pelespirit

After voting no seven times, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., flipped and cast the deciding vote to advance a War Powers Resolution to rein in President Donald Trump’s war in Iran without authorization from Congress.

In a 50-47 vote, Cassidy joined fellow Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., who have previously supported the measure.

The vote marks the first time a War Powers Resolution on Trump’s Iran conflict has gained enough Republican support to advance to a floor debate.

“The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks,” said Zuckerberg. “So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model’s coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company.”

He assured the company’s 78,000 employees that “no human is looking at or watching what people are doing on their computers... None of the data is being used for looking at what people are doing or surveillance or performance tracking or anything like that. It’s purely just that we are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks.”

Zuckerberg explained how the employees have been used to train the model that could potentially replace many of them days after Meta announced it was planning to lay off about 10% of its workforce as the company invests heavily in AI, spending $125 billion to $145 billion on the technology—more than double what it spent last year.

Tennessee officials will pay $835,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a man who was jailed for more than a month over a Facebook post he made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

While many people across the U.S. lost their jobs over social media comments about Kirk’s death, Larry Bushart’s case stood out as a rare instance in which such online speech led to criminal prosecution. The 61-year-old retired police officer spent 37 days behind bars before authorities dropped the felony charge against him in October.

During his time in jail, Bushart lost his postretirement job and missed his wedding anniversary and the birth of his granddaughter, according to a federal lawsuit Bushart filed in December against Perry County, its sheriff and the investigator who obtained the arrest warrant.

“I am pleased my First Amendment rights have been vindicated,” Bushart said in a statement announcing the settlement Wednesday. “The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy. I am looking forward to moving on and spending time with my family.”

President Donald Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service on Monday in exchange for a settlement deal to launch a $1.8 billion fund to pay claims made by his friends for purported unfair prosecution.

“The Fund will consist of a Commission of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership,” the Justice Department’s press release states. “The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.”

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”

Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own US manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”

Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

The new map is supposed to help Republicans pick up five Democratic-held seats, a target set by Trump. If they succeed, Democrats will represent only eight of the state’s 38 districts, down from their current 13.

Republicans pursued this goal with a tactic called “cracking,” which means spreading Democratic-leaning voters across districts that include more Republican-leaning voters. This way, it’s harder for Democrats to patch together a majority in individual congressional races.

But the math behind this isn’t so simple. Predicting whether certain voters lean left or right, or whether they’ll cast a ballot, is complex, and getting it wrong can have consequences.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his family rode snowmobiles, boarded a cruise ship and sat down with Kid Rock as they crisscrossed the country to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

Helping to pick up the tab? Boeing.

The company kicked in $1 million to help fund the five-part video series, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing sources familiar with the agreements.

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Department of Transportation and The Great American Road Trip, a nonprofit, are promoting the video series with a trailer showing Duffy, his wife and their nine children taking in the sights. The nonprofit said it funded the series with the help of corporate sponsorships.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was left squirming and evasive when cornered over whether the Trump administration was preparing to dole out millions of taxpayer dollars to violent offenders who attacked Capitol Hill police on January 6.

The Justice Department revealed the creation of a new $1.776 billion fund to pay out to people who claim to be victims of government weaponization. It was announced after Donald Trump dropped his own $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.

But when confronted about the fund in a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Blanche would not rule out the funds being handed to violent offenders or Trump’s own allies and political donors.

A few months after their friendship began, in a November 2016 email included in the FBI files, Epstein sent Chopra a link to a Daily Mail article about a “troubled woman” who claimed that she had been assaulted by Donald Trump when she was 13 years old, at a party hosted by Epstein. (The article reported that those allegations had not been substantiated, and that the woman’s lawsuit against Trump was dismissed.)

“Did she also drop civil case against you?” Chopra asked. Epstein responded with one word: “yup.” Chopra said: “good.”

Over the following year, the two continued to exchange greetings, ideas and invitations. In February 2017, Chopra invited Epstein by email to attend a course the following month called “Journey Into Healing.” Chopra added that he would also be leading a weeklong retreat that June at a Canadian resort — he wrote “Bamf,” presumably meaning Banff, Alberta — and said, “The girls might enjoy it.”

In another email a few days after that one, Chopra invited Epstein to “Come to Israel with us” to “Relax and have fun with interesting people.” He suggested that Epstein might “use a fake name” and “Bring your girls.”

A federal judge in New York has banned US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from arresting immigrants in or around three federal courthouses in lower Manhattan, where vigorous confrontations have played out since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

Under an order issued on Monday by P Kevin Castel, a US district judge, federal agents are no longer allowed to make arrests of immigrants except under exceptional circumstances at the sites where hearings are held before immigration judges.

Castel’s ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road NY and other groups.