Law & Crime – Page 116 – The Tarbabys Blog

Are terrorists trying to cross the U.S. southern border? Here are the facts.

CBS News

Are terrorists trying to cross the U.S. southern border? Here are the facts.

Camilo Montoya-Galvez – October 11, 2023

Washington — Concerns about whether known or suspected terrorists are exploiting the migration crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border to enter the country have intensified following the brutal terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas in Israel over the weekend.

Republican lawmakers, GOP White House hopefuls and conservative media figures have argued that the Biden administration’s border policies have given terrorists an easier way to enter the U.S. and harm Americans. On Monday, former President Donald Trump claimed that the “same people” who killed or abducted more than 1,000 civilians in Israel are coming across the southern border separating the U.S. and Mexico, offering no evidence to support his assertion.

There has been a marked increase in Border Patrol apprehensions of individuals with matches on the U.S. terror watchlist over the past two years. But they represent a tiny fraction of all migrants processed along the southern border. Such incidents are more common along the U.S.-Canada border, and not all those on the watchlist are suspected terrorists.

Still, there are valid concerns about whether the U.S. has sufficient tools to ensure it detains all national security threats, including those entering the country clandestinely.

“Are terrorists flooding across the border? Probably not,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former Department of Homeland Security official under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “But at the same time, it is true that the large number of people arriving does have national security implications.”

Here’s what we know about this issue, based on government data, reports and policy:

A spike in terror watchlist hits along the U.S.-Mexico border

When Border Patrol apprehends individuals, it is supposed to run criminal and national security screenings on them. The process includes checking names against the Terrorist Screening Data Set, or TSDS, an FBI system that tracks known or suspected terrorists as well as their affiliates.

Border Patrol apprehensions of individuals on the FBI’s terrorism watchlist have increased sharply in recent years as the number of overall crossings recorded by the agency along the U.S.-Mexico border has soared to record levels.

In fiscal year 2023, Border Patrol reported apprehending 151 migrants with positive terrorism watchlist matches who entered the U.S. illegally along the southern border, an all-time high for the region that eclipsed the previous record of 98 set in fiscal year 2022, government figures show. In fiscal year 2021, the agency reported just 15 such apprehensions.

When including those processed at official ports of entry, there were 227 terror database hits with individuals processed along the southern border in fiscal year 2023.

Newly released emails spark GOP demand for “full blown audit” of deepening Sarah Sanders scandal

Salon

Newly released emails spark GOP demand for “full blown audit” of deepening Sarah Sanders scandal

Tatyana Tandanpolie – October 11, 2023

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images

New public records have sparked additional questions about when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ office intended to use Republican Party funds to reimburse the state for a $19,000 lectern purchased in June with a government credit card. Records released this week, obtained by The Associated Press, show that the Arkansas GOP paid for the lectern in September but the words “to be reimbursed” were added to the original invoice later. The undated reimbursement notice has only fueled weeks of scrutiny in the state over the purchase.

This week, a legislative panel is expected to vote on Republican state Sen. Jimmy Hickey’s request for an audit of the lectern’s purchase. An email about the reimbursement notice was among a number of other documents related to the lectern that were released to AP through a Freedom of Information Act request. Hickey told AP that the email “further indicates the need for a full blown audit to get all the facts.” The custom lectern was bought for $19,029.95 and the Arkansas Republican Party reimbursed the state for the purchase on Sept. 14. Sanders’ office called the use of a state credit card for the transaction an accounting error.

Sanders has said she welcomes the audit but has also dismissed questions about the purchase, and her office acknowledged the addition of the reimbursement note. “A note was added to the receipt so that it would accurately reflect that the state was being reimbursed for the podium with private funding the governor raised for her inauguration and the check was properly dated,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for Sanders’ office, told AP, dubbing questions about the invoice “nothing more than a manufactured controversy.”

Josh Hawley Offers World’s Most Offensive Idea for How to Help Israel

The New Republic

Josh Hawley Offers World’s Most Offensive Idea for How to Help Israel

Edith Olmsted – October 10, 2023

Republican Senator Josh Hawley is offering the world’s most hairbrained pitch on how to help Israel: simply redirect funds from Ukraine to Israel instead.

Hawley posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday saying, “Israel is facing an existential threat,” using the tragedy there to further his own political agenda of defunding U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Fighting broke out on Saturday when Hamas launched a deadly surprise attack on Israel, killing over 900 Israelis. The Israeli government has responded by declaring a total siege of Gaza, home to two million Palestinians and what has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison. About 770 Palestinians have already been killed in retribution, and the death toll is expected to keep rising.

On Monday, Senator Mitch McConnell was among several bipartisan lawmakers who pushed for a spending package that would link aid for Israel with support for Ukraine and Taiwan. The hope is to convince Ukraine aid skeptics, like Hawley, to continue supporting the country as support diminishes in the GOP-controlled House. On both sides of the aisle, the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis have already become a political tool.

Meanwhile, some are saying that it’s not clear that Israel requires immediate U.S. funding. Congressional aides have said that Israel already has the resources to wage a weeks-long campaign of violence in Gaza and use its Iron Dome system to defend itself, and can then tap into more than $5 billion made available by Pentagon drawdown authority.

Godfather of AI tells ’60 Minutes’ he fears the technology could one day take over humanity

Yahoo! Entertainment

Godfather of AI tells ’60 Minutes’ he fears the technology could one day take over humanity

Geoffrey Hinton hails the benefits of artificial intelligence but also sounds the alarm on such things as autonomous battlefield robots, fake news and unintended bias in employment and policing.

Kyle Moss – October 9, 2023

“We’re entering a period of great uncertainty where we’re dealing with things we’ve never done before,” says Geoffrey Hinton of AI. “We can’t afford to get it wrong.” (CBS)

Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called “the Godfather of AI,” sat down with 60 Minutes for Sunday’s episode to break down what artificial intelligence technology could mean for humanity in the coming years, both good and bad.

Hinton is a British computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, best known for his work on artificial neural networks — aka the framework for AI. He spent a decade working for Google before leaving in May of this year, citing concerns about the risks of AI.

Here is a look at what Hinton had to say to 60 Minutes interviewer Scott Pelley.

The Intelligence

After highlighting the latest concerns about AI to set up the segment, Pelley opened the Q&A with Hinton by asking him if humanity knows what it’s doing.

“No,” Hinton replied. “I think we’re moving into a period when for the first time ever, we have things more intelligent than us.”

Hinton expanded on that by saying he believes the most advanced AI systems can understand, are intelligent and can make decisions based on their own experiences. When asked if AI systems are conscious, Hinton said that due to a current lack of self-awareness, they probably aren’t, but that day is coming “in time.” And he agreed with Pelley’s take that, consequently, human beings will be the second-most intelligent beings on the planet.

After the idea was floated by Hinton that AI systems may be better at learning than the human mind, Pelley wondered how, since AI was designed by people — a notion that Hinton corrected.

“No, it wasn’t. What we did was, we designed the learning algorithm. That’s a bit like designing the principle of evolution,” Hinton said. “But when this learning algorithm then interacts with data, it produces complicated neural networks that are good at doing things. But we don’t really understand exactly how they do those things.”

Robots in a Google AI lab were programmed merely to score a goal. Through AI, they trained themselves how to play soccer. (CBS)

The Good

Hinton did say that some of the huge benefits of AI have already been seen in healthcare, with its ability to do things like recognize and understand medical images, along with designing drugs. This is one of the main reasons Hinton looks on his work with such a positive light.

The Bad

“We have a very good idea sort of roughly what it’s doing,” Hinton said of how AI systems teach themselves. “But as soon as it gets really complicated, we don’t actually know what’s going on any more than we know what’s going on in your brain.”

That sentiment was just the tip of the iceberg of concerns surrounding AI, with Hinton pointing to one big potential risk as the systems get smarter.

“One of the ways these systems might escape control is by writing their own computer code to modify themselves. And that’s something we need to seriously worry about,” he said.

Hinton added that as AI takes in more and more information from things like famous works of fiction, election media cycles and everything in between, AI will just keep getting better at manipulating people.

“I think in five years time it may well be able to reason better than us,” Hinton said.

And what that means is risks like autonomous battlefield robots, fake news and unintended bias in employment and policing. Not to mention, Hinton said, “having a whole class of people who are unemployed and not valued much because what they used to do is now done by machines.

The Ugly

To make matters worse, Hinton said he doesn’t really see a path forward that totally guarantees safety.

“We’re entering a period of great uncertainty where we’re dealing with things we’ve never done before. And normally the first time you deal with something totally novel, you get it wrong. And we can’t afford to get it wrong with these things.”

When pressed by Pelley if that means AI may one day take over humanity, Hinton said “yes, that’s a possibility. I’m not saying it will happen. If we could stop them ever wanting to, that would be great. But it’s not clear we can stop them ever wanting to.”

So what do we do?

Hinton said that this could be a bit of a turning point, where humanity may have to face the decision of whether to develop these things further and how people should “protect themselves” if they do.

“I think my main message is, there’s enormous uncertainty about what’s going to happen next,” Hinton said. “These things do understand, and because they understand we need to think hard about what’s next, and we just don’t know.”

Pelley reported that Hinton said he has no regrets about the work he’s done given AI’s potential for good, but that now is the time to run more experiments on it to understand, to impose certain regulations and for a world treaty to ban the use of military robots.

60 Minutes airs Sundays on CBS, check your local listings.

Rogue AI will learn to ‘manipulate people’ to stop it from being switched off, predicts British ‘Godfather of AI’

Fortune

Rogue AI will learn to ‘manipulate people’ to stop it from being switched off, predicts British ‘Godfather of AI’

Ryan Hogg – October 10, 2023

Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images

The “Godfather of AI,” and one of its biggest critics, believes the technology will soon become smarter than humans and could learn to manipulate them.

Geoffrey Hinton, a former AI engineer at Google, told 60 Minutes he expected artificial intelligence to become self-aware in time, making humans the second most intelligent beings on the planet.

Humans have about 100 trillion neural connections, while the biggest AI chatbots have just 1 trillion connections, according to Hinton.

However, he suggests the knowledge contained within those connections is likely much more than that contained in humans.

Eventually, Hinton says, computer systems might be able to write their own code to modify themselves, in a sense going rogue. And if it does, he thinks AI will have a way to stop itself from being switched off by humans.

“They will be able to manipulate people,” Hinton told 60 Minutes.

“These will be very good at convincing because they’ll have learned from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the political connivances. They’ll know all that stuff.”

Bigger threat than climate change

Hinton quit his role as an engineer at Google in May after more than a decade with the company, in part to speak out against the growing risks of the technology and lobby for safeguards and regulations against it.

While at Google, Hinton helped build the AI chatbot Bard, the tech giant’s competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He also set the foundations for the growth of AI through his pioneering neural network, which helped him win a prestigious Turing Award.

Since he quit, Hinton has been one of the leading voices warning of AI’s dangers. Following his resignation announcement in the New York Times, he told Reuters he thought the tech had become a bigger threat to humans than climate change.

In late May, he was at the top of a list of hundreds of experts, which included OpenAI founder Sam Altman, calling for urgent regulation of AI.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the 22-word statement read.

Hinton’s biggest worry about AI right now pertains to the labor market. He told 60 Minutes he feared a whole class of people would find themselves unemployed as more capable AI systems take their place.

In the longer run, though, he worries about AI’s militaristic potential. In his interview with 60 Minutes, Hinton called for governments to commit to not building battlefield robots. The warning is akin to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s calls to stop world leaders from developing nuclear weapons after he pioneered the first atomic bomb.

Hinton summed up by saying he couldn’t see a path that guarantees safety, adding he wasn’t sure robots could ever be stopped from wanting to take over humanity.

The world’s major governments appear to have heard Hinton’s and others’ warnings loud and clear.

The U.K. will host the first global AI summit in November, which is expected to be attended by 100 politicians, academics, and AI experts.

It could lay the groundwork for sweeping regulatory changes by major countries including the United States.

The U.S. is crafting an AI Bill of Rights, and in the coming months is expected to bring in safeguards that tech companies must abide by.

The European Union is crafting its own guardrails around AI, titled the AI Act. However, the potential for varying regulations based on geography is creating tension.

In June, more than 150 major European execs requested the EU pull back on its proposed restrictions around AI, including increased bureaucracy and tests on certain tech’s safety. They argued these would create a “critical productivity gap” in the region that would leave it trailing the U.S.

170,000-plus books used to train AI; authors say they weren’t asked

Deseret News

170,000-plus books used to train AI; authors say they weren’t asked

Lois M. Collins – October 9, 2023

An investigation by The Atlantic indicated thousands of e-books are being used to train an artificial intelligence system called Books3. | Adobe Stock

Authors are upset after tech companies started using their books to train artificial intelligence without letting them know or seeking their permission. They worry about copyright infringement and loss of income, among other issues.

Per CNN, “The system is called Books3, and according to an investigation by The Atlantic, the data set is based on a collection of pirated e-books spanning all genres, from erotic fiction to prose poetry. Books help generative AI systems with learning how to communicate information.”

“The future promised by AI is written with stolen words,” The Atlantic article said.

The article notes that some of the text that’s training AI on how to use language is taken from Wikipedia and other online entries. But “high-quality generative AI requires higher-quality input than is usually found on the internet — that is, it requires the kind found in books.”

Many authors apparently don’t view the use of their books to train artificial intelligence as an honor. Rather, it’s a shortcut that robs them of their due, they say.

CNN reported that Nora Roberts, who writes romantic novels, has 206 books in the database — “second only to William Shakespeare.” She told CNN the database is “all kinds of wrong. We are human beings, we are writers and we are being exploited by people who want to use our work, again without permission or compensation, to ‘write’ books, scripts, essays because it’s cheap and easy,” she said in a statement to CNN.

Per The Atlantic, Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden filed a lawsuit in California that claims Meta — owner of Facebook — violated their copyrights by using their books to train the company’s large language model LLaMA. That’s an algorithm that competes with OpenAI’s GPT-4 to create its own text by using word patterns it learned from the books and other sources, the article said.

The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner created a stir when he got a list of the books and published a searchable database so that anyone can see if their favorite author’s work is being used to teach AI communication skills. He notes the authors include well-known names like Stephen King, John Kratz and James Patterson, among others. The books apparently came through web-crawling technology that found bootleg PDF copies of the books for free online and they were then packaged into a database called Books3, where different AI companies are using them. Bloomberg said it will not use Books3 in the future as it trains its BloombergGPT.

The Authors Guild on Sept. 27 published a guide on actions authors can take if they learned their books are in the Books3 dataset. “This can be an unsettling revelation, raising concerns about copyright, compensation and the future implications of AI,” the article said.

The guild and 17 authors filed a different class-action suit in New York against OpenAI for copyright infringement. Those authors, per a separate guild article, include David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Scott Turow and Rachel Vail, among others.

“The complaint draws attention to the fact that the plaintiffs’ books were downloaded from pirate ebook repositories and then copied into the fabric of GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 which power ChatGPT and thousands of applications and enterprise uses — from which OpenAI expects to earn many billions, the article said.

Reisner also wrote that while Meta is using authors’ books without permission, it employed a “takedown” order against at least one developer who used LLaMA coding after it was leaked a few months ago, on the claim that “no one is authorized to exhibit, reproduce, transmit or otherwise distribute Meta Properties without the express written permission of Meta.” And once it decided to make LLaMA open-source, Meta still requires developers to get a license in order to use it.

Not everyone’s upset, however, by use of their work to train AI. Ian Bogost, author of “Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom and the Secret of Games,” among other works, wrote a column for The Atlantic titled “My Books Were Used to Train Meta’s Generative AI. Good.” And he promised “It can have my next one, too.”

Bogost contends that successful art “exceeds its creator’s plans,” noting that an author cannot accurately predict a book’s audience. “Who am I to say what my work is good for, how it might benefit someone — even a near-trillion-dollar company? To bemoan this one unexpected use for my writing is to undermine all of the other unexpected uses for it. Speaking as a writer, that makes me feel bad.”

California hits major industry with lawsuit for allegedly spreading ‘lies and mistruths’: ‘[They] have privately known the truth for decades’

The Cool Down

California hits major industry with lawsuit for allegedly spreading ‘lies and mistruths’: ‘[They] have privately known the truth for decades’

Leo Collis – October 10, 2023

California is one of the most committed regions in the United States when it comes to striving for a sustainable future.

The state is seeking to provide 100% renewable energy to residents and businesses by 2045, and it has seen billions of dollars of investment in “clean energy technologies.”

Now, it is taking on the oil industry, with the state of California filing a lawsuit against industry giants like ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, as well as lobbying body the American Petroleum Institute.

NPR reported the suit was filed in the San Francisco Superior Court, and the focus is on claims the big players in the oil industry have been misleading the public about the dangers of dirty energy.

“California is suing these big polluters to hold them accountable for their decades of deception, cover-up, and billions of dollars in harm done to our state,” the office of California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

The Governor’s office added the “lies” pushed by Big Oil over the course of decades have contributed to global heating, resulting in extreme weather events such as superstorms, wildfires, extreme heat, extreme drought, and flooding.

“It has been decades of damage and deception,” Governor Newsom continued. “Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells. California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill. California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable.”

If the state is successful, it is calling on oil companies to compensate the state and its residents for the industry’s impact on the environment and to help bring protection initiatives to mitigate against future damage that rising temperatures bring. It is also hoping to stop oil companies from engaging in further pollution and to cease misinformation campaigns.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is also leading the lawsuit.

“Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

According to Cal Fire, there have been 5,741 wildfire incidents in the state in 2023 alone, with over 305,000 acres burned.

As California Local observed, Southern California saw its first tropical storm since 1939 in August, leading to record quantities of rainfall in Palm Springs, San Diego, and downtown Los Angeles. The state also saw its hottest recorded month in history in July, and 12 major rainstorms were recorded earlier in the year.

It’s clear, then, that California is bearing a significant burden when it comes to the impact of global heating, and the lawsuit will leave Big Oil with a lot to answer for.

Join our free newsletter for cool news and actionable info that makes it easy to help yourself while helping the planet.

In the GOP Extremist Hamas-Israel Rhetoric Sweepstakes, Marco Rubio Takes Early Lead

The New Republic

In the GOP Extremist Hamas-Israel Rhetoric Sweepstakes, Marco Rubio Takes Early Lead

Tori Otten – October 10, 2023

Senator Marco Rubio had a terrifying suggestion for how to resolve the war between Israel and Palestine: eradicating the Gaza Strip.

Fighting broke out on Saturday when Hamas launched a surprise airstrike attack on Israel. Israel has since responded in kind, imposing a total siege on the Gaza Strip, cutting off food, water, and electricity. At least 1,800 people have been killed on both sides—and the death toll is expected to keep rising.

During a Monday night interview on CNN, host Jake Tapper asked Rubio if there was a way to stop Hamas “without causing massive casualties against the innocent people” in Gaza.

“I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages,” Rubio replied. “These are people, as you’ve been reporting and others have seen, that deliberately targeted teenage girls, women, and children, and the elderly.… Just horrifying things. And I don’t think we know the full extent of it yet. I mean, there’s more to come in the days and weeks ahead. You can’t coexist. They have to be eradicated.”

While Rubio was referring to Hamas, his unwillingness to differentiate between the militants and innocent Palestinian civilians is terrifying. Two million people live in Gaza, and more than half of them are children. Rather than give a nuanced response, Rubio instead seemed to be OK with wiping out an entire region.

“This is going to be incredibly painful. It’s going to be completely difficult. And it’s going to be horrifying, the price to pay.”

Rubio’s comments echo a statement earlier Monday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The far-right leader swore to completely “change the Middle East” over Hamas’s attack.

Mary Trump asks why ‘f‑‑‑ing maniac’ uncle is allowed to ‘roam free’

The Hill

Mary Trump asks why ‘f‑‑‑ing maniac’ uncle is allowed to ‘roam free’

Lauren Irwin – October 10, 2023

Mary Trump, an outspoken adversary of former President Trump, called him a “f‑‑‑ing maniac” in a social media post Monday.

She specifically criticized Trump, who is her uncle, for his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and its possible relation to the war in Israel.

“This f‑‑‑ing maniac likely gave Putin (who gave Iran, who gave Hamas) Israel’s national security secrets,” Mary Trump wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Plus, he divulged highly classified information about our nuclear subs to an Australian cardboard guy,” she added. “Why is he still allowed to roam free?”

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas on Saturday after the group launched a barrage of rocket strikes and entered the country in a surprise attack.

In her post, Mary Trump shared a screenshot of her uncle’s comments on Truth Social that compared the ongoing situation in Israel to the U.S.-Mexico border, suggesting President Biden and former President Obama could be responsible for a Hamas attack on the U.S.

“The same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers,” Trump posted. “Are they planning an attack within our Country? Crooked Joe Biden and his BOSS, Barack Hussein Obama, did this to us!”

In a follow-up post, Mary Trump urged the public to join her newsletter and support her mission.

“If you agree my uncle is unfit to be in the White House or anywhere but prison, please support my mission to get this f‑‑‑ing maniac off our TVs – and our streets,” she said.

Mary Trump has been a prominent critic of Trump, even publishing a book titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

Trump is furious at Forbes after the publication dropped him from its 400 wealthiest Americans list

Business Insider

Trump is furious at Forbes after the publication dropped him from its 400 wealthiest Americans list

Brent D. Griffiths – October 9, 2023

donald trump tpusa — Former President Donald TrumpJoe Raedle/Getty Images

Trump is angry that Forbes kicked him off of its list of wealthiest Americans.
Forbes says Trump just isn’t worth enough money, especially because his social media play fizzled.
The former president claimed Forbes “lost most of its relevance long ago.”

Donald Trump on Monday lashed out at Forbes after the financial publication recently dropped the former president from its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans that includes the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett.

Trump said the publication “lost most of its relevance long ago” and “knows less about me than Stormy Daniels (who doesn’t know me at all!) or Rosie O’Donnell,” a reference to the adult film star who claimed she had an affair with him and the actress and TV host that Trump with which a long-running feud. The former president also repeatedly claimed Forbes was “China-owned” and referenced China’s sovereign wealth fund that was involved in an abandoned deal to take the publication public.

“For years Forbes has attacked me with really dumb writers assigned to hit me hard, and I am now up 60 Points on the Republicans, and beating Crooked Joe by a lot. So much for Forbes!” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth.

Forbes said that the former president failed to make the influential list for the second time in three years, because some of his portfolio has failed to live up to the hype. One of the main reasons was that Truth Social, the very social media platform where Trump lashed out at Forbes, has lost significant value.

“Trump once envisioned a significant percentage of the country logging onto the platform. But that never happened,” Forbes’ Dan Alexander wrote of the decision. “Roughly 6.5 million have signed up so far, about 1% of the total on X (né Twitter). Trump’s 90% stake in Truth Social’s parent company has plummeted in value from an estimated $730 million to less than $100 million.”

As Forbes alluded to in explaining its decision, Trump’s net worth is in the news for far more than vanity. New York Attorney General Letitia James has argued Trump exaggerated his net worth by billions. New York Supreme Court Justice issued a surprise order that was effectively viewed as a “corporate death penalty” after finding that Trump committed fraud for years. The former president’s legal team quickly appealed the decision, which another judge put on hold for the time being.

Trump’s claims about Forbes’ China ties are outdated and extremely misleading. Despite his claims, China’s sovereign wealth fund does not own Forbes. In May, Forbes announced that Austin Russell, an automotive tech tycoon, had acquired an 82% stake in the parent company of the magazine. The Hong-Kong based Integrated Whale Media Investments now holds only a minority stake in the company.

Trump’s lengthy rant did not refer to Whale Media Investments, but he mentioned the China Investment Corp, the nation’s sovereign wealth fund. The fund, per the South China Morning Post, owned just over a $11 million stake in a company that was going to take Forbes public. As The New York Times later reported, the agreement to take Forbes public through a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) was abandoned.

This is not to say that there have not been concerns about Forbes’ ownership. A Washington Post contributor pointed out in 2017 examples of potential “editorial meddling,” including the publication cutting ties with a long-time Communist Party critic.

A spokesperson for Forbes pointed Insider to the publication’s own story, which included a statement that defended Forbes’ view of Trump’s net worth.

“Twice a year, we publish a detailed breakdown of our work, offering a far more accurate portrayal of Trump’s personal balance sheet than the fictitious documents the Trump Organization has created over the years,” the publication said.