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Anna Sorokin, the real-life ‘Inventing Anna,’ is out of jail | CNN

Published

2 years ago

October 8, 2022

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Anna Sorokin, the real-life ‘Inventing Anna,’ is out of jail | CNN

CNN
—

Anna Sorokin, the faux heiress Netflix’s “Inventing Anna” relies on, was launched from ICE detention on Friday.

Juda Engelmayer, a spokesman for Sorokin, confirmed her launch in an e mail to CNN Friday evening.

“She’s going to stay underneath the supervision of ICE, however will be capable to combat her deportation free from bodily custody,” mentioned John Sandweg, a former performing director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who’s on Sorokin’s authorized crew.

Immigration Choose Charles Conroy cleared the best way for Sorokin’s launch earlier this week, setting her bond at $10,000 and requiring her to observe sure situations. Amongst them: staying off social media and remaining on the similar residential deal with 24 hours a day whereas her case proceeds.

The decide’s ruling additionally mentioned ICE might use an ankle monitor to maintain tabs on Sorokin.

A spokesman for ICE mentioned Sorokin was being launched Friday after the decide’s ruling.

She’d been in ICE detention for 17 months, based on her lawyer – principally on the Orange County Correctional Facility in upstate New York, about 60 miles from New York Metropolis.

“We’re grateful that the Courtroom agreed that her continued detention is pointless,” Sandweg mentioned in an announcement Friday.

Sorokin was discovered responsible of stealing greater than $200,000 from banks and mates whereas scamming her means into New York society, the Manhattan District Lawyer mentioned after her 2019 conviction.

Her case drew widespread consideration after a 2018 New York journal article.

That article grew to become the idea of Shonda Rhimes’ “Inventing Anna,” a dramatization that launched on Netflix in February and rapidly grew to become one of many streamer’s hottest exhibits. Actress Julia Garner, greatest recognized for her Emmy-winning function as Ruth on “Ozark,” performed Sorokin.

The present ends with Sorokin’s conviction. However in actual life, the drama has continued.

Sorokin was launched from jail in February 2021 after serving almost 4 years on theft and larceny expenses. Nevertheless it wasn’t lengthy earlier than she ended up again behind bars.

ICE took custody of Sorokin on March 25, 2021. In November, the Board of Immigration Appeals granted an emergency keep in her case, based on ICE. She’s been preventing her deportation – and likewise joined a bunch of plaintiffs suing the company earlier this yr, alleging they’d requested and been denied Covid booster pictures whereas in custody. They dropped their lawsuit in March after receiving the pictures, based on court docket data.

Whereas she’s been detained, frequent posts have been made on Sorokin’s social media accounts. Lately they’ve highlighted Sorokin’s art work, which was featured in a New York present in Could.

Earlier this yr an lawyer representing Sorokin advised NBC Information that he feared her deportation when he couldn’t attain her, however phrase later emerged that she was nonetheless in ICE custody.

Quickly afterward, Sorokin spoke out from behind bars, telling the “Name Her Daddy” podcast that she by no means claimed to be a German heiress.

“I used to be from Germany, which was true, however no one ever requested me about my job,” Sorokin mentioned. “No person asks who’re your mother and father and the way a lot cash do they make. It’s simply outrageous.”

She advised host Alex Cooper that she by no means “advised any mindless lies.”

However she admitted – kind of – to mendacity about her standing and background.

“I suppose I did,” she mentioned. “I imply, I can’t inform an actual occasion, however I’m certain.”

Sorokin additionally mentioned she was shocked by the general public’s fascination together with her story.

“It was simply actually a shock to me that individuals could be, like, so thinking about the best way I went concerning the issues, as a result of it simply made a lot sense to me,” she mentioned.

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Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Published

28 minutes ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Fox News appears headed for trial over false election fraud claims made after the 2020 election, after a New York state appellate court chose not to dismiss a lawsuit brought by voting tech company Smartmatic.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

Fox News appears to be headed once more to court over the lies involving election fraud it aired about the 2020 presidential race. This time, it’s over the false claims that election tech company Smartmatic sabotaged the re-election of then-President Donald Trump.

In April 2023, on the eve of a trial in Delaware in which Fox founder Rupert Murdoch was set to testify, the network and its parent corporation agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems.

Fox News settles blockbuster defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems

A flood of revelations from the pre-trial process of discovery yielded damning internal communications. The judge found that network figures from junior producers to primetime hosts, network executives, Murdoch and his son Lachlan knew that Joe Biden had won the election fairly. Yet, they allowed guests to spread lies that Trump had been cheated of victory to win back Trump viewers. Some hosts amplified and even embraced the claims.

Now, an appellate court ruling in New York state is allowing Smartmatic’s parallel, $2.7 billion suit to press ahead. The same ruling also dismissed some counts against the network’s parent company, Fox Corp.

Pro-Trump Fox hosts including Maria Bartiromo and the late Lou Dobbs invited guests making unsubstantiated and wild claims about Smartmatic on the air, and at times appeared to endorse those allegations themselves.

Fox forced Dobbs off the air just a day after Smartmatic filed its suit in February 2021. Two weeks later, Fox News and Fox Business Network ran an awkward segment with a voting tech expert, Edward Perez, to present viewers with a rebuttal to those outlandish claims. Newsmax, a right-wing channel in competition with Fox for viewers who supported Trump, did much the same.

“Today, the New York Supreme Court rebuffed Fox Corporation’s latest attempt to escape responsibility for the defamation campaign it orchestrated against Smartmatic following the 2020 election,” Smartmatic’s lead attorney, Erik Connolly, said in a statement. “Fox Corporation attempted, and failed, to have this case dismissed, and it must now answer for its actions at trial. Smartmatic is seeking several billion in damages for the defamation campaign that Fox News and Fox Corporation are responsible for executing. We look forward to presenting our evidence at trial.”

Unlike Dominion, whose voting machines were used in two dozen states, Smartmatic says its technology was used only in Los Angeles County in 2020. Fox has sharply questioned the value of Smartmatic and the contracts it says were jeopardized and lost.

“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial,” a network spokesperson said in a statement. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on their face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

In the Dominion case, Fox also relied on arguments that its shows and hosts were simply relaying inherently newsworthy allegations from inherently newsworthy people — the then-president and his allies. The presiding judge in Delaware, Eric M. Davis, rejected that argument; he found that Fox’s executives, stars, and shows had broadcast false claims and defamed Dominion in doing so.

Fox has said that the New York case offers a new venue, with slightly different implications, although Davis applied New York defamation law in his Delaware proceedings.

Fox settled, as it has in many other cases, before opening arguments of the trial with Dominion. It maintains it will fight the allegations Smartmatic is making in court.

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Trump Blames L.A. Wildfires on Newsom Using Familiar Tactics

Published

10 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

When enormous wildfires began to menace Los Angeles, the incoming president did not use his social media site to pledge support to emergency responders or offer words of compassion to a city where thousands of people have lost everything.

Instead, President-elect Donald Trump used his megaphone to tell the world who was at fault.

It wasn’t the Santa Ana winds, nor was it the rising temperatures that have dried out vegetation and made fires harder to extinguish.

The culprit, he wrote, was “Gavin Newscum.”

The Los Angeles fires have killed at least 11 people, reduced thousands of structures to ash and burned more than 36,000 acres, an area larger than the footprint of San Francisco. It’s the kind of devastation that, in a bygone era, might have prompted at least a temporary political cease-fire and pledges to work across the aisle to rebuild, even as the authorities face legitimate questions about their handling of the crisis.

Instead, with 10 days until Trump’s second inauguration, he offered a reminder of how he has long used disasters to damage political opponents like Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California — even when they’re still going on.

“What this feels like is, the man hasn’t changed an inch,” said Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, whom Trump described as “nasty” when they tangled over the federal response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria on the island in 2017.

But it’s not just about hurting his political foes. Trump has always been a master of tapping into people’s angst and projecting it far and wide for his benefit — and there is a lot of angst in Los Angeles right now.

‘Why is he doing this?’

Residents in Los Angeles are angry that water systems never designed to fight so many threatening fires have run dry. They are mystified that Karen Bass, the Democratic mayor, wasn’t in the city when the blazes began. They are scared for their lives and fearful that the institutions they have come to rely on, like insurance, won’t make them whole on the other side of this.

This week, Trump has called for Newsom to resign, blamed other Democrats like President Biden and Mayor Bass and said incorrectly that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had no money to respond to the disaster because of the “Green New Scam.”

It’s a revival of a tendency he displayed during his first presidency, when he injected his personal politics into once-sacrosanct concepts like providing federal disaster aid to areas no matter whether they were blue or red. He told aides he wanted to stop money from reaching Puerto Rico after Maria, claiming that the island’s leadership was corrupt, and publicly insulted Cruz.

“At the beginning, I thought, ‘Why is he doing this?’” Cruz told me in an interview today. She suspected, she said, that it was because she was a Latina and a woman who had challenged his federal response to the disaster in her city. “It can be distracting, but it wasn’t distracting because I very clearly saw that it gave me an opportunity to talk about what was really going on in Puerto Rico.”

(He also struggled to manage the optics of his own response, like when he traveled to the island and hucked paper towels into the crowd.)

He also fought extensively with California. After the state’s devastating wildfire season of 2018, he tweeted that he had ordered FEMA to “send no more money” unless the state changed its approach to forest management. He has clashed on and off with Newsom over issues like water management and federal aid ever since.

In a text message last fall, Newsom told my colleagues that Trump often seemed to expect personal treatment before the state could receive aid, saying he was “publicly threatening, playing his politics — looking tough … forcing a call, a ‘transaction’ in his mind — reminding you in process who’s in control, why he matters.”

Beyond withholding aid, Trump has used disasters as political ammunition on the campaign trail. After a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, in early 2023, he used the site as a backdrop to hammer the Biden administration, helping his presidential campaign pick up steam.

And last fall, when Hurricane Helene slammed into Georgia and North Carolina, he made a series of false claims about the federal disaster response as he sought to depict the Biden administration as hapless and even biased against Republicans who were in harm’s way.

Unavoidable politics

Trump’s defenders say there is no reason he shouldn’t bring up politics in a moment irrevocably shaped by them.

“We will have a fire, and there will be winds to blow the fire, but what determines the flow of the fire and the infrastructure capability of the fire department to fight, it is on them,” said former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, referring to the Democratic leadership of the city and the state.

He added: “In a time of crisis, people look at their electeds for leadership. How do you think they’re doing? They’re blaming somebody else. They say you can’t ask these questions. They’re not in town — they can’t answer why something happened.”

James Gallagher, who serves as the Republican leader in the State Assembly and represents Paradise, a Northern California community that was devastated by the Camp Fire in 2018, said there was deep frustration that more hadn’t been done to reduce wildfire fuel in the state.

Climate change exacerbates conditions that can lead to wildfires, he said, but he blamed Democrats’ leadership for inadequate management of the dry brush that can fuel fires. (Trump has discussed this in the past, although his recent posts have focused more on his dispute with Newsom over water management, which California officials say would not have changed the circumstances around the fires.)

“The politics are wrapped up in some very substantive policy,” Gallagher said.

“We’ve been saying this for a long time — maybe we don’t have as big of a megaphone” as Trump, he added.

News

Treasury yields jump after US jobs report smashes expectations

Published

12 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Treasury yields jump after US jobs report smashes expectations

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The US economy blew past expectations to create 256,000 jobs in December, sending yields on US government debt lurching higher as traders and banks trimmed their forecasts for Federal Reserve interest rate cuts.

The figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday exceeded the consensus forecast from economists polled by Reuters of 160,000 and was above the downwardly revised 212,000 positions added in November.

Treasury yields climbed as investors bet the Fed will be slower to cut interest rates this year. Futures markets pushed back the expected timing of the first quarter-point rate cut to September from June before the data release. The odds of a second cut this year fell to about 20 per cent from roughly 60 per cent.

Bank of America went further on Friday, saying the “gangbusters” jobs reports suggests “the cutting cycle is over”.

The Wall Street bank added “the conversation should move to hikes, which could be in play” if inflation picks up significantly. Goldman Sachs on Friday also scaled back its forecasts for 2025 rate cuts from three quarter-point reductions to two.

The robust jobs figures sent US government bond yields rising across the spectrum. The benchmark 10-year yield climbed 0.08 percentage points to 4.76 per cent — the highest level since November 2023. The policy-sensitive two-year yield soared 0.12 percentage points to 4.38 per cent.

Wall Street stocks dropped, with the broad S&P 500 closing down 1.5 per cent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite losing 1.6 per cent. The S&P 500 fell to its lowest since the November 5 US election.

Eric Winograd, chief economist at AllianceBernstein, said: “[December’s jobs] number emphasises that the Fed does not need to rush . . . it validates to a significant degree that they should be on hold for a few months.”

The bond market was already “on edge”, he added.

Friday’s jobs data was hotly anticipated on both sides of the Atlantic amid a sell-off in government bond markets, fuelled in part by growing expectations that the Fed will cut interest rates only slightly in 2025.

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has come under increasing pressure this week after government borrowing costs soared, leaving her with little scope to meet her self-imposed fiscal rules.

UK bond yields climbed after the publication of the US jobs figures. The 10-year gilt yield rose to 4.85 per cent, 0.02 percentage points higher on the day, but below the 16-year high of 4.93 per cent hit earlier this week.

US president-elect Donald Trump’s plans to cut taxes, impose tariffs and curb immigration have also led the Fed to signal it will be more cautious in 2025.

The central bank in December forecast just two quarter-point rate cuts this year, compared with a projection of four in September, partly because of persistent strength in the jobs market.

Jeff Schmid, a top Fed official, on Thursday said the US central bank was “pretty close” to meeting its objectives on inflation and employment, underscoring expectations that policymakers will refrain from sharp interest rate cuts this year.

The Fed began cutting its main interest rate in September, reducing it by 1 full percentage point by the end of 2024.

At its next meeting later this month, the central bank is widely expected to keep interest rates steady at its target range between 4.25 per cent and 4.5 per cent.

Tom Porcelli, chief US economist at PGIM Fixed Income, said: “I think the Fed is feeling very good right now about taking a pass at the coming meeting — and obviously, if this kind of strength persists, they’ll take a pass at the next several meetings.”

Friday’s figures showed the unemployment rate was 4.1 per cent, compared with 4.2 per cent in November. They marked the last monthly jobs numbers released under Joe Biden’s presidency, during which the US economy created 16.6mn jobs.

An exceptionally strong labour market that defied frequent predictions that a sharp slowdown or recession was looming was a defining feature of the economy under Biden’s watch.

But politically it did not help the Biden administration because those gains were undercut by the inflation surge that peaked in the summer of 2022, sharply raising the cost of living for households throughout his tenure.