Names and faces
■ Presidential daughter Ivanka Trump helped load boxes of food into the cars that showed up at a south Florida drive- t hru food dist ri bution event. “Merry Christmas,” Trump said Tuesday as she hauled a black box into a trunk in the parking lot of King Jesus Ministry in Miami-Dade County, according to WSVN. One driver in the line, Karla Fuentes, told the Miami television station that she had gotten to the church more than 12 hours earlier to get in line for the food and slept in her car. “It’s a big help for my house, for my neighbor,” Fuentes said. “We can share with everybody.” Another food recipient, Vivian Lopez, said she had lost her job because of the pandemic. “We are living really hard times,” Lopez said. The food giveaway isn’t too far from where Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, recently bought property on Indian Creek Island near Miami, an area referred to as “Billionaires Bunker,” according to news reports.
■ A date was set Tuesday for singer R. Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago on child-pornography and obs t r ucti on charges, but even the judge said the date was “not set in stone” given the pandemic-related delays that continue to bog down the court. Judge Harry Leinenweber of U.S. District Court set Kelly’s trial for Sept. 13, five months after another federal trial Kelly faces in New York. Prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois told Leinenweber they would need three weeks to present evidence against Kelly, who is facing charges that he and two former employees conspired to fix his 2008 state trial in Cook County on child-pornography charges by paying off witnesses and victims to get them to change their stories. Kelly is also scheduled to face trial April 7 in New York on racketeering charges. In that case, an indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn alleges that Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, and his associates ran a criminal enterprise that recruited women and girls for illegal sexual contact and then isolated and threatened them to keep them under control and prevent them from going to the authorities. If convicted in the New York case, Kelly faces up to 20 years in prison. The federal charges in Chicago have the potential to add decades more in prison, and Kelly also is facing state charges of criminal sexual abuse that were filed in Chicago in February 2019. Kelly, 53, has been held in the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since his arrest in July 2019. Since then, his lawyer, Steven Greenberg, has filed at least six arguments for Kelly’s release, citing the danger of the coronavirus and an attack on Kelly over the summer by another prisoner.