ormer FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried arrives for a bail hearing at Manhattan Federal Court on August 11, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the cryptocurrency fraud conviction of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
The opinion came the same week Bankman-Fried submitted his application for a presidential pardon.
Bankman-Fried was convicted of masterminding one of the largest financial frauds in history stemming from the collapse of the crypto-exchange FTX. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
The “You’re So Vain” singer/songwriter is set to release the new album, Comes in Waves, on Aug. 14. The record is Simon’s first album of original music since 2008.
Fans are getting their first taste of her new music with the release of the album’s opening track “Howl,” which she co-wrote with songwriter David Spencer.
“‘Howl’ lives in that space between betrayal and forgiveness, where anger has to be voiced before it can be released,” says Simon. “It’s about letting the frustration out so it doesn’t sit and simmer. The song begins in anger, but it moves toward forgiveness, and speaks to any situation where trust has been broken.”
Simon wrote and recorded much of Comes in Waves at her home in Martha’s Vineyard. It features contributions from his son, Ben Taylor, and her daughter, Sally Taylor, whose dad is singer James Taylor.
Simon’s last album of new material was 2008’s This Kind of Love. In 2009, she released Never Been Gone, featuring acoustic versions of her previous material.
“Howl” “Maybe I Never Loved You” “Peaches” “Love Has No Ending” “Mother Of Pearl” “Slowly” “Four In The Morning” “The More I Look For You” “Love The Way I Do” “The Father Daughter Dance” “Share the End” “Do It Anyway”
Views of a memorial in remembrance of the victims in the mass shooting at Rob Elementary School, in downtown Uvalde, Texas, on Aug. 21, 2022. (Kat Caulderwood/ABC News)
(UVALDE, Texas) — Former Uvalde school police chief Pete Arredondo is set to return to a Texas courtroom on Friday, as the judge overseeing his criminal trial weighs moving the case out of Uvalde and whether the whole thing might have to wait because US Customs and Border Protection has refused to cooperate.
Arredondo in 2024 was charged with 10 counts of endangering students by failing to quickly respond to the 2022 mass shooting. The criminal case has stalled due to two ongoing civil lawsuits that seek to force agents with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit — involved in taking down the gunman — to testify in the case.
Nineteen students and two of their teachers were killed when Robb Elementary School was attacked by a former student on the last day of school, May 24, 2022.
Arredondo led the response to the 2022 shooting rampage, and prosecutors allege that he ignored his training by waiting some 77 minutes before agents stormed a classroom and killed the gunman. Earlier this year, a jury acquitted former school police officer Adrian Gonzales on similar charges after a three-week trial.
Families of the victims responded to that verdict with outrage and some are looking to Arredondo’s trial as another opportunity for justice.
“We had a little hope, but it wasn’t enough,” Jacinto Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter Jackie died in the shooting, said after Gonzales’ acquittal in January. “Again, we are failed. I don’t even know what to say.”
Arredondo has pleaded not guilty, arguing he followed his training and saying he did not consider himself as the incident commander that day, though investigators said he was just that. Arredondo’s attorney Paul Looney told ABC News that he believes the case against Arredondo is weaker than the failed prosecution of Gonzales.
“They tried the one they thought that they had the best shot at, but now they’re going to put everything they’ve got into doing this one, because they do want to win at least something,” Looney said.
Friday’s status conference comes as Judge Sid Harle weighs the future of the case. The judge has said he wants to determine how the trial against Arredondo can proceed amid the ongoing litigation with CBP and whether — as in the case of Gonzales — the trial ought to be moved out of Uvalde.
Both Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell and Arredondo filed federal lawsuits to compel the federal agents to cooperate with investigators and potentially testify at trial.
“The three border patrol agents whose cooperation is now being sought by District Attorney Mitchell — two of whom participated in the actual killing of the gunman and the third who was present in the hallway during most of the incident — are essential to the pending Texas criminal prosecution,” Mitchell wrote in her lawsuit.
CBP attorneys have argued that the request for testimony is unreasonable, unnecessary and “negatively impacts CBP operations and national security” by taking up resources and potentially disclosing sensitive information.
Attorneys have argued that CBP revealed enough information through the investigative summaries prepared by the Texas Rangers and a report released by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
“It is unclear from your request how testimony from the identified CBP employees is genuinely necessary to the proceedings,” an attorney for CBP said in a court filing.
Earlier this year, a new judge was assigned to the lawsuit filed by Mitchell, and this week she filed a motion to schedule a status conference in that case. Looney, who filed a separate lawsuit largely mirroring the District Attorney’s, said he anticipates the litigation will take another eight months to a year.
Friday’s hearing will be held in Uvalde, though the trial of Gonzales was held in Corpus Christi to find an impartial jury, due to the widespread impact of the shooting on the Uvalde community.
Arredondo’s lawyer said he expects Harle to grant his motion for a venue change, though he claimed there is “no sense of urgency” to resolve the venue issue while the case remains stalled by the ongoing civil litigation.
In this Jan. 4, 2025, file photo, solar panels are seen on the roof of a commercial building in West Los Angeles. (Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images, FILE)
(NEW YORK) — The amount of solar power generated in the U.S. is continuing to grow despite efforts from the Trump administration to slow down the renewable energy sector, according to two reports released this week.
The U.S. has generated more power from solar compared to coal for the first time, according to a report by Ember, a think tank focused on the clean energy transition. In May 2026, solar supplied 12.8% of U.S. electricity, while coal supplied 12.2%, according to an analysis of official monthly and preliminary hourly generation data.
A record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy was generated in May 2026, exceeding the output from May 2025 by 17%, the think tank found. The record could be broken again in the upcoming summer months, as solar output typically peaks in June and July.
The amount of energy from coal generated in the U.S. has been nearly cut in half in the last five years, falling from 19.7% of total power generated in May 2021 to 12.2% last month. Production of coal power rose slightly in May 2026, to 43.4 Twh, but it remained 11% below May 2025 levels.
“Overtaking coal for the first month on record shows just how far solar has come, from a niche contributor to the third-largest and fastest-growing source of power in the U.S. electricity system,” Nicolas Fulghum, an Ember senior data analyst, said in a statement.
Another report, also released this week, further points to the growing solar sector in the U.S. In the first quarter of 2026, the U.S. has added 7.8 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity with more than 6 million solar installations nationwide, according to a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie.
Electricity demand continues to surge, especially from tech companies seeking to secure power sources to meet the growing demands of AI and the data centers that run them, according to the report.
Solar power is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the U.S., according to Climate Central, an environmental nonprofit.
There is currently enough solar installed in the U.S. to power about 50 million households, according to SEIA. By 2034, there will be enough solar capacity to power 100 million households.
The growth is continuing “despite headwinds in Washington,” according to a press release by SEIA.
In August 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency canceled Solar for All, a $7 billion Biden-era solar grant program intended to help pay for resident solar projects and lower energy bills for middle to low-income households.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote on X at the time that the EPA no longer has the statutory authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to “keep the program alive,” touting the move as a savings to U.S. taxpayers.
States won by President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election accounted for 74% of all solar capacity installed in the first quarter, according to the SEIA report. Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona and Mississippi ranked among the top 10 states for new solar additions.
“In a world of fluctuating fuel prices, energy buyers have made it clear that they want the security, low cost, and speed of solar and storage, which commanded a massive 91% of all new capacity built in Q1,” Darren Van’t Hof, interim president and CEO of the SEIA, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is attempting to bolster the coal industry in the U.S. with the allocation of more than $700 million in federal funds to upgrade coal power plants and U.S. exports.
The administration is using wartime authorities under the 1950 Defense Production Act to allot $425 million to 13 existing coal plants and $75 million for an export terminal in California, as well as another $185 million in grant funding from the Energy Department to build two new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia and restart a plant in Maryland, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Coal construction has significantly declined since the 1970s and 1980s, according to the EPA. No utility-scale coal construction has occurred in the past decade.
Trump has touted coal as clean in the past, but experts say coal emits carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and several other pollutants. Scientists says it is a direct contributor to global warming and human-amplified climate change.
ICE agents confront protesters as they gather outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall where ICE is housing detained immigrants on June 8, 2026, in Newark, New Jersey.. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Only 3% of individuals detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first 14 months of the second Trump administration had a violent felony conviction, according to an ABC News analysis of government data.
The findings, based on data tracking the current Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, come after President Donald Trump had pledged to target the “worst of the worst” criminal offenders among the nation’s migrants.
Based on government data analyzed by ABC News as provided by ICE in response to a FOIA requests to the Deportation Data Project and the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, the findings show that immigration enforcement has affected more than 400,000 individuals with no violent criminal history, including parents and spouses of U.S. citizens.
While the 3% figure is consistent with rates seen under the Biden administration, the data shows the Trump administration is not detaining a higher proportion of violent offenders despite a significant overall increase in total detentions.
‘President Trump’s promise’
Under Trump, there has been record high detention population, currently at around 60,000 in federal immigration custody. The most detainees under the previous administration was 39,748 in November 2023, according to a nonprofit data gathering group.
According to the government data, of the 438,537 people detained between Jan. 20, 2025, and March 11, 2026, 13,018 had a violent felony conviction in the United States. The analysis defined “violent felony” as homicide, sexual assault, robbery, or assault.
The data also showed that in the first eight months of 2025, ICE apprehended the parents of approximately 14,450 U.S.-born children. This eight-month figure nearly surpassed the total for all of 2024 and surpassed the yearly totals for both 2022 and 2023.
Of those apprehended during the administration’s first seven months, more than 9,700 children saw at least one parent placed into immigration detention — more than in previous years. Of those detained, parents of more than 7,000 children were eventually deported. Of the more than 4,700 deported parents, 265 had a violent felony conviction. And of the more than 6,400 detained parents, 322 had a violent felony conviction.
In a statement to ABC News, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, “Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists. This data is being cherry picked by the Deportation Data Project to peddle a false narrative.”
The Deportation Data Project provides minimally processed and unprocessed data supplied to them directly by ICE via FOIA.
“Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are criminal illegal aliens,” the statement went on to say. “We are continuing to go after the worst of the worst — including gang members, pedophiles, and rapists. Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
“Further, every single one of these individuals committed a crime when they came into this country illegally,” the statement said regarding charges of unlawful entry, which is generally a civil violation, not a criminal offense.
‘Economic consequences’
Andrea Flores, the founder of Securing America’s Promise and a former Department of Homeland Security official, said the policy of mass deportation could lead to a child welfare crisis.
“So many children are losing primary caretakers or going to guardians,” Flores said in a Zoom interview. “We are going to have a class of children who lose their parents under this administration that is bigger than we probably have seen in modern history.”
DHS said in a statement that ICE does not separate families and that “parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”
In the first eight months of 2025, ICE also apprehended 4,843 spouses of U.S. citizens. During the first seven months of the term, more than 2,000 of these spouses were deported. Of the more than 2,000 spouses of U.S. citizens deported during the first seven months of the term, 165 had a violent felony conviction.
“We cannot underplay what it means to have even just a spouse go to detention, because what if they are the primary earner in that household?” Flores said. “We’re talking about economic consequences. We’re talking about the emotional costs of not having access to that family member.”
Trump administration officials have said that its crackdown on illegal immigration is primarily targeting dangerous and violent criminals living in the U.S. illegally, but they have also maintained that anyone residing in the country without legal status is subject to removal.
Methodology
ABC News analyzed enforcement trends by merging two primary sources: data provided by ICE via FOIA requests to the Deportation Data Project and ICE data provided to the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. The data provided to the Deportation Data Project includes data from the Department of Homeland Security’s PERSIST database, which shows the full lifecycle of immigration cases from January 2022 through early March 2026.
The data provided to the University of Washington Center for Human Rights includes I-213 records, which are the documents created when immigration officers arrest a noncitizen. These records span from January 2022 through late August 2025.
Publicly available data from ICE and DHS show detention populations and numbers on removals.
Statistics regarding the total number of parents and spouses apprehended were calculated using the University of Washington dataset alone. To determine how many of those individuals were specifically detained or deported, ABC News matched records across both databases using unique identifiers such as the date of arrest, gender, country of citizenship, and birth year.
The analysis focused on a subset of the data where a definitive match could be made between the two sources. The merged dataset allowed ABC News to track the progression of individual cases from the initial arrest through federal custody to identify parents and spouses who were ultimately held in facilities or removed from the country.
ABC News’ estimates for the number of U.S. citizens who had a parent or spouse arrested, detained and deported are likely an undercount. ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, first reported similar data in March.
ABC News’ analysis of U.S. citizens who had a parent or spouse detained is limited to only individuals for whom arresting agents wrote an I-213 report, which represents the vast majority of individuals arrested by ICE, but is not everyone who has been detained. To perform the analysis, any possible duplicates in the data were not counted.
Flores said these numbers will likely grow.
“We have seen some recent reporting as well that the numbers are going into the tens of thousands in terms of children who have been impacted by a detained parent,” Flores said. “There are 4 million U.S. citizen children in current estimates who have a parent that isn’t documented.”
ABC News’ Ryann Jones and Armando Garcia contributed to this report.
Elon Musk is photographed at Space X in Brownsville, Texas, May 27, 2025. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk, the wealthiest person alive, could become the first-ever trillionaire when SpaceX goes public on Friday.
The company’s founder and CEO is set to own roughly four out of every 10 SpaceX shares after the initial public offering (IPO). If SpaceX were to achieve its target valuation of $1.75 trillion, Musk would accrue hundreds of millions of dollars in new wealth, at least on paper.
SpaceX builds and operates spacecraft, including thousands of satellites deployed in support of its Starlink satellite internet service. Earlier this year, the Texas-based firm merged with xAI, a Musk-led artificial intelligence company that offers the chatbot Grok.
The potential financial windfall would vault Musk even further ahead of other financial titans. Musk currently boasts a net worth of about $780 billion, according to Forbes. The second-wealthiest person in the world, Google founder Larry Page, counts a net worth of $291 billion.
If Musk were to become a trillionaire, his net worth would exceed the wealth of the poorest 46% of the global population, or about 3.8 billion people, according to a report issued by non-profit Oxfam on Thursday.
The benchmark would indicate Musk’s wealth had grown about $550 billion over the past year, which breaks down to more than $1 million per day, Oxfam said.
After the IPO, Musk could own a major stake in two of the 10-largest companies in the world as measured by market capitalization: Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk’s wealth stems primarily from the sizable stakes he holds in those two companies, Jason Schloetzer, a professor of accounting at Georgetown University who focuses on executive compensation, told ABC News.
His wealth, in other words, will depend in large part on the price of shares in those firms.
The SpaceX IPO has divided stock analysts, some of whom tout its earnings potential in the lucrative aerospace and AI industries, even as others bemoan what they view as pie-in-the-sky initiatives like space-bound data centers.
The company’s revenue jumped to $18.7 billion in 2025, soaring 33% compared to the previous year, a financial filing showed. Nearly a quarter of that revenue came from Starlink, which counted millions of subscribers. Still, SpaceX failed to turn a profit, registering a loss of $4.9 billion last year.
The company is targeting a launch price of $135 per share, which would amount to a $1.75 trillion valuation and a massive boon for Musk. Under that scenario, Musk’s net worth would sail well beyond $1 trillion. It would mark the largest IPO of all time.
Some analysts, however, have questioned that target valuation. Nicolas Owens, an analyst at Morningstar, issued a memo this week criticizing the hoped-for share price. Citing technological challenges faced by the company’s AI initiatives, Owens pegged the value of the stock at about $63 a share, less than half of the target price.
After the IPO, SpaceX will be subject to new attention from public investors and regulators, which could test the company’s long-term ambitions, Schloetzer said.
“It remains to be seen whether the valuation of SpaceX can maintain or whether we’ll see it come down once it’s under the scrutiny of public markets,” Schloetzer added.
Observers seeking evidence of potential shareholder gains can look no further than Musk-led Tesla. Over the past five years, Tesla shares have soared 90%, outpacing a 71% rise in the S&P 500 over that time. But shares of Tesla have also been buoyed by moonshot ventures like self-driving taxis and humanoid robotics.
“Clearly, fundamentals matter in the long run,” Schloetzer said. “But it seems like Musk has been able to defy fundamentals in the past and he may be able to do that again.”
Regardless of its size, the potential influx of wealth from the SpaceX IPO comes with a catch. Musk cannot sell any of his SpaceX shares until a year after the IPO, according to a financial filing. After that, a move to sell shares would erode Musk’s stake in the company and reduce his control over decision-making.
“Selling shares would dilute his ownership control and voting power, but he wants to retain that,” Schloetzer said. “On paper, you may be wealthy, but that’s an asset you’re not willing to sell.”
Meanwhile, Tesla shareholders last year granted Musk a compensation package that could earn him more than $1 trillion over the coming years, meaning he may eventually push toward a net worth of $2 trillion.
“The numbers are so large it’s hard to wrap your brain around,” Schloetzer said.
Widow’s Bay has been renewed for season 2. Apple TV announced the news ahead of the horror comedy series’ first season finale, which airs June 17. The show stars Matthew Rhys as the mayor of a New England town that may or may not be cursed …
Lucy Score’s bestselling book Things We Never Got Over is becoming a TV series. Prime Video has given a series order to the project from showrunners Eric Charmelo and Nicole Snyder, who also penned the first episode. The premise follows a runaway bride who ends up in a small Virginia town where she meets a sexy but grumpy local …
The official teaser for season 3 of Lioness has been released. The spy thriller from Yellowstone hitmaker Taylor Sheridan stars Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña as two CIA operatives running a program where female undercover agents help bring down terrorist organizations. Season 3 premieres Aug. 2 on Paramount+ …
We have our first teaser trailer for Disney and Pixar’s Gatto. The new animated film follows the adventures of a Venetian cat named Nero. Mark Ruffalo and Laurence Fishburne lead the voice cast. Gatto lands in theaters on March 5, 2027. Disney is the parent company of Pixar and ABC News …
Keith Urban didn’t set out to make an oldies cover album as the follow-up to 2024’s High.
But once he fixed his sights on a new spot to make music, it seemed out of his hands.
“I have a yacht rock playlist and I found myself walking around, you know, singing a lot of these songs,” the Aussie superstar explains. “And I bought a studio and kinda just to break the studio in for fun, we thought we’d do one or two yacht rock songs. And I never intended to release them or do anything with them. It was just a fun way to break in my recording studio.”
“And slowly over the course of months of touring, every time I was off the road, we’d record a couple more and then a couple more and before I knew it, we were starting to make a record,” he continues. “It wasn’t a strategy, let’s put it that way. The record just took on a life of its own.”
The 11-song Flow State covers the time period from 1972 to 1981, bridging the gap between Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” and Bread’s “Guitar Man” to “Just the Two of Us” by Grover Washington Jr. & Bill Withers.
Yacht rock legend Michael McDonald guests on the one original, “We Go Back,” with Little Big Town adding their harmonies to “Magnet and Steel” and John Mayer joining “Guitar Man.”
The 50th anniversary of the Eagles’ iconic album Hotel California is being celebrated in a new book.
Eagles and Hotel California: 50 Years is described as a “visual and narrative journey” exploring “the creation, legacy, and lasting cultural power of one of rock’s most iconic albums.”
It includes more than 200 photos and images, including rare studio shots, tour photography and band memorabilia. In book, rock historian Sean Egan delves into the “tumultuous” recording sessions for the album, as well as the record’s iconic songs, including the title track, “New Kid in Town” and “Life in the Fast Lane.” He also explores the band’s internal struggles and the album’s 50-year legacy.
Released in December 1976, Hotel California was the Eagles’ fifth studio album and their third #1. The album, their first with guitarist Joe Walsh, spent eight nonconsecutive weeks in the top spot and went on to become one of the bestselling albums of all time, selling over 32 million records and being certified 26-times Platinum by the RIAA.
