Trailing 3-0 early in a do-or-die match, St. Paul-based Team Peterson rallied to score eight of the final nine points Thursday in the Olympic Qualification Event in Kelowna, Canada to send Norway home with an 8-4 victory that will send the Americans to the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.

After securing the victory, skipper Tabitha Peterson joined her teammates — her sister, Tara Peterson, Cory Thiesse and Taylor Anderson-Heide — threw her arms around them and said, “I’m so proud of you guys. I’m just so proud of you.”

Two spots were available in the women’s draw at this week’s qualification event. Japan and Norway finished in a tie for first in the round-robin portion with 6-1 marks, with the United States in third at 5-2.

Japan edged Norway, 6-5, on Wednesday to secure the first spot, leaving the United States and Norway to battle it out up north Thursday for the final bid.

After the Americans went down early, Tabitha Peterson told her team, “Well, we’ve got lots of game left, girls.”

“We knew with anything like that, there’s lots of time to battle back,” Peterson said in her post-match, television interview, “and that’s just what we did.”

After falling behind, the Americans delivered a three-point end of their own shortly thereafter to knot the match and took control from there.

Team Peterson won a bronze medal at the 2021 World Championships and finished sixth at the 2022 Beijing Games. Tabitha was part of the team that finished eighth in the Pyeongchang Games in 2018. Since then, both sisters have become mothers.

That’s one of the reasons Team Peterson had to compete in the qualification event; with the sisters in and out of the lineup, the team just missed qualifying on international points. The team failed to advance out of the round-robin stage at this year’s World Championships in March.

This was the hard way, and successfully navigating it clearly meant a lot to Tabitha.

“It’s what we’ve been training for since four years ago, really,” she said in her television interview. “It’s just really special, especially with this group of girls. Now being a new mom, it’s just different. it’s just really special and I can’t wait to go there, perform and show everybody what we can do.”

Team Peterson’s victory comes a day after the American men – a Chaska-based team skipped by Danny Casper — clinched an Olympics berth of its own.

The Olympic Games are scheduled for Feb. 6-22.

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By MICHAEL R. SISAK

NEW YORK (AP) — One-time cryptocurrency mogul Do Kwon was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison after a $40 billion crash revealed his crypto ecosystem to be a fraud. Victims said the 34-year-old financial technology whiz weaponized their trust to convince them that the investment — secretly propped up by cash infusions — was safe.

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Kwon, a Stanford graduate known by some as “the cryptocurrency king,” apologized after listening as victims — one in court and others by telephone — described the scam’s toll: wiping out nest eggs, depleting charities and wrecking lives. One told the judge in a letter that he contemplated suicide after his father lost his retirement money in the scheme.

US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said the government’s recommendation of a 12-year prison sentence was “unreasonably lenient” and the defense’s request for five years was “utterly unthinkable and wildly unreasonable.” Kwon faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

“Your offense caused real people to lose $40 billion in real money, not some paper loss,” Engelmayer told Kwon. The judge called it “a fraud on an epic, generational scale” and said Kwon had an “almost mystical hold” on investors and caused incalculable “human wreckage.”

Kwon pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court in August to fraud charges stemming from the collapse of Terraform Labs, the Singapore-based firm he co-founded in 2018. The loss exceeded the combined losses from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood’s frauds, prosecutors said. Engelmayer estimated there may have been a million victims.

Terraform Labs had touted its TerraUSD as a reliable “stablecoin” — a kind of currency typically pegged to stable assets to prevent drastic fluctuations in prices. But prosecutors say it was an illusion backed by outside cash infusions that came crumbling down after it plunged far below its $1 peg. The crash devastated investors in TerraUSD and its floating sister currency, Luna, triggering “a cascade of crises that swept through cryptocurrency markets.”

Kwon tried to rebuild Terraform Labs in Singapore before fleeing to the Balkans, prosecutors said. He spent 17 months in jail in Montenegro after his March 23, 2023, arrest while traveling on a false passport.

Kwon agreed to forfeit over $19 million as part of his plea deal. His lawyers argued his conduct stemmed not from greed, but hubris and desperation. Engelmayer rejected his request to serve his sentence in his native South Korea, where he also faces prosecution and where his wife and 4-year-old daughter live.

“I have spent almost every waking moment of the last few years thinking of what I could have done different and what I can do now to make things right,” Kwon told Engelmayer. Hearing from victims, he said, was “harrowing and reminded me again of the great losses that I have caused.”

One victim, speaking by telephone, said his wife divorced him, his sons had to skip college and he had to move back to Croatia to live with his parents after TerraUSD’s crash evaporated his family’s life savings. Another said he has to “live with the guilt” of persuading his in-laws and hundreds of nonprofit organizations to invest.

Stanislav Trofimchuk said his family’s investment plummeted from $190,000 to $13,000 — “17 years of our life, gone” during what he described as “two weeks of sheer terror.”

Chauncey St. John, speaking in court, said some nonprofits he worked with lost more than $2 million and a church group lost about $900,000. He and his wife are saddled with debt and his in-laws have been forced to work well past their planned retirement, he said.

Nevertheless, St. John said, he forgives Kwon and “I pray to God to have mercy on his soul.”

A prosecutor read excerpts from some of more than 300 letters submitted by victims, including a person identified only by initials who lost nearly $11,400 while juggling bills and trying to complete college. Kwon had made Terra seem like a safe place to stash savings, the person said.

“To some that is just a number on a page, but to me it was years of effort,” the person wrote. “Watching it evaporate, literally overnight, was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.”

“What happened was not an accident. It was not a market event. It was deception,” the person added, imploring the judge to “consider the human cost of this tragedy.”

Kwon created an “illusion of resilience while covering up systemic failure,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Mortazavi told Engelmayer. “This was fraud executed with arrogance, manipulation and total disregard for people.”

Associated Press reporter Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.

The first meeting of the Immigration Justice Committee, one of 17 groups the mayor-elect has assembled to advise on his transition to City Hall, is expected to take place at the end of this week. It will work “to develop the best path forward for upholding and strengthening our sanctuary policies,” a spokesperson said. 

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announcing members of his transition team last month. (X/ZohranKMamdani)

The mayor-elect’s transition committee has raised about $3 million, and is getting ready to start talking policy.

About 400 experts and advocates, serving on 17 committees, are working with the Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team, and will give policy recommendations and suggest appointments for the incoming administration.

After weeks of planning, the first meeting of the Immigration Justice Committee is expected to take place at the end of this week. It will be led by Grace Bonilla, CEO of the nonprofit United Way of New York City. 

“Through the Committee on Immigrant Justice, we are engaging leaders from local and state government, nonprofits, labor, academia, business, and other sectors to develop the best path forward for upholding and strengthening our sanctuary policies,” said Monica Klein, a transition team spokesperson, in a statement.

Mamdani’s campaign platform included a pledge to strengthen New York’s set of sanctuary laws, which the city began enacting in the late 1980s. 

They stipulate the circumstances under which the NYPD and the NYC Department of Correction may detain people at the behest of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and how and when city government agencies can interact and share information with ICE.

Supporters say such policies help ensure immigrant New Yorkers don’t have to live in the shadows, particularly when it comes to reporting crimes and other abuses. But the Trump administration has targeted cities with sanctuary laws on the books as impediments to his immigration enforcement efforts, even suing New York City over it in July. 

With Donald Trump’s return to the White House this year, ICE arrests of immigrants have surged in New York City and nationwide. On Monday, Mayor-elect Mamdani used his platform to provide residents with an explanation of their rights in the event of an ICE encounter. 

According to a New York Immigration Coalition report, the number of “community arrests”—in which people are apprehended in their homes, at work, or on street corners—have jumped statewide since Trump took office.

Those types of arrests are now five times more common than arrests through collaborations with local or state police, or arrests related to other task forces—tactics more commonly under the Biden administration, the report says.

Advocates and City Council members in neighborhoods with high concentrations of immigrants have seen an increase in ICE activity in all the boroughs.

Mamdani’s Immigration Justice transition committee is made up of 25 leaders from major immigrant advocacy groups (such as Murad Awawdeh of the New York Immigration Coalition, Natalia Aristizabal of Make the Road and Amaha Kassa of African Communities Together); large legal services providers (such as Melissa Chua of NYLAG and Rosa Cohen-Cruz of the Bronx Defenders); grassroots organizations (such as Fahd Ahmed of DRUM and Adama Bah of Afrikana); faith leaders (such as Imam Shamsi Ali of the Jamaica Muslim Center and Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim), as well as Bitta Mostofi, former commissioner for the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). 

A Mamdani spokesperson would not comment on who is being considered to lead MOIA under the new administration.

Aristizabal, the deputy director of Make the Road NY, said she plans to push for two main priorities on behalf of the organization: city government’s compliance with sanctuary laws, and a city hotline for residents to report ICE activity.

“We want to make sure that the sanctuary policies are clear for the agencies,” Aristizabal said. 

The City’s Department of Investigations recently found that a Department of Correction investigator twice shared information—violating sanctuary laws—about two city jail detainees with U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents.

New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) created a “transition memo” for Mamdani, calling for the incoming mayor to ensure all agencies comply with existing rules. The group supports passage of Intro. 214, which would allow residents to sue if local officials violate sanctuary laws by working with ICE to detain people.

The second idea that Ariztizabal wants to bring to the committee’s attention is the development of a hotline for New Yorkers to report ICE activities. This could be similar to the rapid response networks set up in various California counties, she said, and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights “Eyes on ICE” Network—a text alert system for community members about ICE sightings and activities in their area. 

“Once you report to the hotline, they connect to a rapid response unit that then is able to verify what’s happening on the ground. And it’s a structure and resource activity for being able to track how ICE is acting in those states,” Ariztizabal explained. “I just feel like it’s the time for New York to set that up.”

The Trump administration has criticized public ICE reporting mechanisms as a threat to federal officers’ safety, and recently got tech giant Apple to remove apps that crowdsource such information.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Daniel@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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The post Mamdani’s Immigration Transition Team to Focus on Fortifying City’s Sanctuary Laws appeared first on City Limits.

By MATT BROWN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Thursday dismissed an effort to impeach President Donald Trump brought by Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas, the second time this year that the Democrat’s efforts to launch impeachment proceedings have been turned aside.

The House voted 237-140 to shelve Green’s impeachment resolution, with 47 Democratic lawmakers voting present. The result was expected, yet suggested a shift in support for bringing charges of impeachment against Trump among House Democrats, who rejected a similar measure by a much wider margin in June.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his deputies said in a statement before the vote that impeachment “requires a comprehensive investigative process” that had not been undertaken by the Republican majority. Yet the Democratic leaders notably declined to oppose the resolution outright, instead voting “present.”

“Impeachment is a sacred constitutional vehicle designed to hold a corrupt executive accountable for abuse of power, breaking the law and violating the public trust,” they said.

“None of that serious work has been done, with the Republican majority focused solely on rubber stamping Donald Trump’s extreme agenda. Accordingly, we will be voting ‘present’ on today’s motion,” they continued.

Green has said impeachment measures are necessary because he believes Trump has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” in his second term, the constitutionally required bar for impeachment and removal from office.

Green’s resolution in June accused Trump of bypassing Congress and potentially declaring war on Iran after the administration conducted air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The latest version sought to impeach Trump for “threatening Democratic lawmakers in Congress with execution” over a social media video urging members of the military to refuse illegal orders.

“He has conducted himself in office such that persons are now threatening members of the judiciary, threatening members of the House of Representatives, threatening members of the Senate,” Green said in a brief floor speech before the vote.

Trump was impeached twice in his first term, first in 2019 by a Democratic-majority House over his push for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a corruption investigation into the Biden family ahead of the 2020 election. He was impeached a second time in 2021 by the House over his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the riot at the U.S. Capitol. He was acquitted by the Senate both times.

Republicans have begun to warn that Democrats are determined to impeach Trump a third time if they win the majority, pushing it toward the forefront of next year’s campaigns. Many of them dismissed Thursday’s vote as a distraction.

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“It shows you they have no agenda. And so this is the kind of stuff that they’ve been doing, as opposed to actually trying to solve the American people’s issues,” said Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, a Florida Republican. “This is not a surprise, but it just shows you that the Democrats continue to do the same kind of thing they’ve been doing for years, which is playing games and not coming up with real solutions.”

Democratic leaders insisted they are not intent on impeaching Trump in his second term and stressed the gravity of such proceedings and the need for a thorough investigation.

Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat and vice chair of the Democratic Caucus, said there are “a diversity of views” about impeachment in the caucus. He said that House Democrats intend to conduct oversight of the administration should they win a majority in next year’s midterms but that a win at the ballot box did not guarantee an impeachment vote.

“I think you would have to have an investigation where you actually talk to witnesses and review documents and look at, you know, video and listen to audio. You need to do all of that before any decisions are made,” he said.