A Mahtomedi man has been put on probation for 15 years for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl who was lured to his apartment by an accomplice who gave her crack cocaine and also assaulted the teen.

Michael Lewis (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

Michael Lewis, 69, was sentenced Wednesday in Washington County District Court after entering a Norgaard plea to third-degree criminal sexual conduct in connection with the teen’s June assault. Under a Norgaard plea, a defendant says they are unable to remember what happened due to drug use or mental health impairment at the time, but acknowledges there is enough evidence for a jury to convict beyond a reasonable doubt.

Judge Juanita Freeman gave Lewis three years in prison, then stayed the sentence for 15 years in favor of probation. He was not ordered to serve additional days in the workhouse beyond the 152 that he’d already served since his arrest.

Lewis received the presumptive sentence under state sentencing guidelines, according to a spokesman for the Washington County Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors said Lewis’ accomplice, Billy Ray Wiley, looked for women and girls in the Twin Cities area, often approaching them near grocery stores or in the street in Minneapolis and St. Paul. He would offer them rides, drugs or money.

Wiley, 52, of Minneapolis, was convicted by a jury in November of two counts of sex trafficking and one each of first- and third-degree criminal sexual conduct after prosecutors said he brought the teen and a 20-year-old woman to the Mahtomedi apartment where they were given drugs and sexually assaulted. He is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 26.

According to the criminal complaints:

Officers on June 30 were called to the Piccadilly Square Apartments, a 62-plus housing community near Wildwood and Stillwater roads, on a report of a teenager dancing in the parking lot and screaming, “no no no.” The person who called said an unknown man dropped her off about four hours earlier.

A man identified as Lewis stepped out the front door of the apartment. The teen, later identified as the 14-year-old, pointed to him and said she was with Lewis and one of his friends. Officers spoke with Lewis, who said he did not know the teen.

Officers searched her purse and found several unopened condoms and drug paraphernalia.

Billy Ray Wiley (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

She was taken to the hospital, where investigators met with her and asked how she knew the man who brought her to the apartment. She said he was a “friend,” who she referred to as “Billy,” and she said he often drove around her Minneapolis neighborhood.

The teen told investigators in a follow-up interview several days later that “when Wiley picked her up, she knew she would be expected to engage in sexual acts in exchange for money and drugs.” She said Wiley had given her crack cocaine and brought her to the apartment, where she was sexually and physically assaulted by Wiley and the other man. She identified Lewis as the man inside the apartment after looking at a photo.

Earlier, on June 13, a 20-year-old woman reported to St. Paul police that a man, later identified as Wiley, picked her up while she was waiting for a bus on Lake Street in Minneapolis. She said he brought her to an apartment, where he physically and sexually assaulted her.

After the assault, Wiley drove her to downtown St. Paul. Once she got out of the car, she asked people on the street for help and they flagged down an officer.

She told police he recorded the sexual assault on his phone, and investigators later recovered the video and identified the location as Lewis’ apartment.

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Law enforcement obtained a tracking warrant and arrested Wiley on July 8 when he drove by the Piccadilly apartments.

Law enforcement also arrested Lewis, and drug paraphernalia was found in his apartment.

A 17-year-old girl was in the car with Wiley. She said that earlier in the day, in the area of Dale Street and University Avenue in St. Paul, Wiley “pulled up right next to her and asked her what she needed. He then gave her a cigarette and asked if she wanted to go for a ride,” the complaints said.

She said they drove around for several hours, and he “told her that she was pretty and had a nice body,” the complaints said. She said she told Wiley several times to drop her off, but he kept driving.

The teen also told officers “that many girls who are struggling with addiction hang around Dale and University” and “said that Wiley is known to pick up a lot of girls in the area,” the complaints said.

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, AP Staff Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Venezuela’s oil industry has been in the spotlight since President Donald Trump used military force to capture the country’s leader, President Nicolas Maduro.

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In the days that followed, Trump said the U.S. would run Venezuela and tap its oil reserves. He said Venezuela stole U.S. oil, a reference to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s move decades ago to nationalize hundreds of foreign-owned assets, including those owned by American oil companies.

Trump floated a plan for those companies to return and rebuild Venezuela’s beleaguered oil industry. He later announced Venezuela would provide 30 to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S. Then the administration “selectively” removed sanctions to enable the shipping and sale of Venezuelan oil to markets worldwide, saying the proceeds would settle in U.S.-controlled accounts and be disbursed to the American and Venezuelan populations, according to the Energy Department.

The moves may be part of a long-term strategy to gain a foothold in a nation with vast oil reserves.

Interest in Venezuela’s vast oil reserves

Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, and some energy analysts predict there won’t be enough oil to meet global demand in coming years.

The South American nation has an estimated 303 billion barrels of crude oil in the ground, which is about 17% of the world’s supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Unlike other parts of the world, where geologists have to search for untapped oil, the reserves under Venezuela’s soil are largely mapped and known, experts say. But because of dilapidated infrastructure, the country only produces about 1% of the world’s oil.

“Venezuela has enormous reserves,” said Claudio Galimberti, global market analysis director and chief economist at Rystad Energy. “If you ask any oil company around the world, go to their exploration team, their geologists, and ask them where is oil going to come from in the 2030’s and 2040’s, their answer is a rather scary, ‘We don’t know.’ So there is going to be a problem of finding oil in the next few years.”

In the short term, the global supply of oil exceeds demand, so increased production from Venezuela isn’t critically needed. But the International Energy Agency estimates that under current policies approximately 25 million barrels per day of new oil supply projects will be needed by 2035 to keep markets in balance.

A ship named Ithaca Patience, Panama, is docked on Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Edgar Frias)

Possible help for U.S. refineries and consumers

The oil in Venezuela is heavy, sour crude, which is what refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast process, and there are only a handful of countries that produce it. By contrast, most oil produced in the U.S. is light, sweet crude. If Venezuelan oil flows freely, it could potentially reduce the price of oil and gasoline.

American refineries could benefit financially from processing more crude oil, and it could increase the availability of diesel and jet fuel, said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners.

“There seem to be two objectives. The first is to overall lower energy prices by adding to global supply, and second is to produce more of the heavy, sour crude that is currently in short supply relative to other grades,” Book said. “The first generally benefits end-users everywhere because lower prices reduce transportation and energy costs.”

More Venezuelan crude wouldn’t necessarily help U.S. oil producers, though, because having more oil on the market can lower oil prices, discouraging production and making it harder for those companies to remain profitable.

The options for major U.S. oil companies

After Chavez nationalized hundreds of private businesses and foreign-owned assets in 2007, including oil projects run by Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, international arbitration panels ordered Venezuela to repay billions of dollars to both companies, but the debts have yet to be collected.

In theory, if sanctions were lifted and Venezuela was under new leadership, major oil companies could invest in infrastructure and profit from the sale of oil.

Trump said he thinks Venezuela’s decimated oil industry could be rebuilt in less than 18 months with U.S. support. He envisions major oil companies returning to Venezuela to make those investments and profit from its oil industry.

But given the unrest and decades of badly damaged infrastructure, it’s unlikely to top the list of places oil companies would choose to invest, experts said.

“Imagine you are Exxon and you have global operations. Where are you going to put your money? Where it’s going to give you most return,” Galimberti said.

Companies also need assurance that assets won’t be taken again by a future government, said Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

“You need to start with basic political stability before you’re going to have companies that are interested in making those kinds of investments,” Sternoff said. “We have more questions than answers over what the government of Venezuela will be.”

A ConocoPhillips spokesman said the company is monitoring developments in Venezuela and their potential implications for global energy supply and stability. “It would be premature to speculate on any future business activities or investments” he said.

Exxon Mobil did not respond to a request for comment.

Production hurdles

Infrastructure and equipment that the oil industry needs to maintain and increase production has been badly damaged in recent years.

“There was a lot of chaos and looting, and so therefore there’s a tremendous amount of damage to the surface equipment for producing oil all around the country,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University. “There are a lot pipelines that are leaking, and it requires a massive cleanup, there’s just a lot of physical devastation.”

There are also massive fuel shortages and electricity blackouts frequently across the country, and “to really produce oil, you need to have a stable grid,” Jaffe said.

In addition, many workers with technical expertise have left the country. Millions of Venezuelans fled as a consequence of Chavez and Maduro, and “there has been tremendous brain drain,” Sternoff said.

Rystad Energy estimates it would take $54 billion of oil and gas investment over the next 15 years to keep Venezuela’s oil production flat at around 1.1 million barrels per day, and that with additional investment over two to three years an additional 300,000 barrels per day could be added. Going beyond 1.4 million barrels per day would require an additional $8 billion to $9 billion per year, the group said.

There’s also no precedent where a regime change in a major oil producing country has led to a rapid increase in output, Sternoff said. In most cases, such as Iraq, Iran, Libya and the Soviet Union, oil output fell significantly, often for years, before returning to prior peaks, he said.

“One of the lessons from Iraq is that the companies did go back, but that it was very difficult to operate when there was a difficult political and local backdrop that can range from insurgency to governance issues and corruption to infrastructure challenges,” Jaffe said.

By SYLVIE CORBET and THOMAS ADAMSON

PARIS (AP) — Brigitte Bardot’s funeral was being held on Wednesday with a private service and a public homage in Saint-Tropez, the French Riviera resort where she lived for more than half a century after retiring from movie stardom at the height of her fame.

The animal rights activist and far-right supporter died Dec. 28 at age 91 at her home in southern France.

She died from cancer after undergoing two operations, her husband, Bernard d’Ormale, said in an interview with Paris Match magazine released Tuesday evening. “She was conscious and concerned about the fate of animals until the very end,” he said.

Residents and admirers applauded the funeral convoy as the coffin of Bardot, once one of the world’s most photographed women and a defining screen siren of the 1960s, was being carried through the town’s narrow streets.

A service started to the sound of Maria Callas’ “Ave Maria” at the Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption Catholic Church in the presence of Bardot’s husband, son and grandchildren, as well as guests invited by the family and the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals.

“Sadness is overwhelming, and pain too,” Max Guazzini, a friend and secretary general of the Foundation, said in a speech.

“We’re going to dream about her as if we were sleeping. In our dream, Brigitte arrives in a great, white immensity and suddenly … thousands of seals arrive,” he said. “All the animals she saved and she loved form a procession behind her … Thousands of animals say: Brigitte, we will miss you, we love you so much, thank you.”

Hundreds of people gathered in the small town to follow the farewell on large screens set up at the port and on two plazas.

Bardot is to be buried “in the strictest privacy” at a cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

She had long called Saint-Tropez her refuge from the celebrity that once made her a household name.

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A public homage was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at a nearby site for admirers of the woman whose image once symbolized France’s postwar liberation and sensuality.

“Brigitte Bardot will forever be associated with Saint-Tropez, of which she was the most dazzling ambassador,” the town hall said last week. “Through her presence, personality and aura, she marked the history of our town.”

Bardot settled decades ago in her seaside villa, La Madrague, and retired from filmmaking in 1973 at age 39, during an international career that spanned more than two dozen films.

She later emerged as an animal rights activist, founding and sustaining a foundation devoted to the protection of animals.

While she withdrew from the film industry, she remained a highly visible and often controversial public figure through decades of militant animal rights activism and links with far-right politics.

She will be buried in the so-called marine cemetery, where her parents are also interred.

The cemetery, overlooking the Mediterranean sea, is also the final resting place of several cultural figures, including filmmaker Roger Vadim, Bardot’s first husband, who directed her breakout film “And God Created Woman,” a role that made her a worldwide star.

Lawyers representing the New York Daily News and an array of news organizations suing OpenAI for allegedly stealing and distorting their reporters’ work have asked a Manhattan judge to sanction ChatGPT’s parent company, alleging the tech behemoth deleted millions of conversations they were required to hand over as evidence of copyright infringement.

OpenAI continued to destroy output logs despite orders from two judges to preserve and provide them to the news organizations, new court filings allege. More than 1 million logs that had been requested — containing information the news outlets believe was based on their journalists’ reporting — were subbed out, according to court documents.

“[A]fter this Court ordered OpenAI to produce 20 million logs over OpenAI’s vociferous and repeated objections, OpenAI substituted millions of conversations that it was ordered to produce with other conversations – seemingly because it had deleted millions of the selected logs,” attorney Steve Lieberman wrote to the court in a Monday letter.

“OpenAI has refused to answer News Plaintiffs’ questions about the deleted and substituted logs.”

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The dispute has come up amid a complex lawsuit brought by The New York Times, The New York Daily News and other outlets affiliated with Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group. The news organizations allege OpenAI is stealing and distorting their copyrighted works, thus providing ChatGPT users stolen reporting that’s often inaccurate. They have been joined by the Authors Guild, and a litany of best-selling writers are also parties in the complex litigation.

As part of the litigation, OpenAI was required to hand over the logs per a November order by Manhattan Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, which was affirmed this week in a Jan. 5 order by Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein.

The A.I. company also engaged in “hashing,” meaning they changed the ID numbers of some 20 million anonymized ChatGPT user conversations, presenting an enormous challenge for the media lawyers sorting through the immense volume of materials, attorneys for the news organizations said.

In denying OpenAI’s objections to Wang’s order, Stein on Monday wrote that her “rulings were neither clearly erroneous nor contrary to law.”

“She adequately balanced ChatGPT users’ privacy interests against the relevance of the documents in light of the privacy protections already in place,” the judge wrote.

In challenging Wang’s November order, OpenAI had argued it was “clearly erroneous” for the judge to have rejected the company’s proposal to run search terms across a sample of 20 million anonymous chats, claiming it would better protect users’ privacy.

Stein said those arguments were “largely a repackaging” of the company’s failed argument that Wang failed to account for the privacy of ChatGPT users.

Lawyers for the news outlets say OpenAI also included billions of “grossly overbroad and inappropriate” redactions in the info they handed over, blacking out the names of news outlets cited to ChatGPT, bylines and other information critical to the case.

“Since this case was about our requests for content of certain publications,” Lieberman said in an interview, “It makes it rather hard to find the evidence we’re looking for.”

The news organizations’ request to the court asks the court to order the tech company to explain why it shouldn’t be held in contempt. They’re requesting an evidentiary hearing in the coming months.

The Daily News has reached out for comment to OpenAI, which did not immediately respond.

On Friday, a company spokesperson told the legal news outlet MLex, “As we’ve made clear to the Court, this is just another example of the Times distorting the facts and misrepresenting how our technology actually works.”