Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines told members of Congress on Tuesday that earlier last month, she was held against her will at San Francisco State University, with protesters demanding ransom for her release.

Gaines shared her story during a discussion about left wing violence plaguing American communities and how Homeland Security can do more to support state and local law enforcement to combat interstate threats.

Since tying for fifth with transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas in the 200-meter NCAA championship last year, Gaines has advocated that women’s sports must be reserved for biological females.

On April 6, Gaines visited San Francisco State University to speak with a campus group about the right of women to compete on a level playing field. She told congress that the school administration was aware of her visit, and she was told she would be met by campus police to be briefed on a security plan before she gave her talk.

But campus police failed to show, according to Gaines.

Still, she gave her speech, despite protesters outside the room chanting.

Gaines said she could hear the protesters shouting, ‘We fight back,’ which is when she began to fear for her safety.

When she finished her speech, protesters flooded the room, Gaines said, while raising their fists and flickering the lights until eventually the lights were turned off.

During the incident, Gaines said, she was assaulted.

‘A woman grabbed me and told me she was with the campus police and pulled me toward the door, but I did not believe she was with the police because she wore no clothes that indicated she was an officer, and she had a face covering on, so I couldn’t see her face,’ Gaines told the committee.

After resisting for a bit, Gaines said she really had no other choice because she ‘really truly feared’ for her life.

When she got into the hallway, she was escorted to the stairwell which was blocked by protesters. Instead, she barricaded in an office with members of campus police.

‘The small room we had found would be my prison for the next three hours, and in those hours, I was certainly held against my will,’ Gaines said.

While she sat in the room, Gaines could hear the angry mob scream ‘vengeful, racist’ things, and police would not assure her she would get out.

Gaines said the officers would not provide any type of support to her because the issue was too controversial, and when she told an officer she was hit, nobody asked if she was ok.

When Gaines realized she missed her flight home because she was being held hostage, the lieutenant in the room responded, ‘Don’t you think we all want to go home?’

Protesters, Gaines said, eventually demanded ransom and threatened to not release her without payment.

‘They said that my appearance on campus was so traumatic that they were owed something,’ Gaines said. ‘They were under the false notion that the university paid me to be there.’

She later expanded on what was being yelled at her by people outside the room, saying she heard things like ‘you’re only protecting her because she’s a white girl,’ ‘you knew this was going to happen,’ ‘you were asking for this,’ and ‘she doesn’t get to go home safely.’

Eventually, Gaines said, the San Francisco Police Department arrived and was able to help get her out safely.

‘Free speech suffers when university administrators do not condemn violence and kidnapping on their campus,’ she said. ‘It’s chilled when administrators do not adequately prepare for and protect the safety of their speakers, whether liberal or conservative. Free speech is undermined when administrators misrepresent and malign the views with whom they disagree.’

President Biden is cutting his international trip short and will return to the U.S. for debt limit negotiations instead of visiting Papua New Guinea and Australia as initially planned.

Biden will still leave Wednesday for a three-day G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, but his previously scheduled stops to Papua New Guinea and Australia will be postponed.

He would have been the first sitting U.S. president to visit Papua New Guinea, where he was originally expected to be in the capital of Port Moresby to witness the signing of a new strategic agreement with Micronesia and meet with 18 Pacific island leaders.

The president had planned to visit Sydney, Australia, next week for the annual Quad Leaders’ Summit to meet with the leaders of Australia, Japan and India to discuss initiatives to counter China’s rising influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Biden told reporters he spoke on the phone with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about his decision to postpone the trip. 

‘Defaulting on the debt is simply not an option,’ Biden said.

White House spokesperson John Kirby said the president would have the opportunity to meet Albanese and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Hiroshima, where he also has meetings planned with the leaders of Japan and South Korea.

Albanese said in a statement that Biden apologized for not being able to visit Australia and that the two leaders would try to reschedule. The Australian leader also said he would visit Washington later this year.

Biden’s decision not to visit Australia comes after Albanese recently placed pressure on the U.S. government to end its prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is locked in the maximum security Belmarsh Prison in London amid a legal battle over his potential extradition to the U.S., where he could be sentenced to as many as 175 years in an American maximum security prison.

Assange is facing 17 charges for receiving, possessing and communicating classified information to the public under the espionage act and one charge alleging a conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for Wikileaks’ 2010 publication of classified military documents leaked to him by a whistleblower that detailed war crimes committed by the U.S. government in the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Albanese’s office declined to comment to Fox News Digital on whether he had planned to bring up Assange’s case to Biden. The prime minister’s office instead referred to a recent interview he gave on the matter.

‘I, of course, don’t discuss the private discussions that I have with leaders of other countries,’ Albanese told ABC’s 7:30 last week. ‘But my public comments are the same as my private ones here. And we have made our views very clear to the U.S. administration. We’ll continue to do so. And a solution needs to be found that brings this matter to a conclusion. And Mr. Assange needs to be a part of that, of course, and so I’m hopeful that that will occur. It has been too long. And in my view, as I’ve said before, I see nothing is served from the further incarceration of Mr. Assange.’

Papua New Guinea’s leaders were also informed by White House officials of Biden’s decision to cancel his visit.

The Treasury Department has estimated that the U.S. will default as soon as June 1 if Congress does not lift the debt ceiling.

The White House has repeatedly blamed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., for a deal on the debt limit not being reached. House Republicans have proposed a bill to raise the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or until the end of March 2024, while capping discretionary government spending at fiscal 2022 levels.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Senators on Tuesday got the green light to impose significant federal regulation on artificial intelligence systems, not just from two industry giants, but from an AI expert who warned that the fate of the nation may depend on tough AI rules from Congress.

A Senate Judiciary subcommittee heard from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and IBM Chief Privacy & Trust Officer Christina Montgomery, who both invited federal oversight of AI even though they split on whether a new federal agency is needed. In between those witnesses sat Gary Marcus, the New York University professor emeritus and leader of Uber’s AI labs from 2016 to 2017, who issued a stark warning that human life is about to be upended by this unpredictable technology.

‘They can and will create persuasive lies at a scale humanity has never seen before,’ Marcus warned of generative AI systems. ‘Outsiders will use them to affect our elections, insiders to manipulate our markets and our political systems. Democracy itself is threatened.’

Marcus warned that AI systems that do severe damage to humans’ trust in each other have already been released and that the damage is already mounting.

‘A law professor, for example, was accused by a chatbot of sexual harassment. Untrue,’ Marcus said. ‘And it pointed to a Washington Post article that didn’t even exist. The more that that happens, the more than anybody can deny anything.’

‘As one prominent lawyer told me on Friday, defendants are starting to claim that plaintiffs are making up legitimate evidence,’ he said. ‘These sorts of allegations undermine the abilities of juries to decide what or who to believe and contribute to the undermining of democracy.’

In an era in which Washington, D.C., is worried more and more about suicide and deteriorating mental health, Marcus said AI is making the problem worse.

‘An open-source large language model recently seems to have played a role in a person’s decision to take their own life,’ he said. ‘The large language model asked the human, ‘If you wanted to die, why didn’t you do it earlier?’ then followed up with, ‘Were you thinking of me when you overdosed?’ without ever referring the patient to the human help that was obviously needed.’

OpenAI and IBM talked at length about industry-led systems designed to make AI ‘safe,’ but Marcus dismissed those as platitudes and goals that aren’t being followed.

‘We all more or less agree on the values we would like for our AI systems to honor. We want, for example, for our systems to be transparent, to protect our privacy, to be free of bias, and above all else, to be safe,’ he said. ‘But current systems are not in line with these values.’

‘The Big Tech companies’ preferred plan boils down to ‘trust us.’ But why should we?’ he asked.

Marcus’ recipe for creating a safe AI regulatory regime includes local, national and global measures. He called for a worldwide organization to set standards that all AI systems developers must follow.

‘Ultimately, we may need something like CERN, global, international and neutral but focused on AI safety rather than high-energy physics,’ he said.

Marcus called for a new federal agency to monitor compliance – one that can review systems before they are released, assess how they run in the real world, and call back systems that are found to be flawed.

‘A safety review like we use [at] the FDA prior to widespread deployment,’ he said when pressed for details by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. ‘If you’re going to introduce something to 100 million people, somebody has to have their eyeballs on it.’

Marcus called for a network of independent scientists who can review AI systems before they are released at each company.

And during the hearing, Marcus also called out Altman for what may have been an attempt to dodge a question about what his biggest fear is in the field. When asked, Altman talked about possible job losses, and when the question came to Marcus, he made a point of getting Altman to answer more directly.

‘Sam’s worst fear I do not think is employment, and he never told us what his worst fear actually is, and I think it’s germane to find out,’ Marcus said.

That interjection arguably led to the highlight of the hearing as Altman admitted that he, too, is worried about the possibility of doing great harm.

‘I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that,’ Altman said. ‘We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said language and cultural inclusivity are ‘very important’ to his company’s mission as it builds and trains powerful artificial intelligence systems.

‘We think this is really important,’ Altman told California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of language inclusivity in AI. 

‘One example is that we worked with the government of Iceland, which is a language of fewer speakers than many of the languages that are well represented on the internet, to ensure that their language was included in our model,’ Altman said.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law held a hearing Tuesday during which Altman, IBM Chief Privacy & Trust Officer Christina Montgomery and New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus delivered testimony on how best to regulate powerful artificial intelligence systems. 

Padilla asked Altman and Montgomery how OpenAI and IBM are ‘ensuring language and cultural inclusivity’ in their technologies, arguing that social media companies in recent years have not ‘adequately invested in content moderation, tools and resources for their non-English’ users. 

Altman argued that OpenAI’s tech ‘will have lots of positive impact’ on its users, ‘but, in particular, underrepresented … people who have not had as much access to technology around the world.’

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was released late last year and launched a race in the tech community to build comparable and more powerful systems, is trained on copious amounts of text, such as news articles and books, that it uses to answer humans who input prompts on the platform. GPT-4, the company’s most advanced system, is ‘pretty good at a large number of languages’ after previous systems weren’t as well trained, Altman explained. 

He added that OpenAI is ‘equally focused’ on incorporating cultural inclusivity on the platform. 

OpenAI is ‘excited to work with people who have particular datasets and to work to collect a representative set of values from around the world to draw these wide bounds of what the system can do,’ he said. 

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Missouri’s emergency rule limiting gender transition treatments for minors and some adults was abruptly ended on Tuesday.

‘This emergency rule terminated effective May 16, 2023,’ the Missouri Secretary of State’s website read.

The rule proposed by state Attorney General Andrew Bailey would have required minors and adults to undergo more than a year of therapy and fulfill other requirements before receiving access to gender transition treatments, including puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries.

Bailey said in a statement that his office was ‘standing in the gap’ until the legislature acted on the issue of gender transition medical care. State lawmakers passed a bill last week that would ban minors from receiving this kind of medical treatment. GOP Gov. Mike Parson is expected to sign the bill into law.

‘The General Assembly has now filled that gap with a statute,’ Bailey said. ‘I’m proud to have shed light on the experimental nature of these procedures, and will continue to do everything in my power to make Missouri the safest state in the nation for children.’

The legislature also approved a bill to ban transgender student-athletes in public and private schools from competing on sports teams that do not correspond with their biological sex.

Bailey had planned to impose the rule on April 27, but a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri to stop it. The lawsuit argued that Bailey bypassed the legislature and did not have the authority to regulate medical care through Missouri’s consumer-protection law.

Judge Ellen Ribaudo later granted a temporary restraining order and scheduled a hearing for July 20.

The proposed rule would have required people to experience an ‘intense pattern’ of documented gender dysphoria for three years and receive at least 15 hourly sessions with a therapist for at least 18 months before receiving treatment. People seeking this medical care would have also been required to be screened for autism. Psychiatric symptoms from mental health issues would have to be treated and resolved.

Bailey said he proposed the rule in an effort to protect minors from what he described as experimental medical treatments.

At least 14 U.S. states have full or partial bans on gender transition care for transgender youth, according to ABC News.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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EXCLUSIVE: A coalition of nine Senate Republicans led by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, sent a letter Wednesday morning to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, blasting the central bank for its climate agenda amid other pressing issues.

Sullivan and the other Republicans criticized the Fed — which has a statutorily defined mission of promoting ‘maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates’ — for increasingly pursuing a climate agenda, according to the letter first obtained by Fox News Digital. The lawmakers said the central bank should instead focus on issues within its mandate such as inflation and uncertainty in the banking sector.

‘We are growing increasingly frustrated with the Federal Reserve’s engagement on environmental policymaking and research far outside of its statutory mandate, all while there is persistent inflation and a crisis of confidence in the banking sector,’ they stated in the letter to Powell. 

‘We urge you to rein in the Fed’s regional banks and its economists who are seemingly ignoring your leadership,’ the letter continued. ‘The Fed’s credibility hangs in the balance, and without a course correction, history will find you either complicit or ineffective as Chairman.’

The Republicans pointed to comments from Powell throughout his tenure leading the central bank affirming his commitment to the Fed’s statutory mandate, leaving social and political policies to Congress. 

In January, Powell stressed the importance of the Fed resisting ‘the temptation to broaden our scope to address other important social issues of the day.’ The Fed chairman even went as far as to say that climate policymaking should be left to the ‘elected branches of government and thus reflect the public’s will as expressed through elections.’

However, a week after the comments, which Powell made during a global summit in Sweden, the Fed told the nation’s six largest banks to produce data about how their business might be impacted by climate change and, separately, a green transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

‘The Fed is actively signaling that bank activities that do not further the goals of net zero by 2050 are inherently risky and disfavored,’ the Republicans’ letter Wednesday added. ‘This drives capital away from traditional energy development at a critical time for our economic and national security, while empowering America’s adversaries.’

The Fed’s so-called climate stress test, the letter continued, is the logical result of a ‘persistent and growing track record of climate activism at the Fed.’ They noted, the central bank has also joined the Network for the Greening of the Financial System, the Fed’s regional banks host climate-focused events, and it has published hundreds of policy papers, studies, and documents dedicated to climate change.

Meanwhile, over the last two years, year-over-year inflation has worsened from 2.6% to a more than four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022, but has come down to 4.9% as of April. The slowed inflation rate rise has been coupled by rapid Fed rate hikes, from near-zero 0.25% in March 2022 to 5.25% this month.

The Federal Reserve has been widely criticized for maintaining extremely low pandemic-era interest rates for too long.

In addition, three major banks — First Republic Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank which had assets worth $212 billion, $209 billion and $110 billion, respectively, according to Federal Reserve data — recently imploded partly as a result of high interest rates. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimated its actions to resolve the failures will cost taxpayers about $36 billion.

‘When federal regulators become political and start prioritizing activist-driven ESG principles rather than doing the jobs federal law requires them to do, areas of concern quickly become crises, and the American people are left to face the consequences,’ Sullivan told Fox News Digital in a statement. 

‘From the regional banking crisis experienced earlier this year to the growing influence China holds on American businesses, there are serious problems and national security threats that require our federal government’s focus,’ the Alaska senator continued. ‘Unfortunately, during the Biden administration, we’ve seen the politics of far-left environmental activists infiltrate a wide range of offices and agencies intended to be apolitical.’

‘Whether it’s the Securities & Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Defense Department, or others, my colleagues and I will continue to hold federal officials accountable to the American people and ensure they are following the law,’ Sullivan said

Sens. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, Mike Braun, R-Ind., Roger Marshall, R-Kan., Ted Budd, R-N.C., Mike Lee, R-Utah, Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., and James Risch, R-Idaho, signed onto Sullivan’s letter Wednesday.

And Sullivan penned a separate letter Tuesday to Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, expressing his concern about the Wall Street regulator’s focus on climate change.

‘The SEC should be focusing on these issues and ensuring that American investors are protected from a shaky Chinese economy and dangerously fickle and politically-focused authoritarian rule by the CCP,’ Sullivan wrote in that letter. ‘Yet the SEC seems divorced from this reality, pursuing an aggressive agenda of unnecessary climate disclosures and other burdensome rules.’

Democratic Minnesota senators, holding firm despite only a one-vote majority, successfully passed sweeping gun control legislation in an effort to keep guns out of the hands of people in crisis and criminals.

The public safety and judiciary finance and policy agreement passed early Tuesday, May 16 by a vote of 69-63, after passing the Senate 34-33 on Friday, May 12.

The proposals included the controversial ‘red flag law’ that would allow authorities to ask courts for ‘extreme risk protection orders’ to temporarily take guns away from people deemed to be an imminent threat to others or themselves. 

‘What we are going to be providing — finally — is a path forward for families and law enforcement who know that someone’s exhibiting signs of crisis and danger,’ said Democratic Sen. Rob Latz of St. Louis Park, chairman of the Senate public safety committee. ‘And it will give them lawful tools to separate people in crisis from the firearms that are around them.’

The provision is part of a broad public safety budget bill that also contains expanded background checks for gun transfers, with opponents arguing it violates a person’s due process and the Second Amendment of the constitution.

The extension on background check requires background for private transfers, which excludes family and law enforcement, of pistols and ‘semi-automatic military-style assault weapons.’

Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz is expected to sign the bill into law, after sharing his thoughts on the legislation in a Twitter post on Tuesday.

‘As a veteran, gun-owner, hunter, and dad, I know that basic gun safety isn’t a threat to the Second Amendment. It’s about our first responsibility to our kids: Keeping them safe,’ Waltz wrote in a Twitter post. ‘When the bill reaches my desk, I’m going to sign a red flag law and background checks into law.’

The bill also includes: 

Expanding the definition of bias crimes to include gender identityCreating an Office of Missing and Murdered Black Women and GirlsProviding $8.8 million for law enforcement recruitment and retention in the next four yearsBoosting funding for the state judicial system, including pay raises for judgesRestricting strip searches of detained juveniles