Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal case over the collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange has been reassigned to a judge recently known for handling defamation lawsuits against former U.S. President Donald Trump and a sexual abuse lawsuit against Britain’s Prince Andrew.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan replaces his colleague Ronnie Abrams, who recused herself on Friday after learning that the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, where her husband is a partner, advised FTX in 2021.

Known for his no-nonsense demeanor in the courtroom, Kaplan, a judge since 1994, oversees two civil lawsuits by former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll accusing Trump of defaming her by denying he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room 27 years ago.

Trump has sought the dismissal of both lawsuits, including a battery claim.

Kaplan also recently oversaw Virginia Giuffre’s civil lawsuit accusing Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was 17 at the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell, the now-convicted former associate of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew settled that case in February.

The U.S. Department of Justice accused Bankman-Fried of causing billions of dollars of losses related to FTX, once the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, including by using customer funds to support his Alameda Research crypto trading platform.

Bankman-Fried has acknowledged risk-management failures at FTX, but said he does not believe he is criminally liable for what prosecutors called a “fraud of epic proportions.”

After being extradited to New York from the Bahamas to face the charges, the 30-year-old Bankman-Fried was released on Thursday on a $250 million bond, and required to remain under detention at his parents’ California home. He has not entered a plea.

Former Republican President Donald Trump’s redacted tax returns will be made public on Friday, a spokesperson for the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee said on Tuesday.

The Democratic-controlled committee obtained the returns last month as part of an investigation into Trump’s taxes, after a lengthy court battle that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the committee’s favor.

The committee released a report into its findings last week, which said the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) broke its own rules by not auditing Trump for three of the four years of his presidency.

The documents to be released on Friday are expected to include Trump’s tax returns filed between 2015 and 2021, the years he ran for and served as president.

A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.

Trump’s tax returns were not released alongside last week’s report because they contained sensitive information that had to be redacted before publication, committee members said.

Democrats on the committee said making the returns public was necessary to understanding the context of its report, which also included legislation that would mandate the IRS to audit presidents.

Trump was the first presidential candidate in decades not to release his tax returns during either of his campaigns for president.

Democrats on the committee had only a few weeks to decide how to handle the returns once they got them, before Republicans retake control of the U.S. House in January after winning a narrow margin of victory in November’s midterm elections.

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We often talk about the fact that there are large swaths of the U.S., and of the world, where people have never encountered a Jew. And, it turns out, if they were curious to learn more about Jews, and Googled “Jew,” the top result would be a dictionary excerpt defining the term — lowercase — as an offensive verb meaning “to bargain with someone in a miserly or petty way.” You had to click a button to see more definitions before finding an entry about the ethnicity or religion.

On Twitter on Tuesday, Jews tweeted a screenshot of the definition in outrage; as of early afternoon on Tuesday, Google appears to have remedied the issue. The search now brings up a dictionary excerpt defining “Jew” — uppercase — as “a member of the people and cultural community whose traditional religion is Judaism and who trace their origins through the ancient Hebrew people of Israel to Abraham.”

Hey @Google, why does the top search result for “Jew” show up as this? This is incredibly offensive and antisemitic. pic.twitter.com/fz2WuXf93w

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) December 27, 2022

Google often displays what are known as “snippets,” or definitions and excerpts from other sites that sit at the top of a list of search results, without requiring the user to click through to read the original article or page from which they are excerpted. This is particularly common with definitions, which are usually sourced from Oxford Languages, a dictionary company.

There is a disclaimer that accompanies the dictionary snippets, which notes that “Google doesn’t create, write, or modify definitions. Dictionary results don’t reflect the opinions of Google.” The disclaimer section says that Google will include offensive words — always labeled as such — to ensure that the definition is comprehensive. But it says that the search engine will “only display an offensive definition by default when it’s the main meaning of the term.” 

The verb usage of Jew is certainly not the objective meaning. So why was the offensive verb the top result instead of, you know, the religion and ethnicity that’s been around for thousands of years? In a roundabout way, it’s the ancient people — or stereotypes about them, to be specific — that generated the derogatory verb usage in the first place, so that certainly supersedes the offensive usage as a main meaning.

A brainstorm with colleagues brought up a few theories, but none of them quite held up. Is Google not case-sensitive, meaning it defaults to searching for jew in its lowercase usage? Google Trends, a tool that analyzes the popularity of top search queries, does not differentiate between a search for the popularity of “Jew” v. “jew,” confirming that the search engine cannot tell the difference between cases. But if that were why the offensive verb were popping up, results should always favor the lowercase usage.

Yet searching “turkey” brought up the nation, not the Thanksgiving bird. Searching for “china,” similarly, brings up the country, not the material your grandmother’s tea set is made of. 

Perhaps Google puts up the most frequently used or searched-for definition? It’s impossible to confirm which usage is more common, thanks to Google Trends’ lack of case-sensitivity. But from my many years online, in a wide variety of arenas, it seems unlikely that Jew is used more frequently as a verb than as a proper noun. Even antisemitic white supremacists and conspiracy theorists tend to talk — rather nonstop, actually — about the Jews in the word’s proper noun usage. 

Plus, a search for “august” brought up the adjective instead of the month, despite the fact that the month is almost certainly used more frequently. So that puts to bed the idea that the search engine defaults to prioritizing a word’s most frequently used form.

Another theory: it could be the algorithmic tailoring. Users often get different search results on Google, depending on what the search engine’s algorithm thinks you’re likely to want to see. Perhaps you recently were researching synonyms for “big” so a search for “titanic” brought up the adjective, and not the boat. (For me, it pulls up the cast of the movie; movie casts are a frequent search of mine.)

The algorithmic tailoring seems like an unlikely culprit for the Google result for “Jew,” however, given that Jews were the ones raising the alarm about the offensive result — and the fact that many different people all got the same result. 

Google’s algorithm is complex, and uses large sets of data to determine how to rank results and what to show users, including concepts such as “relevance” and “freshness,” according to a page explaining its ranking processes. Perhaps a page or definition using “jew” as an offensive verb was going viral, and that elevated Google’s algorithmic “freshness” assessment — though Google’s public information on ranking specifically says that freshness is more important to news-based queries than when determining which dictionary definitions to show.

As of publication, the search engine had not replied to a request for comment. The offensive verb definition is currently not listed in the dictionary results at all, even when you scroll down. Honestly, though, that seems wrong too.

The post Jew vs. ‘jew:’ Google’s offensive definition causes a (brief) online stir appeared first on The Forward.

Southwest Airlines passengers stand in lines during delays and cancellations at LaGuardia Airport, Friday Dec. 23, 2022, in New York

AP

• Southwest Airlines in part blamed a “scheduling issue” for thousands of flight cancelations during the holidays. 
• At first, the airline blamed the week’s travel chaos only on the weather after an arctic blast caused low temperatures, strong winds, and snow across the country. 
• Southwest said it would reimburse “reasonable” requests like meals, hotel stays, or other transportation. 

Southwest Airlines says a “scheduling issue” was partially to blame for the airline’s holiday meltdown, sparking thousands of canceled flights and leaving customers stranded in airports across the country.

In a statement to Insider, the airline said a problem with its scheduling tools is partially to blame for the chaos. 

“The Southwest Team is working to accommodate Customers on available flights as soon as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience to our Customers,” the airline said.

The company also said it’d honor “reasonable” reimbursement requests from customers for things like meals, hotel stays, or other ways to travel to their destination.

“We are encouraging Customers to submit receipts to be considered for reimbursement. We have assisted with hotels in some situations,” it told Insider.

According to Southwest’s customer service plan, the airline guarantees compensation like meal vouchers and hotel stays for delays and cancellations “that are within our control.”

For delays that are out of the airline’s control — such as weather events or air traffic control issues — the airline promises to rebook passengers on the next available flight at no extra cost or refund their ticket.

Southwest at first blamed this week’s travel chaos on the lingering effects of a brutal blast of arctic air that sent temperatures plummeting and spun blizzards across the country, killing dozens. 

The mayhem fell right at Christmas, leaving thousands stuck in airports without luggage or a way to get to their final destinations. Southwest has said that customers may have to wait until December 31 to be rebooked.

Southwest captain Mike Santoro, vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA), told Insider that the airline’s system is having so many issues, schedulers are sorting out flight crews by hand.

“We had four [flight attendants] ready to work, but the system didn’t know where they were so they canceled the flight, but they didn’t have to,” Santoro told Insider.

Customers who want to rebook their flight or get a refund can go to the airline’s “Travel Disruption” page.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• Elon Musk has seen more than $130 billion disappear from his net worth in 2022 as Tesla continues to fall.
• Despite the massive decline in wealth, Musk remains the world’s second richest person.
• Tesla has dropped 68% year-to-date as investors fear Musk might be spread too thin between his different business ventures.

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The unraveling of Tesla stock has erased $132 billion from Elon Musk’s net worth in 2022, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Despite the massive decline, Musk’s $139 billion fortune still makes him the world’s second richest person, based on data as of December 23.

But the wealth destruction is set to get worse based on Tuesday’s trading session for Tesla stock, as its near 10% sell-off will knock an estimated $7 billion to $8 billion from Musk’s net worth. That would bring his total year-to-date wealth destruction to about $140 billion.

Luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, who is the co-founder and CEO of LVMH, is $20 billion richer than Musk and has reclaimed his spot as the world’s richest person. Meanwhile, Indian businessman Gautam Adani ranks third in the billionaires index with $110 billion.

Musk’s net worth peaked at just over $300 billion earlier this year. But a 68% year-to-date decline in Tesla stock has erased a large chunk of that, as more investors grow concerned about his committement to running the electric vehicle maker while also juggling his other business ventures. 

Since Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late October, shares of Tesla have dropped 50% compared to just a 3% decline for the Nasdaq 100. Musk has also sold billions of dollars of Tesla stock to fund his acquisition of Twitter. 

Other factors hurting Tesla stock includes growing concerns of an economic recession in 2023, which would likely put a dent in the company’s sales growth, and higher interest rates, which make growth stocks like Tesla less attractive to investors.

According to Bloomberg, Musk’s SpaceX equity stake is now his most valuable asset, worth $47 billion. Meanwhile, Musk’s Tesla stake is worth about $40 billion, while his options in Tesla are worth another $28 billion, according to Bloomberg.

The next most valuable asset owned by Musk is Twitter, which Bloomberg estimates is worth $20 billion, about half Musk’s purchase price for the social media company. “Obviously myself and the other investors are obviously overpaying for Twitter right now,” Musk said in October.

Finally, Bloomberg assigned a $3.3 billion value to Musk’s stake in The Boring Company. 

While the decline in Tesla stock has erased the biggest chunk of Musk’s net worth, it has created fortunes for those who bet against the company. According to S3, Tesla is the most profitable short of 2022, generating short sellers mark-to-market profits of $15 billion.

The tailspin in Tesla shares accelerated Tuesday as a report of a plan to temporarily halt production at its China factory rekindled fears about demand risks and put the stock on pace for its longest losing streak since 2018.

Shares of the Elon Musk-led company fell as much as 8.3% to $112.88, for a seventh straight day of declines. The electric-vehicle maker’s market valuation has shrunk to roughly $357 billion, below that of Walmart, JPMorgan Chase and Nvidia. This latest selloff will cost Tesla its position among the 10-highest valued companies in the S&P 500 Index, a distinction it has held since joining the benchmark in December 2020.

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News of reduced output in Shanghai comes on the heels of last week’s report that Tesla was offering US consumers a $7,500 discount to take delivery of its two highest-volume models before year-end, combining to intensify concerns that demand is ebbing. For Tesla, whose valuation is pinned on its future growth prospects, these worries reflect a significant risk.

“Most of the stock’s weakness this year is due to indicators showing flagging demand globally,” said Craig Irwin, an analyst at Roth Capital Partners. Tesla’s estimated revenue growth “is still amazing, but not $385 billion market valuation-type amazing,” he said, referring to the value at the end of last week.

Analysts on average expect revenue to grow 54% in 2022 and 37% in 2023, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The hope that Tesla will be the leading EV company in a future dominated by electric cars drove a spectacular eight-fold rally in the shares in 2020, earning its place in the S&P 500 and at one point making it the fifth-most valuable stock in the gauge.

Breakneck Unwind

But this year the unwinding has come equally fast. It has lost about two-thirds of its value amid Musk’s Twitter takeover and related distractions, investor jitters about growth assets and most recently, worries that high inflation and rising interest rates will dampen consumers’ enthusiasm for EVs.

“Our sense is the company’s market share has peaked and concerns about its over-reliance on China for profits and the factory shutdown are weighing on the stock,” said Jeffrey Osborne, an analyst at Cowen. Tesla “appears to have burned through its backlog as they are resorting to promotions to move cars and delivery lead times are 1-2 weeks in the majority of the world.”

Wall Street analysts started flagging warnings about EV demand earlier this month, with the average 12-month price target for Tesla falling 10% since the end of November. Meanwhile, the average adjusted earnings estimate for 2022 has declined over 4% from just three months ago.

Tesla has now seen nearly $700 billion of shareholder value evaporate this year. The collapse is among the biggest contributors to the S&P 500’s decline in 2022, after Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc.

Still, analysts’ overall stance on Tesla remains bullish, with the highest share of buy or equivalent ratings since early 2015.

“Despite the stock’s performance, Tesla’s innovation curve appears to be accelerating, a stark contrast to other large tech companies whose incremental product updates appear stagnant at best,” Canaccord Genuity analyst George Gianarikas wrote in a note last week. He added that “green shoots” of recovery may appear in 2023.

(GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.) — The co-leader of a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was sentenced Wednesday to 16 years in prison for conspiring to abduct the Democrat and blow up a bridge to ease an escape.

Adam Fox returned to federal court Tuesday, four months after he and Barry Croft Jr. were convicted of conspiracy charges at a second trial in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

They were accused of being at the helm of a wild plot to whip up anti-government extremists just before the 2020 presidential election. Their arrest, as well as the capture of 12 others, was a stunning coda to a tumultuous year of racial strife and political turmoil in the U.S.

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The government had pushed for a life sentence, saying Croft offered bomb-making skills and ideology while Fox was the “driving force urging their recruits to take up arms, kidnap the governor and kill those who stood in their way.”

But Judge Robert J. Jonker said that while Fox’s sentence was needed as a punishment and deterrent to future similar acts, the government’s request for life in prison is “not necessary to achieve those purposes.”

“It’s too much. Something less than life gets the job done in this case,” Jonker said, later adding that 16 years in prison “is still in my mind a very long time.”

In addition to the 16-year prison sentence, Fox will have to serve five years of supervised release.

Fox and Croft were convicted at a second trial in August, months after a different jury in Grand Rapids, Michigan, couldn’t reach a verdict but acquitted two other men. Croft, a trucker from Bear, Delaware, will be sentenced Wednesday.

Fox and Croft in 2020 met with like-minded provocateurs at a summit in Ohio, trained with weapons in Michigan and Wisconsin and took a ride to “put eyes” on Whitmer’s vacation home with night-vision goggles, according to evidence.

“People need to stop with the misplaced anger and place the anger where it should go, and that’s against our tyrannical … government,” Fox declared that spring, boiling over COVID-19 restrictions and perceived threats to gun ownership.

Whitmer wasn’t physically harmed. The FBI, which was secretly embedded in the group, broke things up by fall.

“They had no real plan for what to do with the governor if they actually seized her. Paradoxically, this made them more dangerous, not less,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler said in a court filing ahead of the hearing.

In 2020, Fox, 39, was living in the basement of a Grand Rapids-area vacuum shop, the site of clandestine meetings with members of a paramilitary group and an undercover FBI agent. His lawyer said he was depressed, anxious and smoking marijuana daily.

Christopher Gibbons said a life sentence would be extreme.

Fox was regularly exposed to “inflammatory rhetoric” by FBI informants, especially Army veteran Dan Chappel, who “manipulated not only Fox’s sense of ‘patriotism’ but also his need for friendship, acceptance and male approval,” Gibbons said in a court filing.

He said prosecutors had exaggerated Fox’s capabilities, saying he was poor and lacked the capability to obtain a bomb and carry out the plan.

Two men who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and testified against Fox and Croft received substantial breaks: Ty Garbin already is free after a 2 1/2-year prison term, while Kaleb Franks was given a four-year sentence.

In state court, three men recently were given lengthy sentences for assisting Fox earlier in the summer of 2020. Five more are awaiting trial in Antrim County, where Whitmer’s vacation home is located.

When the plot was extinguished, Whitmer, a Democrat, blamed then-President Donald Trump, saying he had given “comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.” In August, 19 months after leaving office, Trump said the kidnapping plan was a “fake deal.”

___

Ed White in Detroit contributed to this story. Joey Cappelletti is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Southwest Airlines expects the flight chaos caused by the massive winter storm that battered the US to continue for at least another few days as the government questioned whether the airline is complying with its customer service plan.

“In all likelihood we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this,” Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Monday evening. “This is the largest scale event that I’ve ever seen.”

Southwest plans to operate just over one-third of its typical schedule in the coming days to allow crews to get into the right positions, Jordan said, adding that the reduced schedule could be extended.

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Dallas-based Southwest canceled almost 3,000 flights on Monday and had hundreds of others run late, disrupting more than 80% of its schedule as operational woes mushroomed in the wake of the storm.

The trips wiped off the books meant that Southwest was responsible for almost three-fourths of cancellations in the US. That made the biggest discount carrier an unhappy outlier in the US industry, where recovery was the watchword after a holiday weekend of travel tie-ups.

Later on Monday, the US Department of Transportation said it was concerned by Southwest’s “unacceptable” rate of cancellations and delays as well as reports of a lack of prompt customer service.

The DOT said it will examine whether the cancellations were controllable and if the company is complying with its customer service plan.

Southwest did apologize for the disruptions, saying that although the airline was fully staffed for the holiday, 23 out of its 25 top airports were affected by the storm.

“With consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network behind us, continuing challenges are impacting our customers and employees in a significant way that is unacceptable,” the airline said in a statement. The storm “forced daily changes to our flight schedule at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity.”

Travelers took to Twitter to vent about the turmoil, whose arrival in the midst of a busy holiday punctuated a dismal year for the US airline industry. With Southwest’s stock down 16% this year through Dec. 23, the stock is headed toward a third straight annual decline, the worst such run since a similar stretch that ended in 2008.

On Tuesday, the shares declined 3.6% in U.S. pre-market trading.

The storm over the weekend affected a wide swath of the US and Canada, with record snow totals in the Midwest and Buffalo, New York — the area hardest hit by the storm where as many as 27 people have been reported dead.

Getting Worse

Southwest canceled 67% of its flights Monday, according to flight tracker FlightAware, even more than the 42% of flights abandoned Sunday. By contrast, Delta Air Lines Inc. — which dumped 21% of flights on Sunday — had to drop only 8% of its flights Monday. FlightAware said 18% of Southwest’s flights were running late.

Unlike competitors that use a so-called hub-and-spoke system to funnel passengers to large airports, Southwest is focused on point-to-point service, flying the same aircraft — Boeing Co. 737s — on trips that may hopscotch around the US.

Southwest is the biggest carrier serving Buffalo, the hardest-hit urban area in the storm’s path and the focus of continued foul weather on Monday. While that accounted for part of Monday’s upheaval, FlightAware data showed struggles in cities where Southwest has major operations, including Dallas, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Entitled to Refunds

Ryan Green, Southwest’s chief commercial officer, told the Wall Street Journal that the airline is taking steps like covering customers’ reasonable travel costs — including hotels, rental cars and tickets on other airlines, and will be communicating the process for customers to have expenses reimbursed.

People whose flights have been canceled are entitled to refunds if they opt not to travel, Green was quoted as saying.

The tumult evoked memories of other tie-ups at Southwest and elsewhere. Southwest blamed a worker shortage, an air-traffic control interruption and bad weather for a four-day disruption that erased 3,100 flights in late 2021. In 2007, JetBlue Airways Corp. cut 1,102 flights over six days — almost a third of its schedule — after a Valentine’s Day ice storm.