DRULAP

With control over some of his most prized real estate holdings in jeopardy, former President Donald Trump says he will make a rare, voluntary trip to court in New York on Monday for the start of a civil trial in a lawsuit that already has resulted in a judge ruling that he committed fraud in his business dealings.

“I’m going to Court tomorrow morning to fight for my name and reputation,” Trump wrote Sunday night on his Truth Social platform.

Trump lashed out in his post at New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is suing him, and Judge Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over the non-jury trial and made the fraud ruling last week.

“THIS WHOLE CASE IS SHAM!!!” Trump wrote. “See you in Court — Monday morning.”

The trial is the culmination of a yearslong investigation by James, who accused Trump and his company of habitually lying about his wealth in financial statements.

Last week, Engoron resolved the lawsuit’s top claim before the trial even began, ruling that Trump routinely deceived banks, insurers and others by exaggerating the value of assets on paperwork used in making deals and securing loans.

The former president and a who’s who of people in his orbit — his two eldest sons, Trump Organization executives and former lawyer-turned-foe Michael Cohen are all listed among dozens of potential witnesses.

Trump isn’t expected to testify for several weeks. His trip to court Monday will mark a remarkable departure from his past practice.

Trump didn’t come to court as either a witness or a spectator when his company and one of its top executives was convicted of tax fraud last year. He didn’t show, either, for a trial earlier this year in which a jury found him liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.

In some ways, though, this new trial comes with higher stakes.

James, a Democrat, is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on doing business in New York.

Engoron’s ruling of last week, if upheld on appeal, would also shift control of some of his companies to a court-appointed receiver and could force him to give up prized New York properties such as Trump Tower, a Wall Street office building, golf courses and a suburban estate.

Trump called it a “a corporate death penalty.”

“I have a Deranged, Trump Hating Judge, who RAILROADED this FAKE CASE through a NYS Court at a speed never before seen,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

In his post Sunday night, Trump wrote that Engoron is “unfair, unhinged, and vicious in his PURSUIT of me.”

Engoron will decide on six remaining claims in James’ lawsuit, including allegations of conspiracy, falsifying business records and insurance fraud.

James’ lawsuit accused Trump and his company of a long list of fibs in the financial statements he gave to banks. In a recent court filing, James’ office alleged Trump exaggerated his wealth by as much as $3.6 billion.

Among the allegations were that Trump claimed his Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan — a three-story penthouse replete with gold-plated fixtures — was nearly three times its actual size and worth an astounding $327 million. No apartment in New York City has ever sold for close to that amount, James said.

Trump valued Mar-a-Lago as high as $739 million — more than 10 times a more reasonable estimate of its worth, James claimed. Trump’s figure for the private club and residence was based on the idea that the property, now a private club, could be developed for residential use, but deed terms prohibit that, James said.

Trump has denied wrongdoing, arguing in sworn testimony for the case that it didn’t matter what he put on his financial statements because they have a disclaimer that says they shouldn’t be trusted.

He and his lawyers have also argued that no one was harmed by anything in the financial statements. Banks he borrowed money from were fully repaid. Business partners made money. And Trump’s own company flourished.

James’ lawsuit is one of several legal headaches for Trump as he campaigns for a return to the White House in next year’s election. He has been indicted four times since March, accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss, hoarding classified documents and falsifying business records related to hush money paid on his behalf.

The trial could last into December, Engoron said.
…

Late-night talk shows are returning after a five-month absence brought on by the Hollywood writers strike, while actors will begin talks that could end their own long work walk-off.

CBS’s “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” were the first shows to leave the air when the writers strike began on May 2, and now will be among the first to return on Monday night.

Comedian John Oliver got his first take on the strike out, exuberantly returning Sunday night to his “Last Week Tonight” show on HBO and delivering full-throated support for the strike.

Oliver cheerily delivered a recap of stories from the last five months before turning serious, calling the strike “an immensely difficult time” for all those in the industry.

“To be clear, this strike happened for good reasons. Our industry has seen its workers severely squeezed in recent years,” Oliver said. “So, the writers guild went to strike and thankfully won. But it took a lot of sacrifices from a lot of people to achieve that.”

“I am also furious that it took the studios 148 days to achieve a deal they could have offered on day (expletive) one,” Oliver said. He added that he hoped the writers contract would give leverage to other entertainment industry guilds – as well as striking auto workers and employees in other industries – to negotiate better deals.

Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, is among the studios on the other side of the table in the writers and actors strikes.

Network late-night hosts will have their returns later Monday.

Colbert will have Astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson on his first show back. Kimmel will host Arnold Schwarzenegger. Matthew McConaughey will be on Fallon’s couch.

All the hosts will surely address the strike in their monologues.

“I’ll see you Monday, and every day after that!” an ebullient Colbert said in an Instagram video last week from the Ed Sullivan Theater, which was full of his writers and other staffers for their first meeting since spring.

The hosts haven’t been entirely idle. They teamed up for a podcast, “Strike Force Five,” during the strike.

The writers were allowed to return to work last week after the Writers Guild of America reached an agreement on a three-year contract with an alliance of the industry’s biggest studios, streaming services and production companies.

Union leaders touted the deal as a clear win on issues including pay, size of staffs and the use of artificial intelligence that made the months off worth it. The writers themselves will vote on the contract in a week of balloting that begins Monday.

Meanwhile, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists will begin negotiations with the same group, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, for the first time since they joined writers in a historic dual strike on July 14.

Actors walked off the job over many of the same issues as writers, and SAG-AFTRA leaders said they would look closely at the gains and compromises of the WGA’s deal but emphasized that their demands would remain the same as they were when the strike began.

It was just five days after writers and studios resumed talks that a deal was reached and that strike ended, though an attempt to restart negotiations a month earlier broke off after a few meetings.

The late-night shows will have significant limits on their guest lists. Their bread and butter, actors appearing to promote projects, will not be allowed to appear if the movies and shows are for studios that are the subject of the strikes.

But exceptions abound. McConaughey, for example, is appearing with Fallon to promote his children’s book, “Just Because.”

And SAG-AFTRA has granted interim agreements allowing actors to work on many productions, and with that comes the right of actors to publicly promote them.

 
…

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will name Laphonza Butler, a Democratic strategist and adviser to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, to fill the vacant U.S. Senate seat held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a spokesman in his office said Sunday.

In choosing Butler, Newsom fulfilled his pledge to appoint a Black woman if Feinstein’s seat should become open. However, he had been facing pressure by some Black politicians and advocacy groups to select Rep. Barbara Lee, a prominent Black congresswoman who is already running for the seat.

Butler will be the only Black woman serving in the U.S. Senate, and the first openly LGBTQ person to represent California in the chamber.

The long-serving Democratic senator died last Thursday after a series of illnesses.

Butler leads Emily’s List, a political organization that supports Democratic women candidates who favor abortion rights. She also is a former labor leader with SEIU 2015, a powerful force in California politics.

Butler currently lives in Maryland, according to her Emily’s List biography.

She did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. A spokesman in Newsom’s office who declined to be named confirmed to The Associated Press that Newsom had chosen Butler.

Democrats control the Senate 51-49, though Feinstein’s seat is vacant. A quick appointment by Newsom will give the Democratic caucus more wiggle room on close votes, including nominations that Republicans uniformly oppose. She could be sworn in as early as Tuesday evening when the Senate returns to session.

Feinstein, the oldest member of Congress and the longest-serving woman in the Senate, died at age 90 after a series of illnesses. She said in February she would not seek reelection in 2024. Lee is one of several prominent Democrats competing for the seat, including Democratic U.S. Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. Newsom said he did not want to appoint any of the candidates because it would give them an unfair advantage in the race.

His spokesman Anthony York said the governor did not ask Butler to commit to staying out of the race. Dec. 8 is the deadline for candidates to file for the office.

Butler has never held elected office but has a long track record in California politics. She served as a senior adviser to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign while working at a political firm filled with strategists who have worked for Newsom and many other prominent state Democrats. She also briefly worked in the private sector for Airbnb.

She called Feinstein “a legendary figure for women in politics and around the country,” in a statement posted after Feinstein’s death.

Emily’s List, the group Butler leads, focuses on electing Democratic women who support abortion rights. With the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn women’s constitutional right to abortion, the issue has become a galvanizing one for many Democrats.

It’s not Newsom’s first time selecting a U.S. senator, after being tasked with choosing a replacement for Kamala Harris when she was elected vice president; at that time he selected California Secretary of State Alex Padilla for the post. It was one of a string of appointments Newsom made in late 2020 and early 2021, a power that gave him kingmaker status among the state’s ambitious Democrats.

The seat is expected to stay in Democratic hands in the 2024 election. Democrats in the liberal-leaning state have not lost a statewide election since 2006, and the party holds a nearly 2-to-1 voter registration advantage over Republicans.
…

Jimmy Carter has always been a man of discipline and habit. But the former president broke routine Sunday, putting off his practice of quietly watching church services online to instead celebrate his 99th birthday with his wife, Rosalynn, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Plains.

The gathering took place in the same one-story structure where the Carters lived before he was first elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962. As tributes poured in from around the world, it was an opportunity for Carter’s family to honor his personal legacy.

“The remarkable piece to me and I think to my family is that while my grandparents have accomplished so much, they have really remained the same sort of South Georgia couple that lives in a 600-person village where they were born,” said grandson Jason Carter, who chairs the board at The Carter Center, which his grandparents founded in 1982 after leaving the White House a year earlier.

Despite being global figures, the younger Carter said his grandparents have always “made it easy for us, as a family, to be as normal as we can be.”

At the Carter Center in Atlanta, meanwhile, 99 new American citizens, who came from 45 countries, took the oath of allegiance as part of a naturalization ceremony timed for the former president’s birthday.

“This is so impressive, and I’m so happy for it to be here,” said Tania Martinez after the ceremony. A 53-year-old nurse in Roswell, Martinez was born in Cuba and came to the U.S. from Ghana 12 years ago.

“Now, I will be free forever,” she said, tears welling.

Celebrating the longest-lived U.S. president this way was inconceivable not long ago. The Carters announced in February that their patriarch was forgoing further medical treatments and entering home hospice care after a series of hospitalizations. Yet Carter, who overcame cancer diagnosed at age 90 and learned to walk after having his hip replaced at age 94, defied all odds again.

“If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be a towering, old Southern oak,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic national chairperson and presidential campaign manager who got her start on Carter’s campaigns. “He’s as good as they come and tough as they come.”

Jill Stuckey, a longtime Plains resident who visits the former first couple regularly, cautioned to “never underestimate Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.”

His latest resilience has allowed Carter a rare privilege even for presidents: He’s been able to enjoy months of accolades typically reserved for when a former White House resident dies. The latest round includes a flood of messages from world leaders and pop culture figures donning “Jimmy Carter 99” hats, with many of them focusing on Carter’s four decades of global humanitarian work after leaving the Oval Office.

Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor a U.S. television network’s evening news broadcast, praised Carter in a social media video for his “relentless effort every day to make the world a better place.”

She pointed to Carter’s work to eradicate Guinea worm disease and river blindness, while advocating for peace and democracy in scores of countries. She noted he has written 32 books and worked for decades with Habitat for Humanity building houses for low-income people.

“Oh, yeah, and you were governor of Georgia. And did I mention president of the United States?” she joked. “When are you going to stop slacking off?”

Bill Clinton, the 42nd president and first Democratic president after Carter’s landslide defeat, showed no signs of the chilly relationship the two fellow Southerners once had.

“Jimmy! Happy birthday,” Clinton said in his video message. “You only get to be 99 once. It’s been a long, good ride, and we thank you for your service and your friendship and the enduring embodiment of the American dream.”

Musician Peter Gabriel led concertgoers at Madison Square Garden in a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” as did the Indigo Girls at a recent concert.

In Atlanta, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and adjacent Carter Center held a weekend of events, including the citizenship ceremony. The museum offered 99-cent admission Saturday. The commemoration there was able to continue Sunday only because Congress came to an agreement to avoid a partial government shutdown at the start of the federal fiscal year, which coincides with Carter’s birthday.

Jason Carter said his grandfather has found it “gratifying” to see reassessments of his presidency. Carter’s term often has been broad-brushed as a failure because of inflation, global fuel shortages and the holding of American hostages in Iran, a confluence that led to Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1980 romp.

Yet Carter’s focus on diplomacy, his emphasis on the environment before the climate crisis was widely acknowledged and his focus on efficient government — his presidency added a relative pittance to the national debt — have garnered second looks from historians.

Indeed, Carter’s longevity offers a frame to illuminate both how much the world has changed over his lifetime while still recognizing that certain political and societal challenges endure.

The Carter Center’s disease-eradication work occurs mostly in developing countries. But Jimmy and Roslaynn Carter were first exposed to river blindness growing up surrounded by the crushing poverty of the rural Deep South during the Great Depression.

The center’s global democracy advocacy has reached countries that were still part of various European empires when Carter was born in 1924 or were under heavy American influence in the decades after World War II. Yet in recent years, Carter has declared his own country to be more of an “oligarchy” than a well-functioning democracy. And the center has since become involved in monitoring and tracking U.S. elections.

Carter has lived long enough finally to have a genuine friend in the Oval Office again. President Joe Biden was a young Delaware politician in 1976 and became the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s campaign against better-known Washington figures. Now, as Biden seeks reelection in 2024, he faces the headwinds of inflation that Republicans openly compare to Carter’s economy. Biden had a wooden birthday cake display placed on the White House front law to honor Carter.

The year Carter was born, Congress passed sweeping immigration restrictions, sharply curtailing Ellis Island as a portal to the nation. Now, the naturalization ceremony to mark Carter’s 99th birthday comes as Washington continues a decades-long fight over immigration policy. Republicans, especially, have moved well to the right of Reagan, who in 1986 signed a sweeping amnesty policy for millions of immigrants who were in the country illegally or had no sure legal path to citizenship.

Carter also was born into Jim Crow segregation, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched openly on state capitols and in Washington. As governor and president, Carter set new marks for appointing Black Americans to top government posts. At 99, Carter’s Sunday online church circuit includes watching Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Yet, at the same time, some white state lawmakers in Carter’s native region are defying the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to curtail Black voters’ strength at the ballot box.

Jason Carter said understanding his grandfather’s impact means resisting the urge to assess whether he solved every problem he confronted or won every election. Instead, he said, the takeaway is to recognize a sweeping impact rooted in respecting other people on an individual level and trying to help them.

“You don’t get more out of a life than he got, right?” the younger Carter said. “It is an incredible, full rich life with a long marriage, a wonderful partnership with my grandmother, and the ability to see the world and interact with the world in ways that almost nobody else has ever been able to do.”
…

After a summer of extreme heat, Arizona’s most populous city is in the record books again. This time Phoenix is notching a record for dry heat.

The National Weather Service said the monsoon season this year in the arid Southwest dropped only 0.15 inches (.38 centimeters) of rainfall from June 15 to September 30. That’s the driest since the agency began keeping records in 1895. The previous mark was 0.35 inches in 1924.

The monsoon season normally runs for about three months each year starting in June, when rising temperatures heat the land and shifting winds carry moisture from the eastern Pacific and Gulf of California to the Southwest via summer thunderstorms.

Phoenix’s average rainfall during a monsoon season is 2.43 inches (6.1 centimeters). Arizona gets less than 13 inches (33 centimeters) of average annual rainfall as America’s second driest state behind Nevada, which meteorologist say averages less than 10 inches (25.4 centimeters) of rain per year compared to the national average of about 30 inches (76 centimeters).

Nevada has struggled with drought conditions since 2020. New Mexico, the fourth driest state in the U.S. with an average annual rainfall of about 14 inches (35.5 centimeters) per year, also has been affected by the drought in recent years.

Phoenix this summer experienced the hottest July and the second-hottest August. The daily average temperature of 97 F (36.1 C) in June, July and August passed the previous record of 96.7 F (35.9 C) set three years ago.

In July, Phoenix also set a record with a 31-day streak of highs at or above 110 F (43.3 C) — creating a health hazard for people whose bodies were unable to cool off sufficiently amid the persistent, relenting heat.

Confirmed heat-associated deaths in Arizona’s most populous county continue to rise in the aftermath of the record summer heat.

Maricopa County public health data shows that as of Sept. 23, there were 295 heat-associated deaths confirmed with a similar number — 298 — still under investigation for causes associated with the heat.

The rising numbers are keeping Maricopa on track to set an annual record for heat-associated deaths after a blistering summer, particularly in Phoenix. No other major metropolitan area in the United States has reported such high heat death figures or spends so much time tracking and studying them.

Scientists predict the numbers will only continue to climb as climate change makes heat waves more frequent, intense and enduring.
…

Despite the fact that a U.S. government shutdown was averted, another week of turmoil seems to be in the making on Capitol Hill. A conservative legislator has promised to be “relentless” in his efforts to oust Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias has the latest.
…

A forecast that record high temperatures and humidity would create “extreme and dangerous” conditions prompted organizers to cancel two long-distance races Sunday in Minnesota’s two largest cities that were expected to draw up to 20,000 runners.

The Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon from Minneapolis to neighboring St. Paul had been expected to draw up to 8,000 runners when organizers called it off early Sunday. The organizers, Twin Cities in Motion, also canceled a separate 16-kilometer race drawing 12,000 runners.

In an email to race participants early Sunday, race organizers said, “The latest weather forecast update projects record-setting heat conditions that do not allow a safe event for runners, supporters and volunteers.”

In the days leading up to Sunday’s race, organizers had warned that weather conditions could be unsafe. But the race was expected to still be held, with additional safety precautions in place. By Sunday morning, a “black flag” warning was issued, prompting the event’s cancellatio

The National Weather Service predicted a midday high Sunday of 31 degrees Celsius.

Some runners had lined up for the race’s start early Sunday and told Minneapolis’ Star Tribune they planned to run anyway.
…

The U.S. government stayed open Sunday, with funding assured through mid-November, but the political infighting among Republican lawmakers surrounding the votes to keep it operating only intensified.

Renegade Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida told news talk shows that he would try this week to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives. This comes after McCarthy, in a sharp turnaround Saturday, welcomed a near unanimous bloc of opposition Democratic lawmakers in voting to avert a partial government shutdown.

“I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid. I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” Gaetz told CNN’s “State of the Union” show. Gaetz has accused McCarthy of reneging on pledges to hard-right lawmakers when McCarthy became speaker in January to cut government spending to 2020 pre-coronavirus pandemic levels and not pass key legislation with Democratic votes.

But McCarthy seemed unworried about Gaetz’s move against his speakership, telling CBS’s “Face the Nation” show, “I’ll survive. He’s more interested in securing TV interviews than in doing something. He wanted to push us into a shutdown,” a work stoppage McCarthy said would have delayed paychecks for military personnel living in Gaetz’s congressional district.

“Bring it on,” McCarthy said of the move to oust him. “Let’s get over with it.”

At the White House, Democratic President Joe Biden decried the turmoil among Republican lawmakers. He said they should honor the deal he cut months ago with McCarthy on an overall spending ceiling for the fiscal year that started Sunday, which conservative Republicans objected to and since have tried to trim further.

“I’m sick and tired of the brinksmanship,” Biden said. “I’ve never seen a Republican Congress — or any Congress act like this… Enough is enough is enough. I strongly urge my Republican friends in Congress not to wait. Stop the games. Get to work” to approve spending packages for the next 12 months.

Gaetz, a four-term House lawmaker, said of McCarthy on the ABC News “This Week” show, “There is almost no promise he hasn’t violated.”

McCarthy advanced Republican-sponsored measures with sharp spending cuts in recent days but all lost in House votes, often as the most hard-right lawmakers in the Republican caucus demanded even bigger reductions.

But with a partial government shutdown looming at midnight Saturday, McCarthy pushed through legislation acceptable to the majority of Republican lawmakers, if not the most conservative bloc.

“There has to be an adult in the room,” McCarthy said after the House vote. “I am going to govern with what is best for this country. I’m going to be a conservative who gets things done for the American public. Whatever that holds, so be it because I believe in not giving up on America. I’m not going to be beholden to somebody who portrays and does something different.”

The majority of the 221 Republicans in the 435-member House still support McCarthy as speaker, leaving Gaetz way short of a 218 majority to elect another leader of the chamber.

Representative Michael Lawler, a New York Republican, told ABC that Gaetz’s complaints against McCarthy were a “diatribe of delusional thinking.”

But there might be two dozen or more Republicans willing to side with Gaetz to try to oust McCarthy, a number predicated on those who voted against the speaker’s preferred spending plans in recent days. Six Republicans said they would not vote for any short-term funding measure, such as the one that eventually won congressional passage and was signed by President Joe Biden.

Whether the minority Democratic bloc of 212 lawmakers will vote with Gaetz to oust McCarthy or endorse his continued speakership is likely to be grist for widespread intrigue and deal-making this week.

Gaetz told CNN, “If at this time next week, Kevin McCarthy is still speaker of the House, it will be because the Democrats bailed him out and he can be their speaker, not mine.” Gaetz mentioned no names of some other Republican lawmaker he would prefer.

One Democratic lawmaker, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, told CNN, “It’s not up to Democrats to save Kevin McCarthy” and said she would “absolutely” vote to oust him.

She said that if Democrats do eventually vote to support McCarthy’s continued speakership, “We don’t give up something for free. It comes at a price.”

She said the Republican bloc in the House “is not a moderate party. There are just different degrees of fealty to [former President] Donald Trump,” who encouraged Republican lawmakers to allow a government shutdown to occur.

What Democrats might demand in exchange to support McCarthy was not clear, but some form of power sharing on committees in the narrowly divided House could be one goal. With their narrow edge in the chamber, Republicans now control the agenda on House panels.
…

No one picked the winning numbers for Saturday’s Powerball lottery.

The Powerball jackpot now rises to $1.04 billion for Monday’s game.

Most people who win choose to take a lump sum, which for Monday’s game would be close to half a billion dollars after taxes – not a bad deal for a $2 ticket.

The jackpot has grown so incredibly large because there have been 30 consecutive games without a big winner.  
…