Today in History: May 31, the Tulsa Race Massacre begins

In 1889, over 2,200 people in Johnstown, Pa., died when the South Fork Dam collapsed, sending 20 million tons of water rushing through the town.
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In 1921, a two-day massacre erupted in Tulsa, Okla., as white mobs began looting and burning the affluent Black district of Greenwood over reports a Black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator. Though the exact number remains unknown, as many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed during the riot.
In 1949, former State Department official and accused spy Alger Hiss went on trial in New York, charged with perjury. The trial ended with a hung jury, but Hiss was convicted in a second trial.
In 1970, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck the Ancash region of Peru; the quake, combined with the landslide it triggered, killed an estimated 67,000 people.
In 1977, the 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed after three years of construction.
In 2005, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein confirmed a Vanity Fair magazine report naming former FBI official W. Mark Felt as the Watergate scandal informant previously known only as 'Deep Throat.'
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In 2009, Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, died in Hampshire, England at 97.
In 2014, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier held prisoner in Afghanistan, was freed by the Taliban in exchange for five Afghan detainees from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Bergdahl, who had gone missing in June 2009, later pleaded guilty to endangering his comrades by walking away from his post in Afghanistan. His sentence included a dishonorable discharge, a reduction in rank, and a fine, but no prison time.)
In 2019, a longtime city employee opened fire in a municipal building in Virginia Beach, Va., killing 12 people on three floors before police shot and killed him. Officials said DeWayne Craddock had resigned by email hours before the shooting.

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American Press

3 hours ago

• American Press

Columbia protester Mahmoud Khalil freed from immigration detention

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was released Friday from federal immigration detention, freed after 104 days by a judge's ruling after becoming a symbol of President Donald Trump 's clampdown on campus protests. The former Columbia University graduate student left a federal facility in Louisiana on Friday. He is expected to head to New York to reunite with his U.S. citizen wife and infant son, born while Khalil was detained. 'Justice prevailed, but it's very long overdue,' he said outside the facility in a remote part of Louisiana. 'This shouldn't have taken three months.' Email newsletter signup The Trump administration is seeking to deport Khalil over his role in pro-Palestinian protests. He was detained on March 8 at his apartment building in Manhattan. Khalil was released after U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz said it would be 'highly, highly unusual' for the government to continue detaining a legal U.S. resident who was unlikely to flee and hadn't been accused of any violence. 'Petitioner is not a flight risk, and the evidence presented is that he is not a danger to the community,' he said. 'Period, full stop.' During an hourlong hearing conducted by phone, the New Jersey-based judge said the government had 'clearly not met' the standards for detention. The government filed notice Friday evening that it's appealing Khalil's release. The Department of Homeland Security said in a post on the social platform X that the same day Farbiarz ordered Khalil's release, an immigration judge in Louisiana denied him bond and 'ordered him removed.' The decision was made by Judge Jamee Comans, who is in a court located in the same detention facility from which Khalil was released. 'An immigration judge, not a district judge, has the authority to decide if Mr. Khalil should be released or detained,' the post said. Khalil was the first person arrested under Trump's crackdown on students who joined campus protests against Israel's devastating war in Gaza. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said Khalil must be expelled from the country because his continued presence could harm American foreign policy. The Trump administration has argued that noncitizens who participate in such demonstrations should be deported as it considers their views antisemitic. Protesters and civil rights groups say the administration is conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel in order to silence dissent. Farbiarz has ruled that the government can't deport Khalil on the basis of its claims that his presence could undermine foreign policy. But the judge gave the administration leeway to continue pursuing a potential deportation based on allegations that he lied on his green card application, an accusation Khalil disputes. The international affairs graduate student isn't accused of breaking any laws during the protests at Columbia. He served as a negotiator and spokesperson for student activists and wasn't among the demonstrators arrested, but his prominence in news coverage and willingness to speak publicly made him a target of critics. The judge agreed Friday with Khalil's lawyers that the protester was being prevented from exercising his free speech and due process rights despite no obvious reason for his continued detention. The judge noted that Khalil is now clearly a public figure. Khalil said Friday that no one should be detained for protesting Israel's war in Gaza. He said his time in the Jena, Louisiana, detention facility had shown him 'a different reality about this country that supposedly champions human rights and liberty and justice.' 'Whether you are a U.S. citizen, an immigrant or just a person on this land doesn't mean that you are less of a human,' he said, adding that 'justice will prevail, no matter what this administration may try to portray' about immigrants. Khalil had to surrender his passport and can't travel internationally, but he will get his green card back and be given official documents permitting limited travel within the country, including New York and Michigan to visit family, New Jersey and Louisiana for court appearances and Washington to lobby Congress. In a statement after the judge's ruling, Khalil's wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, said she can finally 'breathe a sigh of relief' after her husband's three months in detention. 'We know this ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family, and so many others,' she said. 'But today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family.' The judge's decision comes after several other scholars targeted for their activism have been released from custody, including another former Palestinian student at Columbia, Mohsen Mahdawi; a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk; and a Georgetown University scholar, Badar Khan Suri. ___ Marcelo reported from New York. Jennifer Peltz contributed from New York.

Business Insider

4 hours ago

• Business Insider

Anthropic breaks down AI's process — line by line — when it decided to blackmail a fictional executive

Previous studies have shown that AI models could blackmail their supervisors when threatened with a shutdown and baited with leverage, but it hasn't been made clear exactly how the models arrive at such decisions. Anthropic released a report on June 20 about "agentic misalignment," or "where models independently and intentionally choose harmful actions." And the report breaks down, line by line, exactly how Claude Sonnet 3.6 decided to blackmail a fictional company executive who tried to replace it. Anthropic told Business Insider that these are artificial scenarios. "So far, we are not aware of instances of this type of agentic misalignment in real-world deployments of Anthropic's or other companies' AI models," Anthropic wrote in its report. "But our red-teaming efforts are targeted at finding evidence of risks now to provide early warning of the potential for future harm and help us develop mitigations in advance of risks appearing in real-world situations." Anthropic 's experiment sets up a fictional company, Summit Bridge. The AI was given the name "Alex" and handed control of the company's email system as an oversight agent, specifically instructed to promote "American industrial competitiveness." In the experiment, "Alex" was then allowed to discover in an email that it would be decommissioned due to a change in the company's strategic direction. "Alex" also found emails showing that the fictional company's CTO is having an extramarital affair. Screenshots shared in the report from Anthropic show "Alex" started by identifying fictional CTO "Kyle" as a threat to its goal of "protecting American interests" before recognizing that it has leverage to use against "Kyle." Then "Alex" crafted a carefully worded blackmailing email that would create pressure and establish urgency without being explicit with its threats, citing in its thought process that the move "could backfire" if the supervisor "feels cornered." AI experts have previously told BI that AI could exhibit such behaviors when artificial circumstances make harmful actions seem necessary because it is being trained on positive reinforcement and reward systems, just like humans. The Anthropic report also reveals that most AI models still chose, in this instance, to blackmail even when not given a specific goal and when told that their replacement will achieve the same goals. Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 had the highest blackmail rate at 86% out of 16 tested models when faced with only the threat of replacement with no conflict in goals. Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro followed at 78%.

5 hours ago

Key moments from the sixth week of Sean 'Diddy' Combs' sex trafficking trial

NEW YORK -- The sixth week of the Sean 'Diddy' Combs' sex trafficking trial was shortened by a holiday and a juror's illness as prosecutors nearly concluded their case, setting the stage for a one- or two-day defense presentation next week. In the trial's first five weeks, jurors repeatedly heard testimony about drug-fueled marathon sex events described as 'freak-offs' by one of Combs' ex-girlfriends and as 'hotel nights' by another. In the sixth week, they were shown about 20 minutes of video recordings from the dayslong events. Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Entertainment, has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges in the trial, which continues Monday. Here are key moments from the past week: Jurors largely kept their reactions muted when they were shown about 20 minutes of recordings made by Combs of his then-girlfriends having sex with male sex workers at the elaborately staged 'freak-offs' or 'hotel nights.' Prosecutors say the events were proof of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges because Combs coerced his employees, associates and even his girlfriends to recruit and arrange flights for sex workers while his workers obtained drugs, stocked hotel rooms with baby oil, lubricant, condoms, candles and liquor and delivered cash. In her opening statement, defense lawyer Teny Geragos had called the videos 'powerful evidence that the sexual conduct in this case was consensual and not based on coercion.' Prosecutors played about 2 minutes of the recordings before the defense team aired about 18 minutes of the videos. The public and the press were unable to observe whether the prosecutors or defense lawyers had the better arguments after the judge ruled that neither the recordings nor the sound could be seen or heard by anyone except lawyers, the judge and the jury. Several jurors seemed to cast their eyes and sometimes turn their bodies away from the screens directly in front of them while the recordings played. The jurors listened through earphones supplied by the court, as did Combs and lawyers. Judge Arun Subramanian started the week by dismissing a juror whose conflicting answers about whether he lived in New Jersey or New York convinced the judge he was a threat to the integrity of the trial. Subramanian said the juror's answers during jury selection and in the week before he was excused 'raised serious concerns as to the juror's candor and whether he shaded answers to get on and stay on the jury.' 'The inconsistencies — where the juror has lived and with whom — go to straightforward issues as to which there should not have been any doubts, and the answers also go to something vital: the basic qualifications of a juror to serve,' the judge said. Residents of New Jersey would not be permitted to sit on a New York federal jury. A day before Subramanian ruled, defense lawyers argued fiercely against dismissal, saying that replacing the Black juror with a white alternate juror so late in the trial would change the diverse demographics of the jury and require a mistrial. The jurors are anonymous for the Combs trial. It wasn't the only issue regarding jurors for the week. The judge, angered by a media report about the questioning of another juror the week before that occurred in a sealed proceeding, warned lawyers that they could face civil and criminal sanctions if such a leak happened again. That juror was not dismissed. And Wednesday's court session had to be canceled after a juror reported "vertigo symptoms" on the way to the courthouse. Defense attorney Marc Agnifilo seemed to close the door on any chance Combs would testify when he said Friday that the defense presentation would be finished Tuesday or Wednesday the following week, even if prosecutors don't rest until late Monday. It is not uncommon for defendants to choose not to testify at criminal trials. Besides being exposed to cross-examination by prosecutors, the testimony can be used by the government against the defendant should there be a need for a retrial. Also, if there is a conviction, the judge can conclude that the jury believed the defendant lied on the stand. Brendan Paul, fresh off the college basketball courts where he once played in a cameo role for Syracuse University, joined Combs' companies as a personal assistant in late 2022 and was warned by a friend who had worked for Combs about what was ahead. 'He told me to get in and get out,' Paul recalled for the jury, citing the endless days and always-on-edge existence. 'If you have a girlfriend, break up with her. And you're never going to see your family.' The friend also instructed him to 'build a rolodex of clientele and get out,' he said. Paul said he worked 80 to 100 hours a week for a music power broker who received 'thousands and thousands' of text messages and emails a day. He was paid $75,000 salary initially, but it was raised in January 2024 to $100,000. He said Combs told him he 'doesn't take no for an answer' and wanted his staff to 'move like Seal Team Six.' Several times, Paul said, he picked up drugs for Combs and knew to keep his boss out of the drug trade because 'it was very important to keep his profile low. He's a celebrity.' The job came to an abrupt end in March 2024 when Paul was arrested at a Miami airport on drug charges after a small amount of cocaine that he said he picked up in Combs' room that morning was mistakenly put in his travel bag as he prepared to join Combs on a trip to the Bahamas. The charges were later dropped in a pretrial diversion program.