Visa wants to give artificial intelligence ‘agents’ your credit card

• April 30, 2025

By MATT O’BRIEN

Artificial intelligence “agents” are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf.

So far, they’re not doing much.

Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents — successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.

“We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”

Visa announced Wednesday it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers — among them U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative. Pilot projects begin Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.

The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it.

For emerging AI companies, Visa’s backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents.

The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI, though few are yet found in the real world. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models — the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarize documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that.

“The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments,” Forestell said. “You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, ‘OK, you go buy it.’

Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases.

“The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves,” Forestell said. “That’s why we started working with them.”

The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the U.S., making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant.

Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone’s digital credentials would authorize AI agents to work on a customer’s behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes.

Forestell said that doesn’t mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people — like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists — or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that “just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us,” Forestell said.

Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background.

And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit $1.21 trillion at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York.

Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to “go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B,” he said.

Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer’s consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases.

“Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer. “When we generate a recommendation — say you’re asking, ‘What are the best laptops?’ — we would know what are other transactions you’ve made and the revealed preferences from that.”

Perplexity’s chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it’s still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko says. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google’s internet browser, Chrome, if the U.S. forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.

​ Orange County Register 

Rogue rulings are a credibility crisis for our courts

• April 30, 2025

There is a major malfunction in a critical part of our federal judiciary: Activist judges at the district court level are imposing nationwide injunctions where they do not belong and demonstrating the kind of political partisanship that will deliver lasting damage to the vital credibility of the courts.

Practically every day, federal judges are contradicting the Constitution and blocking President Donald Trump from exercising his executive authority to deport criminal illegals, reduce wasteful government spending, strengthen our military, and even conduct bilateral foreign policy.

That’s why I introduced—and the Congress passed—the No Rogue Rulings Act. This bill restores the constitutional limits on judicial power by ensuring that district courts can only issue relief to the actual parties before them.

It is contrary to both statute and precedent that a single district judge can obstruct executive actions by the president of the United States and halt the policies that voters elected him to pursue. In this way, the injunctions also rob the people of their voice and deny them the due policies of their choice in a democracy.

This must stop. We are not one nation under judge.

But don’t just take my word for it. Consider the words of President Biden’s own Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar in 2024. “Universal remedies are inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts and impose a severe toll on the federal court system.” She also identified the essential imbalance of these rogue rulings: “The government must prevail in every suit to keep its policy in force, but plaintiffs can derail a federal program nationwide with just a single lower-court victory.”

I’ve said from the start that my colleagues on the other side of the political aisle should join us to end this. If it was good enough for the Biden administration only a few months ago, it should make for bipartisan policy today.

One reason why consensus used to exist about this problem is that America was more than 180 years old before a district court judge imposed the first nationwide injunction in 1963. Since then, more than 130 nationwide injunctions have been issued.

While judges have used them against presidents of both parties, the Trump administrations have been disproportionately targeted far more than any other.

A Harvard Law Review study revealed more than half of nationwide injunctions ever issued came during Trump’s first four years in office. And in only the first few weeks of the current Trump term, federal judges issued more than 20 injunctions — surpassing what George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden received in their entire terms in office.

The result? Immigration enforcement, streamlining bureaucracy, ending discrimination in education, military preparedness – virtually every major Trump policy initiative has been halted by judicial blockade.

This is neither balanced jurisprudence nor an arcane legal dispute. It is lawfare waged from the bench that is confronting the Trump Administration and making increasingly unreasonable demands.

One district judge ordered a plane carrying illegal alien gang members bound for El Salvador to turn around midair. Another instructed the commander in chief exactly who he must enlist in the military. Yet a third demanded the Trump Administration pay contractors almost $2 billion in a single weekend, even though some invoices were flagged for fraud.

There is a better way: Congress should reassert its Article I authority, clarify obvious legislative intent, and honor the Founders who conceived of the Separation of Powers and our co-equal branches of government.

The No Rogue Rulings Act will return the judiciary to its proper role, end this partisan exercise, and put democracy back in charge.

Darrell Issa represents California’s 48^th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

​ Orange County Register 

Guitarist John 5 amassed a trove of Kiss memorabilia. A lucky few can take the tour

• April 30, 2025

In a Sears department store during the summer of 1977, rock guitarist John 5 first saw the album cover that would change his life.

“My first one was ‘Love Gun,’” he says of the Kiss record display that stopped him on that shopping trip when he was 7. “I saw that – and because I loved monsters and I loved guitar – went, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’

“My mom bought me the record and that’s where it all happened,” says John 5, whose rock and roll career includes long runs as lead guitarist for acts such as Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, and currently Mötley Crüe.

SEE ALSO: 50 years later, Kiss legend Gene Simmons reflects on ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’

What happened was this: John 5 became obsessed with the hard rock band Kiss and the costumed personas of singer-bassist Gene Simmons, singer-guitarist Paul Stanley, guitarist Ace Frehley, and drummer Peter Criss.

Forty-eight years later, John 5 has compiled one of the world’s largest private collections of Kiss memorabilia, more than 2,500 pieces created from 1973 to 1983, the first decade of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band’s career.

And now, John 5 is opening the doors to his Kiss cache in May for a limited number of tours of the museum he’s calling Knights In Satan’s Service, a name that overly excitable parents in the ’70s, frightened that their kids were enamored of their kabuki-faced super-villain stage look, were certain was what the letters in the name KISS secretly stood for.

He will conduct the tours himself, offering stories and sharing memories about any piece of memorabilia in the collection, as he did on a recent day for a visiting reporter and photographer.

“You could point to anything and there’s a story about it,” John 5 says as he leads his visitors into the secured room where his collection is displayed. “And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces.”

The walls are covered in Kiss posters, mirrors, promotional signs, and special event publicity banners. In the center of the room are record store bins filled with multiples of Kiss albums from different record-pressing plants in the United States, as well as versions made for countries around the world.

Shiny glass display cases hold more treasures. The platform boots Gene Simmons wore on the Destroyer and Rock & Roll Over tours. Boxes of unopened Kiss Halloween costumes from the ’70s. The drum head from the kit seen on the cover of Kiss’s “Alive!” album. A packet of Kiss typing paper with the $1.19 price tag on its unopened shrink-wrapped plastic.

“I was obsessed with the dolls,” John 5 says as we approach a glass case filled with multiple variants of miniature Genes, Pauls, Aces, and Peters he longed for as a boy.

“I vividly remember being in Toys “R” Us looking for an Ace and a Peter,” he says. “Thumbing through all of them, going, ‘God, it’s all Gene and Paul, Gene and Paul, Gene and Paul,’ but I would find Ace and Peters every once in a while.”

We stop at the next case and point to what looks like a small black animal pelt, perhaps a piece of roadkill or a thick clump of cat hair.

John 5 laughs. “That’s … OK, true story,” he says.

But let’s come back to that in a moment.

Kiss ‘n guitars

As a boy named John Lowery growing up just outside of Detroit, John 5 says there were only two things he cared about – playing guitar, which he got serious about by the time he was 7, and following Kiss via albums, magazines, comic books, and other merchandise.

And he was very good at both things, which came together nicely when, as a middle schooler, he started to play guitar professionally in local clubs.

“My mom was so cool because she let me play clubs starting at like seventh grade,” John 5 says. “She knew I didn’t drink or smoke, so she was OK with it. She was like, ‘As long as you get up for school, you can play.’

“And I’m glad I did because it was all just experience,” he says. “You grow up fast, you know? You see all this weird stuff that happens on a Wednesday, Thursday night at one in the morning, in Detroit in seventh or eighth grade.

“I would play with grown – what I thought were grown men at the time. They were like 24, 25, and I was so little. They had to put a wig on me, a long black wig on me, because I was so little.”

Somewhat surprisingly, his earnings didn’t all go to Kiss merch.

“Talk about demystifying,” he says, when revealing what he was actually spending his hard rock-earned cash on. “What I bought with the money was – because I grew up in Grosse Pointe, which is very highfalutin – I would buy Ralph Lauren stuff, like, Polo stuff.”

After he moved to Los Angeles at 17 to work as a session guitarist, his career started to pay more than just the basic bills. So he started spending much more on his Kiss collection.

At times, in the early days poring over collectibles listings in the Penny Saver, and later on eBay, John 5 says he relied more on fate to help him find things he did not yet have in the collection.

“I was in Virginia, in a pawn shop, and I was on the phone,” he says. “I’m just talking. I’m like, ‘Yeah, dude, OK, let’s do it.’ And I went, “Wait a minute. Hold on a minute.’

“And I saw that little Kiss Pop Rock Amp” – a kids’ toy amp sold in the ’70s – “covered in dust. It hadn’t been moved in this antique store or whatever it was. It had been there a zillion years.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘This can’t be what that is,’” John 5 says of the item, which one Kiss fan site describes as “the Holy Grails” of Kiss collection, along with the Kiss record player and Kiss pinball machine. “That this is worth so much money, like 7,500 bucks, and I got it for 30 bucks.”

That’s the exception, he adds, the rare item he got for a steal.

“Because everybody knows me now,” John 5 says of his reputation as a Kiss collector. “They’re like, ‘Oh, let’s jack up the price.’ So I have people call and bid for me, because they take such advantage.”

Boy meets band

Sometime after his guitar chops brought John 5 into the rock and roll fraternity, he started to meet the Kiss members. Today, he considers them all friends, and he’s played with all of them but Gene now.

“Peter, we played ‘Georgia on My Mind’ on my record,” he says. “I played on a number of Ace’s records. He’s a good friend of mine. Played on Paul’s record. The only one I haven’t played on is Gene, and I’m close with Gene.”

Simmons, in a separate interview, said he and John 5 exchange emails frequently and see each other at different musical events.

“He’s got a lot,” Simmons says of John 5’s collection. “Probably more posters than anybody out there.

“But this is the great thing about America,” he continues. “How magical is it for John to be a kid and be a fan and collect all the stuff. And that’s appreciated; we love that.

“And then to actually become a musician and actually get to play with everybody from Roth to Mötley Crüe,” Simmons says. “And good for him. You know how he got there? Hard work.”

Simmons was actually the first member of Kiss that John 5 ever met, back in Detroit when he was about 14. It did not, he says, laughing, go as he’d hoped.

“It’s a great story, really funny,” John 5 says. “I skipped school to go meet my heroes. My friend Cool Breeze, not his real name, took me down there, and we’re waiting. I had my Polo and my khakis and penny loafers on. I had my booklet from ‘The Originals’ [a repackaging of the band’s first three albums] and Gene comes walking by.

“I was like, ‘Gene, could you sign this?’ He walked right by me. I’m a little kid. I was like, I can’t believe you just walked by. And I’m like, I’m not gonna blow this chance because I’ve got to get home.

“So I get in the elevator with him. Wouldn’t sign in the elevator, just like this. [He demonstrates Simmons with arms crossed, staring straight ahead.] The elevator door opens. He goes, ‘Do you want me to sign that?’

“I said, ‘No, it’s OK.’ True story. And he didn’t sign it.”

Years later, friendships blossomed with all of the original members, but especially with Frehley and Criss. Which brings us back to that strange black fur-like object in one of the cases.

“So Peter was here,” John 5 explains. “He goes, ‘Hey, where can I get my haircut?’ I say, ‘I’ll make an appointment,’ and his wife takes him. They come back, and Gigi goes, ‘Oh, I brought you Peter’s hair for your museum.’ I go, ‘OK!’

“So that’s Peter’s hair. How funny is that?”

Sharing treasures

The collection continues to grow steadily as John 5’s Instagram page @knightsinsatanservice, has helped fans with Kiss memorabilia to find him more easily.

Just before our tour, he’d received a package with a “Now in Stock” record-store display for Kiss and a bumper sticker advertising Kiss’s first Canadian tour. Through a complicated series of trades and negotiations, he also scored a promotion matchbook on which the cover announced the release of Kiss’s 1974 album “Hotter Than Hell.”

Asked if he has a Great White Whale, some piece of Kiss memorabilia that he’s dying to acquire, John 5 hesitates and then nods.

“Absolutely. But you have to stop recording,” he says, explaining that if his interest is known the asking price will skyrocket. “I’ll tell you what it is, but you can’t print it.”

We agree to his terms. And it really is something unique and very, very cool.

It’s difficult, of course, for him to pick a favorite out of the collection, but when pressed to do so, he finally offers up a pair of the rarest items he owns. Simmons’ stage costume from 1974, the only one believed to exist, is one. And a fan-made flag, which gave the Kiss fandom its name.

“When Kiss was starting out, these kids in the photo here were holding this flag outside of a radio station, demanding they play Kiss,” John 5 says. “They called themselves the Kiss Army. Kiss didn’t think of the Kiss Army, these two kids did.

“Kiss heard about it and invited them to the show, and said, ‘We like that name. We want to use the name,’” John 5 says. “They’re like, ‘Great!’ So this is the original banner that they did.”

It’s that purity of the passion of the fans that convinced John 5, who has always been a Kiss fan first and foremost, to open his museum for limited tours in May.

“There’s some great collectors out there and they won’t even send me a picture of the stuff,” he says. “That’s how rare and exclusive this stuff is. I was like, ‘God, that seems so odd to me.’

So I thought, hmm, OK – and these people are dying to see this stuff, you know?” John 5 says. “Meet and greets last like 30 seconds. I said I’m going to do a museum and I’m going to spend time with the people, talking about it.

“These are people that really want to come and they’re coming from all over the world. I thought, ‘Would I like to do that?’ And I absolutely would. I would totally want to do it if there was like a Rolling Stones museum, and, I don’t know, the guy from whatever band is showing up. I’d be like, ‘That’d be rad. I’d like to see that.’ It’s that simple.

“It has taken a lifetime to do this,” he says. “So why not share it and make some people happy?”

Knights In Satan’s Service museum tour

What: A two-hour tour of rock guitarist John 5’s collection of Kiss memorabilia. Only six people are allowed per tour. All tours will be led by John 5.

When: May 5-9, May 12-16, May 19-23 and May 27-30, with a possible expansion of future dates.

How much: $500

For more: See John5store.com.

​ Orange County Register 

50 years later, Kiss legend Gene Simmons reflects on ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’

• April 30, 2025

As Gene Simmons sat in his dressing room at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 2, 2023, the final night of the End of the Road Tour, the singer-bassist of Kiss cleaned off his Demon makeup for the last time.

“I thought, ‘You know, I’m not going to get on stage for a while,’” Simmons says on a call from his Malibu home. “Just relax.”

Only one problem. “I can’t, you know,” he says. “It’s, you can’t stay away from it. It’s a great feeling. I’ve played the Superdome and the Coliseum, Dodger Stadium and Anaheim Stadium and the Whisky. All sizes, all shapes.”

SEE ALSO: Guitarist John 5 amassed a trove of Kiss memorabilia. A lucky few can take the tour

Then he remembered that while Kiss might be done with touring after four years of farewell shows interrupted by the pandemic, the Gene Simmons Band, well, that’s a whole other thing.

Five months later, Simmons was back on the road, playing loose solo shows with musicians he’s known for years, the setlist all drawn from Kiss songs, most of them ones he sang lead on, and covers of songs such as Motörhead’s “Ace Of Spades,” the Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing,” Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” and Van Halen’s “House Of Pain.”

“It’s very strange, this love-hate relationship with touring and being on stage,” Simmons says. “When you tour your butt off, you can’t wait to get back home and do nothing. I mean, I have other things that keep me busy.

“But when you’re away from it, that feeling, that magic that happens on stage, there is no other feeling like that,” he says. “It’s not like being on a baseball team or in a boxing ring or even being the Pope.

“What we can do (in the Gene Simmons Band) that Kiss could never do is if I get a call, somebody says, ‘You want to play a gig tomorrow night at this place?’” Simmons says. “I go, ‘Sure!’ Just go to the airport with my bass and my guitar pick. It’s so easy. You just go, and it’s so much fun.”

When we spoke, Simmons had been preparing for a handful of Southern California shows that were subsequently postponed. New dates have not yet been announced.

He and Kiss co-founder, singer-guitarist Paul Stanley, later announced they will be in Las Vegas in November for the first official Kiss Army fan convention in 30 years. They’ll be joined by Kiss guitarist Tommy Thayer for a performance without the iconic Kiss makeup or drummer Eric Singer.

Kiss is also celebrating several significant 50th anniversaries this year. The albums “Dressed To Kill” and “Alive!” both arrived in 1975, as did the single “Rock and Roll All Nite,” which became Kiss’s signature song and the one that often closed the band’s concerts.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Simmons talked about how “Dressed To Kill” and “Rock and Roll All Nite” were created, why he finds it hard to relax, and what his Hungarian immigrant mother taught him about work.

Q: There’s a Kiss audio tour, a walking tour of sites in New York City for the 50th anniversary of “Dressed To Kill.” How’d that come together?

A: This was put together by Pophouse, the company that bought our underlying rights, and they’re magnificent. They’re putting together the event that’s going to be an experience called Kiss Avatars. That’s all I’ll say about it, but in about two years, people will experience something they’ve never seen or heard before.

It’s like at the beginning of the 20th century, if somebody put a pair of virtual reality glasses on you, you would think it was magic. You wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.

So they were the ones who put (the audio tour) together. They start at 10 E. 23rd St., where the band was put together at our loft. There are various stops in New York, including where the “Dressed To Kill” album cover was shot, a few blocks away on the street in New York, to Electric Lady Studios, where we recorded our first demo.

Q: What memories stand out about making “Dressed To Kill” at Electric Lady?

A: We didn’t know anything about the recording process. In those days, we were writing, recording and releasing two albums a year. I remember I wrote “Calling Dr. Love” on a bus going from Indianapolis to, oh my goodness, another city. Before we left, I was watching an old black-and-white Three Stooges movie. They were idiots, knuckleheads in the hospital playing doctors: “Calling Dr. Howard! Calling Dr. Howard!”

For some reason, Dr. Love popped out of my mouth. Then I rhymed it: “Because I’ve got the cure you’re thinking of.” The song wrote itself on the bus, traveling with the road crew, because in those days I didn’t want to fly, so I traveled with the road crew after they packed up the gear.

Q: All that road work paid off when you put out “Alive!” and the live “Rock and Roll All Nite,” which was first on “Dressed To Kill.” Suddenly, that’s a massive hit.

A: We were noticing a disconnect between album sales because we didn’t have a lot of hit singles. We didn’t try to write hit singles. It was about live, turning up the guitars and a raucous shaking of the heavens. But at the same time, we were breaking records all over the place with attendance. People were kind of like, “You gotta see this band!”

So the idea we came up with, ‘Why don’t we do a souvenir of our tours?” Like if you were there, a live album, double live album, with a tour book, photos, and stuff like that. That thing flew off the shelves like nothing you’ve ever seen. All of a sudden, we were playing stadiums.

Q: Tell me about writing “Rock and Roll All Nite” for “Dressed To Kill,” and later “Alive!” where it took off.

A: Neil Bogart [head of Casablanca Records] decided he wanted to produce “Dressed To Kill.” He was a record company president, didn’t know how to produce, was close to being tone deaf, but he knew a hit when he heard it.

And when Bogart entered the studio, he said, “What you guys need is an anthem.” We had no clue what that meant. What’s an anthem? He goes, ‘You know, kind of like a song you sing at a football game that says what you believe in.”

We’re touring while we’re discussing songs and everything, and it’s time to go to the studio. I turned to Paul and I go, ‘You know, I’ve got this song called “Drive Me Wild” about a hot car. “You drive me wild, I’ll drive you crazy.” Paul thought about the anthem thing and says, “That’s great, let’s finish that off. But it doesn’t say what we believe in.”

So he came back the next day and says, “What do you think of this? ‘I wanna rock and roll all night, and party every day,’” which is exactly what the band is all about. Then, like Frankenstein, we put the two pieces together and presto, you got a song.

Q: I’m sure as soon as you started playing that live you could see the crowd’s reaction.

A: Not only that, but we noticed that everybody wanted to sing along. So we changed the arrangement so that the guitars stopped. The song kept going just with drums so that the fans could sing along.

Q: One of the things that’s always struck me is your strong entrepreneurial spirit. You’ve always got some kind of business action going on. You’re not just hanging out at your house in Malibu.

A: Hanging out at any one of the six houses. I don’t say that to be, you know, cocky and boastful. It is a magical thing what Kiss has enabled us to have this magical lifestyle.

But truly, I often wonder what people do on vacations and weekends. What do you do when you’re not doing something? It sounds like wordplay. What do you do when there’s nothing to do? You eat, you take a crap, you watch “I Love Lucy” reruns. And then what?

If God gave you 24 hours of life, I would hope you got off your lazy butt, worked hard, helped somebody, did a little philanthropy, kissed a pretty girl. Do something! Leave a mark on the planet that you were here. Otherwise, time just passes and because we’re all just passing through at some point, you’re not going to be here. What did you do with your life?

Q: Where do you think that came from? Immigrating to this country from Israel after your mother escaped the Nazis in Europe?

A: My mother has always been the moral compass and the wisest person. Not the most educated person. She spoke in a very heavy Hungarian accent. Always wanted to know, “How is the orchestra?”

Point being that at 14 she survived Nazi Germany’s concentration camps while the rest of our family was all wiped out. The only thing she knew was how to survive. How do you survive? You work hard. So the work ethic.

My mother was a single mother. My father left us when I was about 6 years old, so all I ever saw was my mother getting up at the crack of dawn and coming home late at night. Six days a week, not five. But because my mother worked hard, we had food on the table and a roof over our head. I never forgot that.

Q: What did your mother do? Her job?

A: She worked at a sweatshop factory, which was illegal, that didn’t even have air conditioning or heat. In the winters, it was freezing, in the summer, boiling hot. She was a button and buttonhole maker. She’d meticulously take a button to the Singer sewing machine and then put the buttons on a coat, six buttons, and then hang the coat back on a different rack.

You make a half penny a button. No other things. No pregnancy leave, no holidays, no nothing. If she worked six days a week, she might make $100 a week.

Q: Oh, that’s a lot of buttons.

A: America was built by that work ethic. Before the infrastructure, before skyscrapers, before any of that stuff, America was built by people who worked all the time.

​ Orange County Register 

Feds charge alleged white supremacist over 2019 arson at Tennessee school that trained Rosa Parks

• April 30, 2025

By TRAVIS LOLLER and AARON MORRISON

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A suspect whom authorities have linked to white supremacist movements has been arrested in the March 2019 fire that destroyed an office at a storied Tennessee social justice center.

Regan Prater was arrested last Thursday and charged with one count of arson.

An affidavit filed in federal court in East Tennessee says Prater’s posts in several group chats affiliated with white supremacist organizations connect him to the blaze at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market. In one private message, a witness who sent screenshots to the FBI asked a person authorities believe is Prater whether he set the fire.

“I’m not admitting anything,” the person using the screen name “Rooster” wrote. But he later went on to describe exactly how the fire was set with “a sparkler bomb and some Napalm.”

A white-power symbol was spray-painted on the pavement near the site of the fire. The affidavit describes it as a “triple cross” and says it was also found on one of the firearms used by a shooter who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, about two weeks before the Highlander fire.

Prater was previously sentenced to five years in federal prison for setting another fire in June 2019 at an adult video and novelty store in East Tennessee. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay $106,000 in restitution in that case. At the scene of that fire, investigators found a cellphone they later determined belonged to Prater. The phone included a short video showing a person inside the store lighting an accelerant, according to the affidavit.

The federal public defender listed as representing Prater did not respond to an email and phone message requesting comment.

Yearslong investigation sparked worries for Highlander’s leaders

The blaze at Highlander broke out in the early morning of March 29, 2019. No one was injured. The building that burned was part of a complex and it housed decades’ worth of irreplaceable documents, artifacts, speeches and other materials from different eras including the Civil Rights Movement.

In an interview, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a former co-executive director at Highlander, recalled arriving at the scene of the fire to discover some priceless items from the administrative office still smoldering.

“Every time the wind blew, we would see what was left of it go up in flames again, for weeks,” Woodard Henderson said.

The trauma of the ordeal was compounded by a feeling that, despite early signs that the culprit had ties to white supremacist movements, authorities were opaque about the investigation, Woodard Henderson said.

“We were told that it was like finding a needle in the haystack to prove who did it — that that’s in fact the point of an arson,” she said. “You’ve got to remember this was 2019, so Donald Trump was still in his first presidency. Frankly, for years, we didn’t get any updates.”

A week after the incident, Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, of Memphis, called for a federal probe. He also called on more government funding to counter an uptick in hate crimes and white nationalism nationwide.

Woodard Henderson said authorities informed Highlander’s leaders in 2022 that they were indeed victims of a hate-motivated attack.

Rosa Parks, John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. had ties to the center

Highlander is known as a place where Civil Rights icons such as Rosa Parks and John Lewis received training. Parks attended a workshop there on integration in 1955, about six months before she famously refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She always credited Highlander with helping her become a more determined activist.

Parks returned to Highlander two years later with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the school’s 25th anniversary celebration, where King gave a keynote address on achieving freedom and equality through nonviolence.

First established in Monteagle in 1932 as a center for union organizing, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was among its early supporters.

Highlander’s co-founder and longtime leader, Myles Horton, a white man, created a place that was unique in the Jim Crow South, where activists white and Black could build and strengthen alliances. In his memoir, Congressman Lewis wrote of how eye-opening being at Highlander was.

Highlander “was the first time in my life that I saw black people and white people not just sitting down together at long tables for shared meals, but also cleaning up together afterward, doing the dishes together, gathering together late into the night in deep discussion,” he wrote.

“That paved the way for Highlander’s work around the Civil Rights Movement, or the Black Freedom Struggle, as we should rightly call it,” said Allyn Steele, a co-executive director of Highlander.

Highlander turns 93 this year and, six years past the fire, it expects to complete a rebuild of its administrative office, Steele said.

Woodard Henderson said the arson attack on the center has never deterred it from its mission.

“I think if their goal was to break our spirit, they failed miserably,” she said. “If anything, it reminded us that there’s a collective responsibility in our movements to keep each other safe.”

Morrison reported from New York City. Associated Press writer Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed to this report.

​ Orange County Register 

Kuwait frees 10 more Americans in the second release in as many months

• April 30, 2025

By ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Kuwait has released an additional 10 American detainees, bringing to nearly two dozen the total number freed by the country in the past two months, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Taken together, Kuwait’s pardons of 23 Americans since March — done as a goodwill gesture by the U.S. ally — amounted to the largest release of U.S. citizens by a single foreign country in years.

The prisoners include military contractors and veterans held on drug charges and other offenses by the small, oil-rich nation. One detainee was said by supporters to have been coerced into signing a false confession and endured physical violence and threats against his wife and daughter.

Ten others were released on March 12, weeks after a visit to Kuwait by Adam Boehler, who is serving as the Trump administration’s envoy for hostage affairs.

“We flew out, we sat down with the Kuwaitis, and they said, listen, no one’s ever asked before at this level” for the release of the Americans, Boehler told the AP.

The releases were not done as part of a swap and the U.S. was not asked to give up anything in return.

“They’ve been extremely responsive, and their view is the United States is a huge ally. They know it’s a priority for (President Donald Trump) to bring Americans home,” Boehler said. “I credit it to the Kuwaiti understanding that we’ve stood up for them historically and they know that these things are important for the president.”

The Americans “maintain their innocence, and it’s important to note none of these cases had an identified victim, and all of them were built on supposed confessions taken in Arabic without translation,” according to a statement from Jonathan Franks, a private consultant working on cases involving American hostages and detainees who represented nine of the 10 people released Wednesday. He spent weeks in the country trying to negotiate the releases.

Kuwait is considered a major non-NATO ally of the U.S. The U.S. and Kuwait have had a close military partnership since America launched the 1991 Gulf War to expel Iraqi troops after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, with some 13,500 American troops stationed in Kuwait at Camp Arifjan and Ali al-Salem Air Base.

But Kuwait also has detained many American military contractors on drug charges, in some cases for years. Their families have alleged that their loved ones faced abuse while imprisoned in a country that bans alcohol and has strict laws regarding drugs.

Others have criticized Kuwaiti police for bringing trumped-up charges and manufacturing evidence used against them — allegations never acknowledged by the autocratic nation ruled by a hereditary emir.

Among those freed Wednesday was Tony Holden, an HVAC technician. He was working as a defense contractor in support of Camp Arifjan at the time of his November 2022 arrest, when his family and supporters allege he was “set up by corrupt Kuwaiti police looking to earn bonuses.”

His supporters say his wife and daughter were physically threatened, that he was coerced into signing a written confession in Arabic and was charged with drug possession despite testing negative in a drug test and abstaining for religious reasons from drug and alcohol use.

“Tony was an innocent man when he was arrested, and he remains an innocent man today,” says a website that was established to support him and advocate for his release.

Added Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “We celebrate his release and return to the United States.”

A minor is also being released in the coming days but is expected to remain in Kuwait.

​ Orange County Register 

Iran’s foreign minister says next round of talks with US over nuclear program will be held in Rome

• April 30, 2025

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran said Wednesday the next round of negotiations over its rapidly advancing nuclear program it will have with the United States will be in Rome on Saturday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made the comment on the sidelines of a Cabinet meeting, adding that Iran also anticipated having a meeting Friday with France, Germany and the United Kingdom to discuss the talks.

The talks with the U.S. again will be mediated by Oman. The sultanate has hosted two rounds of talks in Oman’s capital, Muscat, and one round at its embassy in Rome.

The talks seek to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of some of the crushing economic sanctions the U.S. has imposed on the Islamic Republic closing in on a half-century of enmity.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to unleash airstrikes targeting Iran’s program if a deal isn’t reached. Iranian officials increasingly warn that they could pursue a nuclear weapon with their stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels.

​ Orange County Register 

A woodpecker has invaded a Massachusetts neighborhood. Residents are taking it in stride

• April 30, 2025

By HOLLY RAMER and RODRIQUE NGOWI, Associated Press

ROCKPORT, Mass. (AP) — Rockport residents have a history of fighting off invaders, but not this time.

During the War of 1812, townsfolk in the tiny fishing village hurled rocks at British soldiers using their stockings as slings. Now, they’re slinging trash bags and towels over the side mirrors of their cars to protect them from a destructive and determined pileated woodpecker.

Over the last few weeks, the bird has broken more than two dozen mirrors and at least one vehicle’s side window. But residents are taking the violence in stride.

“Everybody’s having a good laugh about it,” said Ben Favaloro. “Nobody wants harm to the bird. He’s always welcome back.”

Favaloro, who has lived in the neighborhood for nearly four decades, said he’s seen the occasional woodpecker on the side of houses in years past and he removed several trees last summer that were damaged beyond recovery. But the attacking of glass is a new phenomenon.

“Initially, we just noticed that all the mirrors had been adjusted. It looked like maybe there’s a child in the neighborhood that was going around pushing the mirrors down,” he said. But then his sister-in-law spotted the roughly 21-inch (53-centimeter) tall woodpecker on Favaloro’s truck, pecking at the side mirror.

Given their enormous size, piliated woodpeckers are plenty strong enough to break mirrors, but such behavior is “definitely weird,” said Pamela Hunt, senior biologist for avian conservation at the New Hampshire Audubon.

“Lots of birds will be aggressive against reflections in mirrors, but I don’t usually hear about woodpeckers,” she said. “They don’t usually peck at their opponents, they kind of chase them around.”

She said the woodpecker might be “a little stupid” and is trying to defend its territory and scare away what it sees as competition. The damage coincides with the mating season for pileated woodpeckers and resident Barbara Smith said she’d be fine with “lots of little woodpeckers” around, though she hopes they won’t be as destructive.

“Woodpeckers have to do what woodpeckers do,” she said. “Good luck, woodpecker.”

Favalro said the woodpecker and the media attention it has attracted has been a fun distraction from everything else going on in the world.

“This small town of Rockport that I live in is one of the safest communities around,” he said. “I think this is probably one of the biggest crimes in years. It’s kind of funny, but it’s nice as well.”

Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire.

​ Orange County Register