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Hard-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene has become one of the most aggressive spokespeople for the “Make America Great Again” movement.

The representative from Georgia has become infamous for her combative encounters with journalists and fellow politicians and her susceptibility to conspiracy theories.

Here’s a look at how she rose to prominence and some of her most controversial moments.

Who is Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Ms Taylor Greene is, according to her bio on X: “Congresswoman for GA-14, Christian, mom, small business owner.”

She was elected to Congress in 2020 and quickly became a powerful – and vocal – player in the Republican Party.

Often known by her initials MTG, she also proclaims herself to be a “proud American, 100% pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Trump”.

She is a staunch ally of Donald Trump, whose political style she emulates.

Donald Trump greets Marjorie Taylor Greene after addressing a joint session of Congress.
Pic: AP
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Donald Trump greets Marjorie Taylor Greene after addressing a joint session of Congress. Pic: AP

She has downplayed and justified the 6 January Capitol insurrection, claiming the rioters would have “won” and “been armed” if she had organised it.

After the White House called her comments “dangerous, abhorrent”, Ms Taylor Greene said she had been joking.

In 2021, she was stripped of her committee assignments by House of Representatives managers over racist comments, her embracing of conspiracy theories and her past endorsement of violence against Democratic officials.

She was widely denounced for comparing COVID-19 masks and vaccinations to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust.

On social media, she had made posts advocating violence against Democrat opponents and casting doubt on the 9/11 terror attacks and the school mass shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook.

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And she had voiced loud backing for QAnon, the popular conspiracy that the Trump administration was waging a secret fight against an evil global cabal including a Democrat paedophile ring.

Before being kicked off committees, Ms Taylor Greene stated her case on the House floor, employing a mixture of back-pedalling and finger-pointing while wearing a dark mask emblazoned with the words “Free Speech”.

She told House members her support for QAnon was “words of the past” and that she no longer believes in it, but did not explicitly apologise for other controversial remarks.

Telling Sky News reporter to ‘go back to your own country’

Ms Taylor Greene snapped at Sky News’ US correspondent Martha Kelner after she was asked about the group chat that The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was mistakenly added to, where top US officials discussed war plans in Yemen.

Asked by Kelner if she had seen the latest information on the leak, Ms Taylor Greene said she wasn’t willing to discuss The Atlantic.

Asked if she believed the information shared on the chat was classified, she said the Trump administration had said it “was not” and added: “I think this is a continuance of someone like you [Kelner] to try to push an issue that isn’t even relevant.”

Before Kelner could ask her next question, the politician interjected: “Wait, what country are you from?”

When Kelner said the UK, she responded: “Ok well we don’t give a crap about your opinion, or your reporting. Why don’t you go back to your country where you have a major migrant problem.”

You can watch the full exchange below, and see Kelner’s thoughts here.

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Sky reporter told ‘go back to your own country’

David Cameron ‘can kiss my ass’

Ms Taylor Greene made comments aimed at former prime minister David Cameron that truly “put her on the map” in the UK.

They came in February 2024, after the then-foreign secretary wrote an article calling for the US to commit to funding for Ukraine and drew comparisons between the West’s treatment of Hitler and Putin.

Many Republicans – including Ms Taylor Greene – were against upping the US’s Ukraine funding.

Asked about his comments, Ms Taylor Greene told Sky News: “David Cameron needs to worry about his own country and, frankly, he can kiss my ass.”

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David Cameron ‘can kiss my a**’

She suggested that comparing a refusal to vote through the funding with appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s was “rude name-calling and I don’t appreciate that type of language”.

In a post on X later, she said the remarks would not “bully me into funding the war in Ukraine”.

Lord Cameron laughed her comments off during a speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he said he had met Ms Taylor Greene.

“We met,” he told the audience in Germany. “I went to the Republican study group lunch, talking about exactly this issue.”

“We didn’t get anatomical at that stage, it was very early in our relationship,” he joked.

‘Why don’t you f*** off, how about that?’

Kelner wasn’t the first British reporter Ms Taylor Greene took issue with.

In March 2024, she ended a conversation with Emily Maitlis by responding: “Really why don’t you f*** off, how about that?”

In a video clip posted to podcast The News Agents’ social media channels, Maitlis started the line of questioning by asking Ms Taylor Greene why “so many people that support Donald Trump love conspiracy theories, including yourself?”

She added that he “seems to attract lots of conspiracy theorists”.

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Tells reporter to ‘f*** off’

Ms Taylor Greene replied: “Well let me tell you, you’re a conspiracy theorist and the left and the media spreads more conspiracy theories.

“We like the truth, we like supporting our constitution, our freedoms and America first, so…”

As Ms Taylor Greene started to walk away, Maitlis asked: “What about Jewish space lasers? Tell us about Jewish space lasers” – a reference to a conspiracy theory the politician had peddled.

The Republican right-winger replied: “Why don’t you go talk about Jewish space lasers, and really why don’t you f*** off, how about that?”

The other half of ‘MAGA America’s favourite couple’

Ms Taylor Greene is in a relationship with Brian Glenn, who is the host of Real America’s Voice.

Mr Glenn referred to himself as the other half of “MAGA America’s favourite couple” in an interview with Politico.

He is chief White House correspondent for the right-wing streaming channel, which grants him access to the White House press pool.

Real America’s Voice has supported numerous conspiracy theories in the past and helps distribute former Trump adviser Stephen K Bannon’s War Room podcast, after he was barred from YouTube, Spotify and other mainstream platforms.

Before joining Real America’s Voice, Mr Glenn was programme director of the Right Wing Broadcasting Network – a media company founded by Joe Seales in 2015

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Demolition work begins on White House East Wing for Trump’s £186m ballroom

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Demolition work begins on White House East Wing for Trump's £186m ballroom

Demolition on parts of the White House’s East Wing has begun in order to build Donald Trump’s new ballroom.

On Monday, builders were seen tearing down the facade of the building.

The US President, who insists the $250million (£186m) ballroom will be paid for by himself and donors, said in July it would not interfere with the existing landmark.

The East Wing was built at the beginning of the last century and was last modified in 1942.

Mr Trump said in July: “It will be beautiful. It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be – it will be near it, but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favourite.”

Mr Trump confirmed on Monday that ground had been broken on the project, despite lacking approval for construction from the federal agency that oversees such projects.

Windows of the complex could be seen being torn down. Pic: Reuters
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Windows of the complex could be seen being torn down. Pic: Reuters

Photos of the demolition work showed construction equipment tearing into the East Wing façade and windows and other building parts in tatters on the ground.

He added that future parties would start with cocktails in the East Room, before they are taken into the “finest” ballroom in the country.

It will also boast views of the Washington Monument with room for 999 people, he added. Other estimates have claimed it will house some 600 people.

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On his social media platform, Truth Social, he said: “Completely separate from the White House itself, the East Wing is being fully modernised as part of this process, and will be more beautiful than ever when it is complete!”

Trump has also claimed on social media that the project would be completed “with zero cost to the American Taxpayer! The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly”.

Earlier this year, Trump said they have “wanted a ballroom” in the White House for 150 years.

“There’s never been a president that was good at ballrooms,” he said. “I’m good at building things and we’re going to build quickly and on time. It’ll be beautiful, top, top of the line.”

Since being in office, Mr Trump has made a number of changes to the White House.

He has hand-picked gold ornamentation for the Oval Office and has redone the Rose Garden.

A former Republican member of Congress, Joe Walsh, called the latest plans an “utter desecration”, and said if he became president would take “a bulldozer” to the ballroom.

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Inside ‘data centre alley’ – the biggest story in economics right now

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Inside 'data centre alley' - the biggest story in economics right now

If you ever fly to Washington DC, look out of the window as you land at Dulles Airport – and you might snatch a glimpse of the single biggest story in economics right now.

There below you, you will see scattered around the fields and woods of the local area a set of vast warehouses that might to the untrained eye look like supermarkets or distribution centres. But no: these are in fact data centres – the biggest concentration of data centres anywhere in the world.

For this area surrounding Dulles Airport has more of these buildings, housing computer servers that do the calculations to train and run artificial intelligence (AI), than anywhere else. And since AI accounts for the vast majority of economic growth in the US so far this year, that makes this place an enormous deal.

Down at ground level you can see the hallmarks as you drive around what is known as “data centre alley”. There are enormous power lines everywhere – a reminder that running these plants is an incredibly energy-intensive task.

This tiny area alone, Loudoun County, consumes roughly 4.9 gigawatts of power – more than the entire consumption of Denmark. That number has already tripled in the past six years, and is due to be catapulted ever higher in the coming years.

Inside ‘data centre alley’

We know as much because we have gained rare access into the heart of “data centre alley”, into two sites run by Digital Realty, one of the biggest datacentre companies in the world. It runs servers that power nearly all the major AI and cloud services in the world. If you send a request to one of those models or search engines there’s a good chance you’ve unknowingly used their machines yourself.

Inside a site run by Digital Realty
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Inside a site run by Digital Realty

Their Digital Dulles site, under construction right now, is due to consume up to a gigawatt in power all told, with six substations to help provide that power. Indeed, it consumes about the same amount of power as a large nuclear power plant.

Walking through the site, a series of large warehouses, some already equipped with rows and rows of backup generators, there to ensure the silicon chips whirring away inside never lose power, is a striking experience – a reminder of the physical underpinnings of the AI age. For all that this technology feels weightless, it has enormous physical demands. It entails the construction of these massive concrete buildings, each of which needs enormous amounts of power and water to keep the servers cool.

Sky's Ed Conway at the data centre
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Sky’s Ed Conway at the data centre

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We were given access inside one of the company’s existing server centres – behind multiple security cordons into rooms only accessible with fingerprint identification. And there we saw the infrastructure necessary to keep those AI chips running. We saw an Nvidia DGX H100 running away, in a server rack capable of sucking in more power than a small village. We saw the cooling pipes running in and out of the building, as well as the ones which feed coolant into the GPUs (graphic processing units) themselves.

Such things underline that to the extent that AI has brainpower, it is provided not out of thin air, but via very physical amenities and infrastructure. And the availability of that infrastructure is one of the main limiting factors for this economic boom in the coming years.

According to economist Jason Furman, once you subtract AI and related technologies, the US economy barely grew at all in the first half of this year. So much is riding on this. But there are some who question whether the US is going to be able to construct power plants quickly enough to fuel this boom.

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Is Trump’s AI plan a ‘tech bro’ manifesto?

For years, American power consumption remained more or less flat. That has changed rapidly in the past couple of years. Now, AI companies have made grand promises about future computing power, but that depends on being able to plug those chips into the grid.

Last week the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned AI could indeed be a financial bubble.

He said: “There are echoes in the current tech investment surge of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. It was the internet then… it is AI now. We’re seeing surging valuations, booming investment and strong consumption on the back of solid capital gains. The risk is that with stronger investment and consumption, a tighter monetary policy will be needed to contain price pressures. This is what happened in the late 1990s.”

‘The terrifying thing is…’

For those inside the AI world, this also feels like uncharted territory.

Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and formerly on the OpenAI board, said: “The terrifying thing is: no one knows how much further AI is going to go, and no one really knows how much economic growth is going to come out of it.

“The trends have certainly been that the AI systems we are developing get more and more sophisticated over time, and I don’t see signs of that stopping. I think they’ll keep getting more advanced. But the question of how much productivity growth will that create? How will that compare to the absolutely gobsmacking investments that are being made today?”

Whether it’s a new industrial revolution or a bubble – or both – there’s no denying AI is a massive economic story with massive implications.

For energy. For materials. For jobs. We just don’t know how massive yet.

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Nicholas Rossi: US man who fled to Scotland to avoid rape charges jailed

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Nicholas Rossi: US man who fled to Scotland to avoid rape charges jailed

Nicholas Rossi, an American man who faked his death and fled to Scotland to escape rape charges, has been jailed for at least five years.

The sentence handed down to the 38-year-old is the first of two he faces after being convicted separately in August and September of raping two women in 2008.

Utah has “indeterminate sentencing” – meaning jail terms handed down are in a range of years rather than a fixed number, with release dates set by the state’s parole board.

Nicholas Rossi appearing in court in August. Pic: AP
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Nicholas Rossi appearing in court in August. Pic: AP

During August’s three-day trial, Rossi’s accuser and her parents took the stand – with the victim telling the court that he left a “trail of fear, pain, and destruction” behind him.

“This is not a plea for vengeance. This is a plea for safety and accountability, for recognition of the damage that will never fully heal,” she said.

Brandon Simmons, a prosecutor in the case, alleged Rossi “uses rape to control women” and posed a risk to community safety.

Rossi – whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian – maintained his innocence during the sentencing hearing. In a soft, raspy voice, he said: “I am not guilty of this. These women are lying.”

He was first identified in 2018 after a decade-old DNA rape kit was examined.

How Rossi was caught

But in February 2020 – months after he was charged in one of the cases – an online obituary claimed he had died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Rossi was arrested in Scotland the following year while being treated for COVID, after hospital staff recognised his distinctive tattoos – including the crest of a university he never attended.

A protracted court battle meant he wasn’t extradited until January 2024, with Rossi claiming he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight who was being framed.

Investigators identified at least a dozen aliases that he had used to evade capture over the years.

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Jan 2024: Extradited man denies identity to US court

One of his victims had been recovering from a traumatic brain injury when she responded to a personal advert that Rossi had posted on Craigslist.

They began dating and were engaged within a couple of weeks – and according to her testimony, Rossi had asked her to pay for dates and car repairs, lend him money, and take on debt for their rings.

She told the court that Rossi raped her in his bedroom one night after she drove him home – and went to police years later after discovering that another woman in Utah had come forward with accusations.

Rossi is due to be sentenced for the second conviction in November.

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