New York
‘60 Minutes’ report that prompted Trump lawsuit is nominated for an Emmy Award
It got “60 Minutes” sued by the man who became president of the United States. Now it’s up for a major award — for precisely the same aspect of it that so enraged Donald Trump.
Last fall’s “60 Minutes” story on Kamala Harris — the subject of Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS — was nominated for an Emmy Award Thursday for “outstanding edited interview.” Trump, in his lawsuit, complained that the interview was deceptively edited to make his Democratic election opponent look good.
The annual News & Documentary Emmys will be awarded in late June. “60 Minutes” is competing against interviews with singer Celine Dion, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Pope Francis and WNBA star Brittney Griner.
The fallout over the Harris interview still hangs over CBS News. The news division claims to have done nothing wrong, but its parent company, Paramount Global, is reportedly negotiating a settlement with Trump.
Many CBS News journalists oppose a settlement. Former “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, who has fought against such a deal, resigned last month. Owens cited in his resignation the corporate restrictions placed on him in the wake of the Harris story, which is also the subject of an investigation by President Trump’s FCC chairman.
Trump complained about the interview again on Wednesday in a Truth Social post. This time, his anger spread to The New York Times, which in a story on Tuesday said that “legal experts have called the suit baseless and an easy victory for CBS.”
“They don’t mean that, they just have a non curable case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” the president wrote, saying he’s looking into potential legal action against the newspaper.
“The New York Times will not be deterred by the administration’s intimidation tactics,” the newspaper said in response.
Wisconsin
Mother of dead inmate sues troubled prison where 7 have died since 2023
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The mother of an inmate who died of dehydration and malnutrition at Wisconsin’s oldest maximum security prison last year has filed a federal lawsuit, marking the fourth action brought by relatives of inmates who have died at the troubled institution since 2023.
Donald Maier’s mother, Jeanette Maier, filed her lawsuit Monday in federal court in Milwaukee alleging her son was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment at Waupun Correctional Institution. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and names state Department of Corrections Secretary Jared Hoy, former Waupun Warden Randall Hepp and multiple Waupun staffers as defendants.
Corrections spokesperson Kevin Hoffman declined to comment, saying the agency typically doesn’t speak publicly about pending litigation. Hepp’s attorney, Michael Steinle, didn’t return an email Thursday.
Donald Maier, 62, was found dead in his cell in February 2024 at Waupun. The Dodge County medical examiner determined he died of dehydration and failure to thrive due to malnutrition. Investigators found that guards had repeatedly shut off the water to his cell during the week leading up to Maier’s death after he flooded his cell, according to court documents.
Jeanette Maier’s lawsuit alleges that Waupun staff failed to document the water shut-offs in violation of prison protocol, didn’t tell him when the water was back on and didn’t offer to get him any water themselves. He also didn’t receive medication at Waupun, even though the state Corrections Department had designated him as suffering from a serious mental illness, according to the lawsuit.
The filing also alleges that staff shortages at Waupun have left workers exhausted and extra shifts have left them resentful of inmates who need help.
Waupun opened in 1854, making it Wisconsin’s oldest maximum security prison. It’s been plagued by a litany of problems in recent years.
Inmates filed a federal class-action lawsuit in October 2023 alleging inhumane conditions at the prison, but dropped it in August 2024 after a judge found eight of 10 plaintiff inmates hadn’t exhausted an internal complaint process.
Seven inmates, including Maier, have died at the prison since 2023. Family members of three of them — Cameron Williams, Dean Hoffman and Tyshun Lemons — filed federal lawsuits last year. Those case are still pending.
Williams was found dead of a stroke in his cell in October 2023. His mother alleges no one helped him, even though he’d been throwing up blood and begging to go to the emergency room for head pain in the days before he died.
Hoffmann killed himself at the prison in June 2023. His daughter contends he went weeks without seeing any mental health care providers due to a lockdown and received medication only sporadically.
Lemons died of a fentanyl overdose at the prison in October 2023. His sister maintains that Corrections failed to prevent illegal drugs from entering the prison.
Federal investigators have been probing alleged smuggling at Waupun. The investigation has netted at least one former employee who pleaded guilty to smuggling cellphones and drugs in exchange for money.
Hepp, the former warden, was charged in June with felony misconduct in connection with Maier’s death after investigators concluded that he failed to ensure his staff followed policy. He pleaded no contest Monday to a misdemeanor count of violating laws governing state or county institutions in a deal with prosecutors and walked away with a $500 fine.
Eight Waupun staffers were charged in June with abuse or misconduct in connection with either Maier or Williams’ death. Charges have been dismissed against one of them and another was fined $250. The remaining cases are pending.
Florida
Jordanian man gets 6 years for attacking power facility and several businesses over support of Israel
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A Jordanian man living in central Florida accused of causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage at a solar power facility and vandalizing multiple private businesses over their perceived support for the state of Israel was sentenced Thursday to six years in prison.
Hashem Younis Hashem Hnaihen, 44, was sentenced in Orlando federal court, according to court records. He pleaded guilty in December to threatening to use explosives and destruction of an energy facility. A restitution hearing will be held to address the more than $450,000 in damage, officials said.
“Threatening to commit mass violence against American citizens and targeting businesses or institutions for destruction will not be tolerated,” U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida Gregory W. Kehoe said in a statement.
According to court records, Hnaihen began going to businesses at night while wearing a mask last June and smashing the front doors. Prosecutors said Hnaihen left behind “warning letters,” which were addressed to the United States government. The letters laid out a series of political demands, culminating in a threat to “destroy or explode everything here in whole America. Especially the companies and factories that support the racist state of Israel.”
Near the end of June, Hnaihen broke into a solar power generation facility in Wedgefield, Florida, investigators said. He spent several hours systematically destroying solar panel arrays, officials said. Two more copies of the warning letter were left behind.
After a multiagency investigation, Hnaihen was arrested July 11 on local charges after another warning letter was discovered at an industrial propane gas distribution depot in Orlando, officials said. He was transferred to federal custody after his indictment.
Georgia
State is sued over age verification for children on social websites
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia on Thursday became the eighth state to see its law requiring parental consent for children to use social media challenged in court.
NetChoice, a technology industry trade group, sued in federal court in Atlanta to overturn the law, which is scheduled to take effect on July 1.
Similar laws have been overturned by federal judges in Arkansas and Ohio and temporarily blocked in Utah. Litigation is pending against laws in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
The fight pits a growing movement that social media use is harmful to children and teens against constitutional protections for free speech. While the laws in Georgia and other states require parental consent, Australia, a country
without constitutional free speech protections, has banned social media for children younger than 16 altogether.
Some in the U.S. Congress have also proposed parental consent for minors.
“Georgia’s SB 351 unconstitutionally blocks access to protected online speech and forces Georgians to surrender their private information just to use everyday digital services,” Paul Taske, NetChoice associate director of litigation, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “That’s unconstitutional, as several other states have now been told by courts. We’re fighting to keep online communication safe and free in the Peach State.”
The suit asks U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg to declare the law unconstitutional because it violates First Amendment rights to free speech and 14th Amendment rights to due process.
Georgia officials said they will defend the measure.
“It’s a shame that the industry would rather file a lawsuit than partner with us to protect children from online predators,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican running for governor in 2026, said in a statement.
Republican state Sen. Jason Anavitarte, the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement that he “won’t stop working to give Georgia’s parents the tools they need to help keep kids safe online.”
NetChoice spokesperson Krista Chavez said the group is not challenging a separate section of the Georgia law that requires age verification for users of online pornography sites. A number of states have made laws aimed at pornography, and a challenge to Texas’ law is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Georgia’s law says social media services must use “commercially reasonable efforts” to verify someone’s age by July 1.
Services would have to treat anyone who can’t be verified as a minor. Parents of children younger than 16 would have to consent to their children joining a service. Social media companies would be limited in how they could customize ads for children younger than 16 and how much information they could collect on those children, a provision that Thursday’s lawsuit also argues is illegal.
To comply with federal regulations, social media companies already ban kids under 13 from signing up for their platforms. “Parents have many existing tools they can choose from to regulate whether and how their minor children use the internet,” the lawsuit states.
But children have been shown to easily evade the bans. Up to 95% of teens aged 13 to 17 report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use them “almost constantly,” the Pew Research Center found.
‘60 Minutes’ report that prompted Trump lawsuit is nominated for an Emmy Award
It got “60 Minutes” sued by the man who became president of the United States. Now it’s up for a major award — for precisely the same aspect of it that so enraged Donald Trump.
Last fall’s “60 Minutes” story on Kamala Harris — the subject of Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS — was nominated for an Emmy Award Thursday for “outstanding edited interview.” Trump, in his lawsuit, complained that the interview was deceptively edited to make his Democratic election opponent look good.
The annual News & Documentary Emmys will be awarded in late June. “60 Minutes” is competing against interviews with singer Celine Dion, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Pope Francis and WNBA star Brittney Griner.
The fallout over the Harris interview still hangs over CBS News. The news division claims to have done nothing wrong, but its parent company, Paramount Global, is reportedly negotiating a settlement with Trump.
Many CBS News journalists oppose a settlement. Former “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, who has fought against such a deal, resigned last month. Owens cited in his resignation the corporate restrictions placed on him in the wake of the Harris story, which is also the subject of an investigation by President Trump’s FCC chairman.
Trump complained about the interview again on Wednesday in a Truth Social post. This time, his anger spread to The New York Times, which in a story on Tuesday said that “legal experts have called the suit baseless and an easy victory for CBS.”
“They don’t mean that, they just have a non curable case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” the president wrote, saying he’s looking into potential legal action against the newspaper.
“The New York Times will not be deterred by the administration’s intimidation tactics,” the newspaper said in response.
Wisconsin
Mother of dead inmate sues troubled prison where 7 have died since 2023
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The mother of an inmate who died of dehydration and malnutrition at Wisconsin’s oldest maximum security prison last year has filed a federal lawsuit, marking the fourth action brought by relatives of inmates who have died at the troubled institution since 2023.
Donald Maier’s mother, Jeanette Maier, filed her lawsuit Monday in federal court in Milwaukee alleging her son was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment at Waupun Correctional Institution. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and names state Department of Corrections Secretary Jared Hoy, former Waupun Warden Randall Hepp and multiple Waupun staffers as defendants.
Corrections spokesperson Kevin Hoffman declined to comment, saying the agency typically doesn’t speak publicly about pending litigation. Hepp’s attorney, Michael Steinle, didn’t return an email Thursday.
Donald Maier, 62, was found dead in his cell in February 2024 at Waupun. The Dodge County medical examiner determined he died of dehydration and failure to thrive due to malnutrition. Investigators found that guards had repeatedly shut off the water to his cell during the week leading up to Maier’s death after he flooded his cell, according to court documents.
Jeanette Maier’s lawsuit alleges that Waupun staff failed to document the water shut-offs in violation of prison protocol, didn’t tell him when the water was back on and didn’t offer to get him any water themselves. He also didn’t receive medication at Waupun, even though the state Corrections Department had designated him as suffering from a serious mental illness, according to the lawsuit.
The filing also alleges that staff shortages at Waupun have left workers exhausted and extra shifts have left them resentful of inmates who need help.
Waupun opened in 1854, making it Wisconsin’s oldest maximum security prison. It’s been plagued by a litany of problems in recent years.
Inmates filed a federal class-action lawsuit in October 2023 alleging inhumane conditions at the prison, but dropped it in August 2024 after a judge found eight of 10 plaintiff inmates hadn’t exhausted an internal complaint process.
Seven inmates, including Maier, have died at the prison since 2023. Family members of three of them — Cameron Williams, Dean Hoffman and Tyshun Lemons — filed federal lawsuits last year. Those case are still pending.
Williams was found dead of a stroke in his cell in October 2023. His mother alleges no one helped him, even though he’d been throwing up blood and begging to go to the emergency room for head pain in the days before he died.
Hoffmann killed himself at the prison in June 2023. His daughter contends he went weeks without seeing any mental health care providers due to a lockdown and received medication only sporadically.
Lemons died of a fentanyl overdose at the prison in October 2023. His sister maintains that Corrections failed to prevent illegal drugs from entering the prison.
Federal investigators have been probing alleged smuggling at Waupun. The investigation has netted at least one former employee who pleaded guilty to smuggling cellphones and drugs in exchange for money.
Hepp, the former warden, was charged in June with felony misconduct in connection with Maier’s death after investigators concluded that he failed to ensure his staff followed policy. He pleaded no contest Monday to a misdemeanor count of violating laws governing state or county institutions in a deal with prosecutors and walked away with a $500 fine.
Eight Waupun staffers were charged in June with abuse or misconduct in connection with either Maier or Williams’ death. Charges have been dismissed against one of them and another was fined $250. The remaining cases are pending.
Florida
Jordanian man gets 6 years for attacking power facility and several businesses over support of Israel
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A Jordanian man living in central Florida accused of causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage at a solar power facility and vandalizing multiple private businesses over their perceived support for the state of Israel was sentenced Thursday to six years in prison.
Hashem Younis Hashem Hnaihen, 44, was sentenced in Orlando federal court, according to court records. He pleaded guilty in December to threatening to use explosives and destruction of an energy facility. A restitution hearing will be held to address the more than $450,000 in damage, officials said.
“Threatening to commit mass violence against American citizens and targeting businesses or institutions for destruction will not be tolerated,” U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida Gregory W. Kehoe said in a statement.
According to court records, Hnaihen began going to businesses at night while wearing a mask last June and smashing the front doors. Prosecutors said Hnaihen left behind “warning letters,” which were addressed to the United States government. The letters laid out a series of political demands, culminating in a threat to “destroy or explode everything here in whole America. Especially the companies and factories that support the racist state of Israel.”
Near the end of June, Hnaihen broke into a solar power generation facility in Wedgefield, Florida, investigators said. He spent several hours systematically destroying solar panel arrays, officials said. Two more copies of the warning letter were left behind.
After a multiagency investigation, Hnaihen was arrested July 11 on local charges after another warning letter was discovered at an industrial propane gas distribution depot in Orlando, officials said. He was transferred to federal custody after his indictment.
Georgia
State is sued over age verification for children on social websites
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia on Thursday became the eighth state to see its law requiring parental consent for children to use social media challenged in court.
NetChoice, a technology industry trade group, sued in federal court in Atlanta to overturn the law, which is scheduled to take effect on July 1.
Similar laws have been overturned by federal judges in Arkansas and Ohio and temporarily blocked in Utah. Litigation is pending against laws in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
The fight pits a growing movement that social media use is harmful to children and teens against constitutional protections for free speech. While the laws in Georgia and other states require parental consent, Australia, a country
without constitutional free speech protections, has banned social media for children younger than 16 altogether.
Some in the U.S. Congress have also proposed parental consent for minors.
“Georgia’s SB 351 unconstitutionally blocks access to protected online speech and forces Georgians to surrender their private information just to use everyday digital services,” Paul Taske, NetChoice associate director of litigation, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “That’s unconstitutional, as several other states have now been told by courts. We’re fighting to keep online communication safe and free in the Peach State.”
The suit asks U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg to declare the law unconstitutional because it violates First Amendment rights to free speech and 14th Amendment rights to due process.
Georgia officials said they will defend the measure.
“It’s a shame that the industry would rather file a lawsuit than partner with us to protect children from online predators,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican running for governor in 2026, said in a statement.
Republican state Sen. Jason Anavitarte, the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement that he “won’t stop working to give Georgia’s parents the tools they need to help keep kids safe online.”
NetChoice spokesperson Krista Chavez said the group is not challenging a separate section of the Georgia law that requires age verification for users of online pornography sites. A number of states have made laws aimed at pornography, and a challenge to Texas’ law is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Georgia’s law says social media services must use “commercially reasonable efforts” to verify someone’s age by July 1.
Services would have to treat anyone who can’t be verified as a minor. Parents of children younger than 16 would have to consent to their children joining a service. Social media companies would be limited in how they could customize ads for children younger than 16 and how much information they could collect on those children, a provision that Thursday’s lawsuit also argues is illegal.
To comply with federal regulations, social media companies already ban kids under 13 from signing up for their platforms. “Parents have many existing tools they can choose from to regulate whether and how their minor children use the internet,” the lawsuit states.
But children have been shown to easily evade the bans. Up to 95% of teens aged 13 to 17 report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use them “almost constantly,” the Pew Research Center found.
