Politics

This is not your grandparent’s gentrification, but rather a hyper-gentrification fueled by concentrated wealth driving up land and housing costs, expanding short-term rentals, and treating housing like a commodity to speculate on or a place to park wealth. The billionaires are displacing the millionaires, and the millionaires are disrupting the housing market for everyone else.

Our report found that billionaire-backed private equity firms have wormed their way into different segments of the housing market to extract ever-increasing rents and value from multi-family rental, single-family homes, and mobile home park communities. For instance, Blackstone has become the largest corporate landlord in the world, with a vast and diversified real estate portfolio. It owns more than 300,000 residential units across the U.S., has $1 trillion in global assets, and nearly doubled its profits in 2021.

“She testified [that] in July of 2017, at this house party, she was walking out to the pool area, and she looked to her right, and she saw Rep. Gaetz having sex with her friend who was 17,” Leppard told ABC News.

Leppard added that House investigators placed screenshots of Venmo payments on a screen during a hearing and asked his clients to give a reasoning for each payment. Leppard said they’d respond each time, “‘That was for sex.’”

“On more than one occasion, this individual was involved in sexual activities with several of the other girls,” Greenberg wrote in his confession, identifying Gaetz as “the congressman from Florida’s 1st Congressional District.”

Greenberg added, “From time to time, gas money or gifts, rent or partial tuition payments were made to several of these girls, including the individual who was not yet 18. I did see the acts occur firsthand and Venmo transactions, Cash App or other payments were made to these girls on behalf of the Congressman.”

At another point, Greenberg wrote that his lawyers “know he paid me to pay the girls” and “that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage.”

The outcry erupted after a single student created sexually explicit AI images of nearly 50 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaster Online reported.

Head of School Matt Micciche seemingly first learned of the problem in November 2023, when a student anonymously reported the explicit deepfakes through a school portal run by the state attorney’s general office called "Safe2Say Something." But Micciche allegedly did nothing, allowing more students to be targeted for months until police were tipped off in mid-2024.

Cops arrested the student accused of creating the harmful content in August. The student's phone was seized as cops investigated the origins of the AI-generated images. But that arrest was not enough justice for parents who were shocked by the school's failure to uphold mandatory reporting responsibilities following any suspicion of child abuse. They filed a court summons threatening to sue last week unless the school leaders responsible for the mishandled response resigned within 48 hours.

In North Carolina alone, we identified 39 of these likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that have received voucher money. Of these, 20 schools reported student bodies that were at least 85% white in a 2021-22 federal survey of private schools, the most recent data available.

Those 20 academies, all founded in the 1960s and 1970s, brought in more than $20 million from the state in the past three years alone. None reflected the demographics of their communities. Few even came close.

Republican U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin called on the House of Representatives on Sunday to share an unreleased ethics report into alleged sexual misconduct involving a 17-year-old girl by Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for attorney general.

In California, death-penalty litigation often takes decades to be resolved, and five years ago Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions in the state. So last year, in an effort to ease the backlog, a few old cases were referred to a federal judge, Vince Chhabria, of the Northern District of California, for possible settlement—to see if there was a way to resentence the defendants and end their litigation. One of the cases was Dykes’s.

On the cards were handwritten notes, which Solway realized were comments about prospective jurors for Dykes’s trial, presumably compiled by the prosecutors. One card described an “MW”—male, white—who was a Republican and in favor of the death penalty. That didn’t seem too surprising, but a card for a Black woman read “Don’t believe she could vote D/P”—for the death penalty—and characterized her as a “Short, Fat, Troll.” A card for a forty-seven-year-old man said that he had a “Jewish background.” Another card, for a man who had a Ph.D. in physics, read “I liked him better than any other Jew But No Way,” then added, “Must Kick, too Risky.”

President Biden is expected to take an aerial tour over part of the Amazon, meet local and indigenous leaders and visit an Amazonian museum as he looks to highlight his commitment to the preservation of the region.

The Biden administration announced plans last year for a $500 million contribution to the Amazon Fund, the most significant international cooperation effort to preserve the rainforest, primarily financed by Norway.

>“We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” the judge, Christopher Lopez, said in an emergency hearing on Thursday afternoon. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.”

Oh bullshit.

A woman told the House Ethics Committee that she saw former Florida congressman and Donald Trump’s choice for U.S. attorney general Matt Gaetz “having sex with a minor” at a party in 2017, her lawyer said.

The woman’s attorney, Joel Leppard, said the woman testified to the House committee in April 2024, according to NBC News. “My client testified to the House Ethics Committee that she witnessed Rep. Gaetz having sex with a minor at a house party in Orlando in 2017,” Leppard said.

"Let me be clear: UAP are real," he wrote. "Advanced technologies not made by our Government — or any other government — are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries."

Elizondo is a former intelligence officer who later "managed a highly sensitive Special Access Program on behalf of the White House and the National Security Council," according to his official bio.

Through the Library's program Bringing Books To Life, more than 100 local childcare centers are already receiving training for teachers and parents. Begin Bright will help them reach potentially 45,000 kids five and younger. In addition to establishing Little Libraries at every center, the program will include workshops for adults in kids' lives which will guide them in effectively reading to little kids.

"When you're reading to a child, stop and ask them, 'What's going to happen? Or what do you think just happened?' And that allows the child to develop a love of learning," said Shawn Bakker, NPL Foundation president.

John Clune, a lawyer for the woman who has accused Gaetz of having an inappropriate relationship with her as a high schooler, called on lawmakers to “immediately” release their findings about Gaetz.

“Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as Attorney General is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events,” Clune said in a statement. “We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses.”

Complicating matters for the committee is that Gaetz, 42, has already resigned from Congress after Trump appointed him to be his attorney general. That means Gaetz is no longer a congressman, nullifying any jurisdiction they had held over him.

Conspiracy mega-site Infowars, whose founder and main host Alex Jones has become the face of monetized suspicion in America, has been acquired at a bankruptcy auction by the satirical news company The Onion. They plan to relaunch Infowars as a parody of itself, with backing from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun law reform. The news was first reported by The New York Times.

Ben Collins, The Onion’s CEO and a former journalist covering disinformation at NBC News, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. The bankruptcy court-ordered auction process for Infowars concluded yesterday; the bids were secret and considered behind closed doors by a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee, Christopher Murray. The process surprised some close to the situation, who told Mother Jones they’d thought the bids should be considered publicly. Murray also did not respond to a request for comment.

Meta has been fined nearly €800 million by Brussels after regulators accused Facebook’s parent company of stifling competition by “tying” its free Marketplace services with the social network.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s outgoing competition chief, said on Thursday that by linking Facebook with its classified ads service Meta had “imposed unfair trading conditions” on other providers.

She added: “It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that [others] could not match. This is illegal.”

Meta said it would appeal against the €797.72 million fine levied by regulators. “We built Marketplace in response to consumer demand—this decision ignores the market realities, and will only serve to protect incumbent marketplaces from competition.”

The company, the largest distributor of home oxygen equipment in the United States, admitted billing Medicare for ventilators it knew customers weren’t using (2024) and overcharging Medicare and thousands of elderly patients (2023). It settled allegations of violating a law against kickbacks (2018) and charging Medicare for patients who had died (2017). The company resolved lawsuits alleging a “nationwide scheme to pay physicians kickbacks to refer their patients to Lincare” (2006) and that it falsified claims that its customers needed oxygen (2001). (Lincare admitted wrongdoing in only the two most recent settlements.)

But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky. In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime.

A British Columbia teen who contracted Canada's first known human case of H5 bird flu has deteriorated swiftly in recent days and is now in critical condition, health officials reported Tuesday.

The teen's case was announced Saturday by provincial health officials, who noted that the teen had no obvious exposure to animals that could explain an infection with the highly pathogenic avian influenza. The teen tested positive for H5 bird flu at BC's public health laboratory, and the result is currently being confirmed by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.