Por Patrick Svitek, CNN

Ken Paxton superó una larga lista de escándalos en los años previos a su decisiva victoria del martes en la segunda vuelta de las primarias republicanas en Texas para el Senado de EE.UU.

A pesar de los cargos penales y las acusaciones de infidelidad, el fiscal general de Texas se ha mantenido como una figura influyente en la política estatal y ha conservado una estrecha relación con el presidente Donald Trump, quien le brindó un respaldo crucial una semana antes de la reñida segunda vuelta contra el senador John Cornyn.

Paxton a menudo ha desestimado las acusaciones en su contra como políticamente motivadas, y muchos de sus partidarios han estado dispuestos a pasarlas por alto porque les gusta la agresividad con la que impulsa una agenda conservadora como fiscal general.

Se prevé que las controversias influyan considerablemente en las elecciones generales.

El candidato demócrata, James Talarico, respondió al surgimiento de Paxton como abanderado republicano calificándolo como “El político más corrupto de Estados Unidos”.

El Comité de Campaña Senatorial Demócrata declaró que Paxton es “tan corrupto que incluso su propio partido intentó destituirlo”, en referencia al juicio político al que fue sometido por la Cámara de Representantes estatal en 2023.

Mientras tanto, los republicanos han dado a entender que esperan mantener la atención en Talarico y acosarlo con preguntas sobre temas de la guerra cultural.

En su discurso de victoria, Paxton afirmó que Talarico es el “radical más extremista que los demócratas hayan nominado jamás”.

Aquí tenéis un resumen de las controversias de Paxton:

Varios meses después de asumir el cargo de fiscal general en 2015, Paxton fue acusado de fraude bursátil grave en Texas y de haber engañado a los inversores de una empresa años atrás. De haber sido declarado culpable, se habría enfrentado a décadas de prisión.

El caso se prolongó durante casi nueve años y finalizó en marzo de 2024 con un acuerdo previo al juicio que le obligaba a realizar servicio comunitario y pagar una indemnización. Paxton no tuvo que declararse culpable ni inocente en virtud de dicho acuerdo.

En el transcurso de este proceso, Paxton también se enfrentó a una demanda civil basada en acusaciones similares presentadas por la Comisión de Bolsa y Valores de Estados Unidos. Ese caso no duró tanto y un juez lo desestimó en 2016 .

En 2020, un grupo de altos funcionarios de Paxton lo denunciaron ante el FBI, expresando su preocupación por el abuso de poder que suponía favorecer a Nate Paul, un inversor inmobiliario y donante político de Austin.

Algunos empleados de Paxton dimitieron, pero cuatro fueron despedidos y posteriormente demandaron a Paxton amparándose en la Ley de Protección de Denunciantes de Texas.

Paxton se enfrentó duramente a sus antiguos ayudantes tanto en los tribunales como en público, tachándolos de “rebeldes” y resentidos.

En 2025, un juez del tribunal de distrito del condado de Travis dictaminó que los antiguos asesores

By Yoonjung Seo, Stephanie Yang, CNN

(CNN) — A Chinese dissident has made a daring 30-hour escape from China by sea to South Korea, his fourth attempt to try and flee authorities in his homeland and reunite with his family who have been granted asylum in Canada.

Dong Guangping, a former police officer who has faced years of imprisonment and detention for his activism, fled using an inflatable boat and was picked up by South Korean Coast Guard on Monday, his lawyer and a fellow activist told CNN.

Dong – who has also been granted asylum in Canada – previously fled to Thailand and later Vietnam, only to find authorities in those countries detain and deport him back to China, sparking anguish for his family and criticism from rights groups and United Nations officials.

His arrival in South Korea could now put pressure on the administration of President Lee Jae Myung – who took office last year and has tried to reset his country’s often shaky ties with China.

South Korean Coast Guard officials confirmed fishermen spotted an unidentified boat on Monday evening and reported it to the authorities.

The Coast Guard told CNN the person on the boat was a Chinese national man in his 60s, but declined to confirm his identity under to the country’s privacy protection law.

Dong’s lawyer, Kim Joo-kwang, confirmed his identity with CNN, but said he could not share further details because the Coast Guard’s investigation is ongoing.

Sheng Xue, a Chinese Canadian activist, said she had spoken to Dong by phone since his arrival in South Korea, adding that the Coast Guard had also confirmed his identity to her.

“For a long time, we discussed ways to escape China,” she said.

Dong told Sheng he spent more than 30 hours on the water since leaving Weihai, a coastal city in China’s eastern Shandong province.

He said his boat engine broke down as he approached the coast of Taean, a county in western South Korea. He had not slept for two days and was about to faint when he arrived in South Korea’s waters, according to Sheng.

“He was lucky to get close to the shore,” she said.

Rights group Human Rights in China has called on South Korea to protect Dong and not send him back.

“For more than a decade, he has never ceased striving for liberty and reunion with his family,” the group said. “That a man nearing seventy years old was driven to cross open seas in a small inflatable boat is itself a devastating indictment of China’s human rights situation.”

CNN has reached out to the foreign ministries of both Canada and South Korea for comment as well as the Chinese embassy in Seoul.

Previous escape attempts

Dong, 68, worked as a police officer in Zhengzhou, a city in China’s central Henan province, before he was fired for co-signing a letter commemorating the 10th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

He was imprisoned for three years in 2001 for activism and arrested again in May 2014 for participating in another memorial for Tiananmen Square victims, according to Amnesty International.

In 2015, Dong fled to Thailand with his wife and daughter, where the three of them sought refugee status from the UN.

While his wife and daughter were able to move to Canada, Dong was forcibly returned to China by the Thai authorities, despite appeals from his family and rights groups at the time. He was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and released in 2019.

Barred from leaving the country, Dong tried unsuccessfully to swim to Kinmen, an island controlled by Taiwan a few kilometers away from China’s east coast.

In 2020, he was able to illegally cross into Vietnam, but was eventually arrested and again sent back by Vietnamese authorities in 2022. He was sentenced to 11 months in prison in China for “illegal border crossin

Análisis por Aaron Blake, CNN

La guerra del presidente Donald Trump con Irán no ha sido precisamente un éxito rotundo hasta el momento. Y gran parte del público estadounidense no espera que el fin del conflicto, cuando sea que ocurra, cambie esa situación.

Las encuestas de las últimas semanas muestran a un público estadounidense harto del tema.

A la gente no le gustaba la guerra desde el principio, no creen que vaya a traer muchos resultados positivos y no parecen esperar concesiones significativas, o al menos, concesiones que valgan la pena.

En resumen, no hay mucha fe en que Trump tenga una buena salida de esta guerra.

El fin de semana del Día de los Caídos ofrece algunas claves para comprender esta perspectiva.

Durante ese periodo se observaron algunas de las señales más significativas hasta la fecha de progreso real en un acuerdo para poner fin a la guerra.

Sin embargo, a medida que se filtraban los detalles, quedó claro que eran completamente inaceptables para muchos republicanos más belicistas.

Algunos de estos republicanos incluso advirtieron que el acuerdo podría dejar a Irán más fuerte que antes de la guerra.

Y si Irán mantiene su postura intransigente, no está claro qué acuerdo podría permitirle a Trump salvar las apariencias y poner fin a la guerra antes de que se convierta en un problema aún mayor para el Partido Republicano.

Varias encuestas sugieren que la gente simplemente quiere que esto termine.

Una encuesta de Fox News realizada la semana pasada mostró que solo el 39 % de los votantes registrados deseaba que las operaciones militares estadounidenses duraran “el tiempo que sea necesario para lograr los objetivos de Estados Unidos”, en comparación con el 61 % que prefería un “plazo limitado”.

De manera similar, una encuesta del New York Times-Siena College mostró que el 52 % de los votantes registrados dijeron que Estados Unidos debería poner fin a las operaciones militares incluso si no puede llegar a un acuerdo con Irán sobre su programa nuclear.

Solo el 37 % se mostró a favor de reanudar las operaciones militares si los países no logran llegar a un acuerdo sobre el programa nuclear de Irán.

Esta última encuesta y otros datos refuerzan la idea de que los estadounidenses no son precisamente optimistas respecto a un acuerdo aceptable. Al contrario, parecen propensos a mirar con escepticismo todo lo que se produzca.

Según la encuesta del Times-Siena, solo el 22 % creía que la guerra sería “muy exitosa” para eliminar el programa nuclear de Irán, un programa que, cabe recalcar, la administración Trump ya afirmó que fue “aniquilado” el verano pasado.

(Otro 18 % pensaba que sería “algo exitoso”, mientras que el 50 % esperaba que fuera un fracaso).

Asimismo, el 65 % de los estadounidenses no estaban “muy seguros” o no estaban “en absoluto seguros” de que un acuerdo para poner fin a la guerra detendría a Irán en el desarrollo de armas nucleares (lo cual ha sido la línea roja reiterada de Trump), según una encuesta del Washington Post-ABC News.

Y casi dos tercios tenían solo una confianza “moderada”, o incluso menor, en que la administración lograría sus objetivos en Irán, según una Read more

* WHAT…Northwest winds 20 to 35 mph with gusts to 45 mph expected.
Local gusts to 50 mph near Gaviota and Refugio.

* WHERE…Santa Barbara County Southwestern Coast and Santa Ynez
Mountains Western Range.

* WHEN…Until 6 AM PDT Wednesday.

* IMPACTS…Gusty winds will blow around unsecured objects. Tree
limbs could be blown down and a few power outages may result.
Winds this strong can make driving difficult, especially for high
profile vehicles. Use extra caution.

The post Wind Advisory issued May 26 at 9:18PM PDT until May 27 at 6:00AM PDT by NWS Los Angeles/Oxnard CA appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Laura Paddison, CNN

The Dead Sea (CNN) — The motorboat cut through the aquamarine water of the Dead Sea, past dazzling-white formations forged from salt crystals. Jake Ben Zaken, the boat captain, pointed to a patch of darker water nearby indicating a sinkhole beneath the seabed. These are both signs of an unfolding ecological disaster, he said.

The Dead Sea sits where Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian land meet and is a place of extremes. It’s the lowest point on the planet, around 1,400 feet below sea level. It’s also one of the world’s saltiest water bodies, nearly 10 times saltier than the ocean, which makes the water so dense people can float effortlessly on its surface.

But this unique body of water is dying. Every year it recedes around 4 feet, as the impacts of human activities and climate change take a heavy toll. Over the past five decades, its surface area has shrunk by roughly a third. As the water retreats, it’s forging a new landscape of sinkholes and salt-encrusted shorelines that is both strikingly beautiful and a haunting reminder that the Dead Sea’s future hangs in the balance.

Ben Zaken, who runs the company Salty Landscapes from Mitzpe Shalem, a settlement in the West Bank, has been taking people out onto the Dead Sea for more than 12 years. It’s given him a front row seat to the alarming changes.

His boat tours used to start from Mineral Beach, just to the south of Mitzpe Shalem, but he was forced to move when sinkholes closed it in 2015. His current location is safe for now, but the landscape is shifting fast. “Every year we get about seven and a half meters of new shoreline,” Ben Zaken said.

There are multiple plans to save the Dead Sea, but the years tick by and little happens as costs, fraught regional politics and a lack of political urgency stymie action, experts told CNN. Unless something is done, the world risks losing a unique ecosystem, they warned.

“It is a treasure,” said Peleg Gottdiener of EcoPeace Middle East, an organization of Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian environmentalists. “There’s nothing like the Dead Sea.”

The Dead Sea’s demise is human-caused.

This landlocked swath of salty water is technically a lake. Water enters from the Jordan River, which starts on the Syria-Lebanon border, flows through the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, then continues its journey south toward the Dead Sea, with Jordan on one side and Israel and the occupied West Bank on the other.

Over the decades, the Jordan River, and its main tributary the Yarmouk, have shrunk as they’ve been dammed and diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan to quench the thirst of people, crops and livestock. The river used to transport 1.3 billion cubic meters of water to the Dead Sea; that has fallen to roughly 100 million cubic meters.

The mineral extraction industry is the other major driver of decline.

In the late 1970s, the Dead Sea split into two basins, now separated by a strip of dry land. The deeper northern basin, where Ben Zaken operates his boat tours, is the natural remnant of the sea. The southern basin is artificially maintained, made up of a series of industrial evaporation pools.

Companies on the Israeli and Jordanian sides — the Dead Sea Works and the Arab Potash Company — pump water from the northern basin into the pools. The water evaporates in the sun leaving behind a mineral-rich brine, from which companies extract minerals including potash and magnesium for fertilizers and other industrial uses.

There’s another force at work too: climate change. Droughts are becoming fiercer and more prolonged, and rainfall is rarer. Even without river diversions and industry, there’s evidence climate change impacts would cause the Dead Sea to shrink, albeit far more slowly, said Yael Kiro, a geochemist at the Weizman