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The Trump administration has moved to cripple Title IX protections against sexual assault and harassment on the same day New York prosecutors reopened the investigation into heinous allegations of a fraternity gang rape at Cornell University. 

On Monday, the Education Department rescinded a 2024 Title IX rule enacted by former President Joe Biden that required schools to move proactively on sexual assault harassment cases, calling on them to strengthen and specify their protections for campus survivors. It also extended protections for LGBTQ students as well as those who were pregnant or a parent. Now, that has all been scrapped because the department doesn’t think the requirements are “enforceable nationwide.” 

The timing couldn’t be worse. Also on Monday, New York state prosecutors reopened an investigation into an alleged 2024 gang rape. The victim filed a lawsuit last week against members of the Chi Phi fraternity for allegedly raping her—and against Cornell University for failing to adequately protect her and discipline the fraternity members. The victim, Jane Doe, said that after leaving a bar she “stumbled alone” to Chi Phi’s  fraternity house around 11 p.m., became intoxicated, and was pressured by the members to snort what fraternity brothers told her was ketamine. She also smoked marijuana and drank more liquor. She was propositioned for a threesome by two of the brothers, even as the lawsuit alleges she was “incapable of consenting.” 

After that encounter, at about 1:42 a.m., one of the defendants texted a Chi Phi Snapchat groupchat telling his brothers that there was “free pussy” at the fraternity house. Jane Doe says she was then raped for hours by seven fraternity brothers. Aside from alleged forced oral and vaginal intercourse, they also allegedly snorted ketamine off of Jane Doe’s body. She said she was completely incapacitated at this point, with the alleged assault lasting until nearly 6:00 a.m. the next morning. 

Doe filed a report in November. Cornell University conducted an internal investigation, barred the fraternity but only suspended the defendants, giving them the option to write essays to lessen their punishment rather than expelling them. None were arrested, and Doe dropped out of Cornell shortly after. Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar are the Chi Phi members named in the lawsuit. 

“The Cornell University case is a devastating example of why robust federal Title IX enforcement matters,” said Shiwali Patel of the National Women’s Law Center. “Sexual harassment and assault continue to be pervasive in schools and, to the fullest extent possible, we should be working to enforce the laws that protect student survivors of sexual violence. Yet, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the Trump administration have decided to ignore what survivors need, instead weaponizing Title IX to attack trans students.” 

“While the administration is unlawfully eroding protections for trans students under the guise of ‘protecting women and girls,’ they are systematically weakening the very laws that keep students safe and schools accountable,”  she added.

New York prosecutors are now reconsidering criminal charges against the defendants. 

Microsoft has unveiled its shiny new Copilot super app alongside an “evolved” pricing model to go with it, which means that customers will keep paying for a subscription and then cough up more when they want the really clever stuff. The company outlined the changes alongside its expanded vision for Copilot, which is being turned into a single AI work hub spanning chat, Office apps, coding, and increasingly autonomous agents. Microsoft calls the new pricing setup a combination of a User Subscription License (USL), charged per user per month, and Usage-Based Billing (UBB), which charges according to how much work Copilot does. The regular subscription pays for what Microsoft calls “Everyday AI.” That's Copilot Chat, plus Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Users can pick which model they want, or leave it to Auto, which chooses based on accuracy, speed, and cost. Then there's “Advanced AI.” Customers wanting Copilot to get stuck into more compute-hungry agentic work will also need usage-based billing (UBB). Microsoft says that this includes Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new agentic experiences in SharePoint, and frontier models including Astra and Fable. Crucially, those UBB charges are on top of the user subscription, not an alternative to it. The meter itself isn't entirely new. Microsoft has already used consumption-based pricing for some AI services, including Cowork, and Copilot Credits provide the common currency for eligible services billed by usage. What's changing is how central that model will become as Microsoft pushes Copilot further into agent territory. Exactly how many credits disappear depends on what Copilot is asked to do. Microsoft says consumption can vary by the models used, how much context it has to retrieve, how long the task runs, and which tools it calls. More complicated, multi-step jobs can therefore chew through more credits than simpler tasks. Redmond isn't leaving admins completely at the mercy of an enthusiastic employee and a hungry AI agent. Usage-based features have to be enabled through a billing policy, and administrators can impose organization- and user-level spending limits, configure alerts, and monitor consumption from the Microsoft 365 admin center. That will require a mindset shift for organizations used to knowing what their Copilot seats will cost, according to Simon Baxter at analyst TechMarketView. “Customers that want these agentic capabilities will have to adopt a consumption mindset, along with the cost governance that goes with it,” Baxter said. He pointed to Microsoft's new FinOps tools for managing spending policies, credit approvals, and model access as evidence that Redmond knows customers will need help keeping tabs on the meter. Code and Autopilot could be particularly interesting for whoever holds the purse strings because they're designed to carry on working once they're set up. As Baxter put it, “an agent working without prompts is no longer tied to someone sitting at a keyboard.” That could prove awkward for public sector organizations accustomed to budgeting by headcount. Baxter pointed to NHS England's Copilot rollout, where license allocations across 505,000 staff give buyers a cost that they can plan around. Putting agents used for jobs such as complaints handling or freedom of information requests on a meter leaves trusts with a variable cost and, at least initially, little usage history on which to base a forecast. Microsoft's attempts to bundle Copilot with subscriptions and charge accordingly have already attracted some unwanted attention. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation in July into whether customers were properly informed when Microsoft added Copilot to consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions and moved them onto more expensive plans unless they opted for a cheaper Classic alternative. This time, Microsoft is drawing a clearer line between the Copilot included in a subscription and the more ambitious stuff that costs extra. That’s becoming more important as Copilot itself grows from a chatbot bolted onto Microsoft's existing applications into what the company is pitching as a “super app.” The super app, then, comes with a super-app-sized ambition – and a meter for the bits that require the most horsepower. ®

Anthropic, Clay, and Gamma on what it takes for an AI product to go beyond the demo at the AI Stage at TechCrunchDisrupt 2026. Register to join and get 50% off a second pass.

The edge computing startup raised a $150 million Series C led by Fidelity and Amplify.

Accounting staffing company Mavi emerges from stealth with $4million in funding.

The Trump administration is flip-flopping on how to manage its mass deportation policy ahead of the midterm elections.

Sources at ICE told CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez that officers had received guidance to limit arrests to individuals with criminal histories—but that policy was quickly rolled back.

“The backdrop here is important,” Montoya-Galvez wrote on X. “Ahead of the midterms, some GOP lawmakers and business leaders have been expressing concerns about the political and economic consequences of ICE’s crackdown.”

It appears that some Republicans are finally seeing how ICE’s operations in their home states might hurt them on election day. Last week, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall issued a rare rebuke of ICE after a series of surprise raids in his state sparked protests and business closures.

Marshall was among the majority of Republicans who spent months blocking even the most modest reforms for ICE but saw a dip in the polls ahead of his statement.

This isn’t the first time that cracks have appeared in enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security.

After two deadly incidents in July, the Trump administration issued a temporary pause on traffic stops, and then rescinded that policy just one day later.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reportedly never received the White House’s blessing before announcing the sudden policy change—leaving President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan in the dark. Trump was reportedly furious, believing that it signaled the administration was softening on immigration enforcement.

But increasingly, voters are finding that Trump’s immigration policies have gone too far.

On Tuesday, the full D.C. Circuit will hear arguments in a case that began on a Saturday evening in March 2025, when a federal judge ordered two planeloads of Venezuelan men returned to the United States and the administration, hours later, transported them to a prison in El Salvador instead.

Eighteen months later, the only question before the court is narrow, and worth stating precisely, because the government has spent great energy twisting it into something else: may Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court James Boasberg continue to inquire into whether the administration knowingly defied his order?

The case has taken a long, tortuous path to tomorrow’s hearing. It is important in itself, but the stakes reach past it, to whether this administration set out to buck the law from the first days of Trump 2.0. That’s why I left my usual seat in the journalist’s box and signed onto an amicus brief in the case, one of 12 former Justice Department officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, who think Boasberg should be allowed to do his job.

Cast your mind back to March 2025. It was the first real collision between the second Trump administration and the federal courts: before the birthright-citizenship fights, before the funding freezes, before the parade of emergency stays that is now the background hum of this presidency.

At an emergency hearing on March 15, Boasberg ordered the government not to remove anyone under the Alien Enemies Act and, if planes were aloft, to turn them around. His statement from the bench: any plane carrying these people “needs to be returned to the United States.”

Notwithstanding Boasberg’s instructions, the planes landed in El Salvador and went straight into a maximum-security prison, and that country’s president posted a laughing emoji and the word, “Oopsie.”

Later, a whistleblower—Erez Reuveni, a career Justice Department lawyer since fired—told Congress that at a March 14 leadership meeting, then-senior DOJ official Emil Bove said the planes were leaving “no matter what,” and that the Department might have to say “Fuck You” to the courts. Bove, since rewarded with a lifetime seat on the Third Circuit, told the Senate he couldn’t recall the profane remark.

Boasberg has doggedly insisted on getting to the bottom of what happened for well over a year. That has entailed plowing past a series of avoidance maneuvers from the administration. The extended bob-and-weave has included refusing to address his questions on national-security grounds, dismissing the matter as a “picayune dispute,” floating and then not invoking the state secrets privilege, serving up a declaration so empty that Boasberg called it “woefully insufficient,” and filing a misconduct complaint against the judge himself.

When Boasberg continued to hang fire, the administration tried its well-worn play of crying “emergency” to the D.C. Circuit. A panel of three judges gave Trump a ringing victory that lasted only a little while before the court as a whole took the unusual step of vacating the opinion and agreeing to hear the case again. That hearing before the full en banc court takes place Tuesday.

The now-vacated panel opinion was remarkably obtuse and spiteful. It’s the most naked piece of judicial pandering I have seen by a judge this side of Aileen Cannon. It was written by a judge, Neomi Rao, widely considered to be in the running for the next Supreme Court vacancy.

The proof of Rao’s overreach was the series of nasty swipes at Boasberg, a judge widely respected on both sides of the aisle (he was nominated to the bench by Barack Obama and confirmed unanimously). Courts of appeals taking a case away from a district court customarily cushion the blow with polite asides about the learned district judge.

But not in this case. Rao fairly savaged Boasberg, with words that likely shocked her colleagues but delighted her Oval Office patron. Among many potshots and low blows, she accused Boasberg of a “widening gyre” of investigation and wrote “criminal liability cannot turn on the unstated intentions (or post hoc assertions) of a district court judge.” It was her vitriol as much as her reasoning that I think explains the full court’s rare decision to vacate her opinion and rehear it en banc.

It’s certain that the eventual opinion will excise those Rao nasty-grams. But the focus Tuesday will be on Rao’s legal analysis. The brief I joined made the fundamental point that, contrary to Rao’s suggestion, there has been no finding of contempt, and all Boasberg’s order does is consider the possibility based on compelling evidence pointing in that direction.

Second and relatedly, Rao’s opinion recasts that factual question as a legal one that isn’t in front of Boasberg at all. Criminal contempt, the majority reasoned, requires a “clear and specific” order, and Boasberg’s temporary restraining order “did not clearly and specifically bar the government from transferring plaintiffs into Salvadoran custody.”

That move takes Bove and other administration officials’ mental state out of the equation. But contempt is judged at the moment of the conduct, not against a reading two appellate judges reached a year and a half later. If the people in that room understood the order and defied it because the planes were landing “no matter what,” the fact that some judges now find the wording debatable does not launder the defiance. At a bare minimum, it is no basis for pulling the plug on the inquiry.

As Judge Michelle Childs warned in dissent, the majority’s logic would “echo in future proceedings against all litigants,” letting anyone “argue, based on their preferred interpretation of a court’s order, that they did not commit contempt before contempt findings are even made.”

The D.C. Circuit should stand behind Boasberg’s doggedness. It would have been easy for him to drop it, but I think as the chief judge, he sees himself as acting on behalf of his colleagues, whose three-year project of trying the January 6 offenders—the largest prosecution effort in the department’s history—was wiped away with a stroke in Trump’s wholesale pardons the day that he took office.

Moreover, Boasberg is now in a sense carrying the load for American society and history. The administration has been intent from its first minutes in office on the Orwellian project of whitewashing history and erasing Trump’s perfidy, the worst by any president in our history. Its war on the truth is comprehensive, ranging from the burial of the Jack Smith report to the campaign to launder the Smithsonian’s account of the American past to the ouster of the national archivist charged with keeping the government’s own record. As Orwell wrote of the machinery of the Party, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified... And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”

The D.C. Circuit argument thus has a dual role: It will settle Boasberg’s ability to continue to hold the administration accountable. But it also will serve as a sort of truth and reconciliation commission, on the model of the January 6 committee during Trump 1.0. It is vital for us to know as a country whether the administration came into office determined to elevate presidential will over the rule of law, to land the planes “no matter what.” Unless Boasberg is permitted to finish the job he started well over a year ago, we may never learn the answer—which is precisely the result the administration has been seeking for over a year.

The Dutch government is backing an effort to build a FOSS workplace for public administration, including a desktop operating system based on NixOS. The DAWO Project has been gestating for some months, but it just got a lot more visible thanks to an in-depth report on Dutch tech news site Tweakers.net. DAWO stands for "Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid," or "Digital Autonomous Government Work Environment." Rather than a single product, its blueprint combines replaceable components for the operating system, cloud infrastructure, AI, communications, and collaborative working. Development remains at an early stage, but small-scale pilots are already under way within Dutch public bodies. The work acquired official status in July, when the Dutch government's ICBR – the Interdepartmental Committee on Government Operations – commissioned three government IT providers to develop a standardized, more sovereign digital workplace: DICTU, SSC-ICT and the ICT division of DUO, the Education Executive Agency. The wider blueprint comes from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, or BZK. Its components include MijnBureau, a self-hosted workplace suite built from projects including Nextcloud, Collabora, Element and OpenProject. The MijnBureau developers are also collaborating with France's La Suite and aligning their work with Germany's openDesk. Regular Register readers will probably recognize the name openDesk: it's featured in several recent stories. OpenDesk is the suite that the International Criminal Court is adopting following US sanctions against senior court officials. (Tweakers mentions these sanctions as being a motivating factor behind the Dutch efforts.) The ICC is based in the Netherlands, in The Hague. According to a Reuters report, the Trump administration is planning wider sanctions against the ICC. OpenDesk is also a core part of the moves in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, as we reported in July, and those in Switzerland which we covered earlier this month. Back in April, the Association of Netherlands Municipalities, or VNG, announced that four municipalities were taking part in the trials. Tweakers reports that the number has since doubled to eight – still a small fraction of the country's hundreds of municipalities. The project publishes code through the BZK's government-hosted Forgejo instance, with repositories also available through Codeberg for outside contributors. For its client OS, the project initially experimented with openSUSE, then Fedora, before settling on NixOS. The Reg FOSS desk has written about NixOS several times, including its radical approach to package management and the arrival of NixOS 22.11. NixOS offers more than a conveniently Dutch pedigree. It is not controlled by a commercial vendor, while its declarative configuration and reproducible deployments make it attractive for managing and auditing large fleets of machines. The Nix packaging system project was founded by a Dutchman, Eelco Dolstra; the first version of the NixOS distro built with it by another, Armijn Hemel; and the NixOS Foundation is based in the Netherlands. The Nix community has not been without controversy. In 2023, conference organizers withdrew sponsorship from US autonomous weapons vendor Anduril following objections from contributors. The dispute fed into a broader argument over project governance that culminated the following year in a fork called Auxolotl. FOSS projects have little control over who uses their code, while attempts to restrict particular users can create problems of their own. Government interest does, however, bring money and momentum. As we noted following the launch of Euro-Office in April and Collabora's AI-infused CODE suite in June, the scent of public sector cash is proving highly effective at stimulating activity and cooperation in the FOSS world. ®

Senator John Fetterman seemed to forget where he stands politically over the weekend.

At the Texas Tribune Festival Saturday, the Pennsylvania Democrat was asked why he wouldn’t become an independent considering the stances and votes he has taken in defiance of the Democratic Party. 

“Because I’m a lifelong Republican,” Fetterman responded. 

“Democrat,” CBS News correspondent Major Garrett corrected him as the audience gasped and laughed. “That’s a moment right there, that’s clippable ladies and gentlemen!”

“Yeah, I’m a lifelong Democrat, though,” Fetterman said sheepishly as some in the audience jeered. 

Q: Why not become an independent?

Fetterman: Because I’m a lifelong Republican.

Garrett: You mean a Democrat.

Fetterman: A Democrat. pic.twitter.com/HD92TVceVr

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 27, 2026

It was quite the revelatory gaffe for Fetterman, who has confirmed President Trump’s nominees, voted to reopen the government, and helped thwart multiple resolutions seeking to end the Iran war. The Pennsylvania senator is facing renewed calls to step down from Democrats in his home state after a Wall Street Journal article earlier this month reported that he has blown off meetings with disabled veterans, families of slain police officers, children’s hospital officials, and numerous constituents in the past two years.  

In 2028, Fetterman is up for reelection, and several Democrats will likely launch primary challenges against the incumbent senator. Several of them have not hesitated to attack Fetterman, with Representative Brendan Boyle calling him a “disgrace” and former Representative Conor Lamb, who lost to Fetterman in the 2022 Senate primary, saying that he should “just quit.”  

“John, if there is a decent bone left in your body, just quit. It’s an insult to decent people in our state for you to treat them and the office this way,” Lamb posted on X. 

Fetterman’s turn towards the right is getting him attention from all of the wrong places. He made a surprise cameo at the Republicans’ midterm convention, and he’s become a right-wing media darling at places such as Fox News, who cater to his vehement pro-Israel views. Meanwhile, his Pennsylvania constituents are being ignored. 

President Donald Trump’s thirst for revenge against Republican lawmakers who refused to sufficiently bow to him is backfiring spectacularly—and nowhere more so than in North Carolina. Trump effectively pushed out Tar Heel State GOP Sen. Thom Tillis last June, after Tillis refused to vote for Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” over its damaging cuts to Medicaid. And now, Tillis is publicly admitting…

Source

After her grandfather was scammed by a deepfake of his brother's voice, Tarini Padmanabhuni founded DetectifAI, a San Francisco startup building AI models small enough to run directly on smartphones and flag fake voices in real time, and it's now one of the companies competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt.

CFS' Brandon Sorbom and Helion's David Kirtley join the Smart Systems Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to discuss the breakthroughs moving fusion forward, the challenges that remain, and what it will take to deliver fusion power to the grid at scale. Get your pass at regular price and get a second one at 50% off.

Quick Take

• The latest trailer for Robert Eggers’ Gothic film Werwulf is bloody, dark, and deeply unsettling.
• The film will come to theaters on December 25.
• Nerdist‘s Take: We are sure that many people will thirst over a beastly and cursed Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

Robert Eggers is once again bringing frights to Christmas with Werwulf, which is arriving just two years after Nosferatu. We’ve seen some teases from the film, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, and Lily-Rose Depp, a trio whom we all love. The latest trailer for Werwulf is perhaps our biggest insight into the gothic tale as we see a man’s curse fully unfold. 

In addition to this new clip, Focus Features is giving fans an immersive look into this world with a new website, DevourethAllMankynde.com. It’s an alternate reality game that is timed to our real-life full moons from September to November. There’s a special prize for those who complete its challenges for all three moons, which we assume isn’t the gift of becoming beastly. Fans will have to find a hidden “sign” on different digital platforms and decipher the sign back into the site in order to fulfill the moon. 

But, they only get 24 hours each full moon to search for the sign before it disappears, so they will need to work fast to find it.

Nerdist’s Take: This Werwulf Trailer Makes Us Sure That Fans Will Thirst Over a Beastly Aaron Taylor-Johnson Courtesy of Focus Features

Sounds like some great Fall fun for us to have while we keep this Werwulf trailer on a loop. We already know that this film will somehow spawn a legion of thirst for Taylor-Johnson’s leading man, even after his transition. He truly cannot help being a good looking guy despite the overall haggard look and bloodlust. And, of course, we will be at the theaters on December 25 to check out Werwulf.

Tai Gooden is the Features Editor for Nerdist, a fictional villain apologist, and a horror aficionado who is forever waiting for her trip in the TARDIS.

The post WERWULF Trailer: Aaron Taylor-Johnson Is Both Hot and Haunting appeared first on Nerdist.

The bureau has not yet publicly confirmed a breach, but has told its agents that their personal information and Social Security numbers were exposed.

Thousands of applications. Multiple rounds of review. Hundreds of hours spent evaluating startups from around the world. Now comes the part everyone has been waiting for. Startup Battlefield 200 is almost here, and with today’s announcement, the judging panel is nearly complete. In just a couple of weeks, 200 carefully selected startups will gather at […]

Selling weapons to China is suddenly off the table. It’s unclear how it got on the table in the first place.

U.S. Ambassador David Perdue told Fox News Sunday that “President Trump continues to say: Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,” and that “he actually asked [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] would he like to buy some at one point.”

But hours later, the Trump administration aggressively attempted to cover its own tracks. Two U.S. officials denied any such plan while speaking with The Wall Street Journal. One source told the daily that the White House had no intentions of selling weapons to Beijing, while the other acknowledged that it’s already illegal to do so. That ban circles back to Taiwan, which relies on U.S. weapons to deter Chinese encroachment.

China has reaffirmed for years that Taiwan is an inalienable part of its territory, and that it intends to formally reunite with the island nation. More than 23 million people live in Taiwan, and its sovereignty is highly contested due to a complex history of colonization.

The U.S. has provided material defense support to Taiwan since 1979, when Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act. The law binds the U.S. to resist anything that would jeopardize Taiwan’s national security.

The White House rattled Beijing when it made an $11 billion arms sale to the island in December, with a separate $14 billion package expected down the line. Donald Trump has since held off on advancing that larger sale, despite urging from Senate Republicans ahead of Xi’s visit last week.

“It is difficult to imagine ​how the United States might credibly project influence deterrence in the Indo-Pacific if the price of keeping up diplomatic appearances ​is denying our partners key deterrent capabilities,” Senators Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ahead of the state visit.

Trump has not commented on the abeyance since. However, Xi made his position regarding U.S. involvement in the region abundantly clear. On Thursday, Xi told Trump that he hoped America would take the “correct position” of opposing Taiwan’s independence.

Taiwanese Deputy Foreign Minister Francois Wu commented on the summit on Saturday, telling reporters in Taipei that maintaining military sales and providing Taiwan the support to defend itself was an “important U.S. interest” due to the island’s dominating semiconductor industry, reported Reuters.

5 minutes agoWalter EinenkelOh, just a Texas GOP candidate calling for public lynchings Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 19 minutes agoWalter EinenkelTrump releases unhinged taxpayer-funded ad during college football@MediumBuyingAccording to Medium Buying—a political campaign ad-strategizing group—this ad ran nationally on Fox during Ohio State game and during Fox News Sunday.

Source

Attorney General Todd Blanche crashed and burned while trying to defend President Donald Trump’s ever-increasing restrictions on the press.

Speaking on ABC’s This Week Sunday, Blanche struggled to keep his composure while facing questions about a federal judge’s temporary injunction on Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. 

Last week, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s decision had little to do with national security, as the Justice Department had argued in court, and that the president’s initial statements indicated that the ban stemmed from the media’s coverage of the Republican Party. 

“Well, I’m not going to get into what the judge says, the litigation is ongoing. But our position has been clear from the beginning. What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security,” Blanche said. 

When ABC host Martha Raddatz pressed him for a single example, Blanche appeared to claim that any negative reporting about the president was inaccurate. 

“Give you an example of when CNN doesn’t report accurately? You cannot be asking me that!” Blanche said. “They don’t even disagree. There’s not even a real dispute that the information coming out of CNN and some of these other networks is wholly and completely, almost 100 percent, negative towards the president.”

Raddatz reminded Blanche that the judge ruled that the ban had nothing to do with national security, and the attorney general doubled down.  

“At some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue and it’s not right for the people of the United States to have to put up with it,” Blanche said. 

Blanche blew up when Raddatz asked whether the Trump administration planned to screen reporters. 

“I did not say that! I did not say that! You don’t get to put words in my mouth! You don’t get to put words in my mouth! That’s not the way it works,” he cried. 

Then Blanche balked at a question about what the First Amendment meant to him, and insisted that news coverage did not have to be positive for the Trump administration. 

“But you heard what the president said: ‘They want to try to diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration,’” Raddatz said. 

“For you to pick out seven words and say, ‘Oh, that’s what the president means,’ that’s extraordinarily disingenuous,” Blanche said. 

Clearly, the Trump administration simply can’t stand when the press reports on what the president actually says. 

Despite the judge’s order, the Trump administration has continued to lash out at the press. Over the weekend, the president blocked CNN from traveling with him on Air Force One.

Europe is one of the world's largest markets for AI datacenter infrastructure, but its own local companies capture only a fraction of the value, because overseas suppliers dominate chips, servers, and cloud infrastructure. According to the Global Electronics Association (GEA), EU-headquartered companies account for only six percent of the bloc's datacenter semiconductor market, seven percent of server manufacturing and assembly, and eight percent of cloud infrastructure. Its report, "From Chips to Systems: Building an End-to-End EU Strategy for Data Centre, Cloud Infrastructure and AI," says that Europe's Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) aims to at least triple the bloc's datacenter capacity within five to seven years. The association argues that Europe needs policies to develop its own industrial ecosystem and capture more of the "unprecedented demand for servers, electronic systems and semiconductor components" CADA is expected to stimulate. Europe has fallen behind other regions in much of the electronics supply chain. Taiwan dominates contract chip manufacturing and produces most of the world's leading-edge processors, many of them designed by American companies, while South Korean and US suppliers dominate the memory market. Most major server makers are American, with China's Lenovo a notable exception. US companies also dominate networking and storage, leaving Europe with few large suppliers of its own. The report recommends that the EU pursue an end-to-end strategy for the datacenter supply chain, using European demand to encourage private investment while enticing global technology and manufacturing companies to expand production within the bloc. Its case rests partly on the claim that servers, driven by AI processing requirements, have become the primary growth driver of the entire electronics industry since 2024, overtaking other segments. It points to forecasts that expect servers to become the largest electronics segment by 2030, ahead of smartphones or automotive electronics. The report also identifies datacenter, cloud, and AI infrastructure as the most strategically important market for EU technological sovereignty. Server farms constitute the critical infrastructure on which a large number of essential services now depend, and the cloud services that run on them are now integral to the design, manufacture, and operation of many physical goods. GEA argues that supporting individual parts of the supply chain in isolation will not create a competitive European industry. It points to the Chips Act 2.0 and CADA as steps in the right direction, but says that other industrial policy instruments will need to match them. "For the first time, printed circuit boards, electronic manufacturing services, advanced packaging, and substrates sit alongside semiconductor fabrication as explicit targets of European industrial strategy," it says. The report acknowledges that Europe cannot realistically build this supply chain using EU-headquartered companies alone. It says policymakers should use the "attractiveness and growth of the EU market to encourage global leaders to expand their manufacturing footprint in Europe." That could involve partnerships with European technology companies and research organizations, spreading manufacturing expertise through the region's electronics industry. The proposal echoes the Trump administration's push to rebuild American manufacturing, although it relies more on incentives than on tariffs or threats to exclude foreign products unless their manufacturers establish US production. Nevertheless, the GEA says that the European objective should be to progressively anchor a greater share of the end-to-end value chain within Europe. Whether EU members have the collective will to do this is another question, as is whether it is possible to reverse the continent's deep dependence on overseas technology. ®

FBI Director Kash Patel appears to have spent his weekend schmoozing with a man his own department fired under suspicions of being a double agent in 2008.

Patel attended the wedding of former acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, who resigned in disgrace in December.

On Sunday, Israeli-born federal prosecutor Sigal Chattah shared a photo from the festivities, featuring herself, Habba, her new billionaire husband Turhan Mildon, and Ali Abdelaziz, a former UFC manager and NYPD and FBI informant suspected of being a double agent.

According to the 2013 book Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, Abdelaziz was initially hired by the NYPD to serve as a mole against Muslims of America, a Virginia-based group, but was dropped after they after administered a polygraph test and suspected he was a double agent. The FBI tried to deport him but was unable to, according to the book’s authors.

This is at least the second time Patel and Abdelaziz have been pictured together.

“Why, that’s Ali Abdelaziz is on the far left. Manages a lot of Russian, Belarusian and Chechen MMA fighters including Khamzat Chimaev, who is close to Kadyrov. Abdelaziz was an FBI informant until the Bureau dropped him because they suspected he was a double agent,” The Insider’s Michael Weiss wrote on X. “Looks like Ka$h (far right) has forgiven and forgotten. These MAGA weddings are Mos Eisley cantinas for counterintelligence.”

Patel also drew backlash for appearing with Chattah, who made headlines last year for allowing senior Israeli government official Tom Alexandrovich to return to Israel on bail after being arrested in a sting operation for soliciting sexual acts from a minor.