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New TikTok deal to secure and retrain algorithm

admin - Latest News - September 22, 2025
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The White House says TikTok’s algorithm “will be secured, retrained, and operated in the United States” as part of the Trump administration’s new TikTok deal. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt also says user data will be stored in the U.S. and not by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and President Donald Trump plans to sign the deal later this week.



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Sept. 22, 2025, 11:20 AM EDTBy Edwin Flores, Morgan Radford and Aaron FrancoYou’ve heard of pickleball, the wildly popular sport that’s gone mainstream. But now there’s padel — another racket sport that’s surging in popularity and one that has strong Latino roots.“It’s a sport that always keeps you on your toes,” said Roy Tabet, a professional padel player and a coach at Reserve Padel, one of the biggest luxury padel brands in the U.S., with clubs in Miami and New York. Tabet said he had played tennis his whole life but started finding it repetitive.“I started playing padel and I immediately felt the passion. The hype for the game was real,” he said in an interview with the “TODAY” show’s Morgan Radford.Morgan Radford and Santiago Gomez at Padel Haus in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y.NBC NewsPadel got its start in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1969 when Enrique Corcuera, a Mexican businessman, was trying to build a makeshift tennis court in his backyard. He didn’t have enough space and chose to make a smaller version — the very first padel court — with a distinguishing feature: It was surrounded by an almost 10-foot wall.The sport would eventually grow and spread internationally. It’s now described as the fastest-growing sport worldwide. The International Padel Federation says padel is played in more than 140 countries around the world with about 30 million amateur players.Currently in the U.S., there are over 100,000 amateur players, according to PadelUSA, an online marketplace for padel equipment, but the number of padel courts has been increasing.The sport’s growing popularity has even captured the attention of athletes and celebrities like Eva Longoria, Derek Jeter, Jimmy Butler and Adam Levine.“It’s like pickleball but kind of a little cooler,” Levine told Jimmy Fallon in April on “The Tonight Show.” “It’s super fun,” the singer added, explaining he was first introduced to the sport by Michael Bublé, his fellow coach on “The Voice,” when they were vacationing together in Mexico.Padel differs from other racket sports in that the court is about one-third the size of a tennis court and is typically surrounded by a glass or mesh wall. The ball can be hit off the walls and even from outside the court, as players can exit the court through a door to return the ball. Players must have a teammate, as the sport can only be played in doubles.A big draw, fans say, is the community it fosters as well as the game’s fast pace.“What got me hooked is the community. I feel like I met a lot of my best friends here, so coming to see them specifically turned into my love for playing padel,” Rachel Kuan, who’s now a customer experiences employee at Reserve Padel, told “TODAY.” Santiago Gomez, who fell in love with the game while growing up in Acapulco, founded Padel Haus, a sprawling padel social and cultural hub located in New York City — and among the first dedicated padel courts in the U.S. Padel Haus has since opened more courts across the New York City area as well as in Atlanta, Nashville and Denver.“A lot of Latinos were first — they were the first ones to come because they play the sport at home,” Gomez said.“Americans didn’t know about the sport when we first opened in 2022,” he said. “And then after that, a lot of tennis players, former tennis players, former squash players — Americans — came and tried it for the first time and they fully converted to padel.”Gomez estimates that about 70% of Padel Haus’ members are from the U.S. while the remaining 30% hail from other countries. The growth has increased so significantly that there’s now a waitlist for people looking to sign up.Fast pace ‘keeps you hooked’In addition to the social aspect of the game, Gomez said it’s addictive because of how fast-paced it can get compared to other racket sports.“[In tennis], a ball passes you, your mind is wired to think that the point is over. But here, given the wall’s in the back, you can still save the point. So you feel like a hero when you’re catching a ball that you couldn’t catch in tennis,” Gomez said.“You’re still in the game, and that gives you [a] big dopamine rush and that’s what keeps you hooked.”Mexican tennis player Yola Ramirez competing in the women’s singles tournament at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, on July 1,1959.Evening Standard / Hulton Archive/Getty Images fileThe International Padel Federation is working on getting the sport included in the 2032 Olympics. But for some like Marnie Perez-Ochoa, whose grandmother Yola Ramirez was a former professional tennis player from Mexico and grandfather built Padel courts for professional tournaments in Acapulco, the game has also become a point of cultural pride.“The power of sport is so prevalent — it’s just now getting started in the States. You see it in Mexico. It already boomed in Europe — Spain in particular. So I’m really excited to see where it’s going to go in the States. And I think it’s really beautiful that it started in Mexico,” Perez-Ochoa said.Edwin FloresEdwin Flores was a former reporter and video producer based in Anaheim, California. Morgan RadfordAaron Franco
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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 1, 2025, 6:42 AM EDTBy Chloe Atkins and Corky SiemaszkoWhen former NBA player Damon Jones, who has been accused of feeding inside information to sports gamblers, first filed for bankruptcy in 2013, he had to list his Yorkshire Terrier as an asset.The unnamed pooch was valued, according to the court documents, at just $1.A decade later, Jones was a few months away from being evicted from a luxury Houston apartment building when prosecutors allege he texted a co-conspirator and urged him to bet on the Milwaukee Bucks against the Los Angeles because a top Lakers player, believed to be LeBron James, was out with an injury. Jones went from relative anonymity as a former NBA player and coach to the forefront of one of the biggest gambling scandals in modern sports when he was named by federal prosecutors last week in two separate indictments allegedly involving gambling and fixed, mob-linked poker games. NBC News reviewed more than 150 pages of court documents from Jones, including financial forms, spanning more than a decade that show persistent financial problems for the ex-athlete. In addition to the eviction proceedings, Jones listed his 2016 NBA championship ring as collateral for a personal loan and was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. “Operation Nothing But Bet” is one of two sprawling federal investigations into illegal gambling that were unveiled Oct. 23, the other being a probe of rigged high-stakes poker games allegedly backed by the Mafia called “Operation Royal Flush” which led to the arrests of several people, including Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Prosecutors said the evidence in the latter case includes “financial records, telephone records, cellphone records and texts, cellphone extractions and location information, the contents of Apple iCloud accounts, witness testimony, and surveillance photographs.”Jones has yet to enter a plea, but is due in federal court for his arraignment in New York. Jones’ lawyer declined to comment. Jones’ current address, according to available records, appears to be the Houston apartment that a property management company tried to evict him from in June 2023, claiming he owed around $5,600 in rent, records show.The management company dismissed the case after Jones failed to appear in court. But in August 2023, the company filed another eviction notice against Jones, this time claiming he owed more than $11,000 in back rent. Once again, Jones failed to appear in court and the judge issued a default judgment in favor of the company, granting it possession of the apartment and slapping Jones with a monetary judgment of $11,240, records show. When the court tried to mail Jones a copy of the default judgment, the notice was returned due to an insufficient address. The management company has not responded to NBC News’ request for comment. Jones’ financial woes go back at least to 2013, when his initial bankruptcy case was dismissed. Two years later, Jones filed for bankruptcy again and this time, according to court records, he reported $500,000 to $1 million in liabilities and claimed to have assets in the range of $100,001 to $500,000.Jones, those records showed, owed around $640,000 to creditors and $47,000 to the Bellagio Hotels and Casino for “breach of contract/confession of judgement.”It’s not clear what happened with that bankruptcy case. Bellagio did not respond to an inquiry from NBC News. But in 2019, another man who said Jones owed him money surfaced, court records show.Scott Kerr filed a civil complaint against Jones seeking monetary relief of $100,000 or less. According to the filing, Jones borrowed $10,000 from Kerr. That, plus a $4,000 fee, was supposed to be paid by Aug. 28, 2017.Jones failed to pay back the loan and the collateral Jones put up to secure the loan from Kerr was his 2016 NBA championship ring, according to the filing, which added that he also failed to provide the collateral.Kerr wasn’t the only person Jones allegedly stiffed. Between October 2023 and November 2024, Jones was hit with complaints from three men saying he failed to repay them thousands of dollars in loans. One of them, Antonio Hooper, said in a November 2024 filing that Jones had agreed in writing to pay him $20,000 in return for a $4,500 loan. His filing included screenshots of text exchanges with Jones, including one in which the former NBA player mentions “Bron” being unable to “get over that Sports Illustrated article he did.” Hooper, in a telephone interview, said Jones never paid him back. He said the reason he was asking for $20,000 is that he lent Jones more money after the initial $4,500 loan. He also said he and Jones have mutual friends in the NBA.“I don’t know what article Damon was talking about,” said Hooper, who said he runs a youth basketball program in Houston. “But I have a friend who was looking for a job in the NBA and Damon put him on the phone with LeBron for an interview. He didn’t get the job and LeBron didn’t like Damon trading on his name. He didn’t appreciate that.”James did not immediately respond to a request for comment via the Lakers.Jones was one of more than 30 people arrested in the operations. Also nabbed was Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, who is accused of faking an injury to take himself out of a game in 2023 when he played for the Charlotte Hornets, giving a heads up to a friend who, in turn, “sold that tip” to gamblers betting on that Hornets versus New Orleans Pelicans game.Like Jones, Rozier is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. And like Jones, Rozier too, has had money problems. In 2023, the IRS filed a federal tax lien in Florida against Rozier for $8.2 million in unpaid taxes from 2021. In August 2022, a construction company filed a lien against Rozier for over $270,000, according to a claim filed in Florida. A year later, Rozier paid off the lien except for $20,000, court documents showed.Rozier has yet to enter a plea to the federal charges. Rozier’s attorney pushed back on allegations that his client owed millions to the government.“The federal tax lien story is a nothing-burger. His total tax liability was about $8 million. Between the CPAs and the IRS, something happened with his electronic filing, so the IRS issued a lien on the entire amount. The actual tax deficiency ended up being $3,000, and that has been paid off. We expect the now-defunct lien to be removed in the near future,” Rozier’s attorney Jim Trusty said on Friday. Chloe AtkinsChloe Atkins reports for the NBC News National Security and Law Unit, based in New York.Corky SiemaszkoCorky Siemaszko is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital.Tom Winter contributed.
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