LOS ANGELES — President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said Stormy Daniels’ claim she had sex with Trump in 2006 isn’t credible because she’s a porn actress with “no reputation.”
“I’m sorry I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation,” Giuliani said at a conference in Tel Aviv.
Daniels’ work as an adult film actress “entitles you to no degree of giving your credibility any weight,” he said. He said people could “just look” at Daniels to know she wasn’t believable.
“Excuse me, but when you look at Stormy Daniels…” Giuliani said, prompting the moderator to interject and tell him that he must respect women while he was speaking at the conference.
Giuliani’s comments at the “Globes” Capital Market conference Wednesday drew a heated response Thursday from Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, who called for the president to immediately fire Giuliani.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — New Mars discoveries are making a case for possible life on the red planet, past or even present. Scientists reported Thursday that NASA’s Curiosity rover has found potential building blocks of life in an ancient Martian lakebed. Hints have been found before, but this is the best evidence yet.
The organic molecules preserved in 3.5 billion-year-old bedrock in Gale Crater — believed to once contain a shallow lake the size of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee — suggest conditions back then may have been conducive to life. That leaves open the possibility that microorganisms once populated our planetary neighbor and might still exist there.
“The chances of being able to find signs of ancient life with future missions, if life ever was present, just went up,” said Curiosity’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Curiosity also has confirmed sharp seasonal increases of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Researchers said they can’t rule out a biological source. Most of Earth’s atmospheric methane comes from animal and plant life, and the environment itself.
NEW YORK — A series of seemingly authoritative assertions in recent weeks about the shape and scope of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference has helped define it in the public eye, generating countless headlines and cable chyrons about the ongoing saga that has shadowed President Donald Trump’s White House.
But none of those pronouncements about Mueller’s probe were made by Mueller.
They were made by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s attorney, who has used a media blitz to frequently set — and later move — the goalposts of the investigation, making public declarations about the probe to color its perception among voters and lawmakers, all while confident that Mueller will never speak up to correct him.
“Our strategy is: When we weren’t talking, we were losing,” Giuliani told The Associated Press on Thursday from Israel. “Normally in a criminal or civil investigation, the audience would not be the public. But in this one, it is.”
Among Giuliani’s declarations in the last month: that Mueller’s probe will end by Sept. 1 so as not to affect the midterm elections; that an interview with Trump will be limited and take place only under certain conditions; that prosecutors have ruled out indicting a sitting president.
WASHINGTON — A leader of House Republican moderates said Thursday that a tentative deal with conservatives is being discussed to help young “Dreamer” immigrants stay in the U.S. legally. It was unclear if the offer was a potential breakthrough in the GOP’s long-running schism over immigration or would devolve into another failed bid to bridge that gap.
The proposal emerged the same day that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said leaders will craft an attempt at compromise on the issue that Republicans could embrace. Ryan is hoping an accord will derail threats by GOP centrists to force a series of House votes on immigration soon that leaders say would be divisive and damage the party’s electoral prospects in November.
Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., said that under an offer from the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, young immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children could get a new visa that would let them stay in the country for eight years. He expressed uncertainty over what would happen after that, but said participants have characterized the proposal as a bridge to the legal immigration system — which suggests a pathway to remaining in the U.S. permanently.
Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., Denham’s fellow moderate leader, said that while talks have focused on providing legal status to Dreamers, the proposal “does not involve a special pathway nor a visa unique to any specific group.” Conservatives have been adamant about not providing a “special” process carving out a unique way for Dreamers to gain legal status, and some of them bristled at Denham’s narrower description.
Denham, Curbelo and other lawmakers said details of the proposal remained in flux and nothing has been finalized.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Housing Secretary Ben Carson says his latest proposal to raise rents would mean a path toward self-sufficiency for millions of low-income households across the United States by pushing more people to find work. For Ebony Morris and her four small children, it could mean homelessness.
Morris lives in Charleston, South Carolina, where most households receiving federal housing assistance would see their rent go up an average 26 percent, according to an analysis done by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and provided exclusively to The Associated Press. But her increase would be nearly double that.
Overall, the analysis shows that in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, low-income tenants — many of whom have jobs — would have to pay roughly 20 percent more each year for rent under the plan. That rent increase is about six times greater than the growth in average hourly earnings, putting the poorest workers at an increased risk of homelessness because wages simply haven’t kept pace with housing expenses.
“I saw public housing as an option to get on my feet, to pay 30 percent of my income and get myself out of debt and eventually become a homeowner,” said Morris, whose monthly rent would jump from $403 to $600. “But this would put us in a homeless state.”
Roughly 4 million low-income households receiving HUD assistance would be affected by the proposal. HUD estimates that about 2 million would be affected immediately, while the other 2 million would see rent increases phased in after six years.
From Associated Press