• Former Congressman Anthony Weiner has been released from a federal prison where he was serving time after being convicted of having illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl. The Federal Bureau of Prisons website shows the 54-year-old New York Democrat is currently in the custody of the Residential Re-entry Management office in Brooklyn, N.Y. It wasn't immediately clear when Weiner was transferred, but he will have to register as a sex offender and spend three years on supervised release. Weiner had a dramatic and sordid fall from grace after he sent a lewd picture of himself to a college student over Twitter in 2011. Weiner initially claimed his account had been hacked, then admitted he'd had inappropriate online interactions with at least six other women while married to Huma Abedin, a top Hillary Clinton aide. Weiner resigned from Congress but ran for New York City mayor in 2013. That campaign ended after it was disclosed he sent explicit photos under the alias "Carlos Danger" to at least one woman after resigning from Congress. His final fall came in 2017 after prosecutors said he sent a series of sexually explicit messages to a North Carolina high school student. Weiner pleaded guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor. At his sentencing, he said he'd been a "very sick man for a very long time." Abedin filed for divorce in 2017.
• Billionaire Richard Branson said Monday that he hopes the concert he's throwing to rally humanitarian aid for Venezuela will help draw global attention and save lives by raising funds for "much-needed medical help" for the crisis-torn country. Branson said as many as 300,000 people are expected to attend Friday's concert on the Venezuela-Colombia border featuring Spanish-French singer Manu Chao, Mexican band Mana, Spanish singer-songwriter Alejandro Sanz and Dominican artist Juan Luis Guerra. Branson said all the artists are performing for free, hoping to raise donations from viewers watching it on a livestream over the Internet. "Venezuela sadly has not become the utopia that the current administration of Venezuela or the past administration were hoping for, and that has resulted in a lot of people literally dying from lack of medical help," Branson said. The concert is being held in Cucuta, a Colombian border city of about 700,000 people that has been swollen by hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing Venezuela. Elsewhere, Venezuelan Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez on Monday announced a rival concert for Friday and Saturday on the Venezuelan side of the border. Rodriguez did not announce the artists who are expected to perform.
A Section on 02/19/2019