Ghislaine Maxwell has been transferred from a Florida prison to a lower-security facility in Texas to continue serving her 20-year sentence for helping the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said on Friday.
Maxwell&#8217;s move from FCI Tallahassee, a low-security prison, to the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, comes a week after she met with Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who said he wanted to speak with her about anyone else who may have been involved in Epstein&#8217;s crimes.
Maxwell&#8217;s lawyer, David Markus, confirmed she was moved but said he had no other comment. Spokespeople for the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The BOP classifies prison camps such as Bryan as minimum security institutions, the lowest of five security levels in the federal system. Such facilities have limited or no perimeter fencing. Low-security facilities such as FCI Tallahassee have double-fenced perimeters and higher staff-to-inmate ratios than camps, according to the bureau.
Asked why Maxwell was transferred, BOP spokesperson Donald Murphy said he could not comment on the specifics of any incarcerated individual&#8217;s prison assignment, but that the BOP determines where inmates are sent based on factors including &#8220;the level of security and supervision the inmate requires.&#8221;
Blanche&#8217;s meeting with Maxwell came as President Donald Trump faces pressure from both his base of conservative supporters and congressional Democrats to release more information from the Department of Justice&#8217;s investigations of Maxwell and Epstein.
The Department is seeking court approval to release transcripts of law enforcement officers&#8217; testimony before the grand juries that indicted Maxwell and Epstein. Such transcripts are usually kept secret. Two federal judges in Manhattan are weighing the government&#8217;s requests.
Lawyers for Maxwell, Epstein, and their alleged victims are due to share their positions on the potential unsealing with the judges in filings on Tuesday.
Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. He had pleaded not guilty.
Neither Markus nor Blanche has provided detailed accounts of what they discussed. Markus has said Maxwell would welcome relief from Trump, who has said he had not thought about whether to pardon her.
Maxwell was found guilty in 2021 of recruiting and grooming girls for Epstein to abuse. She had pleaded not guilty and is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn her conviction.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward in Washington and Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Daniel Wallis, Rod Nickel)

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Ghislaine Maxwell Moved From Florida Prison To Lower-Security Facility

CONTINUE READING

When &#8220;The Wizard of Oz at Sphere&#8221; opens off the Las Vegas Strip on Aug. 28, audiences will experience the 1939 film classic in a way its creators probably never thought possible.
Nearly 18,000 people will find themselves in the eye of the swirling tornado that rips Dorothy&#8217;s Kansas farmhouse off its moorings and hurtles it onto Munchkinland. The film has been enhanced to fill a 160,000-square-foot wall of LED panels that spans three football fields, encircling the audience and reaching 22 stories high, as 750-horsepower fans kick up wind and debris to simulate the twister.
The $104 or more per seat spectacle is more than meets the eye. &#8220;The Wizard of Oz&#8221; marks one of the most significant partnerships between a studio and a technology company to use artificial intelligence to forge a new media experience.
Reuters spoke with nine people, including principals directly involved in the project and senior entertainment industry experts, who told the story behind a project that some industry veterans see as a potential watershed moment in Hollywood&#8217;s use of AI tools.
&#8220;It definitely represents a really meaningful milestone in AI-human creative collaboration,&#8221; said Thao Nguyen, immersive arts and emerging technologies agent at CAA. &#8220;I think it will set a precedent on how we reimagine culturally significant media.&#8221;
Bringing Dorothy and the Wicked Witch to the massive Sphere, a globe-shaped entertainment venue featuring advanced technology, took two years and brought together its creative team, Warner Bros Discovery executives, Google&#8217;s DeepMind researchers, academics, visual effects artists &#8212; more than 2,000 people, in all.
The development occurred during intense apprehension over AI&#8217;s impact on jobs in Hollywood and the desire to preserve human creativity. Some visual effects companies initially contacted to work on the project declined because they were not permitted to work with AI at the time.
&#8216;YOU&#8217;RE TOAST!&#8217;
Getting here took the blessing of Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav, his studio chiefs and lawyers who established guidelines for using AI. &#8220;Wizard of Oz at Sphere&#8221; drew upon archival materials from the film &#8212; including set blueprints, shot lists, publicity stills and film artifacts &#8212; as well as some 60 research papers to help deliver the movie in resolution representing a ten-fold improvement over previous work.
&#8220;We had to reimagine the cinematography, we had to reimagine the editing, and we had to do all of this without changing the experience,&#8221; said Oscar-winner Ben Grossmann, who oversaw the project&#8217;s visual effects. &#8220;Because if you touch anything about this sacred piece of cinema, you&#8217;re toast!&#8221;
Rather than exploiting AI to cut jobs, they sought to use it to breathe fresh life into a classic story and create new experiences with existing intellectual property.
&#8220;Hollywood embraces new technology, and everyone can&#8217;t wait to be the second one to use it,&#8221; said Buzz Hays, a veteran film producer who leads Google Cloud&#8217;s entertainment industry solutions group. &#8220;What &#8216;The Wizard of Oz&#8217; is doing for us is giving that first opportunity where people go, &#8216;Oh my god, this is not at all what I thought AI was going to be.'&#8221;
The project began in 2023 with Sphere executives discussing which project would push the technological boundaries of the venue that had already hosted U2 and Darren Aronofsky&#8217;s &#8220;Postcard from Earth.&#8221;
&#8220;The Wizard of Oz&#8221; quickly topped the list as a familiar, beloved film well-suited for the Sphere&#8217;s enormous canvas, said Carolyn Blackwood, head of Sphere Studios. It presented an opportunity to reintroduce the classic to a new generation in a way that would place them inside L. Frank Baum&#8217;s world.
Symbolically, the team chose a classic film that was a technical marvel of its time. While not the first movie to use Technicolor, &#8220;The Wizard of Oz&#8217;s&#8221; dramatic transition from sepia tones to hyper-saturated color marked a cinematic milestone.
Sphere Entertainment&#8217;s CEO James Dolan and creative collaborator Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca Film Festival co-founder and noted film producer, envisioned a more ambitious project than a mere digital remastering of a classic. Rosenthal tapped Hays to bring in Google as a technical partner.
AI &#8216;QUARANTINE ZONE&#8217;
Dolan approached Warner Bros Discovery CEO Zaslav, a friend and business partner from the early days of cable TV, to propose bringing &#8220;Oz&#8221; to the Sphere. &#8220;I had just been to the Sphere with a friend and was really blown away,&#8221; said Zaslav, adding that Dolan and Rosenthal also won over his studio chiefs, &#8220;who loved the idea. It&#8217;s an example of the great IP we own at Warner Bros.&#8221;
Before turning over one of the world&#8217;s most important entertainment properties, Warner Bros set strict ground rules. Google could train its generative AI models on each major actor to reproduce their performances, but the data would remain the studio&#8217;s property. None of the &#8220;Oz&#8221; training data would be incorporated into Google&#8217;s public AI models.
&#8220;One of the things critical to getting this project started was creating a safe place for experimentation,&#8221; said Grossmann. &#8220;Warner Brothers and Google and the Sphere created an environment where they said, &#8216;We don&#8217;t necessarily know how it&#8217;s going to end, but we&#8217;re going to create a little quarantine zone here.'&#8221;
The visual effects team initially tried enlarging images using CGI, which would have created photorealistic animated versions of the characters. That approach was rejected because it would violate the integrity of the original performances.
&#8220;AI was effectively a last resort, because we couldn&#8217;t really do it any other way,&#8221; said Grossmann, whose Los Angeles studio, Magnopus, worked on such photo-realistic computer-animated films as Disney’s “The Lion King.”
AI enhanced the resolution of tiny celluloid frames from 1939 to ultra-high-definition images. It restored details &#8212; like freckles on Dorothy&#8217;s face or burlap texture on Scarecrow&#8217;s face &#8212; obscured by Technicolor&#8217;s process. AI also helped &#8220;outpaint&#8221; on-screen images to fill gaps created by camera cuts or framing, as when it took a close-up of the Tin Man chopping a door of the Witch&#8217;s castle with an axe to free Dorothy and completed the image of the woodman.
It took months of repeated fine-tuning and Google&#8217;s DeepMind braintrust to elevate consumer-grade AI tools to deliver crisp images with the Sphere&#8217;s 16K &#8220;super&#8221; resolution.
Musicians re-recorded the entire film score on the original sound stage to take advantage of the venue&#8217;s 167,000 speakers. The vocal performances of Judy Garland and other actors remain unaltered.
FLYING MONKEYS
Despite attention to authenticity, the project has attracted criticism from some cinephiles who object to altering the cherished film. Entertainment writer Joshua Rivera called it &#8220;an affront to art and nature.&#8221;
&#8220;None of these people criticizing this have seen the film or understand what we are doing,&#8221; said Rosenthal.
In a private midnight screening for Reuters, Grossmann offered a glimpse of what’s to come.
Some changes are subtle, as when Uncle Henry stands by the front door while neighbor Almira Gulch demands Toto. AI places the performer, who spends much of his time out of view, back into frame, stitching together a wider view to fill the Sphere&#8217;s expansive viewing plane.
Other changes aim to realize the filmmakers&#8217; vision in ways that weren&#8217;t technically feasible 86 years ago. As Dorothy and friends encounter the Wizard in the Emerald Throne Room, a 200-foot-high green head looms over the audience, eyes bulging and voice booming, creating a more imposing depiction than the original image of an actor in green makeup projected on smoke.
&#8220;Whenever we made a change, it was because we wanted the audience to experience what Dorothy was experiencing directly,&#8221; said Grossmann. &#8220;We completed something filmmakers were intending to do but were limited by 1939&#8217;s tools .
Coordinated physical effects add another dimension. Flying monkeys will swoop into the Sphere as 16-foot-long helium-filled simians steered by drone operators, one of many Four-D effects.
The result is an amalgam of cinema, live production, and experiential VR. &#8220;I think that&#8217;s going to change the way people think about entertainment and experience,&#8221; Grossmann said.
(Written by Dawn Chmielewski; Editing by Anna Driver and Ken Li)

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Hollywood’s Biggest AI Debut? Las Vegas Sphere’s ‘Wizard Of Oz’

The European Commission will keep pressing for a preferential tariff for wine and spirits exports to the U.S. that would spare the sector the 15% rate applied on most items under the EU-U.S. trade deal, the EU&#8217;s trade commissioner said on Thursday.
&#8220;This one we didn&#8217;t get in. But I can tell you that there is clear commitment from the European Commission to put it on the table,&#8221; Maros Sefcovic said when asked if a preferential rate for the sector had been secured.
Sefcovic spoke after the European Union and the U.S. detailed commitments made in the deal reached last month, which includes a 15% U.S. tariff on most imports from the bloc, including autos, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber.
The same rate also applies to EU wine and spirits exports, despite industry efforts to get a lower, or even zero rate.
That means U.S. buyers of French Champagne, Irish whiskey, and Italian Prosecco could face significant price rises, with the tariffs impacting some $10 billion worth of alcoholic beverage imports each year, analysts say.
Brands affected include Diageo&#8217;s Guinness beer and Pernod Ricard&#8217;s Jameson Irish whiskey.
The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, an industry group representing spirits producers and marketers, has called for permanent zero tariffs by both sides and expressed disappointment that no preferential rate had been agreed.
&#8220;Without a permanent return to zero-for-zero tariffs on spirits, American distillers do not have the certainty to plan for future export and job growth without the fear of retaliatory tariffs returning,&#8221; it said.
It added that it was &#8220;determined to continue engaging with the Trump administration to urge for additional negotiations&#8221;.
That message was echoed by Herve Dumesny, director general of European industry group spiritsEUROPE.
&#8220;We urge both sides to remain at the negotiating table and deliver a swift, full return to zero-for-zero,&#8221; Dumesny said.
&#8220;This means reaffirming the support for our sector across the Atlantic by removing U.S. tariffs on EU spirits and lifting any suspended EU retaliatory measures on U.S. products.&#8221;
The EU announced a six-month suspension of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports, including distilled spirits and wine, on August 5, according to the U.S. spirits council.
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Charlotte Van Campenhout; Editing by Benoit Van Overstraeten, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Helen Popper)

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EU Still Seeking Lower U.S. Tariff For Wine And Spirits, Says Trade Commissioner

BERLIN/MILAN (Reuters) -A Ukrainian man was arrested at a holiday bungalow in Italy on suspicion of coordinating attacks on three Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022, officials said on Thursday, a breakthrough in an episode that sharpened tensions between Russia and the West.
Described by both Moscow and the West as an act of sabotage, the explosions largely severed Russian gas supplies to Europe, prompting a major escalation in the Ukraine conflict and squeezing energy supplies on the continent. No one has taken responsibility for the blasts and Ukraine has denied any role.
The arrest comes just as Kyiv is engaged in fraught diplomatic discussions with the United States over how to end the war in Ukraine without giving away major concessions and swathes of its own territory to Russia.
&#8220;Politically we are firmly on Ukraine&#8217;s side and will continue to be so,&#8221; said Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig when asked if the arrest would affect Berlin&#8217;s ties to Kyiv. &#8220;What is important for me is that Germany is a country of law, and crimes in our jurisdiction are fully investigated.&#8221;
The suspect, identified only as Serhii K. under German privacy laws, was part of a group of people who planted devices on the pipelines near the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, a statement from the prosecutor&#8217;s office said.
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He and his accomplices had set off from Rostock on Germany&#8217;s northeastern coast in a sailing yacht to carry out the attack, it said. The vessel had been rented from a German company with the help of forged identity documents via middlemen, it added.
Authorities acted on a European arrest warrant for the suspect, who faces charges of collusion to cause an explosion, anti-constitutional sabotage and destruction of important structures.
An official in the Ukrainian president&#8217;s office said he could not comment as it was not clear who had been arrested. The official reiterated Ukraine&#8217;s denial of any role in the blasts.
Successive Ukrainian governments have seen the pipelines as a symbol of, and vehicle for, Russia&#8217;s hold over European energy supplies that Kyiv argued made it hard to act against Moscow ever since Russia&#8217;s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
FORMER UKRAINIAN OFFICER?
The Wall Street Journal reported that the suspect was a retired captain in Ukraine’s armed forces and previously served in Ukraine’s security service SBU, as well as in an elite unit that defended Kyiv in the early months of Russia&#8217;s full-scale invasion in 2022.
The officer purportedly headed a team of two soldiers and four civilian divers covertly recruited by a special Ukrainian military unit to lay explosives that damaged the undersea pipelines, the WSJ said, citing investigators.
German prosecutors declined to comment on the WSJ report.
Carabinieri officers arrested the suspect overnight in San Clemente on Italy&#8217;s Adriatic coast, where he was supposed to spend a few days with his family.
&#8220;Once his presence had been verified, the Carabinieri surrounded the bungalow and launched a raid, during which the man surrendered without resistance,&#8221; a statement by the Carabinieri said, adding the suspect was 49 years old.
A police official told Reuters the suspect was arrested because, when providing documents at a hotel check-in, an alert flagging he was wanted popped up at the police headquarters, which dispatched a Carabinieri police patrol.
In September 2022, one of the two lines of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was damaged by mysterious blasts, along with both lines of Nord Stream 1 that carried Russian gas to Europe.
Moscow, without providing evidence, blamed Western sabotage for the blasts, which cut off most Russian gas supplies to the lucrative European market. The U.S. denied having anything to do with the attacks.
The Washington Post and Germany&#8217;s Der Spiegel magazine have previously said the team that carried out the attack was put together by a former Ukrainian intelligence officer, who denied involvement.
In January 2023, Germany raided a ship that it said may have been used to transport explosives and told the United Nations it believed trained divers could have attached devices to the pipelines at about 70 to 80 metres deep.
The boat, leased in Germany via a Poland-registered company, contained traces of octogen, the same explosive that was found at the underwater blast sites, according to the investigations by Germany, Denmark and Sweden.
Russia&#8217;s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered Europe&#8217;s deadliest conflict in 80 years, in which analysts say more than 1 million people have been killed or injured.
(Reporting by Rachel More, Philippe LeroyBeaulieu, Sarah Marsh, Giulio Piovaccari, Gavin Jones, Thomas Escritt, Tom Balmforth, Stine Jacobsen; writing by Matthias WilliamsEditing by Gareth Jones and Philippa Fletcher)

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Ukrainian Man Arrested For Nord Stream Attacks Heightens Tensions Between Russia And The West

KYIV (Reuters) -Russia targeted a U.S.-founded electronics manufacturer near Ukraine&#8217;s border with the European Union in a major air attack on Thursday as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sought U.S. support to bring Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.
The overnight attack, which included 574 drones and 40 missiles, was one of the largest of Russia&#8217;s full-scale invasion of its neighbour, now in its fourth year.
One person was killed and 22 were wounded, most of them in the attack that damaged storage facilities at the electronics manufacturer in Ukraine&#8217;s far-Western Zakarpattia region, authorities said.
&#8220;It was a regular civilian business, supported by American investment, producing everyday items like coffee machines. And yet, it was also a target for the Russians,&#8221; Zelenskiy wrote on X.
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&#8220;This is very telling.&#8221;
Mukachevo mayor Andriy Baloha said the damaged enterprise belonged to the U.S.-listed company Flex Ltd. The corporate headquarters of the company, a global technology, supply chain and advanced manufacturing solutions partner, is in Austin, Texas and its registered office is in Singapore.
The company employed thousands of the area&#8217;s residents, Baloha said. Flex, which grew from a family firm founded in Silicon Valley in 1969, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Ukraine&#8217;s western city of Lviv, the attack killed one person, wounded three others and damaged 26 homes, said Governor Maksym Kozytskyi. Authorities in southeastern Ukraine&#8217;s Dnipropetrovsk region also reported damage to businesses, homes and gas lines. Two industry sources told Reuters a key gas pumping facility had been attacked, without giving a location.
Russia said Putin had repeatedly said he was ready to meet Zelenskiy but that Ukraine was trying to undermine Trump&#8217;s efforts to resolve the conflict and its leader was illegitimate.
The defence ministry in Moscow said it had struck Ukrainian energy and airfield infrastructure as well as military industrial facilities overnight, and captured another frontline village &#8211; Oleksandro-Shultyne, Russian news agency RIA reported. Ukraine said it had hit a Russian oil refinery, a drone warehouse and a fuel base.
Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports.
SECURITY TALKS
U.S. President Donald Trump met both Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putin over the past week in pursuit of a diplomatic end to the fighting but has acknowledged that his Russian counterpart may not want to make a deal. Zelenskiy urged Trump to react firmly if that was the case.
&#8220;We are ready. But what if the Russians are not ready?&#8221; he said in comments released on Thursday. &#8220;If the Russians are not ready, we would like to see a strong reaction from the United States.&#8221;
U.S. and European military planners have begun exploring post-conflict security guarantees for Ukraine, according to U.S. officials and sources, but the path to peace remained uncertain.
A defence ministry source in Turkey, which has opposed sanctions on Russia while also giving military help to Ukraine and joining a &#8220;Coalition of the Willing&#8221; to help it with post-conflict security, said peace was still far off.
&#8220;It is necessary to first secure a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, then determine the framework of a mission with a clear mandate, and clarify the extent to which each country will contribute,&#8221; the Turkish source said on condition of anonymity.
The Kremlin said Putin had discussed Ukraine with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday, when Moscow also said attempts to resolve security issues without Russian involvement were a &#8220;road to nowhere&#8221;.
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was ready for an honest talk about security guarantees for Ukraine and accused Ukraine&#8217;s European backers of &#8216;adventurism&#8217; by excluding Moscow from their discussions.
Russia, which denies targeting civilians, has used missiles and drones to strike Ukrainian towns and cities far from the front lines throughout the war.
Thousands of civilians, the vast majority of them Ukrainian, have been killed since Moscow&#8217;s full-scale invasion of February 2022. More than a million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are estimated to have been killed or wounded.
(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Tomasz Janowski, Philippa Fletcher)
&nbsp;

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Russia Slams Ukraine In Massive Strikes, Blames Kyiv For Blocking Peace Talks

ATMEH, Syria (Reuters) -A pre-dawn U.S. military raid in northwestern Syria early on Wednesday targeted and killed a senior member of the Islamic State group, a U.S. official told Reuters.
It was the second known raid in northern Syria by U.S. troops since former President Bashar al-Assad was ousted in December. The Islamist-led government that replaced him has pledged to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State and is part of an anti-ISIS alliance that includes the U.S.-led coalition fighting the group.
The U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the raid killed a senior ISIS member who was seen as a candidate to be the leader of ISIS in Syria.
No U.S. troops were killed or injured in the raid, the official added.
A Syrian security source and Syria&#8217;s state-owned Al-Ikhbariya said the target was killed as he tried to escape.
Another Syrian source said the target was an Iraqi national and was married to a French national. It was not immediately clear what happened to his wife.
The Pentagon did not immediately have any public comment on the reports.
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The operation began at around 2 a.m. (1100 GMT), according to the Syrian security sources and neighbours in the town of Atmeh, in Idlib province.
Helicopters and drones provided air cover, one Syrian security source and residents said. Local Syrian forces set up a cordon around the neighbourhood, but U.S. forces conducted the actual raid, the second security source said.
Abdelqader al-Sheikh, a neighbour, said he was up late with his son and heard a noise in the yard next door.
&#8220;I called out, &#8216;Who are you?&#8217; and they started speaking to me in English, telling me to put my hands up,&#8221; Sheikh told Reuters.
He said the armed forces stayed on the roofs of surrounding houses for the next two hours and that he could hear someone nearby speaking Arabic in an Iraqi accent.
In July, the Pentagon said its forces had conducted a raid in Aleppo province resulting in the death of a senior Islamic State leader and his two adult Islamic State-affiliated sons.
Idlib has been a hiding spot for senior Islamic State figures for years. U.S. forces killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the village of Barisha in Idlib province in 2019 and his successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi, in Atmeh in 2022.
(Reporting by Karam al-Masri in Atmeh, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Idrees AliWriting by Maya GebeilyEditing by Frances Kerry, Rod Nickel)

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U.S. Troops Take Down Senior ISIS Terrorist In Syria, Official Says

(Reuters) — Hurricane Erin, churning north in the Atlantic hundreds of miles offshore, is expected to trigger a dangerous storm surge and tropical storm conditions on Wednesday along North Carolina’s Outer Banks and other stretches of the U.S. East Coast.
The National Hurricane Center warned that roads in the low-lying barrier islands may become impassable, with waves as high as 20 feet crashing ashore. The heavy surf is likely to result in significant beach erosion, it said in its 8 a.m. EDT update.
North Carolina Governor Josh Stein declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, freeing up state money and manpower to help during the storm and its aftermath.
Tropical storm and storm-surge warnings are in place for other parts of the North Carolina coastline.
Earlier in the week, the coastal counties of Dare and Hyde — which encompass most of the Outer Banks — ordered residents and tourists to evacuate the vulnerable Ocracoke and Hatteras islands, whose populations swell during the summer months.
Local media reported that ferries took more than 2,220 people off Ocracoke, with the final sailing scheduled for 11 a.m. on Wednesday. Ferries to Hatteras will keep operating as long as conditions allow, ABC News affiliate WCTI reported.
But Chris Styron, manager of the Pony Island Inn on Ocracoke, is ignoring the evacuation orders and staying to watch over the 50-room hotel.
&#8220;We&#8217;re used to storms like this,&#8221; Styron said. &#8220;I&#8217;m born and raised here. We&#8217;re not really worried — it&#8217;s so far offshore.&#8221;
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The eye of Erin, rated as a Category 2 storm with sustained winds of 100 mph (155 km/h), was expected to move midway between the U.S. East Coast and Bermuda on Wednesday and Thursday as it traveled northward, the NHC said. That trajectory will keep the worst of its winds offshore.
Tropical-storm-force winds extend up to 265 miles (426 km) from the storm’s center, with hurricane-force winds extending for 90 miles.
Even so, the NHC warned beachgoers along most of the East Coast to stay out of the water because of &#8220;life-threatening surf and rip currents.&#8221;
Along the New Jersey shore, swimming and other water activities were prohibited on beaches from Cape May north to Sandy Hook, with high surf and rip current warnings in effect into Friday, the NWS said. Coastal flooding is expected to peak during high tide on Thursday.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams ordered all city public beaches — including Coney Island and Brighton Beach — to close on Wednesday and Thursday.
Fortunately, temperatures in New York were expected to be seasonably cool on Wednesday and Thursday, with highs only reaching 70°F, well below the average of 82°F.
Erin, the fifth named storm of the 2025 Atlantic season and the first to attain hurricane status, had strengthened to a Category 5 storm. The last Atlantic storm to reach that intensity was Hurricane Milton in October 2024.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Frank McGurty and Mark Porter)

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Hurricane Erin Threatens North Carolina’s Outer Banks With Storm Surge

News

Ghislaine Maxwell

Jeffrey Epstein

Here are 6 essential Hollywood classics that I know you'll love. Not only will they grab you with their compelling stories, but they'll move you emotionally in ways that only a great film can do.


Hour 1

The Andrew Klavan Show

Why You Need To See These 6 Classic Movies

Why You Need To See These 6 Classic Movies [Member Exclusive]

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a man will spend the next 50 years of his life in prison after shooting and killing a car thief. This case is an absurd miscarriage of justice. We’ll do a deep dive into it today. Also, is war with Venezuela brewing? We’ll discuss. And a man is left beaten and bloodied after asking a group of “teens” to quiet down in a movie theater. Plus, Cracker Barrels unveils their exciting new rebrand. Of course, as always, rebranding just means making everything ugly and generic.

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The Matt Walsh Show

Ep. 1644 - This Case Is An Insane Miscarriage Of Justice [Member Exclusive]

Get ready for college football season and check out our full 2025 College Football Playoff, and Championship predictions. Who do you think is right? Who do you think we missed? Let us know in the comments!

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Crain & Company

College Football Playoff Bracket Predictions [Member Exclusive]

Get ready for college football season and check out our full 2025 College Football Playoff, and Championship predictions. Who do you think is right? Who do you think we missed? Let us know in the comments!

College Football Playoff Bracket Predictions

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a man will spend the next 50 years of his life in prison after shooting and killing a car thief. This case is an absurd miscarriage of justice. We’ll do a deep dive into it today. Also, is war with Venezuela brewing? We’ll discuss. And a man is left beaten and bloodied after asking a group of “teens” to quiet down in a movie theater. Plus, Cracker Barrels unveils their exciting new rebrand. Of course, as always, rebranding just means making everything ugly and generic.

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Ghislaine Maxwell Moved From Florida Prison To Lower-Security Facility

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