A Republican state committeewoman and the reigning winner of the Miss United States beauty pageant has accused Central Florida U.S. Rep. Cory Mills of threatening to release nude videos of her after the two ended their relationship, according to a police report.

Lindsey Langston, 25, filed a report with the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office on July 14, alleging that the Republican congressman threatened to harm any future romantic interest of hers after they broke up in February.

“Cory has contacted Lindsey numerous times on numerous different accounts threatening to release nude images and videos of her, to include recorded videos of her and Cory engaging in sexual acts,” the report states.

The matter was referred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which would handle any investigation, said Sgt. Steven Khachigan, a spokesman for North Florida’s Columbia County Sheriff’s Office. Casey Smith, an FDLE spokesman, said the agency received the report but does not comment on active inquiries or investigations.

In a statement released to Politico, Mills, 45, said he was unaware of the report and denied wrongdoing. He has not been charged with any crime. His team did not respond to requests for comment from the Orlando Sentinel.

“These claims are false and misrepresent the nature of my interactions,” Mills told Politico. “I have always conducted myself with integrity, both personally and in service to Florida’s 7th District.”

Blaze Media and Drop Site News first reported the incident.

The police report does not list a potential criminal offense and is labeled as an “information/intelligence report.” Anthony Sabatini, a Lake County attorney who said he is representing Langston, told the Sentinel that Florida has an extortion law he thinks could apply to this case.

Sabatini, who is also a Lake County commissioner and former state representative, lost to Mills in the 2022 GOP congressional primary for District 7.

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Langston, who could not be reached for comment, told officers she started a romantic relationship with Mills in November 2021 and lived with him at his New Smyrna Beach home, according to the report.

Though Mills was married, she told officers Mills said he separated from his wife. The status of Mills’ marriage is unclear. In March, he told The Floridian news website he had been working through divorce proceedings for the past two years.

Langston told officers she broke off the relationship in February, when an incident made headlines involving the congressman and another woman.

That month, the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department opened a probe of Mills following a report of an alleged assault at Mills’ penthouse apartment near the Capitol.

Mills, 45, vehemently denied any physical altercation occurred. Sarah Raviani, the 27-year-old woman listed as the victim by police, also denied she was assaulted in a statement to the Orlando Sentinel and other media outlets.

Police sent an arrest warrant to the U.S. Attorney’s office for consideration, but that investigation was closed after it was returned unsigned, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

Mills, who joined Congress in 2023, represents Seminole County and portions of Volusia County. He’s faced a firestorm of controversy this year, and Democrats are targeting his seat in next year’s election.

Last month, his D.C. landlord filed a lawsuit seeking to evict him from his $20,833-a-month luxury penthouse. Bozzuto Management Co. alleged he owed about $85,000 in missed rental payments.

Mills blamed a faulty payment system for the back rent. The property management company voluntarily dismissed the suit on Monday. The court filing does not specify how much Mills paid or if he’ll remain a tenant.

The House Ethics Committee is also scrutinizing Mills’ business dealings and financial disclosure statements, including whether Mills benefited from federal contracts while serving in Congress.

By MARI YAMAGUCHI

TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s first three F-35B stealth fighter jets arrived Thursday at an air base in the south of the country, its latest move to fortify defenses as tensions in the region grow.

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The new arrivals are three of the four F-35Bs scheduled for deployment at the Nyutabaru Air Base in the Miyazaki prefecture. The fourth jet is set to arrive at a later date, the Air Self-Defense Force said.

The jets, which have short take-off and vertical landing functions, are to operate from two Japanese helicopter carriers, the Izumo and the Kaga, that were modified to accommodate the F-35B.

The Defense Ministry has said four more F-35Bs will be delivered to Nyutabaru by the end of March 2026.

Japan considers China as a regional threat and has accelerated its military buildup on remote islands in the southwest.

One of Japan’s first three F-35B stealth fighter jets is seen after they arrived at the Nyutabaru Air Base of the Air Self-Defense Force in Shintomi, southern Japan, Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025. (Takumi Sato/Kyodo News via AP)

Separately on Thursday, a F-2A single-seater fighter jet crashed in the Pacific off Japan’s eastern coast during a training flight, but the pilot was rescued alive after he ejected himself in an emergency, according to the ASDF. It said that training flights for the aircraft have been suspended for safety checks.

Japan is currently constructing a runway on a new air base on the island of Mageshima, 100 miles south of the Nyutabaru base, for F-35B flight exercises. However, the drills will have to be conducted at Nyutabaru until around 2030 due to construction delays, triggering protests from local residents concerned about aircraft noise.

Japan plans to deploy a total of 42 Lockheed Martin F-35Bs and 105 of the conventional take-off and landing, or CTOL, F-35As, making the country the biggest F-35 user outside of the United States.

Even lifelong Texans may not have heard of my hometown of Lindale. With just under 5,000 people while I lived there, Lindale sits roughly 90 miles east of Dallas and bears many hallmarks of a small Texas town: more than three churches per square mile, roads dominated by trucks, and packed football stadiums on Friday nights. It’s also overwhelmingly white. On paper, Lindale might seem an unlikely home for an Indian-American kid. In reality, it was great to me.

Whether playing basketball nearby or attending a debate tournament out of town, my friends’ parents looked after me like I was their own—including by scolding me when needed. Teachers occasionally drove me home after late practice for a math or band competition—teachers who were as impressive as they were kind. My debate coach could easily help me with a speech or Algebra 2 homework; my calculus teacher excelled at explaining differential equations and coaching soccer.

My path to medicine began in Lindale, too. I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin (hook ‘em), but my interest in becoming a doctor developed through working with clinicians at Lindale Medical Clinic and hospitals in nearby Tyler. I never dreamed these experiences would take me to Harvard Medical School. But my teachers did. After I competed in a debate tournament at Harvard University, one joked, “You could end up in school there; just be a smart, well-rounded, hard-working liberal.” The joke did not surprise me—Lindale sits in Smith County, a deep-red county in East Texas where more than 70 percent of voters backed Donald Trump in the last election. Politics aside, the people of Lindale saw Harvard as an incredible place to learn. They were right. Their belief helped propel me to the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program.

(City of Lindale)

This rigorous program bridges clinical medicine and research. Students complete the first two years of medical school, earn a PhD, then finish the final two years of medical school. Most often, graduates continue to hospital residency and careers at academic medical centers, where they care for patients while pursuing new cures, treatments, and diagnostic tools. In the process, they improve the health of individual patients and the future of medicine itself. 

To enable this mission, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds 57 MD-PhD programs through its Medical Scientist Training Program. These grants, which totaled $4 million for the current academic year, come with strict requirements to ensure that spending aligns with the NIH’s ultimate goal of improving human health through science.

On May 15, 2025, both NIH grants that support the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program were terminated as part of a broader attempt by the federal government to terminate direct NIH funding to Harvard Medical School. Thirty-two students who spent countless hours applying for and earning NIH F30 fellowships saw their awards vanish. These decisions affect not just the archetypal Harvard student many imagine—they affect people who grew up in Lindale, people whose parents are not doctors or scientists, people who attended public schools their entire lives, people who tirelessly pursued a career in service of others, and people who often decline lucrative private practice and dedicate their lives to life-saving research.

My classmates are among the hardest-working people I know. Publishing a peer-reviewed biomedical research paper routinely demands years of perseverance and troubleshooting. In 2024 alone, the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program’s 208 students co-authored more than 180 peer-reviewed publications. Those students regularly work more than 12 hours a day conducting and repeating experiments in laboratories followed by continued reading, writing, and coding at home. Instead of halting this work, the government should support it—it’s an investment in our collective health as a country.

Consider Dr. Arlene Sharpe and Dr. Vijay Sankaran. Sharpe, who obtained her MD and PhD from Harvard Medical School, made discoveries critical to the development of cancer immunotherapy drugs that have redefined cancer treatment. Sankaran, while still a student in the program, contributed to a discovery that led to the first FDA-approved CRISPR/Cas9 gene therapy for sickle cell disease. Such life-changing research takes time. More than a decade passed between each discovery and drug approval. And not every story ends in success. Research can fail, scientists’ hypotheses can turn out to be wrong, and a discovery’s long-term importance may not immediately be clear.  Yet, losing patience or faith in the research process risks failing to provide improved treatments for patients everywhere.

Whether a biomarker can improve the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, a genetic mutation affects a person’s risk of Alzheimer’s disease, or a molecule kills an antibiotic-resistant superbug is not political. My classmates and I are working on each of these problems and countless others.

Our mentors apply for and win government grants that fund this research for the benefit of all Americans. Terminating those grants threatens our ability to do this research and, with it, the promise of making discoveries that will one day improve and save lives.

The post I Came from Rural Texas to Harvard’s MD-PhD program. Now, Trump Defunded that Program. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior FBI official who served as acting director in the first weeks of the Trump administration and resisted demands to turn over the names of agents who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, investigations is being forced out of the bureau, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday.

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The circumstances of Brian Driscoll’s ouster were not immediately clear, but his final day is Friday, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss the personnel move by name and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. Additional ousters were possible.

Spokespeople for the FBI declined to comment.

The news comes amid a much broader personnel purge that has unfolded over the last several months under the leadership of current FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Numerous senior officials including top agents in charge of big-city field offices have been pushed out of their jobs and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that former officials say have roiled the workforce and contributed to angst.

Driscoll, a veteran agent who worked international counterterrorism investigations in New York and had also commanded the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, had most recently served as acting director in charge of the Critical Incident Response Group, which deploys manpower and resources to crisis situations.

Driscoll was named acting director in January to replace Christopher Wray and served in the position as Patel’s nomination was pending.

He made headlines after he and Rob Kissane, the then-deputy director, resisted Trump administration demands for information about agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6 riot by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters at the U.S. Capitol.

Emil Bove, the then-senior Justice Department official who made the request and was last week confirmed for a seat on a federal appeals court, wrote a memo accusing the FBI’s top leaders of “insubordination.”

Responding to Bove’s request, the FBI ultimately provided personnel details about several thousand employees, identifying them by unique employee numbers rather than by names.

The FBI has moved under Patel’s watch to aggressively demote, reassign or push out agents. In April, for instance, the bureau reassigned several agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, two people familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

Numerous special agents in charge of field offices have been told to retire, resign or accept reassignment.

Another agent, Michael Feinberg, has said publicly that he was told to resign or accept a demotion amid scrutiny from leadership of his friendship with Peter Strzok, a lead agent on the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation who was fired by the Justice Department in 2018 following revelations that he had exchanged negative text messages about President Donald Trump with an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.