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  • Stillborn infant from Dallas found in Shreveport laundry shipment

    Stillborn infant from Dallas found in Shreveport laundry shipment



    Authorities are investigating how an embalmed infant from Dallas ended up in a shipment of linens delivered to a Shreveport dry cleaner.

    Just after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, Shreveport police were called to Alsco Uniforms on Hollywood Avenue after employees reported finding what appeared to be a mummified infant wrapped in laundry.

    “It was a very disturbing scene,” said Cpl. Chris Bordelon. “Officers found what was a small infant, what was described as mummified.”

    Detectives determined the linens came from Golden Gate Funeral Home in Dallas. Police said the child died on May 3 and was scheduled to be cremated following a funeral service on May 17, but the body instead ended up in a shipment of laundry bound for Shreveport.

    “It was a very bizarre set of circumstances,” Bordelon said. “Our violent crimes team began their investigation and were able to track down the load of linens.”

    Detectives believe the infant had been embalmed, based on the strong odor and early signs of decomposition observed at the scene.

    “The detective on scene even told me it smelled strongly of formaldehyde, which is something that’s not typical of any of our crime scenes,” Bordelon said.

    The baby was found wearing clothing embroidered with the initials “K.M.,” the only identity police have officially confirmed.

    No foul play is suspected, but investigators said the incident appears to involve negligence.

    “This clearly is some type of act of negligence, whether it be on the part of a cleaning service for the funeral home or the funeral home itself,” Bordelon said.

    The remains are now in the custody of the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office, which is coordinating to return the child to the family in Dallas.

    Authorities said that the Texas Funeral Service Commission has been notified and that the investigation will continue across state lines.

    “There are laws when it comes to discarding of bodies, and the funeral home and or any individuals involved could be subject to those laws,” Bordelon said.

    NBC 5 reached out to Golden Gate Funeral Home, which declined to comment.

    “This is an unfortunate set of circumstances that no family should have to go through,” Bordelon said.



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  • Inside the scramble to keep FEMA alive ahead of hurricane season

    Inside the scramble to keep FEMA alive ahead of hurricane season



    Publicly, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs to be reoriented or even done away with altogether.

    “We are eliminating FEMA,” Noem said at a televised meeting of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet in March.

    But with hurricane season about to start, Noem has been quietly pushing behind the scenes to keep key employees in place and to approve reimbursements to states previously hit by disaster, sources familiar with the situation told NBC News.

    Trump himself talked about possibly “getting rid of” FEMA shortly after he was inaugurated for his second term, while he was touring North Carolina to see areas of the state damaged by Hurricane Helene. There has been no public indication that his administration, including Noem, is reconsidering that stance — indeed, the administration’s original acting FEMA administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was removed from the job one day after he testified at a congressional hearing that he does not think “it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate” FEMA. Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, has told NBC News that the move was not a response to his testimony.

    There does, however, appear to be some internal recognition that, absent a plan ready for how the country would move forward without FEMA, important elements of the agency and its work have to remain in place for now.

    According to internal documents reviewed by NBC News, on May 19, Noem approved a request from newly installed acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson to retain 2,652 employees whose terms had been set to expire between April and December. The employees are part of FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees (CORE) group, for which people are always hired for specific periods of two to four years; their departures this year would have left FEMA without a large number of key employees during hurricane season. According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, FEMA had 8,802 total CORE employees as of fiscal year 2022.

    A FEMA employee told NBC News that the workforce seemed surprised and pleased that Noem decided to keep the CORE employees on during hurricane season after the administration had moved to cut them.

    The same week FEMA was moving to keep those key employees in place, the White House was suddenly approving disaster recovery reimbursement requests from 10 states, including some that had been stalled for months, accounting for 20% of all such approvals in Trump’s second term, according to FEMA disaster approval data online.

    Three sources familiar with Noem’s recent actions say she has taken an outsized role compared with previous secretaries in pushing the White House to support FEMA and reimburse states.

    State and local governments are entitled by statute to have 75% of their costs for disasters reimbursed by the federal government. Anything above that is determined by a fixed formula or, if the formula’s requirements are not met, by the president. In the past, the White House generally approved what FEMA officials determined was appropriate based on those formulas, leaving the homeland security secretary to function largely as a rubber stamp, according to two sources familiar with the disaster approval process. But with the White House pushing to downsize FEMA’s role and encourage more states to bail themselves out, at least as of last week, the White House had repeatedly pushed back against FEMA’s recommendations, according to one of the sources familiar with Noem’s recent actions. And Noem had gotten involved.

    Asked for comment on this article, McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said in a statement: “This is a sad attempt by the mainstream media to drive a false narrative that there is daylight between President Trump and Secretary Noem. To the media’s chagrin, there’s not. Secretary Noem has been implementing President Trump’s vision for the future of FEMA to shift it away from a bloated, DC-centric bureaucracy that has let down the American people.”

    Because previous administrations typically approved reimbursements that FEMA determined should be made, states might not have the ability to shoulder the burden without having planned for it years in advance.

    “For a state like North Carolina, it’s significant. And in a state like Alabama or Mississippi, it would bankrupt the state,” said Michael Cohen, who was chief of staff at FEMA during the Biden administration. “They would have to take out a bond. They would have to look at how they increase tax revenue. For some of these states, it might be twice what their annual budget is for the year. So when the DHS secretary or White House is saying states are going to have to own the problem … these states are going to need to have a different mindset for how they budget.”

    Though the CORE employees are being kept on, a large number of FEMA’s senior executives have left this year, largely voluntarily, raising concerns internally and among outside observers and members of Congress about its ability to respond during hurricane season. Sixteen senior officials whose departures were announced in an internal email last week had a combined 228 years of experience at FEMA. Four additional senior executive departures were announced Wednesday in an email from the acting chief of staff at FEMA, who is herself set to step down.

    “It’s like having a relay team, and instead of having six members you’ve only got four, and yeah, you can do it, but those four runners are going to have to run more than they’re trained for,” the FEMA employee said.



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  • Jeep reveals new Cherokee SUV, confirms hybrid model

    Jeep reveals new Cherokee SUV, confirms hybrid model



    DETROIT — Jeep on Thursday revealed the first details and image of its new Cherokee SUV, which the company expects to assist in the brand’s turnaround when it arrives later this year.

    The Stellantis brand said the new midsize SUV will feature a hybrid powertrain option but declined to specify if it would be a traditional hybrid or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), which the company currently offers on several SUVs.

    “The all-new Jeep Cherokee headlines our efforts to deliver more product, innovation, choice and standard content to customers than ever before,” Jeep CEO Bob Broderdorf said in a statement. “Jeep Cherokee will boast competitive pricing that strikes at the core of the largest vehicle segment and sits perfectly between Jeep Compass and Jeep Grand Cherokee to bolster our winning mainstream lineup.”

    Affordability has been a problem for Jeep sales amid price increases in recent years. An entry-level model of the Cherokee started around $30,000 for the 2022 model year, according to Cars.com. That is close to the current Jeep Compass at about $27,000. The 2025 Grand Cherokee starts at roughly $36,500.

    The company declined to release other details of the vehicle, including its production location. Analysts and union officials have said the new SUV is expected to be produced at a plant in Mexico — a decision that was made prior to President Donald Trump’s election and ongoing automotive tariffs of 25% on imported vehicles into the U.S.

    The last generation of the Cherokee was produced at a plant in Illinois, which has been idled since the vehicles was discontinued in early 2023 amid cost-cutting efforts and production realignments.

    The cancellation of the Cherokee and a smaller SUV called the Renegade after the 2023 model-year contributed to ongoing sales declines for the brand.

    Jeep, a coveted brand in the automotive industry, has reported six consecutive years of U.S. annual sales declines, with a 10% decline through the first quarter of this year.

    The SUV brand is expected to be a priority for incoming Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa, who was leading Jeep’s turnaround before being promoted last year to lead the company’s Americas region.



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  • Federal appeals court pauses rulings on Trump tariffs, allowing them to continue — for now

    Federal appeals court pauses rulings on Trump tariffs, allowing them to continue — for now



    A federal appeals court Thursday temporarily paused rulings by a panel of judges that halted several of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on international trading partners.

    The “judgments and the permanent injunctions entered by the Court of International Trade in these cases are temporarily stayed until further notice,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a brief ruling.

    The decision pauses the lower court’s decision until at least June 9, when both sides will have submitted legal arguments about whether the case should remain paused while the appeal proceeds.

    An attorney for the plaintiffs, Jeffrey Schwab of the Liberty Justice Center, said in a statement that the ruling is “merely a procedural step as the court considers the government’s request for a longer stay pending appeal.”

    “We are confident the Federal Circuit will ultimately deny the government’s motion,” Schwab said.

    Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told Fox News that “this is a big victory for the president.” “We’re very pleased with the ruling,” he said.

    Peter Navarro, the White House senior counsel for trade and manufacturing, predicted the administration would find a way to institute the tariffs even if it’s eventually unsuccessful in this case.

    “Even if we lose, we will do it another way,” Navarro said, because Trump has multiple options to keep the tariffs in place. He said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer would lay out how the administration will respond within the next two days.

    The judgment Wednesday was from the U.S. Court of International Trade, which typically hears cases that originate from around the country involving tariff classifications, import transactions and customs law issues.

    The administration had been trying to have challenges to the tariffs heard in that court, but after the ruling, senior White House adviser Stephen Miller accused the New York City-based court of engaging in a “judicial coup.”

    In its decision, a panel of three judges — made up of Reagan, Obama and Trump appointees — found that the decades-old International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a federal law that Trump cited in many of his executive orders, didn’t “delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President.”

    Earlier Thursday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued a similar ruling, finding a number of Trump’s tariffs “unlawful.”

    The decision by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, however, affects only a pair of educational toy makers who’d filed suit arguing the president didn’t have the authority to impose sanctions and that his shifting tariffs were threatening to sink their small businesses.

    Contreras said the main question in the case is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) “enables the President to unilaterally impose, revoke, pause, reinstate, and adjust tariffs to reorder the global economy. The Court agrees with Plaintiffs that it does not.”

    He noted that no other president has ever used the IEEPA to impose tariffs and said allowing Trump to do so would mean congressional limitations on his powers “would be eviscerated if the President could invoke a virtually unrestricted tariffing power.”

    Trump has used tariffs and the threat of tariffs to kick-start trade negotiations with scores of countries he has accused of “ripping off” the United States with unfair trade practices.

    In court filings, the administration had urged Contreras not to block the tariffs, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying in a declaration that doing so “would cause significant and irreparable harm to U.S. foreign policy and national security” because negotiations with trading partners are “in a delicate state.”

    “The Cabinet officials claim that were a court to enjoin the tariffs announced in the Challenged Orders, U.S. trading partners could retaliate against the tariffs.; the U.S. would be embarrassed on the global stage; and the U.S.’s manufacturing position may be so weakened that the country may ‘not be able to produce the weapons and other resources necessary to defend itself,’” Contreras wrote in his decision.

    He said the “consequences described by the government officials in their declarations will flow, if at all,” from the trade court’s order Wednesday, not his much narrower one, but he also suggested the administration had only itself to blame.

    “The President cannot act unlawfully and then use the effects of having that action declared unlawful as a putative shield from judicial review,” he wrote.

    The administration is appealing Contreras’ ruling, as well.



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  • After Rubio seeks to revoke their visas, Chinese students say U.S. resembles the country they left

    After Rubio seeks to revoke their visas, Chinese students say U.S. resembles the country they left



    Chinese students say they’re questioning their decision to study in the U.S. after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the federal government will attempt to “aggressively” revoke their visas.

    Rubio said Wednesday that Chinese students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields” would be targeted.

    Chinese students who spoke to NBC News on Thursday said they came to the U.S. for freedoms that they felt they did not have back in China, but now say that the Trump administration is starting to resemble the strict regime they left behind.

    “USA stands for freedom. It stands for democracy. … That’s why we come here to chase our dreams,” said one Chinese Ph.D. student at a New Jersey university, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “In China, the government can control education, high schools, colleges, universities. We thought that the USA could be different.”

    The State Department referred NBC News to comments by spokesperson Tammy Bruce during a press briefing Thursday in which Bruce said that the department does not discuss the details of its visa process due to privacy concerns.

    “We use every tool that we have to vet and to make sure we know who’s coming in,” Bruce said. “In this particular case, the United States is putting America first by beginning to revoke visas of Chinese students as warranted.”

    The Chinese embassy referred NBC News to comments made by Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the subject. Ning harshly criticized Rubio’s announcement Thursday at a regular briefing in Beijing.

    “This politically discriminatory move exposes the hypocrisy of America’s long-proclaimed values of freedom and openness, and will only further damage the United States’ international image and credibility,” Ning said.

    Questions swirl around the new directive, including what “critical fields” the administration will be looking into and what types of connections to the CCP are under scrutiny. But it’s already prompted panic among many Chinese scholars, who make up the second-largest international student group in the U.S.

    While a temporary nationwide injunction issued last week blocks the Trump administration from revoking international students’ legal statuses amid its mass termination of records, attorneys say that it may not protect Chinese international students. Jath Shao, a Cleveland-based immigration attorney, said that while the restraining order keeps international students from being arrested or detained, or from losing their legal status, they can still have their visas revoked. Without a visa, Shao said, students can’t return to the U.S. once they’ve left, among a host of other issues.

    “If you’re trying to get a job or a study … that means you’re pretty much out of luck,” Shao said. “You’re stuck here. They’re basically trying to take away all your options.”

    Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst with the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, also mentioned that the Trump administration could argue that Chinese students fall under a completely different circumstance compared to those protected by the injunction.

    “We’re seeing in various cases that the administration is saying that it’s doing individualized determinations,” Bush-Joseph said. “Even if they’re focusing on a particular nationality, in any given case, they might say this is based on an individual person’s circumstances.”

    One Chinese student who’s studying economics at an Ivy League institution said that he felt the tactics used by the Trump administration, including harsh, pointed rhetoric and intimidation, smack of those used by the Chinese government. The student said that it wasn’t uncommon for Beijing to withhold funding for certain political research, much like Trump has threatened Harvard University, or use other methods of repression.

    “In China, we’re all Chinese, so they cannot revoke our citizenship, but they can revoke the student record,” he said. “That happens when it comes to people involved in political activities.”

    “I think they’re just using the CCP to evoke a ‘Red Scare.’ They don’t really care about ideals,” the economics student said, referring to the historical periods of fear in the U.S. around the potential rise of communism and socialism. “We just keep joking that it seems like Trump is learning from the Xi Jinping playbook.”

    The Ph.D. student said that at this point, he and his peers are considering either moving back to China or another Asian country — a plan that he said was not in the books before. He mentioned that before coming to America, he envisioned a country that was welcoming of diversity and inclusive of all backgrounds and a place he would put down roots. His thoughts on the U.S. have evolved drastically.

    “My family and my best friends, they had a phone call with me to say, ‘Hey, I think maybe you should come back. We think that there’s no reason for you to stay in the U.S,’” he said.

    Gisela Perez Kusakawa, executive director of the nonprofit Asian Scholar Forum, said that the new policy would only serve to harm the U.S. and its own research ambitions.

    “We know that many of our best and brightest talents are prominent scientists that have gone on to develop so many innovations that have changed the daily lives of so many Americans,” she said. “They started out as international students. They walked these campuses.”

    She also noted that it’s likely policymakers are guided by misconceptions around Chinese nationals. While there’s been a longstanding belief that Chinese international students would take intelligence back to China, research shows that most hope to start their lives in America. From 2005 to 2015, 87% of Chinese Ph.D. students said that they intended to stay in the U.S. A separate survey of more than 1,300 Chinese American researchers found that 89% “aimed to help advance U.S. leadership in science and technology.”

    As disappointing as the Rubio announcement was, Kusakawa underscored that it isn’t necessarily surprising. In March, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would halt the issuance of student visas to Chinese nationals looking to study at U.S. universities or take part in exchange programs.

    “In many ways, there was already this existing fear that this could potentially become a reality,” Kusakawa said. “But perhaps what is surprising is the speed in which it’s happening.”

    So far, the announcement has drawn mass criticism from many high-profile Chinese American lawmakers and leaders, including Gary Locke, a former U.S. ambassador to China and the chair of the Chinese American nonprofit Committee of 100, and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

    “The wholesale revocation of student visas based on national origin — and without an investigation — is xenophobic and wrong,” the lawmakers said on social media. “Turning these students away — many of whom simply wish to learn in a free and democratic society — is not just shortsighted but a betrayal of our values.”



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  • Arizona Supreme Court turns to AI-generated ‘reporters’ to deliver news

    Arizona Supreme Court turns to AI-generated ‘reporters’ to deliver news



    When the Arizona Supreme Court handed down its ruling in a pair of arson and DUI cases this month, the announcement wasn’t delivered by a judge or spokesperson, but instead by two AI avatars that are virtually indistinguishable from real people.

    Daniel and Victoria are the newest computer-generated faces of the Arizona Supreme Court as part of an effort to innovate how justice is communicated to the public.

    “I think it’s just an efficient way for us to get news out,” Communications Director Alberto Rodriguez said. “It’s really an opportunity for us to meet the public where they’re consuming their media.”

    Rodriguez is the man behind the machine who helped design the voice and appearance of his virtual co-workers. He says the AI technology has allowed his team to shrink the production time for a video news release from up to six hours down to a few minutes.

    Though the process has become more efficient, Rodriguez isn’t worried about becoming obsolete, pointing out that every upload still requires a human touch.

    “As far as taking the job of a public information officer, I don’t think that’s an issue because it still takes manpower,” he said. “We still have to work with the bench to make sure that we’re getting accurate information.”

    Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ann Timmer assures that every word the public hears from the avatars was written by the justices themselves. She hopes the added attention will help improve public confidence in the court.

    “For years, we took it for granted that, ‘Of course you trust the courts, of course you trust judges.’ We’re doing our best and these are hard working people,’” she said. “But if people don’t believe that, it doesn’t matter.”

    While Daniel and Victoria might become the most forward-facing examples of AI in the legal system, Timmer points out that the law profession is already using AI every day to assist with legal research, document reviews and data analysis.

    Still, the use of AI in the legal system is not without controversy. One plaintiff in New York tried to use an AI attorney to argue his case before he was shut down by the appeals panel. Across the country in California, the state bar faced heavy criticism from the legal community after disclosing that some questions on the state’s February exam were written using AI.

    As the use of AI in law continues to grow, so do concerns over instances of AI hallucinations and citations of cases that never existed popping up in legal filings.

    Timmer maintains that while these concerns are valid, the Arizona Supreme Court knows where to draw the line.

    “This AI, at least that we’re using, is not generative,” Timmer said. If the public is concerned “that we’ll use AI to start substituting for judgment, I don’t think that will ever happen,” she said.



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  • Non-alcoholic beer projected to overtake ale as the second-largest beer category worldwide this year

    Non-alcoholic beer projected to overtake ale as the second-largest beer category worldwide this year



    Non-alcoholic beer is on track to overtake ale as the second-largest beer category by volume worldwide this year, according to a new projections from industry tracker IWSR.

    While overall beer volume fell roughly 1% in 2024, volume for its non-alcoholic counterpart grew 9% worldwide, according to IWSR. The category’s growth accelerated in 2018 and has continued to outstrip the broader beer market since then.

    IWSR is projecting that no-alcohol beer will grow by 8% annually through 2029, while ale’s volume is expected to slide 2% annually in that same period.

    Despite recent growth, no-alcohol beer is far from becoming the top-selling beer category globally and only holds about 2% of worldwide beer market share. With 92% market share, lager is far and away the largest beer category and still growing, albeit at a slower pace than non-alcoholic beer.

    No-alcohol beer has gained popularity as more consumers cut back on their alcohol consumption, prompting brewers to invest in zero-proof alternatives. The trend is particularly striking across younger age cohorts; Gen Z drinks less than prior generations at the same age, and millennials hold the largest share of no-alcohol drinkers, according to IWSR. Younger drinkers use buzzwords like “sober curious” and “damp lifestyle” to describe moderating their alcoholic intake, rather than abstaining entirely.

    Additional fuel for the trend comes from the companies making non-alcoholic beers, which have gotten better at mimicking the taste of their alcoholic twins. Practically every major beer brand, from Diageo’s Guinness to Heineken and Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Budweiser, has rolled out a zero-proof version over the last five years.

    Non-alcoholic beer’s worldwide retail sales surpassed $17 billion in 2023, according to Bernstein. Looking at global markets, Germany, Spain and Japan bought the most non-alcoholic beer that year. The U.S. landed in sixth place for its no-alcohol beer sales, although its ranking falls much further when measured by overall sales penetration.

    Much of the growth in the U.S. is fueled by Athletic Brewing, now the top-selling no-alcohol beer brand. The upstart, which was founded in 2018, holds 17% of the category’s volume share, edging out AB InBev’s Bud Zero and Heineken’s 0.0 version. Just three years earlier, Athletic held only a 4% share. The company was reportedly valued at roughly $800 million in its latest funding round in 2024.

    Even non-alcoholic beer hasn’t been immune from the rash of celebrity-backed alcohol brands. Actor Tom Holland launched Bero, retired basketball star Dwyane Wade co-founded Budweiser Zero with AB InBev and podcast host and actor Dax Shepherd created Ted Segers.



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  • Nvidia results spark global chip rally

    Nvidia results spark global chip rally



    Nvidia shares jumped on Thursday after posting a positive set of earnings, sparking a rally in global semiconductor stocks.

    Shares of Nvidia were 6% higher after the company posted better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Wednesday, even as it took a hit from U.S. semiconductor export restrictions to China.

    Nvidia has been seen by investors as a bellwether for the broader semiconductor industry and artificial intelligence-related stocks, with its latest strong numbers sparking a rally among global semiconductor names.

    Nvidia’s earnings helped boost other chip names, with Taiwan Semiconductor, AMD and Qualcomm all up about 1%.

    In Japan, Tokyo Electron closed more than 4% higher, while SK Hynix, which is a supplier of high bandwidth memory to Nvidia, was nearly 2% up at the close of markets in South Korea.

    In Europe, ASM International, BE Semiconductor Industries and ASML were all in positive territory.

    The semiconductor industry has faced a number of headwinds from uncertainty around tariff policy in the U.S. and chip export restrictions to China.

    Companies such as ASML, which makes machines that are critical for manufacturing the most advanced chips, have seen billions wiped off their value as a result.

    Nvidia on Wednesday said it wrote off $4.5 billion of H20 chip inventory that it couldn’t ship to China because of export curbs, saying it also calculated $2.5 billion of lost revenue as well.

    The restrictions on China do not seem to be going away.

    The U.S. has ordered a number of companies, including those producing chemicals and design software for semiconductors, to stop shipping goods to China without a license, according to a Reuters report on Thursday.

    Despite this, Nvidia still managed to post financial results for the April quarter that beat market expectations, allaying fears that demand for its graphics processing units, which have become key for training huge AI models, is dwindling.



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  • Republican support for same-sex marriage is lowest in a decade, Gallup poll finds

    Republican support for same-sex marriage is lowest in a decade, Gallup poll finds



    Marriage for same-sex couples has been legal across the United States since the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision a decade ago. While Democratic support for gay nuptials has risen steadily since that landmark 2015 ruling, Republican support has tumbled 14 points since its record high of 55% in 2021 and 2022, according to a Gallup report released Thursday.

    In the latest Gallup poll, 41% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats said marriages between same-sex couples should be “recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages.” This 47-point gap is the largest it has been since Gallup first started asking the question in 1996. The report found 76% of independents and 68% of all U.S. adults surveyed backed marriage rights for same-sex couples.

    A separate question about whether “gay or lesbian relations” are “morally acceptable or morally wrong” found a similar political trend, with 86% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 38% of Republicans answering answering “morally acceptable.”

    When broken down by nonpolitical subgroups, women, younger people and college graduates were more likely to support gay marriage and find same-sex relations morally acceptable than men, older people and those who did not graduate college.

    The Gallup report’s authors noted that the “widening political divide suggests potential vulnerabilities in the durability of LGBTQ+ rights” in the country.

    The report cited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling — which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision — that stated the high court ”should reconsider” some of its past rulings, including the 2015 same-sex marriage decision.

    And, as NBC News reported earlier this year, lawmakers in at least nine states have introduced measures to try to chip away at same-sex couples’ right to marry.



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  • Trump administration says it’s working to return a Guatemalan man deported to Mexico

    Trump administration says it’s working to return a Guatemalan man deported to Mexico



    The Trump administration said in court filings Wednesday that it was working to bring back a Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico in spite of his fears of being harmed there, days after a federal judge ordered the administration to facilitate his return.

    The man, who is gay, was protected from being returned to his home country under a U.S. immigration judge’s order at the time. But the U.S. put him on a bus and sent him to Mexico instead, a removal that U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy found likely “lacked any semblance of due process.”

    Mexico has since returned him to Guatemala, where he is in hiding, according to court documents.

    In a court filing Wednesday, government lawyers said that a so-called significant public benefit parole packet had been approved and was awaiting additional approval from Homeland Security Investigations. The designation allows people who aren’t eligible to enter the U.S. to do so temporarily, often for reasons related to law enforcement or legal proceedings.

    Officials in the Phoenix field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, spoke with the man’s lawyers over the weekend and are working to bring him back to the U.S. on a plane chartered by ICE, the court filing said.

    An earlier court proceeding had determined that the man, identified by the initials O.C.G., risked persecution or torture if returned to Guatemala. But he also feared returning to Mexico, where he says he was raped and extorted while seeking asylum in the U.S., according to court documents.

    Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who called Murphy a “federal activist judge,” said O.C.G. was in the country illegally, was “granted withholding of removal to Guatemala” and was instead sent to Mexico, which she said was “a safe third option for him, pending his asylum claim.”

    Murphy’s order last Friday adds to a string of findings by federal courts against recent Trump administration deportations. Those have included other deportations to third countries and the erroneous deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran who had lived in Maryland for roughly 14 years, working and raising a family.

    Murphy’s order last Friday adds to a string of findings by federal courts against recent Trump administration deportations. Those have included other deportations to third countries and the erroneous deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran who had lived in Maryland for roughly 14 years, working and raising a family.

    The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. from a notorious Salvadoran prison, rejecting the White House’s claim that it couldn’t retrieve him after mistakenly deporting him. Both the White House and the El Salvadoran president have said they are powerless to return him.



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