit during an address in the city.
Republican presidential nominee Trump at the Detroit Economic Club leant into his divisive rhetoric once again when he fear mongered that the United States “will end up being like Detroit” if his Democratic rival Kamala Harris wins the 2024 election.
“The whole country’s going to be like — you want to know the truth?” he asked. “It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”
CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Haberman, who has reported on Trump for years, just why the ex-president would do down the same place where he was speaking.
Haberman replied, “I think he was appealing to the people in that room who were a group of largely white businessmen, as I understand it. You could hear there was applause when he said the line.”
But Haberman acknowledged “this is going to appear in local news outside of that room and insulting the city that you are in, especially one with a large number of Black voters, is not usually a prescription that gets made for candidates.”
“We’ll see if it matters to him. He’s been saying things like this for a very long time about various communities that he goes into,” she continued. “It hasn’t always mattered but it can have a cumulative effect especially in races that are very tight.”
“It’s certainly not something that I think his advisers would have liked that he said. I think calling it a developing nation was something that you will see again used by opponents,” added Haberman.
Watch the video below. The entire segment is interesting. The part about Trump, Detroit, and Haberman appears at about the eight- minute mark.
Hurricane Milton churned across Florida on Thursday after plowing into the state as a Category 3 storm, bringing misery to a coast still ravaged by Helene, pounding cities with winds of over 100 mph (160 kph) after producing a barrage of tornadoes, but sparing Tampa a direct hit.
The storm tracked to the south in the final hours and made landfall Wednesday night in Siesta Key near Sarasota (see video below), about 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of Tampa. The situation in the Tampa area was still a major emergency as St. Petersburg recorded over 16 inches (41 centimeters) of rain, prompting the National Weather Service to warn of flash flooding there as well as other parts of western and central Florida.
Tropicana Field, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team in St. Petersburg, appeared badly damaged. The fabric that serves as the domed stadium’s roof was ripped to shreds by the fierce winds. It was not immediately clear if there was damage inside. Multiple cranes were also toppled in the storm, the weather service said.
St. Petersburg residents also could no longer get water from their household taps because a water main break led the city to shut down service.
The storm knocked out power across a large section of Florida, with more than 3 million homes and businesses without power as of early Thursday, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports.
Before Milton even made landfall, tornadoes were touching down across the state. The Spanish Lakes Country Club near Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, was hit particularly hard, with homes destroyed and some residents killed.
“We have lost some life,” St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson told WPBF News, though he wouldn’t say how many people were killed.
About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane came ashore, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, said Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
About 90 minutes after making landfall, Milton was downgraded to a Category 2 storm. By early Thursday, the hurricane was a Category 1 storm with maximum sustained winds of about 85 mph (135 kph) as it moved offshore and was about 35 miles (55 kilometers) east of Orlando.
Heavy rains were also likely to cause flooding inland along rivers and lakes as Milton traverses the Florida Peninsula as a hurricane, eventually to emerge in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday. It is expected to impact the heavily populated Orlando area.
The storm slammed into a region still reeling two weeks after Hurricane Helene flooded streets and homes in western Florida and left at least 230 people dead across the South. In many places along the coast, municipalities raced to collect and dispose of debris before Milton’s winds and storm surge could toss it around and compound any damage.
Officials had issued dire warnings to flee or face grim odds of survival.
“This is it, folks,” said Cathie Perkins, emergency management director in Pinellas County, which sits on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay. “Those of you who were punched during Hurricane Helene, this is going to be a knockout. You need to get out, and you need to get out now.”
By late afternoon, some officials said the time had passed for such efforts, suggesting that people who stayed behind hunker down instead. By the evening, some counties announced they had suspended emergency services.
Jackie Curnick said she wrestled with her decision to stay aat home in Sarasota, just north of where the storm made landfall. But with a 2-year-old son and a baby girl due Oct. 29, Curnick and her husband thought it was for the best.
Curnick said they started packing Monday to evacuate, but they couldn’t find any available hotel rooms, and the few they came by were too expensive.
She said there were too many unanswered questions if they got in the car and left: Where to sleep, if they’d be able to fill up their gas tank, and if they could even find a safe route out of the state.
“The thing is it’s so difficult to evacuate in a peninsula,” she said. “In most other states, you can go in any direction to get out. In Florida there are only so many roads that take you north or south.”
At a news conference in Tallahassee, Gov. Ron DeSantis described deployment of a wide range of resources, including 9,000 National Guard members from Florida and other states; over 50,000 utility workers from as far as California; and highway patrol cars with sirens to escort gasoline tankers to replenish supplies so people could fill up their tanks before evacuating.
“Unfortunately, there will be fatalities. I don’t think there’s any way around that,” DeSantis said.
Heavy rain and tornadoes lashed parts of southern Florida starting Wednesday morning, with conditions deteriorating throughout the day. Six to 12 inches (15 to 31 centimeters) of rain, with up to 18 inches (46 centimeters) in some places, was expected well inland, bringing the risk of catastrophic flooding.
One twister touched down Wednesday morning in the lightly populated Everglades and crossed Interstate 75. Another apparent tornado touched down in Fort Myers, snapping tree limbs and tearing a gas station’s canopy to shreds.
Authorities issued mandatory evacuation orders across 15 Florida counties with a total population of about 7.2 million people. Officials warned that anyone staying behind must fend for themselves, because first responders were not expected to risk their lives attempting rescues at the height of the storm.
St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch told residents to expect long power outages and the possible shutdown of the sewer system.
In Charlotte Harbor, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Tampa, clouds swirled and winds gusted as Josh Parks packed his Kia sedan with clothes and other belongings. Two weeks ago, Helene’s surge brought about 5 feet (1.5 meters) of water to the neighborhood, and its streets remain filled with waterlogged furniture, torn-out drywall and other debris.
Parks, an auto technician, planned to flee to his daughter’s home inland and said his roommate already left.
“I told her to pack like you aren’t coming back,” he said.
By early afternoon, airlines had canceled about 1,900 flights. SeaWorld was closed all day Wednesday, and Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando shut down in the afternoon.
More than 60% of gas stations in Tampa and St. Petersburg were out of gas Wednesday afternoon, according to GasBuddy. DeSantis said the state’s overall supply was fine, and highway patrol officers were escorting tanker trucks to replenish the supply.
In the Tampa Bay area’s Gulfport, Christian Burke and his mother stayed put in their three-story concrete home overlooking the bay. Burke said his father designed this home with a Category 5 in mind — and now they’re going to test it.
As a passing police vehicle blared encouragement to evacuate, Burke acknowledged staying isn’t a good idea and said he’s “not laughing at this storm one bit.”
The Chronicle of Higher Educationhas an article this morning describing the takeover of Columbia College Hollywood by Arizona State University. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges has given a critical review of the new venture. Here is an excerpt from the The Chronicle article.
“Evidently reassured by double-digit enrollment growth coming out of California amid the Great Recession, ASU’s designs for greater market share in the Golden State have since come to extend well beyond traditional recruitment, and now feature targeted asset purchases of buildings and intellectual property, repeated six-figure lobbying campaigns in Sacramento, as well as the multi-million-dollar backing of a financially unstable California film school.
Though it’s not uncommon in this era of widening haves and have-nots for well-resourced public universities like ASU to absorb struggling colleges, in many cases private universities have simply proved more eager to land such takeover deals. Still, there are few, if any, precedents for ASU and how it has approached expansion inside and outside of Arizona.
“Los Angeles is a behemoth place with three research schools,” ASU President Michael Crow remarked to the Los Angeles Times in 2018 after ASU agreed to lease the city’s historic Herald Examiner building. “Who says that’s enough?”
But even the best-laid plans — including those designed and backed by a multibillion dollar mega-university in Tempe — can’t anticipate and neutralize the future uncertainty that can accompany expansion plans.
A little over a year removed from ASU’s takeover of Columbia College Hollywood — a long-beleaguered private nonprofit Southern California college since rechristened California College of ASU — its accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (Senior College and University Commission), in June reaffirmed its December 2023 warning about the college’s finances and ASU’s oversight of the institution….
At their site visit in March, WASC evaluators questioned CC-ASU’s ever-plummeting enrollments and shaky finances. The accrediting team’s harshest criticisms concerned repeated observations of apparent institutionwide dysfunction and poor leadership.
“Over the course of the visit it became increasingly apparent that the board has failed in its oversight of executive leadership to a degree that shared governance, trust, and effective information sharing has been deeply eroded,” WASC representatives wrote, citing several pieces of evidence, including:
“The apparent unilateral hiring of the acting CEO by two board members;” ● The unplanned absence of said acting CEO during WASC’s site visit; ● A lack of clarity about the future of certain academic programs that had long been offered by Columbia College Hollywood and were taken over by ASU; ● A lack of engagement from high-level leadership on facility needs and usage.
“Change can be difficult,” James O’Brien, ASU’s senior vice president of university affairs, wrote. “The journey of California College has been complicated and it is now emerging into a new California institution of higher education in Downtown L.A. with a refreshed mission and a bright future.”
Donald Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Vladimir Putin since leaving office and secretly sent the Russian president COVID-19 test machines during the height of the pandemic, Bob Woodward reported in his new book, “War.”
The revelations were made in Woodward’s latest book, is due out next week. As reported by The Associated Press.
Trump denied the reporting in an interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. “He’s a storyteller. A bad one. And he’s lost his marbles,” Trump said of Woodward.
Trump had previously spoken to Woodward for the journalist’s 2021 book, “Rage.” Trump later sued over it, claiming Woodward never had permission to publicly release recordings of their interviews for the book. The publisher and Woodward denied his allegations.
Trump has had multiple calls with Putin since his White House term ended
Woodward reports that Trump asked an aide to leave his office at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, so that the former president could have a private call with Putin in early 2024. The aide, whom Woodward doesn’t name, said there have been multiple calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left office, perhaps as many as seven, according to the book, though it does not detail what they discussed.
Trump senior adviser and longtime aide Jason Miller told Woodward that he had not heard Trump was having calls with Putin and said, “I’d push back on that.” But Miller also said, according to the book, “I’m sure they’d know how to get in touch with each other.”
Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said none of the stories in Woodward’s books are true. In a statement on Tuesday, he called them “the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Trump’s relationship with Putin has been scrutinized since his 2016 campaign for president, when he memorably called on Russia to find and make public missing emails deleted by Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said.
U.S. intelligence agencies later determined that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump, though an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy between the Trump team and Russia. In 2018, Trump publicly questioned that finding following an in-person meeting with Putin in Helsinki.
In recent years, Trump has criticized U.S. support for Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion. He has said Ukraine should have made concessions to Putin before Russia invaded in 2022. He also previously touted his good relationship with Putin and called the Russian leader “pretty smart” for invading Ukraine.
Trump sent COVID-19 test machines to Putin for his personal use
Woodward reports that Trump sent Putin COVID-19 test machines for his personal use as the virus began spreading in 2020.
Putin told Trump not to tell anyone because people would be mad at Trump over it, but Trump said he didn’t care if anyone knew, according to the book. Trump ended up agreeing not to tell anyone.
The book doesn’t specify when the machines were sent but describes it as being when the virus spread rapidly through Russia. It was previously reported by The Associated Press and other agencies that Trump’s administration in May 2020 sent ventilators and other equipment to several countries, including Russia.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview Tuesday with radio host Howard Stern, accused Trump of giving the machines to a “murderous dictator” at a time when “everyone was scrambling” to get tests.
“This person who wants to be president again, who secretly is helping out an an adversary while the American people are dying by the hundreds every day,” said Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate.
Trump and Putin are birds of a feather.
Tony
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