US Business

Former US president Donald Trump said Monday that his Mar-A-Lago residence in Florida was being “raided” by FBI agents in what he called an act of “prosecutorial misconduct.”

The FBI declined to comment on whether the search was happening or what it might be for, nor did Trump give any indication of why federal agents were at his home — a situation that adds to the legal pressure on the ex-president.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a statement posted on his Truth Social network.

Aerial footage of Mar-a-Lago showed police cars outside the property.

“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024,” said the former president, who was not present during the raid, according to The New York Times.

“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries,” Trump said, adding: “They even broke into my safe!”

Multiple US media outlets cited sources close to the investigation as saying that agents were conducting a court-authorized search related to the potential mishandling of classified documents that had been sent to Mar-a-Lago.

The National Archives said in February it had recovered 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s Florida estate, which The Washington Post reported included highly classified texts, taken with him when he left Washington following his reelection defeat.

The documents and mementos — which also included correspondence from ex-US president Barack Obama — should by law have been turned over at the end of Trump’s presidency but instead ended up at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

The recovery of the boxes raised questions about Trump’s adherence to presidential records laws enacted after the 1970s Watergate scandal that require Oval Office occupants to preserve records related to administration activity.

The Archives had requested then that the Justice Department open a probe into Trump’s practices.

– ‘Accountable’ –

White House staff also regularly discovered wads of paper clogging toilets, leading them to believe Trump was trying to get rid of certain documents, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Since taking his last Air Force One flight from Washington to Florida on January 20 last year, Trump has remained the country’s most polarizing figure, continuing his unprecedented campaign to sow falsehoods that he actually won the 2020 election.

For weeks, Washington has been riveted by hearings in Congress about the January 6 storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters and his attempts to overturn the election.

The US Department of Justice is also investigating the January 6 attack.

While Attorney General Merrick Garland has declined to comment on growing speculation that Trump could face criminal charges, he has insisted that “no person is above the law” and that he intends to “hold accountable every person who is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election.”

Trump is also being investigated for his efforts to alter the 2020 voting results in the state of Georgia, while his business practices are being probed in New York in separate cases, one civil and the other criminal.

The real estate mogul has not yet officially declared his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election, though he has dropped strong hints over the past few months.

With President Joe Biden’s approval rating currently below 40 percent and Democrats forecast to lose control of Congress in November midterm elections, Trump is apparently bullish that he could ride the Republican wave all the way to the White House in 2024.

Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson has accused an unauthorized television drama of stealing his life story, comparing the streaming platform behind the upcoming series to a “slave master.”

“Mike,” which premieres on US streamer Hulu August 25, is a scripted drama that re-enacts moments from the controversial fighter’s life, from his early childhood and through his 1992 rape conviction.

“Hulu is the streaming version of the slave master. They stole my story and didn’t pay me,” wrote Tyson on Instagram.

He added: “I don’t support their story about my life. It’s not 1822. It’s 2022. They stole my life story and didn’t pay me.”

“To Hulu executives I’m just a n****r they can sell on the auction block,” he wrote, using asterisks in place of letters.

Hulu, which is only available in the United States, is majority-owned by Disney.

The show depicts Tyson being bullied as a young child with a lisp, his teenage years in and out of prison after joining a Brooklyn street gang, and his early start in boxing.

While the eight-part limited series shows Tyson in the ring during various famous bouts, it concentrates on his turbulent private life.

One episode focuses on Desiree Washington, the 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant who accused Tyson of rape in 1991. He was convicted the following year, and jailed for three years. 

The episode tells the events of the rape in an Indianapolis hotel room, and the ensuing trial, from Washington’s perspective and with her narration.

Creator and screenwriter Steven Rogers said the filmmakers actually “couldn’t talk to” Tyson because “his life rights were already taken” by another project.

But he also pointed to the benefits of an unauthorized take on Tyson’s life, saying “I don’t like to be reliant on just one source.”

“I really like to do the research, and get all these different opinions, and then put a story around all of that,” he told a recent Television Critics Association panel.

“I don’t like to be beholden to just one person.”

Trevante Rhodes, who plays Tyson in the eight-part limited series, said “it feels best at least to detach yourself as much as you can.”

Asked if he was worried about angering Tyson — considered one of the best heavyweights of all time, who infamously bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear in a 1997 bout — Rhodes simply replied: “Nah.”

– ‘Baddest man on the planet’ –

While confronting allegations of domestic violence, the show also contextualizes the violence Tyson suffered as a child, the early loss of his mother to cancer, his drug addiction issues, and efforts by establishment figures to take advantage of Tyson’s lucrative success in the ring.

“When I was researching it, I found that a lot of the issues that we’re struggling with today — like Black Lives Matter, and MeToo, and prison reform and addiction and mental health issues all the stuff that we’re struggling with — have their roots in this one man’s story,” said showrunner Karin Gist.

“So it felt like a really good time to tell it, through the lens of the baddest man on the planet.”

Rogers added: “I would hope that if he watches it, that he would change his opinion.”

In Lost Creek, Kentucky, Joe Biden promised flood victims Monday that their shattered lives will be restored — a message of optimism he hopes to beam right through a divided America three months before elections that will decide the fate of his presidency.

A disaster zone, where floods have killed at least 37 people, might seem an odd place for optimism.

The presidential motorcade rolled past scenes of savage natural violence — trees torn to pieces, yellow school buses tossed like toys, and fragments of people’s houses and belongings festooning the banks of a minor creek that had transformed into a sort of tsunami.

But after visiting victims, including one family whose mobile home had floated clean off its foundations before being wrecked up the street, the Democrat said the natural calamity was a moment to recall deep bonds.

“Everyone has an obligation to help,” Biden said. “I promise you, we’re staying, the federal government, along with the state and county and the city, we’re staying until everybody’s back to where they were. Not a joke.”

Championing unity in an era when Democrats and Republicans are barely able to talk might also seem like fantasy.

But Biden is on a roll.

If he was being written off as a lame duck only a few weeks ago, the 79-year-old is now celebrating a string of successes, including likely passage of the biggest climate change bill in US history and an extraordinary intelligence operation culminating in the killing of the last top Al-Qaeda leader involved in 9/11.

His administration has even delivered several landmark bills, including on infrastructure spending and gun ownership reforms, that won Republican support — something earlier considered all but impossible.

And the Democrat is clearly bursting to get back into the country after spending nearly two weeks in isolation due to Covid-19 and a rebound infection.

With November midterms rapidly approaching and Republicans, who are threatening to scuttle what’s left of Biden’s first term, forecast to take control of Congress, the sense of urgency is growing.

– Empathy, unity –

          

So in Lost Creek, Biden did one thing he has long been known for doing well: he comforted the grieving. A man with a long history of his own family tragedies, Biden rarely seems more at ease than with fellow sufferers.

He hugged adults, high-fived a toddler, and joked with a small boy whose home had been smashed that he would become president himself one day.

Then in a speech delivered in searing heat, with sweat gathering through his blue shirt, Biden broadened to a political message he wants the entire angry — many say broken — country to hear.

Recounting how one of the survivors had modestly told him that “Kentuckians don’t want to ask for too much,” he insisted that Americans across the 50 states should not even wait to be asked.

“They’re Americans,” he said of the stricken locals. “This happened in America, it’s an American problem. We’re all Americans.”

“So, I don’t want any Kentuckian telling me, ‘You don’t have to do this for me,'” he said. “Oh yeah we do. You’re an American citizen. We never give up, we never stop, we never bow, we never bend — we just go forward.”

This was the centrist, unity platform that got Biden elected to replace Donald Trump after just one term. It’s a message he hopes voters will embrace again in the midterms, maybe even saving Democrats’ control of Congress.

Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear echoed Biden, saying the tragedy has seen the people of his state “lean on one another in times of need — neither red nor blue, Democratic or Republican.”

Beshear may be a rare Democratic official in the heavily Republican state, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020.

But Kentucky’s veteran Republican congressman Hal Rogers, who also attended the disaster zone visit, warmly praised Biden, calling him someone “doing what he can to ease the pain.”

Is the rest of America listening?

With Biden’s approval ratings stuck below 40 percent, it doesn’t seem so.

“The fact is we’ve been divided for a long time,” Biden responded, when asked by AFP why his message hasn’t got through.

Then, the eternal optimist, he added: “I think you’re going to see a lot of change.”

The United States on Monday returned 30 stolen works of art and antiquities to Cambodia that had been looted from the southeast Asian nation, including from an ancient Khmer city, and illegally trafficked around the world for decades.

Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams officially handed over the looted antiquities to Cambodia’s ambassador to the United States, Keo Chhea, in front of press.

“We celebrate the return of Cambodia’s cultural heritage to the Cambodian people, and reaffirm our commitment to reducing the illicit trafficking of art and antiquities,” Williams said.

Among the 30 works was a 10th-century sculpture of the Hindu deity Skanda, seated on a peacock, as well as a 10th-century sculpture of the Hindu god Ganesha. Both were stolen from Koh Ker, the ancient Khmer capital located 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the renowned temples of Angkor, Williams’s office said in a statement.

The antiquities, which range from the Bronze Age to the 12th century, had been stolen along with thousands of others during the wars in Cambodia in the 1970s and when the country reopened in the 1990s.

The federal prosecutor’s office said that thousands of Khmer statues and sculptures that were trafficked out of Cambodia over the course of decades to antique dealers in Bangkok, before being illegally exported to collectors, businessmen and even museums in Asia, Europe and the United States.

One of the dealers, American Douglas Latchford, was charged in 2019 with art trafficking, but the case was tabled after his death.

The New York prosecutor’s office is involved in the restitution of a vast array of works. From the summer of 2020 to the end of 2021, at least 700 pieces have been returned to 14 different countries, including Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Greece and Italy.

In 2021, American collector Michael Steinhardt returned about 180 antiquities stolen from around the world in recent decades as part of a deal with the government.

The pieces had a total value of $70 million.

The agreement between the US judicial system and Steinhardt, 80, allowed him to escape an indictment but prohibits him from acquiring works on the legal art market for the rest of his life.

Angkor, which at 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) is the largest archaeological site in the world, was the capital of the Khmer empire, which lasted from the ninth to 14th centuries.

The site, which recently reopened to tourists after a two-year pandemic-induced closure, was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.

Singer Olivia Newton-John, who gained worldwide fame as high school sweetheart Sandy in the hit musical movie “Grease,” died on Monday after a 30-year battle with cancer. She was 73.

Newton-John “passed away peacefully at her ranch in Southern California this morning, surrounded by family and friends,” said a statement from her husband John Easterling posted on her official social media accounts.

The multiple Grammy-winning entertainer, whose career spanned more than five decades, including chart-topping songs such as “Physical,” devoted much of her time in later years to charities after first being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992.

The British-born and Australian-raised star dedicated a number of albums and concerts to raise funds for research and early detection of the disease, including the construction of a health center named after her in her adopted home Melbourne. 

“I don’t like to say ‘battled,'” a defiant Newton-John told Australia’s Channel Seven TV in September 2018 after revealing she had been diagnosed with cancer for a third time. 

“I like to say ‘win over,’ because ‘battled’ sets up this anger and inflammation that you don’t want.”

No cause of death was given in the family’s statement.

– ‘Sandy and Danny’ –

Newton-John was best known for starring in the 1978 musical “Grease” alongside John Travolta as the-girl-next-door Sandy, who trades her ankle-length skirt and prim and proper hair for skin-tight black pants and a perm.

The high school sweetheart-turned-bad girl resonated with audiences worldwide, and continues to capture hearts decades after the movie was released. 

“Making it was fun but you never know with movies if audiences are going to go with it or not, even if you love it,” she said in a Forbes interview in 2018. 

“It is incredible that it is still going but it’s not even just that, it’s showing no signs of stopping. You say ‘Sandy and Danny’ and people instantly know what you’re talking about.”

Grease remained the highest-grossing musical for three decades, with Newton-John and Travolta maintaining a close relationship long after the film was made.

“My dearest Olivia, you made all of our lives so much better. Your impact was incredible. I love you so much,” wrote Travolta, in an Instagram post Monday signed “Your Danny, your John!”

Travolta has previously said meeting and working with Newton-John “was my favorite thing about doing Grease.”

There was no one else “in the universe” who could play Sandy, he said of Newton-John, who turned 29 during the making of Grease and later revealed she had to be convinced by Travolta to take up the role after self-doubts that she was too old to play a teenager. 

“If you were a young man in the 70s…, if you remember that album cover with Olivia with that blue shirt on, with those big blue eyes staring at you,” Travolta recalled, in an interview to mark the film’s 40 anniversary in 2018.

“Every boy’s, every man’s dream was: ‘Oh I would love for that girl to be my girlfriend’.”

Australian popstress Kylie Minogue said she had loved and looked up to Newton-John since she was a child.

“She was, and always will be, an inspiration to me in so many, many ways,” the singer wrote on Twitter.

– ‘Done everything’ –

Born in Cambridge, England in 1948, Newton-John was the youngest of three children. 

The granddaughter of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born, she immigrated to Melbourne, Australia with her family when she was five. 

A passion for music saw her perform in several Australian TV shows as a teenager, before moving to England in the 1960s where she teamed up with fellow Australian performer Pat Carroll on the UK pub and club circuit.

From the 1970s, she would go on to top international charts for decades with songs that stretched into folk, country and pop, earning four Grammys from 12 career nominations.

The 1981 hit song “Physical,” which saw Newton-John don a headband and spandex amid an 80s fitness culture boom, demonstrated the dexterity of a performer able to reinvent herself amid cultural change.

Despite her multiple cancer diagnoses, she performed into her late 60s, including a two-year residency in Vegas, a 2015 tour with Australian music legend John Farnham, and even recording a Club Dance track at 67 with her daughter Chloe Lattanzi.

Her philanthropy and passion for cancer research came to the forefront, championing natural therapies including medicinal cannabis in the treatment of cancer.

“I have done everything, and the icing on the cake as well,” she said, reflecting on her career. 

“So I feel grateful for anything that happens now.”

A Georgia man and his father convicted of federal hate crimes for the murder of a Black man who was shot dead while jogging were sentenced to life in prison on Monday.

Travis McMichael, 36, and his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, are already serving life sentences after being found guilty in a state trial for the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery.

US District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood sentenced both men to life in prison on separate hate crimes charges and denied their requests that they be allowed to serve out their sentences in a federal prison instead of a state facility.

The McMichaels, who are white, chased Arbery in a pickup truck on February 23, 2020 as he jogged through their neighborhood near the town of Brunswick, Georgia.

Travis McMichael confronted the 25-year-old Arbery as he passed by their truck and shot and killed him.

The racially-charged case added fuel to nationwide protests over police killings of African Americans sparked initially by the murder in May 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

A third man who was involved in the chase, William Bryan, who had a less direct role in the murder and cooperated with investigators, was given life with the possibility of parole on the state charges.

He received a sentence of 35 years in prison on the federal charges.

During the federal hate crimes trial, prosecutors recounted the three men’s alleged use of vulgar racial slurs and history of racism.

“The Justice Department’s prosecution of this case and the court’s sentences today make clear that hate crimes have no place in our country,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

“Protecting civil rights and combatting white supremacist violence was a founding purpose of the Justice Department, and one that we will continue to pursue with the urgency it demands.”

FBI director Christopher Wray said that hate crimes strike “at the very heart of our society.”

“This is why combatting hate crimes and protecting civil rights are top priorities for the FBI,” he said in the statement.

Princess of pop Britney Spears will join forces with music maestro Elton John on a new single, the record company releasing the track said Monday.

The pair — who between them have 90 years’ experience in the music business — will collaborate on “Hold Me Closer,” Interscope Records said.

There were no further details, including when the track would be released, but it will be the first new music from Spears since the middle of the last decade.

The title of the song comes from the lyrics of the early 1970s hit “Tiny Dancer,” which John co-wrote with long-time creative partner Bernie Taupin.

The news comes after days of online speculation from fans that the pair would be teaming up.

It also comes just weeks after Spears announced a long-wished-for pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage.

The pregnancy, with Sam Asghari, came five months after a Los Angeles judge dissolved a conservatorship overseen by Spears’s father — an arrangement the singer said had prevented her from having a contraceptive IUD removed despite her desire for more kids.

Aside from her very public legal battle with her father, the “…Baby One More Time” singer has mostly only been seen on her social media account in recent years.

She has not given an interview in years, rarely makes public appearances and last performed in October 2018.

The superstar, who first came to public attention as a child in 1992, dropped four studio albums under the conservatorship, most recently 2016’s “Glory.”

She also was among the singers to stage wildly lucrative Las Vegas residencies in recent years. Her four-year “Britney: Pieces of Me” run grossed a reported $138 million.

But in January 2019, she abruptly canceled her planned return to Vegas, going on indefinite professional hiatus.

The multi-award-winning John — properly Sir Elton John — is one of Britain’s most bankable stars, whose showmanship and musicality have left their mark on the performing arts.

Since he first emerged in 1962, the singer — born Reginald Dwight — has been responsible for some of the most recognizable tunes in pop, including “Rocket Man,” “Your Song” and “I’m Still Standing.”