Members of the House Oversight Committee are deposing billionaire Lex Wexner in their investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
President Donald Trump has ordered a military buildup in the Middle East as his administration discusses Iran's nuclear program with Tehran. Mandel Ngan / AFP – Getty Images
Stephen Colbert took on his own network again last night, pushing back against CBS’ statement regarding his unaired interview with a Democratic candidate for Senate.
Holding up the company’s statement on a piece of paper, Colbert joked: “Now this is a surprisingly small piece of paper, considering how many butts it’s trying to cover.”
The statement came after Colbert claimed Monday that CBS had pushed him not to air an interview he had done with Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who is running for U.S. Senate. Colbert, who is parting ways with CBS in May, said the company had been worried about possible legal action from the Trump administration.
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WASHINGTON — A coalition of health and environmental groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency today, challenging its determination last week that revoked a scientific finding that has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change.
The rule finalized by the EPA last week rescinds a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The Obama-era finding is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.
The repeal eliminates all greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks, and could unleash a broader undoing of climate regulations on stationary sources such as power plants and oil and gas facilities, experts say.
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The Vatican will not participate in Trump’s “Board of Peace“ initiative, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s top diplomatic official, said yesterday while adding that efforts to handle crisis situations should be managed by the United Nations.
Pope Leo, the first U.S. pope and a critic of some of Trump’s policies, was invited to join the board in January.
Under Trump’s Gaza plan that led to a fragile ceasefire in October, the board was meant to supervise Gaza’s temporary governance. Trump thereafter said the board, with him as chair, would be expanded to tackle global conflicts. The board will hold its first meeting in Washington on Thursday to discuss Gaza’s reconstruction.
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An 18-year-old man was arrested yesterday after he rushed toward the U.S. Capitol wearing tactical gear and carrying a loaded weapon. Police say the teenager, Carter Camacho, backed down when confronted by Capitol police, but they found more ammunition, a Kevlar helmet and a gas mask in his car. NBC’s Ryan Nobles reports for “Today.”
Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasts to people in China, its CEO said, after Trump administration cuts last year largely forced the U.S.-funded outlet to cease operations.
Radio Free Asia and its sister outlets, including Voice of America, for years had been financed with funding approved by Congress and overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Last year their grants were terminated over allegations of wasting taxpayer money and anti-Trump bias, a move critics decried as ceding ground to China and other U.S. adversaries.
“We are proud to have resumed broadcasting to audiences in China in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur, providing some of the world’s only independent reporting on these regions in the local languages,” the news organization’s president and CEO Bay Fang wrote yesterday in a post on LinkedIn.
Fang said the ability to restart the broadcasts was “due to private contracting with transmission services,” without providing details.
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The Trump administration said Japan was moving forward with its first three projects as part of $550 billion it pledged to invest in the United States in exchange for lower tariffs.
In a statement late last night, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas power facility in Ohio that he said would be one of the largest of its kind of the world, as well as a crude oil export facility along the U.S. Gulf Coast and a synthetic diamond grit facility in Georgia. He said the projects, which together are worth almost $36 billion, would create thousands of American jobs.
Under a trade agreement the two countries reached in July, Japan pledged to invest $550 billion in the U.S. in exchange for a U.S. tariff rate of 15%, lower than Trump had earlier threatened.
“The scale of these projects are so large, and could not be done without one very special word, TARIFFS,” Trump said in a social media post.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who was reappointed by lawmakers today after a landslide election win last week, is set to visit the White House next month.
House Oversight Committee lawmakers will depose billionaire Les Wexner in Ohio today as part of their investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The deposition comes after the Justice Department unredacted part of a 2019 FBI document that included a reference to Wexner as a co-conspirator. An FBI email from the same year also said there was “limited evidence regarding his involvement.”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that Wexner’s name appears in the Epstein files thousands of times.
A legal representative for Wexner said his team was told in 2019 that he wasn’t a co-conspirator or a target of the investigation. Wexner fully cooperated with the government, the representative said.
Wexner, who had a financial relationship with Epstein that dated to the 1980s, has said he cut ties after Epstein was accused of sexually abusing minors in Florida. Wexner said that he later discovered Epstein “had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family.”
The House Oversight Committee voted in January to subpoena Wexner.
A senior U.S. official yesterday revealed what he said were new details of an underground nuclear test blast that China allegedly conducted in June 2020.
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Yeaw told an event at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington that a remote seismic station in Kazakhstan measured an “explosion” of magnitude-2.75 located 450 miles away at the Lop Nor test grounds in western China on June 22, 2020.
“I’ve looked at additional data since then. There is very little possibility I would say that it is anything but an explosion, a singular explosion,” said Yeaw, adding that the data were not consistent with mining blasts.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said the allegation about China conducting a nuclear test was “entirely unfounded” and an attempt “to fabricate excuses for resuming” U.S. nuclear testing.
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Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is expected today to call for a two-year suspension of tax incentives offered to develop data centers amid growing scrutiny over their rapid expansion and impact on communities.
Pritzker plans to advocate for a policy shift in his State of the State and budget address in Springfield under a proposal first shared with NBC News.
At the center of the plan is a two-year pause, effective July 1, on Illinois’ data center tax credit program. Pritzker will instruct key state agencies to study the impact of existing data centers on the state’s energy grid and consumers and analyze the financial impact the centers have had on the economy. Specifically, the governor’s office said it is trying to make sure the centers are financially sustainable over time, protect consumers from soaring energy costs and ensure fair allocation of resources.
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The United States and Iran have reached an understanding on the “guiding principles” in nuclear talks, Tehran’s foreign minister said yesterday, though he cautioned that work still needs to be done to reach an agreement and head off the threat of an American military attack.
“I believe we made good progress,” said Abbas Araghchi, the head of the Iranian delegation in Geneva. “The path toward an agreement has started but we will not reach it quickly,” he told state media after hours of indirect talks, adding that the two sides would separately work on draft texts before a new round of negotiations.
Vice President JD Vance gave a mixed review of the talks today in an interview with Fox News.
“In some ways, it went well. They agreed to meet afterwards,” Vance said. “But in other ways, it was very clear that the president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through. So we’re going to keep on working it.”
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