Category: ESTA News

As the presidential election is becoming a close race, there are reports that the relationship between Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and current President Joe Biden is worsening. Citing 10 sources, online media outlet Axios reported on the 13th that “the relationship between the Harris team and Biden’s White House is getting worse in the final weeks before Election Day (November 5th).”

While they want Vice President Harris to win this election, many of Biden’s senior aides are still upset that the president has given up on reelection and are still adjusting to playing a supporting role for Vice President Harris. Harris’s team complained that “they (Biden’s team) are too emotional,” and that senior White House aides are not properly coordinating Biden’s message and schedule to best suit Harris’s presidential campaign. Axios cited Biden’s impromptu press conference at the White House on the 4th as an example.

At the time, Vice President Harris was scheduled to attend an event in Michigan, and Biden’s press conference inevitably reduced TV coverage of the event. Harris also criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, for not answering her phone calls about Hurricane Milton on the 9th, but Biden quickly praised DeSantis as “decent and cooperative.” Axios also pointed out that while Harris has tried to focus on voters’ financial situation, including inflation, Biden has recently been keen to boast about the strong employment report that helped end the dockworkers’ strike.

A source close to Harris’s campaign told Axios that “there’s not enough people in the White House who are thinking about how it will impact the election.” Tensions are also rising between staffers on both sides. Harris’s team has been trying to hire more staff in the vice president’s office to cope with the growing workload, but she has been frustrated with the White House’s ability to secure detailed staffing. Some of the Biden aides who joined Harris’s camp feel that they have been labeled disloyal for leaving or even considering joining the Biden team, and some on Harris’s team are wary of Biden’s staff, Axios reported.

In response, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said, “President Biden rejected any path that would divide the party immediately after dropping out of the race and supported Vice President Harris, and he has continued to do so,” adding, “He has made significant changes to ensure that all critical functions of the White House are staffed and that the vice president’s team has all the support and resources they need.”

This is an official denial of conflict between the two sides, but Axios argued that tensions between the two sides seem inevitable. Axios noted that “every incumbent vice president’s team that has run for president has had internal strife with the incumbent president’s team,” and that “the uncomfortable dynamic of a vice president running for president on behalf of the president he served was evident between Al Gore and Bill Clinton in 2000 and between George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in 1988.”

Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has been intensively attacking her opponent, Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, for refusing to accept the 2020 election results. In a post on her X (formerly Twitter) on the 6th, Vice President Harris criticized Trump, saying, “Trump lost the 2020 election,” and “He refused to accept the will of the people, sent an armed mob into the Capitol, and threatened the life of his Vice President (Mike Pence).”

Vice President Harris then said, “We cannot grant him a second term.” Following this article, Vice President Harris also uploaded a new digital advertisement video to X. The advertisement began airing in swing states starting today. The 30-second advertisement, produced by Harris’s presidential campaign, features footage of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, along with former President Trump’s voice saying, “We’re going to fight like hell. If we don’t fight like hell, we’re not going to have a country anymore.”

The advertisement was produced after Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team submitted a new 165-page document to the court on the 2nd to prove that former President Trump’s refusal to accept the election results was a private act, not an official act. The document includes part of the conversations former President Trump had with then-Vice President Mike Pence when he refused to accept the election results, and the special counsel’s team determined that former President Trump’s attempt to overturn the election results was a “private act” that could not be subject to criminal immunity.

The ad highlights media reports on former President Trump’s actions at the time, such as “pressuring officials,” “spreading lies,” “inciting rioters,” and “threatening Pence’s life,” in subtitles. It shows a photo of former Vice President Pence and a photo of former President Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, in succession, and emphasizes, “And next time, no one will be able to stop him.”

Regarding this ad, the political media outlet Politico analyzed it as “a rare attack from the Harris camp,” and “Vice President Harris and President Joe Biden have mentioned the storming of the Capitol during their campaigns, but the Harris camp has rarely attacked it in paid ads.”

Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris said on the 6th, despite the Biden administration’s dissuasion, regarding Israel’s de facto expansion of the war to Lebanon and other countries, “We will not stop putting pressure on Israel and Arab countries in the region (for a ceasefire).”

In a two-minute-long interview video released by the CBS current affairs program “60 Minutes” ahead of its main broadcast on the same day, Vice President Harris made this statement when asked, “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be going his own way. Does this mean that the United States has no influence over Prime Minister Netanyahu?” Vice President Harris said, “We are making our principles clear and continuing to consult diplomatically with the Israeli leadership,” adding, “These (our principles) include the need for humanitarian assistance, the need to end this war, the need to release the hostages and negotiate a ceasefire (in the Gaza Strip).”

Regarding security assistance to Israel, he said, “The assistance we provided allowed Israel to defend itself and its people from 200 ballistic missiles (launched by Iran).” “Given the threat that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran pose, it is without question America’s duty to do what we can to help (Israel) defend itself from these types of attacks.”

Harris’s campaign said that Vice President Harris will also appear on ABC’s “The View,” Hardy Stern’s radio show, and CBS’s talk show for interviews. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will meet with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galland in Washington, D.C. on the 9th to discuss the situation in the Middle East.

The meeting is taking place amid Israel’s announcement of its intention to retaliate against Iran’s massive missile attack, Reuters reported.

There is analysis that former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, is laying the groundwork for refusing to accept the election results by filing a series of lawsuits challenging the rules and practices of the November presidential election.

According to the New York Times (NYT) on the 29th, Republican groups have recently been fiercely attacking the rules and practices of the presidential election through lawsuits, including about 90 lawsuits filed across the United States this year. According to Democracy Docket, an election lawsuit tracking platform established by the Democratic Party, this legal offensive by former President Trump is already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before the 2020 presidential election.

These lawsuits are concentrated in swing states and key counties that will determine the outcome of the presidential election. The Republican lawsuits are focused on disqualifying voters who are likely to be Democrats. They are challenging President Joe Biden’s executive order to expand voting access and are seeking to create stricter mail-in voting requirements. However, most election experts, including some Republicans, say that the lawsuits are either filed too late or are based on baseless and obviously false claims, and are bound to fail.

The New York Times pointed out that “given the size of the lawsuits and the late timing of the filing, comments from Republican officials and Trump associates suggest a larger goal behind these efforts: to lay the groundwork for challenging the results after the election.” The argument in these lawsuits could be revived in court or in the media if former President Trump challenges them after the election. The Republican National Committee (RNC) is leading the lawsuits filed by former President Trump.

The RNC has been more aggressive since former President Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and her associates took over in March. In particular, the Times reported that to expand these lawsuits, the Republican Party and the Trump campaign outsourced most of their organizational activities that directly deal with voters to increase voter turnout and reallocated resources to lawsuits and so-called “election integrity efforts.”

Supporters of former President Trump are also joining the lawsuit. The America First Policy Institute, led by former Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon, who chairs Trump’s transition team, has filed lawsuits in Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. United Sovereign Americans has filed lawsuits in nine states. The group describes itself as “bipartisan,” but its lead attorney is Bruce Caster, who represented Trump during his Senate impeachment trial in 2021.

Caster acknowledged that if the lawsuits it is currently filing are not successful before the election, the claims in the lawsuits could continue to be used to challenge the election afterward. In a close election, the losing candidate could use the group to find evidence of voting errors and challenge the results. In response, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign has a legal team of hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers.

The Harris campaign has been intervening in several key areas, including recently filing a lawsuit against the Georgia election board after it allowed its board to easily refuse to certify the election results. “We are more defensive and more involved than ever before,” Mark Elias, a Democratic campaign lawyer, told the Times. “I firmly believe that Republicans should not be allowed to file serious lawsuits that we will not respond to.”

In California, a center for AI technology development, the brakes have been applied to a controversial AI regulation bill. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on the 29th that he had vetoed the AI regulation bill ‘SB 1047’, which strengthens the responsibility of AI development companies. It was just over a month after the state legislature passed the bill on the 28th of last month, and the veto was exercised one day before the signing deadline on the 30th.

Governor Newsom explained the reason for his veto, saying, “The regulations are focused only on the largest and most expensive AI models,” and “It only tried to regulate based on the size and cost of AI models, without considering whether the models are actually being used in dangerous situations.” He continued, “Even small AI models can cause very dangerous situations that handle sensitive data such as the power grid or medical records, while large models are used for relatively low-risk tasks such as customer service.” He added, “I agree with the bill’s supporters that we need to prepare for a major disaster before it happens, but regulations must be based on scientific and empirical evidence.”

The veto by Governor Gavin has given a breather to technology companies that have opposed the bill a chance to take a breather. The bill requires safety testing for large-scale language models costing more than $100 million and requires developers to take reasonable care to ensure that AI systems do not cause serious problems such as multiple deaths or $500 million in property damage.

It also introduces a “kill switch” to stop AI when it becomes difficult to control and allows the state attorney general to sue if regulations are not followed. The bill was introduced by Democratic state senator Scott Wiener, who said, “We need to create laws to protect the public before AI becomes uncontrollable,” and passed the assembly. However, the tech industry, including Microsoft (MS), Meta, and ChatGPT developer OpenAI, opposed the bill, saying that it would slow down technological innovation. The controversy grew as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor London Breed also expressed their opposition.

Governor Newsom emphasized that he would conduct an analysis of the risks and capabilities of major AI models led by several scholars, including AI scholar and entrepreneur Fei-Fei Li, along with announcing his veto of ‘SB 1047’. Meanwhile, Governor Newsom signed and promulgated a privacy law amendment on the 28th to prevent people’s brain information from being misused by neurotechnology companies. According to the New York Times (NYT), the bill protects ‘neural data’ such as brains in the same way as other information that is already considered sensitive data under California’s Consumer Privacy Protection Act, such as biometric information such as facial images, genes (DNA), and fingerprints.

As developments are underway to develop devices that help address cognitive issues, such as meditation, improved concentration, and treatment of mental health conditions such as depression, there is a risk that personal brain information could be misused. “Neural data” also includes data generated by the peripheral nervous system, which extends from the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body. As it is included in the scope of personal information that must be protected, people can request, request deletion or correction of their own data collected by neurotech companies. They can also request that companies that sell or share their neural data exclude their information.

“This bill is critical to protecting the privacy of neural data that belongs to people,” said Senator Josh Becker, a California Democrat who sponsored the bill. Currently, not only startups but also large information and communication companies such as Facebook parent company Meta and Apple are developing devices that can collect massive amounts of brain and neural information.

TechNet, a lobbying group representing these companies, has opposed the bill, arguing that it would regulate almost all technologies that record human behavior. TechNet’s argument was not accepted, but the New York Times reported that the bill does not apply to information inferred from non-neural data of the human body, such as heart rate or blood pressure.

With the November presidential election just 40 days away, another poll of voters nationwide and in swing states has shown that Vice President Kamala Harris is ahead of former President Donald Trump within the margin of error.

According to the results of a CBS poll conducted on 3,129 registered voters from the 18th to the 20th and released on the 22nd, 52% of respondents (with a margin of error of ±2.1 percentage points) who intend to vote said they would vote for Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate. Former President Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, recorded support 48%, 4 percentage points lower. A survey of likely voters in seven battleground states showed a 2-percentage point gap between Vice President Harris (51%) and former President Trump (49%).

In a CBS survey last month, both Vice President Harris and former President Trump scored 50%. In a CBS survey of individual battleground states, Vice President Harris was ahead within the margin of error in five states: ▲ Michigan (+2 percentage points), ▲ Wisconsin (+2 percentage points), ▲ Nevada (+3 percentage points), ▲ Arizona (+1 percentage point), and ▲ North Carolina (+1 percentage point). In Georgia, former President Trump was ahead by 1 percentage point, and in Pennsylvania, the two candidates were tied at 49%. This poll showed that voters’ evaluations of the economy, a key election issue, have improved compared to the previous one.

The response that the economy is good increased from 35% in August to 39%, while the response that the economy is bad decreased from 62% in August to 59%. Regarding former President Trump’s remark during the debate on the 10th that “Haitian immigrants eat the dogs and cats of their neighbors,” 63% of all respondents answered that it was “definitely/probably false.” 37% said that it was “definitely/probably true.”

In addition, 67% of the total did not support former President Trump’s remark, but 64% of former President Trump’s supporters answered that they supported it, showing a difference. Regarding former President Trump’s pledge to ‘deport all illegal immigrants,’ approval ratings were higher at 53%. In an NBC survey of 1,000 registered voters conducted from the 13th to the 17th (margin of error ±3.1 percentage points), Vice President Harris’ approval rating (49%) was 5 percentage points higher than former President Trump’s (44%).

NBC said that compared to a survey conducted in July when President Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate, Vice President Harris’ approval rating was 6 percentage points higher than President Biden’s, but former President Trump’s approval rating decreased by 1 percentage point. In this survey, Vice President Harris’s approval rating was 48% (disapproval rating was 45%). In an NBC survey conducted in July, just before Vice President Harris announced her candidacy for president, her approval rating was only 32%. The 16-percentage-point increase in Harris’s approval rating is the largest since President George W. Bush’s approval rating rose nearly 30 percentage points after the 9/11 attacks, NBC reported.

Former President Donald Trump has stated that if he loses the presidential election in November, he will not run again in 2028. In an interview with the TV news show “Full Measure” on the 22nd, when asked if he would run again in four years if he were not elected this time, the former President Trump answered, “No. I don’t think so at all.”

He added, “I don’t think so at all. I hope we are successful.” Former President Trump turned 78 on June 14 and will be 82 on the presidential election day in November 2028.

Even if former President Trump wins this election and becomes president, he will not be able to run for office again due to the term limit provision in the U.S. Constitution. Accordingly, regardless of whether he wins or not, this election is likely to be former President Trump’s last challenge.

Hip-hop mogul Sean Diddy Combs (54), who was arrested by federal investigators on charges of prostitution, will stand trial while in custody. According to the Associated Press and other news agencies on the 17th, Combs, who was arrested by the Department of Homeland Security Investigations at a hotel in Manhattan, New York the previous afternoon, appeared at the Manhattan Federal District Court on this day. Combs, who spent a day in custody, denied the charges and applied for bail.

Combs’s side proposed that the court hold him on $50 million bail and that he be held in home detention at his Miami residence. However, the motion was denied. Judge Robin Tarnowski said she was concerned that Combs’s charges “are the type of crimes that can be committed behind closed doors and away from outside supervision,” and that “there are no conditions that would guarantee that he will appear in court upon his release.” She also ordered that he “remain in custody while the case is pending.”

According to the indictment released that day, Combs is accused of using his fame to coerce women into engaging in sexual misconduct as part of a prostitution and criminal organization scheme, and of using his businesses to coerce women and men into performing sexual acts. Prosecutors also said that Combs operated a criminal organization to exploit women for at least 16 years.

Damien Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Manhattan District of New York, explained that Combs “led a criminal organization that committed kidnapping, extortion, and sex trafficking,” and that he “used the business empire he controlled to engage in criminal acts including sex trafficking, kidnapping, and arson.” Combs is the most high-profile music figure to be charged with a sex crime, following R&B singer R. Kelly, who was sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison in 2021 and 2022, the Associated Press and other news agencies reported. If convicted of conspiracy to commit racketeering and sex trafficking, he could face a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison and up to life in prison, Reuters reported.

Combs was previously sued by Joy Dickerson-Neal, a woman who had previously appeared in his music videos, for sexual assault, and by Rodney Jones, a producer who worked with him, for coercing him into prostitution.

In May, he was also embroiled in controversy after footage surfaced of him brutally beating his ex-girlfriend in a hotel hallway in Los Angeles in March 2016.

The Federal Reserve (Fed), the central bank, will hold a monetary policy meeting on the 17th and 18th to effectively end the war against inflation that has continued for over two years and decide to start cutting interest rates. As Fed members are struggling to decide on the size of the first cut, experts are fiercely divided on whether the cut will be the typical 25bp (1bp = 0.01% point) or a “big cut” (50bp interest rate cut).

According to the Fed on the 17th, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which determines the Fed’s monetary policy, will announce the results of its meeting at 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on the 18th (3:00 AM Korean Standard Time on the 19th) after a two-day meeting. Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, announced at the Jackson Hole Meeting on the 23rd of last month that “the time for policy adjustment (rate cut) has arrived,” and predicted a rate cut in September.

Regarding the future path of monetary policy, he said, “The timing and pace of the cut will be determined by incoming data, the changing economic outlook, and the balance of risks,” leaving open the possibility of a 50bp rate cut. Economic indicators released over the past 20 days since his Jackson Hole speech have confirmed to the market that there will be no change in the Fed’s September rate cut.

The August employment report suggested that although the increase in jobs was greater than in July, the labor market cooling is continuing, and the August consumer price index (CPI) rose 2.5% year-on-year, the lowest in three years and six months.

Lael Brainard, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Director of the White House National Economic Council, issued a statement after the CPI data was released, saying, “It shows that we are moving away from inflation.” If the Fed cuts interest rates this time, it will be the first rate cut in four and a half years since March 2020, when it urgently lowered interest rates in response to the pandemic crisis. In response to the surge in prices due to shocks such as pandemic relief measures and supply chain disruptions, the Fed raised the base rate to 5.25-5.50%, the highest level in 22 years, from March 2022 to July of last year, and has maintained it there since.

Although the August inflation and employment indicators confirmed the Fed’s September rate cut, the general assessment of Wall Street experts is that they did not provide any clear evidence as to how fast the rate cut would be. They say that the labor market is cooling, but not at a rate fast enough to justify a big cut. In a situation where economic indicators are ambiguous, the interest rate outlook is in sharp contrast to the conflicting views on the possibility of a soft landing for the U.S. economy.

The current U.S. economic situation is not deteriorating so rapidly that a 50bp cut is needed, and the “gradualists” who predict a 25bp cut believe that if the Fed suddenly implements a big cut, it will only cause confusion in the market. On the other hand, some influential figures, such as former New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley, believe that a big cut is inevitable to quickly return monetary policy from the current tightness level to a neutral level. In his contribution last July, former Governor Dudley urged the Fed to cut rates early, diagnosing that “it may already be too late to prevent a recession through rate cuts.”

While Wall Street is fiercely debating whether or not to make a big cut, Nick Timiraos, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) who is often called the Fed’s “unofficial spokesman” for his ability to accurately gauge the intentions of senior Fed officials, wrote in an article on the 12th that “the decision on the rate cut size is likely to be a close one.” The financial market is also hesitating over whether the September cut will be 25bp or 50bp.

According to the FedWatch of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the interest rate futures market reflected the probability of a 50bp cut as low as 14% on the 11th, a week before the FOMC meeting, but then raised it back to around 50% after Timiraos reported that a close decision was expected. Some on Wall Street are also saying that we should pay more attention to how the Fed’s monetary policy easing moves will continue in the future. John Faust, a former senior advisor to Chairman Powell, said, “Whether the first cut is 25bp or 50bp seems to be a close call, but the extent of the cuts in the coming months will be much more important.”

The Fed is planning to release its economic outlook report after its September meeting. In the dot plot released in June, a majority of Fed members suggested a 4.0-4.25% interest rate level by the end of 2025.

As triple-digit temperatures continue to surge across Southern California, a toddler died Friday afternoon in Anaheim, Orange County, after being left in a hot car. Authorities responded to a call about 4:30 p.m. Friday to the 1300 block of Fashion Lane, where they found a mother and her 3-year-old daughter unconscious in the car.

The temperature was 104 degrees, and on hot days, temperatures inside cars can be much higher than outside temperatures. Both mother and child were taken to the hospital due to the extreme heat inside the car, and the infant died at the hospital.

The deceased infant was identified as Ili Ruiz, a resident of Anaheim, and it is unclear whether the mother will face criminal charges.