Sep 30, 2026
David Darling allegedly accessed his deceased brother's bank account to withdraw funds starting one day after his death. Social Security continued payments into the account, unaware of the brother's passing. Darling's actions reportedly led to $109,746 in stolen benefits, resulting in federal charges against him. The Justice Department's crackdown involved multiple cases of Social Security fraud across various states.
Over seven years, Laura Whisenant reportedly misappropriated nearly $121,000 in Social Security funds intended for her uncle, who was left without essential services. Prosecutors reveal this case is a facet of a wider crackdown by the DOJ on Social Security fraud. Numerous other cases of benefit misconduct across states have surfaced. Court proceedings are anticipated to tackle the allegations against Whisenant in the near future.
NEW YORK — Pressure from another increase in Treasury yields weighed down stocks on Wall Street Tuesday. The S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent after spending most of the morning wavering. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 232 points, or 0.5 percent, as of 1:45 p.m. Eastern time. The Nasdaq composite fell 0.2 percent. Major indexes shifted lower after a quiet morning as increased pressure from the bond market undercut much of the heavy lifting being done by several technology behemoths. Nvidia gave up an early and influential gain and was mostly unchanged. Broadcom gave up much of its gain and was up most recently by 1.6 percent. Stocks remain under pressure as oil prices swing sharply as the U.S. war with Iran drags on, helping to push Treasury yields to their highest levels in 24 years. The price of Brent crude oil in the most actively traded part of the oil market fell 1 percent to $96.84 a barrel. It briefly climbed above $100 on Monday before prices eased a bit, but they are still well above the roughly $72 it cost before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in late February. Mediators cont
SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI launched a new mid-range artificial intelligence model Tuesday that costs five times less than its flagship offering, one day after scrapping an upgraded version deemed unreliable. GPT-6.1 Sol ranks below OpenAI's most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, released in early September. The company on Monday said it abandoned plans for GPT-6.1 Astra because the model frequently ignored instructions. The announcement, made at the company's annual developer conference, marks the latest escalation in a price war with rival Anthropic as both firms prepare for initial public offerings.
SEATTLE — The sprawling online hunt for information about Winston Lee, widely believed to be a Korean national who is among seven defendants in a Cornell University sexual assault lawsuit, is increasingly crossing borders, with English-speaking social media users calling on Korean netizens to help uncover more details about him. As the “Cornell 7” case continues to draw intense attention across the United States, Lee has become the subject of a parallel search focused on his Korean identity and background. Publicly available information about him remains limited compared with the volume of material circulating about some of the other defendants. Some English-language users have begun openly looking to Korean netizens to take the search further. “OK Korean people, we're counting on you to track one of your own people down,” one user wrote in a social media thread. “Leaving it up to the knetz,” another wrote, using a shorthand for Korean netizens. Other comments described Korean internet users as “ruthless hunters” and said they “know how to punish their own.” The sear
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday promised the U.S. government wouldn't limit the development of artificial intelligence despite calls for caution from top executives of AI firms, who are gathering in Washington. “I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump said at the unveiling of an AI chatbot , America.gov, intended to help Americans navigate government services. “We can’t stifle it, and we’re leading by a lot.” Top AI executives lunched with Trump at the White House Tuesday, including Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, whose X social media platform includes its own AI model, Grok. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sat to Trump's right at Tuesday's White House lunch, according to a seating chart the president posted on Truth Social. Musk sat to Trump's left. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also attended. Trump's confidence in AI is in sharp contrast to the alarms sounded by AI ex
WASHINGTON — U.S. consumer confidence plunged sharply in September to a level not seen since 2014, according to a key benchmark published on Tuesday, with U.S. households battered by a high cost of living and economic uncertainty from the Iran war. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index fell by 6.7 points to 81.9 this month, its lowest level since April 2014. The high cost of living in the United States is a major issue as the country heads into key midterm elections in November, where Democrats are seeking to wrest control of Congress from U.S. President Donald Trump's Republican Party. "Consumers' write-in responses regarding factors affecting the economy were mostly pessimistic in September," said Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board. "References to prices, the high cost of goods and services, and oil and gas prices in particular, rose to new heights, reflecting September's surge in fuel costs." Global oil prices have skyrocketed since Trump and U.S. ally Israel launched the war against Iran in late February, with Tehran's retaliatory action targeting Wash
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday let President Donald Trump’s administration continue swiftly deporting people to countries other than their own for now, while the justices consider whether the policy is legal. The apparent 6-3 order temporarily lifts lower court requirements for migrants to get a chance to object before being sent to countries to which they have no ties. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have kept the lower court order in place. The Trump administration said last week the lower court order forced the cancellation of a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries. The conservative majority has sided with the administration before on the core Trump administration policy, allowing deportation flights to temporarily continue last year. The court said it will consider several questions: whether the policy is lawful, whether lower courts had the authority to consider the case and issue a sweeping block, as well as other questions the government deems appr
WASHINGTON/CAIRO — Qatar said on Tuesday it hopes that shuttle diplomacy between Iran and the UScan lead to a breakthrough despite U.S. President Donald Trump's denial of media reports that he was willing to ease sanctions and release frozen funds in exchange for Iranian concessions on its nuclear program. "We are exchanging messages between the parties, and we're working towards establishing a common ground in order to get into a deal that would save all of us from the repercussions of the conflict," Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari told reporters. The U.S. and Iran have failed to find an off-ramp from their war, now in its eighth month. Negotiations appeared to intensify during last week's U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, but have so far not yielded any agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Doha once again has emerged as would-be peacemaker after previously playing a supporting role in producing the June memorandum of understanding that led to a brief ceasefire. U.S. and Iranian officials spoke separately with Qatari mediators on Monday. It was uncl
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the tech executives gathered at the White House to discuss regulating AI had signed a "morally binding" commitment to build adequate safeguards on the fast-moving technology. "They're going to police themselves," Trump said after the meeting that gathered the top leaders in artificial intelligence, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Greg Brockman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei. Trump said the tech bosses had signed a deal that would put on paper their commitment to self-regulate in a morally binding agreement that would not be legally enforceable. But the final document, dubbed the White House Accord, left the door open "to codify these steps into laws or regulations" if it made sense over time. Speaking to reporters outside the Oval Office surrounded by the world's most powerful tech bosses, Trump also confirmed that he would officially rename the technology "super intelligence" instead of artificial intelligence "because it's not artificial." Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the accord aims to assure customers that AI technol
As American billionaires gathered at the White House to honor Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan last Thursday, a group of Chinese business leaders spent the evening on the sidelines. They had travelled to the U.S. capital to join the state dinner. But their invitations never arrived. For weeks, their participation was the subject of intense discussion between Washington and Beijing. While it was under consideration until the summit’s final hours, they were ultimately excluded due to poor communication between the two governments, the two sides’ differing views on reciprocity and the White House’s unclear attitude towards Chinese investments in the United States, according to multiple sources. More than 130 high-profile guests attended the dinner, including some of America’s most prominent tycoons. Several were seated at the main table alongside the leaders and first ladies, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su and Apple executive chairman Tim Cook. Of the 134 guests, only 19 were part of the Chinese delegatio
