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admin - Latest News - December 1, 2025
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Bell-ringing goat gives back to one Colorado community



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Dec. 1, 2025, 11:38 AM ESTBy Rebecca ShabadWASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has commuted the seven-year sentence of former private equity CEO David Gentile, a White House official confirmed.Gentile was sentenced in May to seven years in prison on wire and security fraud charges. According to the Bureau of Prisons’ database, Gentile was not in its custody as of Nov. 26. The White House pardon czar, Alice Marie Johnson, also confirmed Gentile’s release in a post on X. Gentile was the CEO and co-founder of GPB Capital Holdings and was convicted by a federal jury in Aug. 2024 of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which brought the indictment during the Biden administration, said at the time that the “charges related to a years-long scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors by misrepresenting the source of funds used to make monthly distribution payments and the amount of revenue generated by three of GPB’s investment funds.” Gentile was charged and convicted alongside Jeffry Schneider, the owner of a marketing firm, whom prosecutors said marketed GPB funds to investors. The White House official disputed the charges brought by the Biden DOJ. The official said GPB paid regular annualized distributions to its investors and in 2015, the company “disclosed to investors the possibility of using investor capital to pay some of these distributions rather than funding them from current operations.””Even though this was disclosed to investors the Biden Department of Justice claimed this was a Ponzi scheme,” the official said. “This claim was profoundly undercut by the fact that GPB had explicitly told investors what would happen. At trial, the government was unable to tie any supposedly fraudulent representations to Mr. Gentile. Mr. Gentile also raised serious concerns that the government had elicited false testimony and failed to correct such testimony.”Gentile’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his release. New York Attorney General Letitia James had also sued Gentile and other co-defendants in 2021 over the scheme. The attorney general’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump has granted pardons and other acts of clemency to hundreds of people since taking office in January, beginning with around 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants and including many people convicted of fraud since then. Last month, Trump pardoned billionaire crypto executive Changpeng Zhao, who founded the Binance crypto exchange. Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty in a deal with the Justice Department for enabling money laundering at Binance.In April, Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, who was convicted on tax charges. Walczak’s mother contributed millions of dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign. In May, Trump pardoned and commuted the sentences of former reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were convicted of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Also in May, he pardoned former New York GOP Rep. Michael Grimm, who was sentenced in 2015 to eight months for tax fraud.In October, Trump released former GOP Rep. George Santos from prison. Santos was serving a prison sentence of over seven years. on wire fraud and identity theft charges.Rebecca ShabadRebecca Shabad is a politics reporter for NBC News based in Washington.
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Oct. 12, 2025, 6:30 AM EDTBy Jared PerloOpenAI’s new text-to-video app, Sora, was supposed to be a social AI playground, allowing users to create imaginative AI videos of themselves, friends and celebrities while building off of others’ ideas.The social structure of the app, which allows users to adjust the availability of their likeness in others’ videos, seemed to address the most pressing questions of consent around AI-generated video when it was launched last week. But as Sora sits atop the iOS App Store with over 1 million downloads, experts worry about its potential to deluge the internet with historical misinformation and deepfakes of deceased historical figures who cannot consent to or opt out of Sora’s AI models.In less than a minute, the app can generate short videos of deceased celebrities in situations they were never in: Aretha Franklin making soy candles, Carrie Fisher trying to balance on a slackline, Nat King Cole ice skating in Havana and Marilyn Monroe teaching Vietnamese to schoolchildren, for instance.That’s a nightmare for people like Adam Streisand, an attorney who has represented several celebrity estates, including Monroe’s at one point.“The challenge with AI is not the law,” Streisand said in an email, pointing out that California’s courts have long protected celebrities “from AI-like reproductions of their images or voices.”“The question is whether a non-AI judicial process that depends on human beings will ever be able to play an almost 5th dimensional game of whack-a-mole.”Videos on Sora range from the absurd to the delightful to the confusing. Aside from celebrities, many videos on Sora show convincing deepfakes of manipulated historical moments. For example, NBC News was able to generate realistic videos of President Dwight Eisenhower confessing to accepting millions of dollars in bribes, U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher arguing that the “so-called D-Day landings” were overblown, and President John F. Kennedy announcing that the moon landing was “not a triumph of science but a fabrication.”The ability to generate such deepfakes of nonconsenting deceased individuals has already caused complaints from family members.In an Instagram story posted Monday about Sora videos featuring Robin Williams, who died in 2014, Williams’ daughter Zelda wrote: “If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, wrote on X: “I concur concerning my father. Please stop.” King’s famous “I have a dream” speech has been continuously manipulated and remixed on the app. George Carlin’s daughter said in a BlueSky post that his family was “doing our best to combat” deepfakes of the late comedian.Sora-generated videos depicting “horrific violence” involving renowned physicist Stephen Hawking have also surged in popularity this week, with many examples circulating on X.A spokesperson for OpenAI told NBC News: “While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, we believe that public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used. For public figures who are recently deceased, authorized representatives or owners of their estate can request that their likeness not be used in Sora cameos.”In a blog post from last Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote that the company would soon “give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters,” referring to wider types of content. “We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of ‘interactive fan fiction’ and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all).”OpenAI’s quickly evolving policies for Sora have led some commentators to argue the company’s move fast and break things approach was purposeful, showing users and intellectual-property holders the app’s power and reach.Liam Mayes, a lecturer at Rice University’s program in media studies, thinks increasingly realistic deepfakes could have two key societal effects. First, he said, “we’ll find trusting people falling victim to all kinds of scams, big, powerful companies exerting coercive pressures and nefarious actors undermining democratic processes,” Mayes said.At the same time, being unable to discern deepfakes from real video might reduce trust in genuine media. “We might see trust in all sorts of media establishments and institutions erode,” Mayes said.As founder and chairman of CMG Worldwide, Mark Roesler has managed the intellectual property and licensing rights for over 3,000 deceased entertainment, sports, historical and music personalities like James Dean, Neil Armstrong and Albert Einstein. Roesler said that Sora is just the latest technology to raise concerns about protecting figures’ legacies.“There is and will be abuse as there has always been with celebrities and their valuable intellectual property,” he wrote in an email. “When we began representing deceased personalities in 1981, the internet was not even in existence.”“New technology and innovation help keep the legacies of many historical, iconic personalities alive, who shaped and influenced our history,” Roesler added, saying that CMG will continue to represent its clients’ interests within AI applications like Sora.To differentiate between a real and Sora-generated video, OpenAI implemented several tools to help users and digital platforms identify Sora-created content.Each video includes invisible signals, a visible watermark and metadata — behind-the-scenes technical information that describes the content as AI-generated.Yet several of these layers are easily removable, said Sid Srinivasan, a computer scientist at Harvard University. “Visible watermarks and metadata will deter casual misuse through some friction, but they are easy enough to remove and won’t stop more determined actors.”Srinivasan said an invisible watermark and an associated detection tool would likely be the most reliable approach. “Ultimately, video-hosting platforms will likely need access to detection tools like this, and there’s no clear timeline for wider access to such internal tools.”Wenting Zheng, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, echoed that view, saying: “To automatically detect AI-generated materials on social media posts, it would be beneficial for OpenAI to share their tool for tracing images, audio and videos with the platforms to assist people in identifying AI-generated content.”When asked for specifics about whether OpenAI had shared these detection tools with other platforms like Meta or X, a spokesperson from OpenAI referred NBC News to a general technical report. The report does not provide such detailed information.To better identify genuine footage, some companies are resorting to AI to detect AI outputs, according to Ben Colman, CEO and co-founder of Reality Defender, a deepfake-detecting startup.“Human beings — even those trained on the problem, as some of our competitors are — are faulty and wrong, missing the unseeable or unhearable,” Colman said.At Reality Defender, “AI is used to detect AI,” Colman told NBC News. AI-generated “videos may get more realistic to you and I, but AI can see and hear things that we cannot.”Similarly, McAfee’s Scam Detector software “listens to a video’s audio for AI fingerprints and analyzes it to determine whether the content is authentic or AI-generated,” according to Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at McAfee.However, Grobman added, “new tools are making fake video and audio look more real all the time, and 1 in 5 people told us they or someone they know has already fallen victim to a deepfake scam.”The quality of deepfakes also differs among languages, as current AI tools in commonly used languages like English, Spanish or Mandarin are vastly more capable than tools in less commonly used languages.“We are regularly evolving the technology as new AI tools come out, and expanding beyond English so more languages and contexts are covered,” Grobman said.Concerns about deepfakes have made headlines before. Less than a year ago, many observers predicted that the 2024 elections would be overrun with deepfakes. This largely turned out not to be true.Until this year, however, AI-generated media, like images, audio and video, has largely been distinguishable from real content. Many commentators have found models released in 2025 to be particularly lifelike, threatening the public’s ability to discern real, human-created information from AI-generated content.Google’s Veo 3 video-generation model, released in May, was called “terrifyingly accurate” and “dangerously lifelike” at the time, inspiring one reviewer to ask, “Are we doomed?”Jared PerloJared Perlo is a writer and reporter at NBC News covering AI. He is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.
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Nov. 4, 2025, 9:32 PM EST / Updated Nov. 4, 2025, 10:49 PM ESTBy Allan SmithZohran Mamdani has won New York’s mayoral race, NBC News projects, after the 34-year-old democratic socialist energized progressives in the city and across the country while generating intense backlash from President Donald Trump and Republicans, as well as some Democratic moderates.Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, on Tuesday handily defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who ran as a third-party candidate after having lost the Democratic primary — and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. Mayor Eric Adams, who mounted a third-party campaign for re-election after he won as a Democrat in 2021, dropped out of the race in September and endorsed Cuomo last month.Follow the election live hereThe victory caps a meteoric rise through New York politics for Mamdani since he launched his campaign roughly one year ago, transforming him from a virtually unknown state assemblyman who barely registered in polling to the incoming leader of America’s largest city. Along the way, he pushed aside the heir to one of New York’s most iconic political dynasties not once but twice within five months.Now a nationally known political figure, Mamdani will attempt to enact the sweeping policy platform that inspired his supporters while managing an enormous municipal bureaucracy — and influencing national politics, as one of the most prominent democratic socialists and Democrats in the country. Among other goals, Mamdani wants to freeze rent on rent-stabilized units, enact universal child care, create a free bus program and launch city-run grocery stores.“It is tempting to believe that this moment was always destined,” Mamdani said before thousands at a rally in Queens late last month, before he noted that when he started his campaign, “there was not a single television camera there to cover it.”“Four months later and as recently as this February, our support had reached eye-watering heights of 1%,” Mamdani continued. “We were tied with noted candidate ‘someone else.’”Mamdani’s victory is sure to reverberate not just throughout New York City but around the nation.In New York, Mamdani’s next challenge will be the tall task of uniting leaders in Albany and on the City Council — many of whom were not eager to line up behind him — to advance his ambitious agenda.Nationally, many Democrats will examine his rise from obscurity, his successful messaging on social media and his focus on affordability for clues about how to navigate their own races.Meanwhile, Republicans are eager to turn Mamdani’s left-wing platform into a wedge issue in competitive races far beyond New York City’s borders.Zohran Mamdani speaking at his campaign office on Oct. 30, 2025 in New York.Laurel Golio for NBC NewsNBC News exit polling found that Mamdani won across racial demographics — with white, Black, Latino, Asian and voters of other races all backing his candidacy over Cuomo’s and Sliwa’s.Younger voters overwhelmingly backed Mamdani, with NBC News exit polling showing that voters under 45 years old favored him over Cuomo by 43 points. Voters over 45, meanwhile, backed Cuomo by a 10-point margin.Education played a big role, too, the exit polling showed. And one of the biggest divides in the election was between New Yorkers who were born in the city and those who had moved to New York within the last 10 years.Meanwhile, with Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian activism having become a key issue in the race, NBC News exit polling found that Jewish voters favored Cuomo over Mamdani by 29 points, 60% to 31%.Speaking to supporters after his defeat on Tuesday, Cuomo thanked Adams, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former New York Gov. David Paterson for their support. He called voters at his election eve party “New York patriots.”“This campaign was the right fight to wage,” Cuomo said. “And I am proud of what we did and what we did together. This campaign was to contest the philosophies that are shaping the Democratic Party, the future of this city and the future of this country. And this coalition transcended normal partisan politics.”The closing weeks of the race turned into a brawl between Mamdani and Cuomo, the onetime front-runner who spent the general election trying to play catch-up. The two had heated debates in recent weeks, with Cuomo calling Mamdani a “divisive force in New York” while Mamdani painted Cuomo as Trump’s “puppet.”Trump made a late jump into the race Monday night, endorsing Cuomo on social media and saying a vote for Sliwa, the Republican nominee, was essentially a vote for Mamdani in the split general election field.Interestingly, exit polling showed self-identified Republicans favored Cuomo over Sliwa, with 61% of Republicans him while just 35% backed Sliwa.Late last month, Mamdani delivered an emotional address condemning what he slammed as “racist, baseless” attacks he has faced for his Muslim faith. He will be the first Muslim mayor in New York City history. His unapologetically pro-Palestinian stance energized progressives who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, as pro-Israel Democrats and donors grew anxious about his rise.At a rally alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., days later, Mamdani said Cuomo, Adams and Sliwa possess only “the playbook of the past.”“They have sought to make this election a referendum not on the affordability crisis that consumes New Yorkers’ lives,” he said, “but on the faith I belong to and the hatred they seem to normalize.”Allan SmithAllan Smith is a political reporter for NBC News.
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