Melania gives Congress private deadline as she works around Trump's team: report

First lady Melania Trump gave Congress a private deadline to pass her signature foster care bill, and she is pursuing it largely outside the usual White House channels, according to a new report in Politico. At a bipartisan roundtable with the House Ways and Means Committee in April, the first lady publicly called foster care legislation a "moral imperative." Then, behind closed doors, she set a target, Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) told the outlet: "I want this on Donald's desk by the August recess." The Fostering the Future Act, which expands housing, education and workforce help for young people aging out of foster care, passed the House unanimously.The Senate has not moved it out of committee, and lawmakers are set to leave Washington around Aug. 10. At a White House picnic the day the House passed the bill, both Trumps urged the Senate to hurry. "Hopefully, it will quickly pass in the Senate," the president said. He has not publicly pressed senators since.The deadline reflects a first lady who increasingly operates on her own track. Her office, not the State Department, has led her effort to reunite children displaced by the Russia-Ukraine war, negotiating directly with Moscow and Kyiv, the White House said. She has also shown a willingness to diverge from the administration's message. She broke with the White House on Epstein, calling for survivors to testify as the president's team tried to move past the scandal, and last week put her own spin on a Supreme Court ruling her husband celebrated, voicing support for the LGBTQIA+ community.A recent book recounted how she resisted Trump's overhaul of the White House grounds and lost.

This Republican Has a Wild Idea for Fixing Housing Prices: Let the Market Actually Work

Billionaire Trump ally melts down in spat with pope: ‘Working for Chinese communists”

Right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel is accusing Pope Leo XIV of doing the work of the Chinese Communist Party with his criticisms of artificial intelligence.According to a Thursday report from CNN, Thiel told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Tuesday that the pope was inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” when he released a 42,000-word encyclical that called for strict regulation of AI, a technology that the pontiff said heightens the “risk of dehumanization” throughout the world.Thiel argued that this sort of thinking was dangerous, CNN reported, because it could result in the US losing the “race” to build more advanced AI to China. Because of this, Thiel continued, the pope is essentially “working for the Chinese communists” by trying to tap the brakes on AI development.Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has long decried AI critics in harsh terms. Over the last year, he has been delivering a series of lectures in which he has said that opponents of AI development are working as agents for the Antichrist.Journalist Christopher Hale, who writes the Letters From Leo newsletter, noted on Friday that Thiel in the past has even speculated that Pope Leo could be “a manifestation of the Antichrist.”Thiel has said that he instructed Vice President JD Vance, a longtime political ally who received major funding from the tech billionaire for his 2022 Senate campaign, to ignore the pope’s moral guidance despite influencing Vance to convert to Catholicism, Hale added.“Thiel seeded the vice president’s Catholic faith,” Hale wrote, “and he now tells wealthy festival audiences that the leader of that faith works for a communist government.”In addition to his attacks on the pope, Thiel also warned about “a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” pointing to recent victories in New York and Colorado of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.Thiel said that this “takeover” would doom the US, arguing that “when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over,” according to CNN.The New York Times reported in May that Thiel has grown so concerned about the political situation in the US that he’s created a “foothold” for himself in Argentina, which is currently being governed by ideologically likeminded libertarian President Javier Milei.“Thiel, who has a history of collecting backup countries as he hedges his bets against the United States, is considering making Argentina another Plan B,” the Times reported. “Born in Germany and raised in the United States, he received citizenship in New Zealand in 2011, and applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.”

New York police officers are about to be worked to extremes – and Zohran Mamdani is to blame

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author. The law enforcement veteran and InVest USA founder discusses why many NYPD officers are in for […]

Trump Tries to Ignore Supreme Court on E. Jean Carroll

Donald Trump is still trying to stiff E. Jean Carroll, according to the columnist’s attorney.Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, wrote in a court filing Tuesday that Trump’s legal representative had called her the day prior asking for another delay to the $5 million sum Trump owes the writer. Later Monday, Kaplan said she informed Trump’s team that “Carroll does not consent,” and asked whether Trump would comply with the immediate disbursement of funds.Carroll has a long and unfortunate history with the president. Trump was found liable by a jury in May 2023 for having sexually assaulted Carroll in the mid-1990s, for which she was awarded $5 million in damages. He subsequently lost his defamation case against her the following January, when a judge ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the assault on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case.But Carroll hasn’t yet seen a dime from either case. In May, a federal appeals court allowed Trump to continue staving off his payments until the Supreme Court decided whether or not to pick up the case. The court made their decision Monday, rejecting Trump’s challenge and allowing the verdict to stand.In a separate filing Tuesday, Kaplan asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll. She referred to a June 2023 filing in which both parties agreed that Carroll could collect if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.Kaplan added that, by this point, the $5 million sum had accrued an additional $779,783 in interest, raising Trump’s initial debt to nearly $5.8 million.Nonetheless, Trump has continued to make a target out of Carroll. In May, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the writer, probing whether Carroll committed perjury in her previous cases against Trump.

Appeals court sides with intelligence officers fired for working on DEI

A federal appeals court in a 2-1 decision Thursday upheld a lower court ruling blocking the Trump administration from firing 19 career intelligence officers who had been assigned to roles dealing with diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA). The ruling from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found the Trump administration erred in firing the…

America’s Real Superpower Has Always Been Free People Working Together

Germans must now have doctor’s note to call in sick to work: ‘Extraordinarily high levels of sick leave’

Under Germany’s former policy, workers were allowed to take up to six weeks of paid leave for an illness. That's on top of the six weeks of vacation time that most employees get.