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Statue of Trump and Epstein placed near U.S. Capitol

admin - Latest News - September 24, 2025
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Statue of Trump and Epstein placed near U.S. Capitol



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Sept. 23, 2025, 6:05 PM EDTBy Daniel ArkinFour Democratic lawmakers are opening a probe into Nexstar and Sinclair, two major TV station owners that are refusing to air Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show amid criticism of his on-air comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.In a letter, first obtained by NBC News, the lawmakers asked the corporate heads of both companies for more information about their decisions to pre-empt airings of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “how those decisions may relate to regulatory issues pending with the Trump administration.”“If you suspended a late-night comedian’s show in part to seek regulatory favors from the administration, you have not only assisted the administration in eroding First Amendment freedoms but also create the appearance of a possible quid-pro-quo arrangement that could implicate federal anti-corruption laws,” the lawmakers wrote.Follow live updates here.The seven-page letter was sent by Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. It is addressed to Perry A. Sook, the chairman of Nexstar Media Group, and Christopher S. Ripley, the president and chief executive of Sinclair Broadcast Group. Together, Nexstar and Sinclair account for roughly 70 ABC affiliates across the U.S.The four Democratic lawmakers do not have subpoena power because their party does not have a majority in the U.S. Senate, but they can still demand answers from business leaders and public officials on issues tied to federal law.Nexstar and Sinclair both have pending business before the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the broadcast television industry and other key media platforms. Nexstar is seeking FCC approval for a proposed $6.2 billion merger with a rival, Tegna. Sinclair is exploring merger options for its broadcast business, according to CNBC.The lawmakers outlined eight questions for the heads of Nexstar and Sinclair, including which company executives were involved in discussions about pre-empting Kimmel’s show; what actions the companies are taking to “facilitate the Trump administration’s sign-off” on their pending deals; and whether the companies spoke with the head of the FCC or other Trump administration officials about the Kimmel decisions.Nexstar joins Sinclair in keeping Jimmy Kimmel off ABC affiliate stations03:29Representatives for Nexstar and Sinclair did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Kimmel’s late-night talk show is set to return Tuesday after he was suspended for what Disney, the owner of ABC, characterized as “ill-timed and thus insensitive” remarks about the killing of Kirk, a prominent conservative activist. “The MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during his Sept. 15 show.Kimmel’s comments set off a political firestorm. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr accused Kimmel of being part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people” and threatened to “take action” at the regulatory level against Disney. Nexstar and Sinclair said they would yank the show from their airwaves, and Disney halted production. The suspension drew backlash from Hollywood talent and lawmakers in both parties, stoking a national debate over free speech.Disney announced Monday that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would return Tuesday night, ending an impasse that riveted Hollywood and Washington alike. But Nexstar and Sinclair said they would continue to pre-empt the show until further notice. “We stand by that decision pending assurance that all parties are committed to fostering an environment of respectful, constructive dialogue in the markets we serve,” Nexstar said in its news release.Carr, for his part, denied that he threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcast licenses unless Disney fired Kimmel, a vocal critic of President Donald Trump who has hosted his namesake talk show since 2003. Carr, speaking at a conference Monday, insisted that Disney, “on its own,” made a “business decision” to suspend the late-night host’s show. He also accused Democratic lawmakers of “distorting what happened here” with accusations of government coercion and censorship.Warren, Wyden, Markey and Van Hollen said they request answers to their questions by Oct. 7.Daniel ArkinDaniel Arkin is a national reporter at NBC News.
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Sept. 23, 2025, 3:05 PM EDTBy Doha MadaniJimmy Kimmel broke his silence after his brief suspension from the airwaves, posting a picture to Instagram on Tuesday of a Hollywood figure who once described himself as being on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.”Kimmel shared a photo of himself and Norman Lear, the television producer who was best known for his progressive activism. Lear died in 2023 at age 101. The late-night host captioned the photo, which features his arm around Lear, “Missing this guy today.” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is set to return to ABC on Tuesday night after the network suspended the show over what it described as “ill-timed” comments from Kimmel on the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. During his Sept. 15 show, Kimmel criticized some Republicans for how they were responding to Kirk’s killing.“The MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during his monologue. Disney’s ABC said last week that it was pre-empting Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” following threats of regulatory action from Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. Many, including a handful of celebrities, expressed outrage toward ABC for choosing to pull Kimmel’s show following Carr’s threats.After increasing public pressure and calls to boycott, Disney announced Monday that Kimmel would return to late night. In its announcement, the company did not address the concerns that Kimmel’s freedom of speech rights had been violated.Hollywood rallies behind Kimmel, while Trump and supporters cheer suspension03:08Kimmel had not spoken publicly about the suspension since it happened.The late-night host has described Lear as one of his idols. Lear developed now-beloved sitcoms such as “All in the Family” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “One Day at a Time.” His work was defined by being unafraid to tackle social issues long considered taboo. Over six decades, Lear’s work took up racism, sexism, the women’s liberation movement, antisemitism, abortion, homophobia, the Vietnam War and class conflict. Lear said his work put him on Nixon’s “enemies list” because he was angry about Lear “glorifying” homosexuality on TV, according to Smithsonian magazine. He appeared delighted to learn of Nixon’s reaction to his work after a tape leaked of the president ranting about “All in the Family.” “I thought it was delicious that in the Oval Office — I didn’t care for what he was saying, I didn’t care for that particular president in any shape, way or form — but to hear the president and his confederates talking about that show and at some length, reasoning about it and comparing it to the Greek civilization, that could not have been more interesting,” he told Talking Points Memo in 2015.In a 2016 interview with “Democracy Now!” Lear compared Nixon’s rant about his show in the leaked tapes to being “Trumpish.” He also said that he remembered his civics education as a child, which taught him that he was protected by the Founding Fathers. “But when I was a boy, I learned to love my Declaration of Independence — and I underline ‘my’ — and my Constitution and my Bill of Rights, because they were the protections Americans needed in a free society where everybody is equal under the law,” Lear said at the time.Doha MadaniDoha Madani is a senior breaking news reporter for NBC News. Pronouns: she/her.
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Nov. 8, 2025, 11:07 AM ESTBy Freddie ClaytonLONDON — It’s been a strange sort of prison break: no daring escapes, no Hollywood getaways — just inmates quietly released, by mistake, onto the streets of Britain.What once might have been an isolated blunder comes at an unwelcome time in a country strained by rising prices, stagnant wages and crumbling public services.One man, an Algerian sex offender, was arrested in London on Friday after being freed in error nine days earlier; another, a British national and convicted fraudster, accidentally released from the same prison shortly afterward and turned himself in on Thursday.Their cases followed the mistaken release of a convicted sex offender from a separate prison in October, which sparked a three-day manhunt before he was rearrested.At least four prisoners released in error over the past year remain at large, the BBC reports. More than 260 were wrongly released in England and Wales in the year to March, official data shows — more than double the figure the year before.Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy said on X Friday that he was “appalled at the rate of releases in error,” and had ordered “tough new release checks, launched an investigation, and started overhauling archaic prison systems.”He told Parliament on Wednesday that the opposition Conservative Party, whose 14-year spell in government was ended by Prime Minister Keir Starmer last year, had “left our prisons on the brink of collapse entirely.”But the recent litany of errors coincides with the ruling Labour Party battling its own economic constraints and record-setting unpopularity.British prisons have been in a state of crisis for several years, with the prison population more than doubling in size since 1990, while staffing and infrastructure struggle to keep pace.The Algerian offender, Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, was mistakenly let out on Oct. 29, though police say they weren’t informed until nearly a week later. He was rearrested for being unlawfully at large and on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker in connection with an earlier incident.As officers bundled him into a van, he offered his own verdict on the system that lost track of him: “Look at the justice of the U.K., they release people by mistake,” he said in a video aired by NBC News’ British partner Sky News.It’s a throwaway line, but it lands with an uncomfortable truth. In a country where little seems to function as it should — from the courts to the National Health Service to the trains — even the prisons can’t quite manage to keep the doors locked.Years of budget cuts are “catching up” with Britain’s public services, according to Glen O’Hara, a professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University.“The whole system of social care, for instance, is completely overwhelmed,” he told NBC News on Saturday, adding that Britain’s prisons had been swamped by a large number of short prison sentences.“It’s just overwhelming the system that can’t cope economically with all these numbers,” he said.Last summer, the men’s prison system was nearly filled to capacity with only a hundred or so empty places, a crisis that triggered the government’s emergency release scheme, allowing some inmates to leave after serving 40% of their sentence instead of the usual 50%. Introduced to ease overcrowding, the policy has since seen nearly 40,000 prisoners released early, Ministry of Justice figures show.Staffing issues have also plagued the services. In the year to June, nearly 13% of staff left British prisons, according to data from the Prison and Probation Service.Prison officers said a clerical error meant there was no warrant from the court to hold Kaddour-Cherif, and he was let go. William Smith, the convicted fraudster, was released as a result of a clerical error at the court level, the BBC reports.Wandsworth prison, where Smith and Kaddour-Cherif were released, was built in 1851 to house fewer than 1,000 prisoners. An August 2024 report by the prison’s independent monitoring board found inmate numbers had grown to 1,513.“Wings were chaotic and staff across most units were unable to confirm where all prisoners were during the working day,” the report said.The Victorian-era prison, one of many still in use dating back to the 1800s, has previously been the scene of high-profile escapes. Wandsworth made headlines in 2023 when former British soldier Daniel Khalife escaped by clinging to the underside of a lorry while awaiting trial for espionage and terrorism offenses.A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that the recent cases “further expose the scale of the crisis in our prisons we inherited,” adding: “This will not be fixed overnight, but we are using every possible lever to bear down on these errors.”For all the headlines and investigations, the mistakes continue to pile up in a country struggling to hold itself together, one unlocked gate at a time.Freddie ClaytonFreddie Clayton is a freelance journalist based in London. 
October 18, 2025
Oct. 18, 2025, 7:00 AM EDTBy Carlo AngererRIGA, Latvia — They’re dotted on dozens of buildings across the Latvian capital: signal green signs with white stick figures of a family and the word “patvertne,” which means shelter.Installed everywhere from art deco buildings to wooden gates, the signs alert people to places to hide in the event of an attack — and have become one of many symbols of war preparedness in this charming city, which is crisscrossed with canals and looks nervously east at its Russian neighbor.After a string of recent aircraft incursions along NATO’s eastern flank and suspicious drones shutting down airports in several European countries including Germany, Denmark and Norway, fears about Russian aggression are growing in Latvia and its fellow Baltic nations, Estonia and Lithuania, already spooked by Moscow’s war in Ukraine.“We are on the front line. We are the eastern flank countries. We are neighboring Russia, an aggressive country,” Andris Sprūds, Latvia’s defense minister, told NBC News earlier this month at the Riga Conference, a meeting of international political and military leaders.A building marked “patvertne,” the Latvian word for “shelter,” in the capital, Riga.Carlo Angerer / NBC NewsHe added that Latvia, which launched a drone initiative earlier this year, had to some extent “already developed some resilience” in the face of any Kremlin aggression.Other attendees openly talked about a direct conflict between NATO and Russia. In an onstage discussion at the conference, Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to the organization, publicly theorized with his fellow panelists about weapons systems, including long-range missiles and strategic bombers, that could be used against the Kremlin’s forces.But he also emphasized that modern warfare begins before troops and military hardware are deployed.“The first shot of the next war is not going to be tanks through the Suwalki Gap,” he said in a separate interview with NBC News, referring to the narrow land bridge between Poland and the Baltic states, seen as a potential attack point in a Russian invasion. “It’s going to be a cyberattack. It’s going to be knocking out airports or critical infrastructure.”Latvia and other Baltic countries have been very receptive to recent NATO initiatives and are on track to reach defense spending targets soon, he said, adding that they were “investing in things that are going to field more capabilities for our defense and deterrence.”Emergency services have identified hundreds of existing shelters in Riga and authorities are planning to build new ones.Carlo Angerer / NBC News“The investments that make each individual ally stronger and therefore the collective alliance stronger are the important investments, and a country like Latvia is certainly doing it best in class right now,” he added.Adm. Rob Bauer, who chaired NATO’s military committee from June 2021 until January, also suggested that a new conflict with Russia would be fought “in a different way.”Ukraine, he said, lacked air power and strong naval assets, adding that NATO fighter jets had been carrying out missions over the Baltics from the USS Gerald Ford after it was deployed to the North Sea earlier this year.Others, like Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament, openly acknowledged that it took “way too long” for other nations to listen to Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, which were occupied by the Soviet Union for decades and more recently have been at the forefront of pushing NATO allies to take the Russian threat seriously.Airis Rikveilis, the national security adviser to Latvia’s Prime Minister Evika Silina, said his country was not only focusing on increasing military capabilities, but also on preparing civil society for conflict.“This is not going to be 1940,” he said, referring to the first Soviet occupation, when the Red Army was able to take over within weeks. “Should that battle start tomorrow, we’ll be ready to fight tomorrow with what we have,” he added.After Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there have been visible changes across Latvia, which has installed a fence along its 176-mile border with Russia. It has also cut itself off from the shared power grid with Russia and Kremlin ally Belarus, which sits to Latvia’s south, and is now relying on energy from its other neighbors.Ukrainian flags fly outside the Russian Embassy in Riga, Latvia.Carlo Angerer / NBC NewsIn Riga, officials have demolished the 260-foot victory memorial dedicated to the Soviet army and renamed the road where the Russian Embassy is located to Ukrainian Independence Street.The blue street sign sits at the corner building next to the embassy’s CCTV cameras and under its large flag. Dozens of Ukrainian flags fly in the square just across the road.Linda Ozola, who served as Riga’s deputy mayor for five years until this summer, oversaw the rebuilding of the shelter network, among other civil protection measures. She said her staff had to scout museums and archives for old documents, as well as reinspect old shelter spaces, some of which had fallen into disrepair.Emergency services have identified hundreds of existing shelters, and updated legislation has cleared the way to build new ones. Their locations are available on a website and cellphone app.Some of them will likely be funded by an 85 million euro ($99.4 million) deal signed on the sidelines of the Riga Conference by Arvils Ašeradens, Latvia’s finance minister, and European allies. The majority of that funding will be used to enhance the civil protection infrastructure, and some will also be used to install generators at health care facilities.Ozola said the city has also started to build up a stock of emergency supplies including canned food and sleeping cots. Riga has been an example for the other regions of Latvia and could also be one for cities across Europe, she said.“The truth is not good because we have a crazy neighbor who wants to destroy our country. And the neighbor is not hiding that, really,” she said. “They haven’t physically crossed the border, but they have crossed the airspace and they have cut our critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.”Carlo AngererCarlo Angerer is a multimedia producer and reporter based in Mainz, Germany. 
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