Jasiel correia biography of rory

After he was elected mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts, at just 23 years old, it seemed Jasiel Correia's political career had nowhere to go but up. Bright and dynamic, Correia charmed voters by portraying himself as a successful entrepreneur who could revive the struggling old mill city.

Prosecutors say in reality he was a fraud and a thief.

Correia heads to trial this month on charges that he stole more than $230,000 from investors in a smartphone app he created to pay for things like a Mercedes, casino trips and adult entertainment. As mayor, he's accused of convincing his chief of staff to give him half of her salary in order to keep her city job and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from marijuana businesses seeking to operate there.

The trial — one of the first to be held in Boston’s federal court since the start of the coronavirus pandemic — will showcase Correia’s dramatic rise and fall in the southeastern Massachusetts city of 89,000 that's still hurting by the collapse of its once-booming textile industry. Prosecutors will try to show that Correia swindled investors just like his critics say he smooth-talked voters into entrusting him with the city.

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“My husband says it best: He could convince the pope that there’s no God,” said Linda Pereira, a Fall River city councilor whom Correia defeated to be reelected mayor in 2017.

Even as Correia's former chief of staff and three others have pleaded guilty in the extortion scheme, the former mayor, now 29, has remained defiant. He has denied any wrongdoing, insisted the app designed to help businesses connect with consumers was legitimate and blamed the charges on political foes who want to bring him down.

The question now becomes: Will he take the stand to try to convince jurors? Correia's name is on the defense's witness list, but it remains unclear whether he will actually testify.

Unlike

The new short-form streaming service Quibi, which debuted April 6, was meant to be ideal for smartphone users on the go. But now that no one’s going anywhere, what’s the main attraction?

For now the answer is content and celebrities — and oodles of both.

Quibi stands for “quick bites,” which refers to the service’s plan to offer short video segments (10 minutes or less) designed for small screens (your phone). But little else about Quibi is bite-size. In its first year, the company’s partners (chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman) are spending more than a billion dollars on content acquisition alone.

That’s partly because everyone in Hollywood seems to be doing a Quibi show, including heavy-hitters like Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Kevin Hart and Jennifer Lopez. Its debut lineup already consisted of more than 40 shows, including Liam Hemsworth’s “Most Dangerous Game,” Queen Latifah’s “When the Streetlights Go On” and Chrissy Teigen’s “Chrissy’s Court.”

But that is just a fraction of what Quibi says it will release in its first year: about 8,500 “quick bites of content” and around 175 new shows. Thirty-five of these shows will be “movies in chapters”; 120 will be unscripted reality shows or documentaries; and the rest will be news and lifestyle pieces, or what they call “daily essentials.”

Of course, times were different even just a month ago. Given all the halted productions and frozen budgets, how many beyond the first 50 will happen? And will anyone pony up $4.99 a month (or $7.99 without ads) to watch Quibi? That’s hard to predict in this time of economic uncertainty and social distancing, in which few people are commuting and more are working from home. That’s a lot less phone time between train stations — and a lot more home time for long-form binges.

For now, Quibi’s

Overview

There are two takeaways from this year’s general election results for the contests involving Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao. Combined with the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, these contests are a clear voter rejection of sentencing reform and progressive prosecutors. And obvious flaws in recent changes to recall laws at the state and local level are now causing headaches for local officials struggling to apply the tangled new procedures to these contests. The results show that attempts by elected officials to discourage recalls failed, that by bungling the reforms those officials made recalls more expensive, and they opened the door to some bizarre replacement scenarios.

Discussion

Strong signs of voter preferences

Voters have turned against the progressive prosecutor movement and its push for rethinking some fundamental tenets of the criminal justice system. The movement, launched with the election of Philadelphia defense attorney Larry Krasner as district attorney in 2017, initially scored some big wins with ideologically-aligned candidates winning district attorney elections nationwide. But Election Day 2024 in California highlights the movement’s electoral problems: Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao were recalled, and Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón lost his reelection race (after surviving a recall drive that just missed qualifying in 2022) — all this just two years after San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled. That might be the end of progressive prosecution in California.

Add the fact that state voters approved Proposition 36, which reversed the penalties lowered by 2014 Proposition 47 for certain drug and theft crimes. Proposition 36 passed by a wide 20% margin and undid Proposition 47, restoring

Ah, New England: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Cradle of The American Revolution. Home of the Pilgrims, Puritans, and Minutemen. Plymouth Rock and Walden Pond. Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale.And Brown and Dartmouth. Dunkin' Donuts and Ben & Jerry's. The Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins. And chock full of fish.

In media, by contrast, New England gets Flanderized into... well, there's kind of a duality here.

On the one side, we have the highbrow intellectuals who attend those Ivy League universities, write books, dabble in philosophy, and end up as magnificent eccentrics. Many of these people are scions of the "Codfish Aristocracy" or "Boston Brahmins" — uber-exclusive, old-money White Anglo-Saxon Protestant families who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower passenger list.None of whom were named Kennedy, incidentally. That family is famously Irish Catholic rather than WASP, and made their money in real estate, the stock market, and Prohibition-era bootlegging. All of this snootiness comes in very handy when a producer requires a Black Sheep... or just wants an excuse to film in and around Kennebunkport, Hyannis, or Martha's Vineyard.

And on the other side of the coin, we have the tough immigrant laborers, folksy down-home farmers, and of course the crusty flannel-wearing fishermen who give us the seafood we so crave. All of these people will be veritable fonts of down-to-earth wisdom, dispensed using as many goofily inscrutable metaphors as possible ("Cold enough to freeze the skin off a beanpole!")

Come to think of it, fish is brain food, so maybe it all fits together after all...

In reality, New England is one of the oldest regi