Former GOP intel chair considers Michigan Senate run after presidential flirtations

Former House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers is seriously weighing a campaign for Michigan’s open Senate seat, a move that would shake up the state’s sleepy Senate race and divert him away from a longshot presidential bid.

The Michigan Republican, who served in the House for seven terms, has told party allies that he is considering entering the Senate race to replace retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), according to a person familiar with the conversations. A second person who has spoken with Rogers recently confirmed the ex-lawmaker has real interest in the race.

Rogers has not made any plans official as he grapples with his political future.

“Mike Rogers is humbled by the outpouring of encouragement he’s received to run for federal office by Michigan friends, family and neighbors, as well as people across the country,” said John Stineman, an adviser to Rogers. “People recognize the need for strong leadership to meet the challenges America faces, and Rogers is actively considering the best way to continue his career of service."

As the former House member explores a potential run for the presidency, the field’s become increasingly crowded in recent weeks. He has argued people are looking for “steady” leadership and would not commit to supporting former President Donald Trump as the presidential nominee in a March interview with CBS.

In the Senate race, Democrats have largely united around Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in her bid to succeed Stabenow, but the Republican side is more unsettled. John Tuttle, the vice chair of the New York Stock Exchange, is considering a bid for the Republican nomination. And former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), a vociferous Trump critic who lost his reelection bid, is also weighing a run.

Regardless of who gets in on the GOP side, it’ll be an uphill battle. Michigan Republicans last won a Senate race in 1994, when Spencer Abraham was elected. He lost to Stabenow in 2000. Rep. John James, who narrowly lost two recent Senate races, has filed to run for reelection in the House.

And regardless of what office he pursues, Rogers will have to contend with his past criticisms of Trump. He’s said that the GOP needs to move on from the former president, arguing that “Trump’s time has passed” and calling his political tactics “destructive.”

Rogers registered to vote in Florida in 2022, according to voter records, but is actively scoping out property in Michigan. After announcing his plans to retire from the House in 2014, he pursued a career in radio and TV as a national security expert and started consulting on national security, eventually moving his business to Florida, according to the Detroit News.

Rogers first won his House seat in 2000, narrowly taking a battleground district that set the stage for him to eventually become one of the most high-profile Republicans in Congress.

Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.

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Mayor Eric Adams doubles down on comparing Holocaust survivor to plantation owner

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Eric Adams doubled down Friday on comments he made earlier in the week comparing an 84-year-old whose family fled the Holocaust to a plantation owner.

The mayor, speaking during an interview on 1010 WINS Friday morning, justified his rhetoric by saying the woman, a tenant activist, was disrespectful when she stood up at a town hall and pointedly asked the mayor about the Rent Guidelines Board, a body entirely composed of mayoral appointees that recently voted for another rent increase for regulated apartments.

“My mom made it clear, never allow someone to be disrespectful to you. That woman disrupted a meeting where all the participants were acting respectfully and cordially to get their issues heard,” Adams said during the interview. “She disrupted that, and then she was degrading on how she communicated with me. I'm not going to allow civil service to be disrespected, and I'm not going to be disrespected as the mayor of this city.”

The woman, Jeanie Dubnau, attended a Wednesday mayoral town hall in Washington Heights. As the mayor was answering a question about housing, she yelled that he raised the rent. Adams asked her to stand up, and the two got into an exchange that included Dubnau accusing Adams of being controlled by the real estate industry.

Dubnau, who chairs the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association, is a longtime tenant rights activist. In 2015, she also harangued former Mayor Bill de Blasio during one of his town halls — which were far less choreographed than those held by Adams and allowed more organic interactions with voters.

Adams' reaction went much further.

“If you're going to ask a question, don't point at me and don't be disrespectful to me. I'm the mayor of this city, and treat me with the respect I deserve to be treated,” Adams said. “I'm speaking to you as an adult, don't stand in front like you treating someone that's on the plantation that you own. Give me the respect I deserve and engage in the conversation.”

City Hall defended the mayor’s comments, which were criticized by a number of observers for going overboard. Dubnau was born in Belgium after her family fled Nazi-led Germany in the 1930s. She moved to New York City when she was 8.

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Deputy acquitted of all charges for failing to act during deadly Parkland school shooting

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A Florida sheriff’s deputy was acquitted Thursday of felony child neglect and other charges for failing to act during the 2018 Parkland school massacre, concluding the first trial in U.S. history of a law enforcement officer for conduct during an on-campus shooting.

Former Broward County Deputy Scot Peterson wept as the verdicts were read. The jury had deliberated for 19 hours over four days.

After court adjourned, Peterson, his family and friends rushed into a group hug as they whooped, hollered and cried. One of his supporters chased after lead prosecutor Chris Killoran and said something. Killoran turned and snapped at him, “Way to be a good winner,” and slapped him on the shoulder. Members of the prosecution team then nudged Killoran out of the courtroom.

The campus deputy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Peterson had been charged with failing to confront shooter Nikolas Cruz during his six-minute attack inside the three-story 1200 classroom building on Feb. 14, 2018, that left 17 dead.

He could have received nearly 100 years in prison, although a sentence even approaching that length would have been highly unlikely given the circumstances and his clean record. He also could have lost his $104,000 annual pension.

Prosecutors, during their two-week presentation, called to the witness stand students, teachers and law enforcement officers who testified about the horror they experienced and how they knew where Cruz was. Some said they knew for certain that the shots were coming from the 1200 building. Prosecutors also called a training supervisor who testified Peterson did not follow protocols for confronting an active shooter.

Peterson’s attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, during his two-day presentation, called several deputies who arrived during the shooting and students and teachers who testified they did not think the shots were coming from the 1200 building. Peterson, who did not testify, has said that because of echoes, he could not pinpoint the shooter’s location.

Eiglarsh also emphasized the failure of the sheriff’s radio system during the attack, which limited what Peterson heard from arriving deputies.

“As parents, we have an expectation that armed school resource officers – who are under contract to be caregivers to our children – will do their jobs when we entrust our children to them and the schools they guard,” Broward State Attorney Harold F. Pryor and the prosecutor’s office said in a statement after the verdict. “They have a special role and responsibilities that exceed the role and responsibilities of a police officer. To those who have tried to make this political, I say: It is not political to expect someone to do their job.”

Security videos show that 36 seconds after Cruz’s attack began, Peterson exited his office about 100 yards (92 meters) from the 1200 building and jumped into a cart with two unarmed civilian security guards. They arrived at the building a minute later.

Peterson got out of the cart near the east doorway to the first-floor hallway. Cruz was at the hallway’s opposite end, firing his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle.

Peterson, who was not wearing a bullet-resistant vest, didn’t open the door. Instead, he took cover 75 feet (23 meters) away in the alcove of a neighboring building, his gun still drawn. He stayed there for 40 minutes, long after the shooting ended and other police officers had stormed the building.

Peterson spent nearly three decades working at schools, including nine years at Stoneman Douglas. He retired shortly after the shooting and was then fired retroactively.

Cruz’s jury could not unanimously agree he deserved the death penalty. The 24-year-old former Stoneman Douglas student was then sentenced to life in prison.

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New York Dems put abortion on the ballot in bid to retake the House

Left-leaning New York groups pledged $20 million Thursday to support a change to the New York State constitution to protect abortion rights that will be on the 2024 ballot — something they believe will boost turnout for Democrats in key swing House districts.

A state Equal Rights Amendment will ask voters next November to codify a number of rights, including abortion and LGBTQ rights, in the state constitution. New York Democrats are hoping to replicate a model they found successful last cycle, when a constitutional abortion amendment was on the same ballot as vulnerable Democrats in Michigan. The amendment passed and those members held their seats.

“We’ve learned a ton from our colleagues around the country, including our colleagues in Michigan,” said Sasha Neha Ahuja, campaign director for New Yorkers for Equal rights. "It was incredibly successful, and similar to New York in that there was support for this ballot measure across party lines. It was really popular for candidates to stand with and encourage people to vote yes on the referendum.”

The coalition released a memo on its investment Thursday, which says it believes that the constitutional amendment will bolster turnout across the state, particularly in six battleground House districts, five of which are held by Republicans. With a razor-thin margin standing in the way of the majority, Democrats think this strategy will help them flip control of the House next year.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, who will both be on the ballot next year, have endorsed the effort, as well as other statewide Democratic officials.

The coalition backing the measure is led by New Yorkers for Equal Rights and also includes Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the NAACP of New York and an SEIU local. The pledged investment will go toward promoting the measure in statewide broadcast and digital ads and dispatching canvassers for a grassroots voter education effort.

The amendment was passed by the Democratic-majority legislature in two consecutive state legislative sessions, which allows it to be voted on statewide. Lawmakers last year chose to put it on the 2014 ballot instead of this November in order to maximize turnout for it.

Exact ballot language text of the amendment will be released next year. It will add to the New York State constitution explicit protections against discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, and sex, according to the memo. The amendment needs only a simple majority of support to pass.

Democrats are increasingly turning to ballot measures for these types of protections, which were previously safeguarded by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. After the fall of Dobbs last year, state level actions, including direct-to-voter ballot initiatives, have become the main vehicles for abortion policy and have passed with large majorities.

The amendment “launches with a clear path to achieving a decisive statewide victory and activating a powerful statewide electoral coalition from every corner of the state and across demographics,” the memo about the referendum stated, noting they're targeting districts in Long Island, upstate and the Hudson Valley.

New York isn’t the only state trying to bring the issue directly to voters next cycle.

A separate coalition in Florida is currently collecting signatures for a citizen initiative to be on the ballot in 2024, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) signed a ban on abortion procedures after six weeks earlier this year.

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Prosecutors charge three men with insider trading scheme related to Trumps media company

Federal prosecutors in New York charged three investors on Thursday with an insider trading scheme in which they allegedly made more than $22 million in illegal profits by acting on information about a plan to take former president Donald Trump’s media company public.

The three men — Michael Shvartsman, Gerald Shvartsman and Bruce Garelick — were investors in a special purpose acquisition corporation called Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which had plans to take public Trump’s company Trump Media & Technology Group. As investors, they learned of the confidential plans for Trump’s media company and they were prohibited by non-disclosure agreements from disclosing or using the information to buy or sell securities, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday.

The defendants used the information to buy millions of dollars of securities in the corporation “so that they could be in a position to profit after the merger was announced publicly,” according to the indictment. Prosecutors said in court papers that the defendants also disclosed the confidential information about the upcoming merger to their friends and employees, who bought tens of thousands of securities in the corporation.

Prosecutors charged the men with one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and nine counts of securities fraud.

The defendants are set to make their initial court appearances in the Southern District of Florida on Thursday afternoon, according to the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office.

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AI Could Pay Dividends to Americans. Literally.

For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet. This is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, funded by the state’s oil revenues and paid to every Alaskan each year. We're now in a different sort of resource rush, with companies peddling bits instead of oil: generative AI.

Everyone is talking about these new AI technologies — like ChatGPT — and AI companies are touting their awesome power. But they aren't talking about how that power comes from all of us. Without all of our writings and photos that AI companies are using to train their models, they would have nothing to sell. Big Tech companies are currently taking the work of the American people, without our knowledge and consent, without licensing it, and are pocketing the proceeds.

You are owed profits for your data that powers today's AI, and we have a way to make that happen. We call it the AI Dividend.

Our proposal is simple, and harkens back to the Alaskan plan. When Big Tech companies produce output from generative AI that was trained on public data, they would pay a tiny licensing fee, by the word or pixel or relevant unit of data. Those fees would go into the AI Dividend fund. Every few months, the Commerce Department would send out the entirety of the fund, split equally, to every resident nationwide. That's it.

There’s no reason to complicate it further. Generative AI needs a wide variety of data, which means all of us are valuable — not just those of us who write professionally, or prolifically, or well. Figuring out who contributed to which words the AIs output would be both challenging and invasive, given that even the companies themselves don't quite know how their models work. Paying the dividend to people in proportion to the words or images they create would just incentivize them to create endless drivel, or worse, use AI to create that drivel. The bottom line for Big Tech is that if their AI model was created using public data, they have to pay into the fund. If you’re an American, you get paid from the fund.

Under this plan, hobbyists and American small businesses would be exempt from fees. Only Big Tech companies — those with substantial revenue — would be required to pay into the fund. And they would pay at the point of generative AI output, such as from ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, or their embedded use in third-party services via Application Programming Interfaces.

Our proposal also includes a compulsory licensing plan. By agreeing to pay into this fund, AI companies will receive a license that allows them to use public data when training their AI. This won’t supersede normal copyright law, of course. If a model starts producing copyright material beyond fair use, that’s a separate issue.

Using today’s numbers, here’s what it would look like. The licensing fee could be small, starting at $0.001 per word generated by AI. A similar type of fee would be applied to other categories of generative AI outputs, such as images. That’s not a lot, but it adds up. Since most of Big Tech has started integrating generative AI into products, these fees would mean an annual dividend payment of a couple hundred dollars per person.

The idea of paying you for your data isn't new, and some companies have tried to do it themselves for users who opted in. And the idea of the public being repaid for use of their resources goes back to well before Alaska's oil fund. But generative AI is different: It uses data from all of us whether we like it or not, it's ubiquitous, and it's potentially immensely valuable. It would cost Big Tech companies a fortune to create a synthetic equivalent to our data from scratch, and synthetic data would almost certainly result in worse output. They can’t create good AI without us.

Our plan would apply to generative AI used in the U.S. It also only issues a dividend to Americans. Other countries can create their own versions, applying a similar fee to AI used within their borders. Just like an American company collects VAT for services sold in Europe, but not here, each country can independently manage their AI policy.

Don’t get us wrong; this isn’t an attempt to strangle this nascent technology. Generative AI has interesting, valuable and possibly transformative uses, and this policy is aligned with that future. Even with the fees of the AI Dividend, generative AI will be cheap and will only get cheaper as technology improves. There are also risks — both every day and esoteric — posed by AI, and the government may need to develop policies to remedy any harms that arise.

Our plan can’t make sure there are no downsides to the development of AI, but it would ensure that all Americans will share in the upsides — particularly since this new technology isn’t possible without our contribution.

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Migration money feud infiltrates European Union summit

Leaders push for renewing relations with Turkey as the divisive migration issue is increasingly dominating Europe’s political agenda.

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