Trump is liable in the second E. Jean Carroll defamation case, judge rules; January trial will determine damages–CNN

By Kara Scannell, CNN

CNN — 

A federal judge ruled that the jury hearing E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit will only need to decide how much money Donald Trump will have to pay her, after the judge found the former president was liable(full text of decision)for making defamatory statements.

The finding is a significant blow to Trump, who is facing numerous criminal indictments and civil lawsuits – many of them coming to a head as he embarks on a presidential campaign.

Judge Lewis Kaplan said that a federal jury’s verdict earlier this year against Trump will carry over to the defamation case set to go to trial in January involving statements Trump made in 2019 about Carroll’s sexual assault allegations.

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Court orders Texas to remove anti-migrant Rio Grande barriers–The Hill

BY RAFAEL BERNAL AND REBECCA BEITSCH

“Governor [Greg] Abbott [R] announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier,” District Judge David Alan Ezra wrote.

“Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters.”

Texas is ordered to remove the buoys by Sept. 15, but Abbott indicated just minutes after the ruling that the state plans to appeal the decision and will continue to use other “strategic barriers.”

The floating buoys cover 1,000 feet in the Rio Grande with anchors in the riverbed. They are arranged in a chain stretching up- and down-river, each separated by a rounded blade with serrated edges similar to a circular saw.

The buoys were put in place around July 10, installed just days after four migrants, including an infant, drowned trying to cross the river. 

The installation was one of several measures taken by Abbott as part of Operation Lone Star, but it has proven the most controversial, creating significant tensions with Mexico.

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US AGs: We need law to purge the web of AI-drawn child sex abuse material–The Register

Deepfakes of underage girls set off alarm bells for legal eagles

Katyanna Quach

The National Association of Attorneys General, the body that all US states and territories use to collaboratively address legal issues, has urged Congress to pass legislation prohibiting the use of AI to generate child sex abuse images.

In a letter [PDF] to the leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives on Tuesday, the Attorneys General requested lawmakers appoint an expert to study how the content-making machine-learning technology can be used to exploit children, with the goal of establishing new laws, rules, or regulations to protect against AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

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Creating pornographic deepfakes depicting real people is illegal in at least some parts of the United States. Earlier this year, prosecutors in Long Island, New York, charged a man for creating and sharing sexually explicit deepfakes depicting “more than a dozen underage women,” using images he took from social media profiles. This machine-made material was shared on porno sites along with the victims’ personal information and calls for fellow perverts to harass them. The 22-year-old man was sentenced to six months in prison and given ten years’ probation with significant sex offender conditions.

However, no federal legislation prohibits making NSFW deepfakes without consent. The laws are murkier when it comes to completely fake AI-generated CSAM, in which the victims are not real people.

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