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G rand jury transcripts from a 2006 Florida investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of dozens of underage girls will be released publicly later this year under legislation signed into law Thursday by Gov. Ron DeSantis. A local judge cited the new law in denying release of the records for now. The measure, which takes effect July 1, would carve out a limited exception to the secrecy that generally shrouds grand jury testimony in specific cases such as that involving Epstein, DeSantis said at a signing ceremony in Palm Beach, Florida, where many of the crimes took place at Epstein's home. “There needs to be a mechanism in some of these rare circumstances where people can get the truth,” the Republican governor said. “This is in the interest of justice to disclose this. We don't think we can just turn a blind eye.” Epstein, a wealthy financier, cut a deal with South Florida federal prosecutors in 2008 that allowed him to escape more severe federal charges and instead plead ...

T he big map in the little shop in Casper, Wyo., was drawing a lot of attention when I visited on Aug. 20, 2017. A solar eclipse was coming the next day, with totality occurring at 11:43 a.m. Mountain Time. Our TIME reporting and video crew had arrived to cover the event and we selected Casper out of all of the cities and towns across the eclipse’s path, from Salem, Ore., through Carleston, S.C., because it has a very low likelihood of cloud cover at that hot and dry time of year.  The owner of the little shop had invited guests to place a pin in the map to mark where they lived—and, by extension, how far they’d Travel ed to see the magnificent sky show. The U.S. portion of the map was almost completely obscured by little plastic pinheads. But every continent in the world except Antarctica was represented too—and the eclipse did not disappoint. The sky was indeed almost entirely clear. Totality was reached precisely when the astronomers had said it would be. And the eerie disappear...

Y ouTuber Ruby Franke, a former family vlogger who pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse, was sentenced on Tuesday to four terms of one to 15 years in prison. Franke’s prior Business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, received the same sentence on Tuesday at Washington County 5th District Court in Utah. Franke and Hildebrandt were charged with six counts of felony child abuse charges in September for abusing two of Franke’s children. Both pleaded guilty to four of the six counts. The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole will determine the actual amount of time they spend in prison. Read More: What to Know About YouTuber Ruby Franke’s Child Abuse Case At the sentencing hearing, Franke’s two eldest children, Shari and Chad, joined their father, Kevin, in court and were seated in the front row. Franke apologized to the children in court.  “ I will never stop crying for hurting your tender souls. You're so precious to me, I'm sorry,” Franke said.  In her statement, Hildeb...

E arly this week, Facebook provided me with a sweet piece of serendipity when it served up a picture of the late Gene Cernan. I had taken and posted the picture in 2014, when Cernan, the last man on the moon, was being feted at the premiere of the documentary about his life, titled, straightforwardly, The Last Man On the Moon . I had gotten to know Gene well over the course of many years of reporting on the space program, and was keenly saddened when we lost him to cancer three years later. But this week, on Feb. 22, Cernan made news in a bank-shot sort of way, when the Odysseus spacecraft touched down near the south lunar pole, marking the first time the U.S. had soft-landed metal on the moon since Cernan feathered his lunar module Challenger down to the surface of the Taurus-Littrow Valley on Dec. 11, 1972. The networks made much of that 52-year gulf in cosmic History , but Odysseus was significant for two other, more substantive reasons: it marked the first time a spacecraft built ...

LAS VEGAS — A former FBI informant charged with making up a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company had contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, prosecutors said in a court paper Tuesday. Prosecutors revealed the alleged contact as they urged a judge to keep Alexander Smirnov behind bars while he awaits trial. He's accused of falsely telling his handler that executives with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each around 2015. The claim became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress. U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel Albregts allowed Smirnov to be released from custody on electronic GPS monitoring while he awaits trial. He must stay in Clark County, Nevada, and is prohibited from applying for a new passport. Prosecutors said Smirnov, 43, admitted during an interview after his arrest last week that “officials associated with Russian intelligence ...

I t was the 1980s. Washington D.C. was being called the “murder capital” of America, and the nightly news in Northern Virginia where I grew up showed an onslaught of Politics , gangs, drugs, and guns. The little television stacked on the microwave was always on. At the dinner table, Dad snapped the newspaper open. Mom hurried with a warm batch of rolls. The reporter said “drive-by” and “shooting” over artistic close-up camera footage of blood puddled in the street. The puddle strobed red and blue as if lights were shining up through a portal that the blood had opened in the street, where the dead go and don’t return. It was a portal I was afraid I’d slip through—one I thought about constantly and where I feared my own blood would spill. Getting shot is not my story. In reality, certain historical, governmental, and racial forces were at work in the nation’s capital that, if they’d been explained to me at the time, might have offered some clarity that I—a 10-year-old middle-class white ...

N ext week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments for two cases that could determine the fate of social media content moderation. In 2021, the states of Florida and Texas both passed laws that aim to address social media sites’ content moderation practices and their perceived bias against conservative viewpoints. The cases being heard in the Supreme Court next week were both filed by industry groups representing the social media sites, who argue that the laws infringe on their First Amendment rights to decide what content they publish and promote. If the laws are upheld, then the platforms' ability to curate their newsfeeds to make them more engaging for users could be severely curtailed, drastically altering social media sites. Whichever way the Court rules, the outcomes of the two cases could set the precedent for how content moderation is handled in the U.S. for decades to come. What are the cases about? In 2021, both Florida and Texas passed laws that would limit the power of ...

T he Alabama state supreme court’s ruling that frozen embryos are considered children under state law has sent shock waves through the world of reproductive medicine. Infertility specialists and legal experts have said the ruling could have profound ramifications for would-be parents and physicians. Some patients have been scrambling to move their frozen embryos into storage in other states, and by Thursday, at least two of Alabama’s eight in vitro fertilization (IVF) providers, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Alabama Fertility, had decided to temporarily pause treatment. “We're getting all sorts of calls that are very valid from patients who are extremely stressed and concerned about what this means for them and their specific care,” says Dr. Beth Malizia, a physician at Alabama Fertility in Birmingham. The first-of-its-kind ruling has raised a host of unprecedented legal questions about whether unused embryos can be discarded without civil or criminal exposure or if t...

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump's legal team filed multiple motions Thursday night urging a Florida judge to dismiss the criminal case charging him with illegally retaining classified documents, claiming in part that presidential immunity protects him from prosecution — an argument they have already submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in his election interference case. Lawyers Christopher Kise and Todd Blanche wrote that the charges "turn on his alleged decision to designate records as personal under the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and to cause the records to be moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago." Since Trump made this decision while he was still in office, they wrote, it "was an official act, and as such is subject to presidential immunity." Read More: The Dangerous Whataboutism in the Trump Classified Docs Case Trump faces dozens of felony counts in federal court in Florida accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar...

ATHENS, Ga. — A woman was found dead Thursday on the campus of the University of Georgia after a friend told police she had not returned from a morning run, authorities said. The woman was not a student at the university, the school's police chief said. Police Chief Jeff Clark did not provide details on how the woman died, citing the ongoing investigation. Clark said at a news conference late Thursday the woman was not a student on campus but did attend another school, which he did not name, news outlets reported. Clark said his department, along with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Athens-Clarke County Police Department, were conducting the investigation. He noted that there has not been a homicide on campus in the last 20 years. “We're not going to leave any rock unturned in this investigation,” he said. The university canceled classes Thursday and urged students to Travel in groups. Clark also asked the university community to avoid the school's Intramural F...

M ore than 70,000 customers have been impacted by outages across AT&T’s network Thursday morning, causing internet and cellular service outages, according to Downdetector.  About 1 in 2 customers that reported issues said they had problems with their mobile phones, while another 40% said they had no signal. The most affected locations are Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, and New York City. Read More: What to Do If Your iPhone Is Stuck in SOS Mode “Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them,” said AT&T in a statement to TIME. “We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.” The cellular company did not provide any details as to what is causing the outages. Reported outages reached a peak of nearly 74,300 outages at 9:15 a.m. ET, though the number of reports are now dipping.   Other providers such as Verizon, T-M...