The Supreme Court acknowledged Wednesday that it inadvertently posted online a document related to a pending abortion case, which Bloomberg Law obtained before it was removed from the website.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe confirmed that a document was “inadvertently and briefly uploaded” to the court website but added that the ruling “has not been released.”

Bloomberg also posted a copy of the document.

The court appears set to allow emergency room doctors in Idaho to perform abortions in certain situations, according to a copy of the decision, Bloomberg reported. The court is likely to dismiss the appeal brought by Idaho officials, Bloomberg said.

In doing so the court would allow a lower court ruling in favor of the Biden administration to go back into effect.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion joined by two other conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, saying the court should not have dismissed the case.

The Supreme Court in January blocked the lower court ruling and allowed Idaho to enforce its abortion law in full while agreeing to hear oral arguments.

Other provisions of the ban are already in effect and would not be affected by the ruling.

The case concerns whether a federal law that regulates emergency room treatment overrides Idaho’s strict abortion ban. If the court dismisses the appeal, it would leave the legal question unresolved.

According to the document posted by Bloomberg, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately to say the court should have gone ahead and decided the bigger issue, which is likely to come up in another case in due course and would have an impact on other states with abortion restrictions similar to Idaho’s.

“Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is delay,” she wrote, according to the document.

“While this court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires.”

In a separate opinion, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained why she would vote to dismiss the case, saying the court had made a “miscalculation” in taking it up before an appeals court had a chance to weigh in. Part of the confusion was caused by both sides’ altering their legal arguments once the case got to the high court, she added.

Idaho’s law says anyone who performs an abortion is subject to criminal penalties, including up to five years in prison. Health care professionals found to have violated the law can lose their professional licenses.

The federal government sued, leading a federal judge in August 2022 to block the state from enforcing provisions concerning medical care that is required under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.

The 1986 law mandates that patients receive appropriate emergency room care.

The Biden administration argued that care should include abortions in certain situations when a woman’s health is imperiled even if death is not imminent.

The Supreme Court is due to issue rulings Thursday and Friday as it reaches the end of its current term. The abortion case is one of 12 argued cases yet to be decided.

CNN’s moderators for Thursday’s presidential debate have deep ties to former intelligence officials who signed the now-debunked letter claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” Real Clear Investigations (RCI) reported Wednesday.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied about leaking false information to one of CNN’s moderators, Jake Tapper, about the Trump campaign exchanging information with Russia throughout the election cycle, according to the RCI report.

Tapper, failing to inform the public that the information came from a Clinton campaign-funded dossier, the now discredited Steele dossier, disseminated the information in a January 10, 2017, CNN report co-authored with Carl Bernstein.

Clapper denied leaking the information to Tapper during a July 2017 congressional deposition.

Clapper “flatly denied ‘discuss[ing] the dossier [compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists,” the House Intelligence Committee said, according to RCI.

But, after further pressure from Congress, “Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,” the House Intelligence Committee wrote in a report of his deposition, according to RCI.

Clapper apparently lied again to the public the day after the CNN story aired, issuing a statement expressing “profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press” and denied that the leak came from within the intelligence community.

Clapper repeated the same lie to incoming President Donald Trump, according to RCI.

CNN later hired Clapper as a national security analyst, making him Tapper’s co-worker.

Tapper, for his part, won an award for his coverage of the story when he received the Merriam Smith Award for broadcast journalism in 2018 for his reporting on the dossier.

Just an incredible sequence of events here.

-Clapper lied in a deposition about leaking very dubious intel to CNN
-Clapper then admitted he did it
-Tapper won a journalism award for running a credulous story on the leak
-Clapper also misled the public about the leak, claiming… pic.twitter.com/peOcrEtRMj

— Emily Jashinsky (@emilyjashinsky) June 26, 2024

Clapper was also a leading signatory of the infamous “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails,” a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials which casted the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, including evidence of the Bidens’ dealings with Ukrainian and Chinese energy companies, as Russian disinformation.

Another signatory of the letter was Jeremy Bash, the CIA’s chief of staff under Barack Obama from 2009-2011. Bash was married to CNN’s Dana Bash from 1998 to 2007 — the latter will co-moderate Thursday night’s debate with Tapper.

Jeremy Bash was involved in coordinating the effort to craft the Hunter Biden laptop letter, according to RCI.

Former deputy CIA Director Mike Morell testified the purpose of the letter “was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election,” according to an April 2023 House Judiciary Committee press release.

Morrell sent an e-mail out to intelligence officials in October 2020 that said “We want to give the VP a talking point to use in response,” a May 2023 House Judiciary Committee report reveals.

I was just made aware that CNN’s Dana Bash, who is moderating the first debate, was married to a CIA official who was one of the 51 intelligence agents that signed the fake letter calling Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation” days before the last election…

Small world. pic.twitter.com/AWRDiyGHvA

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) June 25, 2024

The officials released the statement on October 19, 2020, weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter suspended the account of the New York Post, which broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, and blocked Tweets about the laptop on their platform at the time, based largely on the premise that the story may be “Russian disinformation.”

Despite the assertion from the former intelligence officials that the laptop was disinformation, media outlets like the Daily Caller News Foundation, New York Times, Washington Post and CBS News have verified its contents.

In 2021, NPR issued a correction of a story in which they claimed the laptop had been discredited. “A previous version of this story said U.S. intelligence had discredited the laptop story. U.S. intelligence officials have not made a statement to that effect,” the correction reads.

Federal prosecutors used the laptop contents as evidence while trying Hunter Biden on gun charges in June. FBI agent Erika Jensen testified she had seen no evidence the laptop was tampered with. Special counsel David Weiss also said in May the Biden legal team’s defense of questioning the legitimacy of the laptop was a “conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence.”

Aside from Bash’s ties to one of the most prominent figures to sign the debunked letter, CNN’s newsroom also has journalists who parroted the intelligence claims or outright ignored the story.

Tapper made no mention of the laptop story on either of his two CNN shows in October 2020 following the New York Post’s report, according to a Fox News analysis of his show’s transcripts.

He did, however, have on multiple guests who called the laptop story “Russian disinformation” and a “right-wing conspiracy,” according to Fox News.

CNN also hired and promoted Natasha Bertrand, a former Politico reporter who parroted the intelligence letter’s “disinformation” claim, to the role of national security correspondent in February.

There appears to be no consequences for being the Biden campaign’s disinformation scribe. https://t.co/89q67WAoUk pic.twitter.com/zKwnWU7Ukr

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 13, 2024

Bertrand’s story, titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” is still live on Politico’s site with no correction.

Armored vehicles rammed the doors of Bolivia’s government palace Wednesday in an apparent coup attempt, but President Luis Arce vowed to stand firm and named a new army commander who ordered troops to stand down.

Soon the soldiers pulled back, along with a line of military vehicles, as hundreds of Arce’s supporters rushed the square outside the palace, waving Bolivian flags, singing the national anthem and cheering.

Arce, surrounded by ministers, waved at the crowd. “Thank you to the Bolivian people,” he said. “ Let democracy live on.”

Hours later, the Bolivian general who appeared to be behind the rebellion, Juan José Zúñiga, was arrested after the attorney general opened an investigation. It wasn’t immediately clear what the charges were against him.

However, in a twist, Zúñiga claimed in comments to journalists before his arrest that Arce himself told the general to storm the palace in a political move. “The president told me: ‘The situation is very screwed up, very critical. It is necessary to prepare something to raise my popularity’,” Zúñiga quoted the Bolivian leader as saying.

Zúñiga sajd he asked Arce if he should “take out the armored vehicles?” and Arce replied, “Take them out.”

Justice Minister Iván Lima denied Zúñiga’s claims, saying the general was lying and trying to justify his own actions for which he will face justice.

Prosecutors will seek the maximum sentence of 15 to 20 years in prison for Zúñiga, Lima said via the social media platform X, “for having attacked democracy and the Constitution.”

Wednesday’s rebellion followed months of tensions, with economic hardship and protests growing ever stronger as two political titans — Arce and his one-time ally, leftist former President Evo Morales — battled for control of the ruling party.

Still, the apparent attempt to depose the sitting president appeared to lack any meaningful support, and even Arce’s rivals closed ranks to defend democracy and repudiate the uprising.

The spectacle shocked Bolivians, no stranger to political unrest; in 2019 Morales was ousted as president following an earlier political crisis.

As the crisis unfolded Wednesday, military vehicles flooded into the plaza. Before entering the government palace, Zúñiga told journalists: “Surely soon there will be a new Cabinet of ministers; our country, our state cannot go on like this.” Zúñiga said that “for now,” though, he recognized Arce as commander in chief.

Zúñiga did not explicitly say he was leading a coup, but said the army was trying to “restore democracy and free our political prisoners.”

Shortly after, Arce confronted Zúñiga in the palace hallway, as shown on video on Bolivian television. “I am your captain, and I order you to withdraw your soldiers, and I will not allow this insubordination,” Arce said.

Surrounded by ministers, he added: “Here we are, firm in Casa Grande, to confront any coup attempt. We need the Bolivian people to organize.”

Less than an hour later, Arce announced new heads of the army, navy and air force amid the roar of supporters, and thanked the country’s police and regional allies for standing by him. Arce said the troops who rose against him were “staining the uniform” of the military.

“I order all that are mobilized to return to their units,” said the newly named army chief José Wilson Sánchez. “No one wants the images we’re seeing in the streets.”

Shortly after, the armored vehicles roared out of the plaza, tailed by hundreds of military fighters as police in riot gear set up blockades outside the government palace.

The incident was met with a wave of outrage by other regional leaders, including the Organization of American States, Chilean President Gabriel Boric, the leader of Honduras, and former Bolivian leaders.

Bolivia, a country of 12 million people, has seen intensifying protests in recent months over the economy’s precipitous decline from one of the continent’s fastest-growing two decades ago to one of its most crisis-stricken.

The country also has seen a high-profile rift at the highest levels of the governing party. Arce and his one-time ally, Morales, have been battling for the future of Bolivia’s splintering Movement for Socialism, known by its Spanish acronym MAS, ahead of elections in 2025.

Following Wednesday’s chaos, reports on local media showed Bolivians stocking up on food and other essentials in supermarkets, concerned about what will come next.

But addressing supporters outside the presidential palace, the country’s vice president, David Choquehuanca, vowed: “Never again will the Bolivian people permit coup attempts.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced a national recall of certain coffee products over the risk of a potentially deadly contamination.

Snapchill, a Green Bay, Wisconsin-based coffee manufacturer, recalled all of its canned coffee products due to the potential presence of Clostridium botulinum, a bacterium that can produce a fatal neurotoxin.

Nearly 300 canned coffee products from 147 brands are affected. The products range in sizes from 7oz to 12oz cans and have been distributed nationwide at retail stores and online.

The FDA said that Snapchill’s current manufacturing process could lead to the growth of botulinum toxin. The toxin, if ingested, can cause a rare form of food poison with symptoms that include general weakness, dizziness, double-vision, trouble speaking or swallowing, difficulty breathing, and constipation.

Symptoms can appear from six hours to two weeks after someone eats food containing botulinum toxin.

The FDA warned consumers experiencing these symptoms to seek immediate medical attention.

So far no illnesses have been reported and Snapchill has said it’s unaware of any cases of their products actually containing botulinum toxin. The company is currently working with the agency to clear its manufacturing process.

The FDA recommends consumers who have recalled products to destroy them or return them for a full refund.

This summer, the FDA also issued a recall of several ice cream brands.

Here are the 147 coffee brands hit by the recall:

• 41 & Change
• Alchemy Roasting
• Amavida
• Baba Java Coffee
• Bent Tree Coffee
• Big Iron
• Big Mouth Coffee
• Big Shoulders
• BKG
• Black Acres
• Black Nerd
• Blind
• Bold Bean
• Bolt Coffee
• Borealis
• Brandywine
• BRL
• Broadsheet
• Burwell
• Cafe Ammi
• Cape Cod Coffee
• Carrier
• Cerberus Coffee
• Coffee Hound
• Coffee N Clothes
• Coffee Project NY
• Color Coffee
• Connect Coffee
• Copper Horse
• Coterie Coffee
• Crankshaft Coffee
• Cup to Cup
• Dave’s Coffee
• Dayglow
• Daysol Coffee
• Dead Sled
• Doughnut Plant
• Downeast Coffee
• Dreamy
• Driply
• East End
• Eclipse Coffee Roasters
• Electro Brew Coffee Co.
• Element Coffee
• Emergency Medical Coffee
• Enderly
• Euphoria Coffee
• Farmhouse
• Fazenda
• Fika
• Fire Grounds
• First Crack C/O Sound Coffee
• Five & Hoek
• Five Star Roasters
• Flight
• Gay Awakening Coffee
• George Howell
• Gigawatt
• Goldberry Roasting Company
• Gooseneck Coffee Co.
• Gryphon Coffee
• Heady Cup
• Heart Coffee
• Heine Bros
• Helm
• Honest Coffee
• Hustle N’ Grind
• Intelligentsia
• Joe Bean
• Kahawa 1893
• Kaldi’s
• Kawaha 1893
• Knowledge Perk
• Kribi Coffee
• Kuva Coffee
• La Cosecha
• Lanna Coffee
• Larrys Coffee
• Little Wolf
• Ludwig
• Mad Priest
• Madcap Coffee
• Maple Leaf Coffee Roasters
• Medici
• Metric
• Mighty Good Coffee Co.
• Mocha Joe
• Molon Labe
• Mudd LLC
• Neighbor Coffee
• New Hampshire Coffee Roasters
• Northern Coffeeworks
• OFFSET Coffee
• Others Coffee
• Opus Coffee
• Oye Coffee
• Paper Plane Coffee Co
• Peaks Coffee Co
• Perkatory
• Perla
• Pettibone
• Pink Elephant
• Play Coffee
• Quartertone Coffee
• QUIVR
• Rabble & Lion
• Radial Coffee
• Ragged
• Rarebird
• Red Rooster
• Retrograde Coffee
• Rock City
• Rockford Coffee
• Rusty Dog
• Sacred Grounds
• Saltwater
• Seaworthy Coffee
• Sepia Coffee
• Shirazi Dist.
• Slacktide
• Sleeping Giant Coffee Roasters
• Slow Bloom Coffee
• Snowy Owl
• Southeastern Roastery
• Spot Coffee
• Springline
• Square One Coffee
• Stack St.
• Summit Coffee
• Sur Coffee
• The Boy & The Bear
• The Well Coffeehouse
• Three Tree Coffee Roaster
• Tinker
• Tipico
• Touchy Coffee
• Traction
• True Love Coffee Co.
• Underwood
• Upshot
• Verb
• Victoria Coffee
• Vivid
• Waypost
• White Bison
• White Rhino
• Wild Goose Coffee

The dollar rose to its highest level since November amid speculation that the Federal Reserve will break with other central banks by keeping interest rates elevated, giving global investors an incentive to shift cash to the US to capture higher bond yields.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index climbed as much as 0.4% to a nearly eight-month high, extending the currency’s advance this year as the Fed’s policy leaves a wide interest-rate gap with other major economies. That difference has been particularly pronounced with Japan, driving the yen to the weakest since 1986 and sparking risks of another intervention by the Japanese authorities.

“The US economy remains resilient, and the case for an imminent rate cut isn’t clear unless the data soften, meanwhile, central banks elsewhere are cutting,” said Kit Juckes, chief FX strategist at Societe Generale SA.

“With political uncertainty threatening to play a role in market from now until the end of the year, it’s hard to see why the dollar turns lower this year at all.”

While the European Central Bank and Bank of Canada kicked off their monetary easing cycles in early June, the US central bank has continued to hold interest rates at the highest level in more than two decades.

Elections in France and the UK in coming weeks as well as the US presidential election later in the year are adding volatility to the market.

The yen has been the worst performer against the dollar this year, losing about 12% in value, followed by the Swiss franc and the Norwegian krone. The euro fell more than 3% this year.

“We don’t see the dollar strengthening meaningfully from here but it’s hard to argue it will reverse significantly in the short term,” said Nathan Thooft, a senior portfolio manager at Manulife Investment Management in Boston. “It is hurting global economic growth at these levels.”

Still, speculative traders have been loading up on contracts that would benefit from a stronger dollar, the most recent Commodity Futures Trading Commission data suggest. Over the last two weeks through June 18, they’ve added more than $12 billion worth of bets on greenback gains.

The end of the quarter rebalancing was also supportive of the dollar on Wednesday.

The Department of the Interior published a guide to “inclusive language,” exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, that tells bureaucrats to avoid gendered terms like “husband,” “son,” and “daughter,” and even instructs them to use the “they/them” pronouns for individuals rather than assume someone’s gender, Daily Wire reported.

The 24-page document, called the U.S. Department of the Interior Inclusive Language Guide and published this month “for official use only,” details what terms bureaucrats should use or avoid when discussing gender and sexuality.

The guide includes a list of 104 different terms that the Interior recommends bureaucrats replace with alternate, approved words. “Husband” and “wife,” for example, should be replaced with “spouse, partner, significant other,” the federal agency says. “Daughter” and “son” should also be replaced with “child” or “kid” according to the guide, which even asks bureaucrats to replace “cockpit” with “flight deck.”

The revelation comes as the executive agencies of federal government have been transformed under the Biden administration, with agencies from Interior to the National Security Agency embracing and institutionalizing the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.

Another section of the guide asks bureaucrats to use “identity-first” language, substituting “blind person” and “amputee,” with “a person who is blind,” and “a child with an amputation.” The Interior guide even tells bureaucrats to refrain from assuming anyone’s gender and to instead refer to everyone with the pronouns “they/them” to “avoid making assumptions.”

“When referring to individuals whose identified pronouns are not known or when the gender of a generic or hypothetical person is irrelevant within the context, use their name or a singular ‘they’ to avoid making assumptions about an individual’s gender,” the document reads. “It is recommended to use ‘they,’ ‘them,’ ‘their,’ for example. In informal writing, such as emails, plural pronouns may be used as a shortcut to ensure gender inclusiveness.”

The plural pronoun is said to be a superior alternative to the phrase “he or she,” because it implies “an exclusively binary nature of gender and exclude individuals who do not use these pronouns like gender non-conforming people.” Phrases such as “ladies and gents” are seen as problematic, with the document asking speakers to instead address crowds with “hey team.”

Interior asks bureaucrats to go to even greater lengths to avoid “terms that imply binaries” like “opposite sex” and “opposite gender,” because “some individuals do not identify with either gender or these phrases would then ignore the existence of those individuals.”

It even states that bureaucrats should avoid using the term “preferred pronouns” since it implies that gender identity is a choice. “Pronoun use requires specificity and care on the user’s part, and staff should always use the person’s identified pronouns,” the document states. “Staff should refrain from the term ‘preferred pronouns’ because it implies a choice about one’s gender. Use ‘pronouns’ or ‘identified pronouns’ instead.” It also advises eliminating the use of gendered honorifics entirely, saying titles like “Mr.” and “Ms.” should always be forgone.

The guide also suggests elimination the following words and phrases:

• Replace “Aunt/Uncle” with “Parent’s sibling”
• Replace “male” with “all genders”
• Replace “ladies” with “everyone”
• Replace “gay” with “LGBTQIA+ person”
• Replace “transgender” with “transgender person”
• Replace “opposite sex” with “different sex”
• Replace “woman/women” with “person, people, individual, individuals”
• Replace “sex change” with “transition”
• Replace “father/mother” with “parent, caregiver, care provider”

Interior’s guide to inclusive language is just one way in which the agency has embraced and far-left dogma and embedded it in its policies and practices. The federal agency is also celebrating pride month with a lesson on “LGBTQ American Sign Language” where bureaucrats will be taught sign language for “ally,” “drag queen,” and other LGBT vocabulary terms.

Daily Wire host Matt Walsh previously revealed that bureaucrats at the DOI performed a poem called “I am Diversity” in which the government employees recited lines like “I’m diversity, embrace me and we’ll journey far. I’m diversity, include me and we’ll reach the shining star.”

I have exclusive footage from a Department of Interior event where a poem called “I Am Diversity” was performed. It’s as bad as it sounds. pic.twitter.com/Pzy8licjda

— The Matt Walsh Show (@MattWalshShow) April 12, 2024

The same department also celebrated “transgender day of visibility” by showing a documentary pushing for increased LGBT inclusion in the field of marine biology, the Daily Wire previously revealed.

“Transgender Day of Visibility is an internationally recognized event that is celebrated annually on March 31st to help raise awareness and increase understanding of the challenges, importance and struggles of our transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming communities,” an email obtained by The Daily Wire states. “The Department will mark this important occasion by showing a short documentary called ‘Diving for Rays: A Queer Conservationist’s Story.”

One far-left bureaucrat, an associate communications director at the White House, was recently promoted from his former post as the communications director for the DOI. Named Tyler Cherry, the Biden administration official has a troubling social media history. “Time to recall that the modern day police system is a direct evolution of slave patrols and lynch mobs,” Cherry posted to X, formerly Twitter, in 2015. “Praying for #Baltimore, but praying even harder for an end to a capitalistic police state motivated by explicit and implicit racial biases,” he also said.

Cherry, who crossdresses and identifies as non-binary, also tweeted “Abolish ICE,” making a call to disband a law enforcement component within the Department of Homeland Security that plays a critical role in enforcing immigration law. The communications official also made posts complaining about white people and “the occupation of Palestine.”

The DOI is just one of several federal agencies that has swung to the left and institutionalized ideological dogma under the Biden administration.

President Joe Biden has signed multiple executive orders institutionalizing the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology within the federal agencies and has even worked to enable gender transition attempts among government employees.

Former President Donald Trump has pledged to purge far-left bureaucrats who may otherwise undermine his agenda from his executive agencies if he is reelected in November. “We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the President of the United States,” Trump said at a rally, touting his plan. “The deep state must be brought to heel.”

Trump’s allies are preparing to fill the void left by outgoing bureaucrats, with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 assembling a personnel database that could step into the administration in the event of a Trump victory.

Two high school track coaches in Washington are speaking out after watching a trans-identifying male athlete crush his female competition at the state championship.

Brad Anderson is the boys’ track head coach, and Jason Keniston is the girls’ track head coach at Liberty High School near Seattle.

In May, the two coaches watched Veronica Garcia, a biological male formerly known as Donovan Brown, win first place at the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA) state track meet.

Garcia won the girls’ 400-meter race with a record-smashing time of 55.59.

The two Liberty High track coaches began wondering how things could change and decided to speak up in an interview with the Independent Women’s Forum.

He “just completely blew the competition away,” Keniston recalled.

The win garnered 10 points for Garcia’s school, East Valley Spokane High School, which ended up winning the state championship by eight points, Keniston said.

“And they shouldn’t have,” the girls’ coach added.

The girls’ team from Cedar Crest High School, the “rightful state champions” according to Keniston, ended up in second place.

“Their coaches and everyone who gave everything to their program deserved a title, and they’ll never get that,” he said.

The mother of the girl who got third place in the 400-meter race behind Garcia said Garcia’s time would not have been impressive against male athletes.

“He wouldn’t even have made it to districts,” the mom said. “That time isn’t even competitive for a varsity high school male athlete. He’s a [junior varsity] runner.”

In October 2022, Garcia ran in the boys’ 5,000-meter junior varsity race and performed much worse against his male competitors, placing 164th out of 172.

“How can anyone think this is fair, regardless of the politics of our world and our country?” Keniston asked.

The problem was “really right in your face at state,” Anderson said.

When Garcia stood on the podium, “It was very quiet. There [were] a couple people booing,” Keniston said.

“This individual robbed these girls of their podium spot, and the girl who could have come in eighth [place] didn’t even get to be on the podium and earn a medal,” he said.

Garcia previously said he was “somewhat hurt” the girls did not congratulate him.

“I guess maybe I expected sportsmanship because I was cheering the rest of them on when they were called. So I guess I expected to get that reciprocated,” Garcia told The Spokesman-Review. “But I didn’t get that.”

“I’m just a teenager. I wish people would remember that,” he said.

Anderson, the boys’ coach, said biological males are simply faster than their female counterparts.

“When you come down to a sport, an endurance sport especially, I think the numbers always speak pretty clearly that biological males are faster, and I just don’t know how you can argue otherwise,” Anderson said. “There’s a difference. [To] say there’s not is an injustice.”

Anderson said that one of the girls “just put a heck of a time on the board — great time — and she still loses. That was hard to watch.”

The two coaches emphasized that they are not the only ones who have a problem with trans-identifying males competing against girls.

“There’s a large group that stands against this, however, they’re like most, where we feel the need to hide under this mask of going along with it out of fear that if you are willing to just speak up and say what you believe, even just your opinion, there is going to be a repercussion,” Keniston said.

At first, Keniston said he hesitated to speak out.

“Your job is at risk, your livelihood, you’ll be labeled a bigot or this and that,” he said, adding, “We actually just care about kids, and we want what’s best for everybody.”

Keniston and Anderson said they hope their actions will inspire other coaches to speak out against trans-identifying males in girls’ sports.

“We are going to speak up. We don’t back down from bullies,” Keniston said.

Denmark will introduce the world’s first emissions tax on agriculture from 2030, requiring farmers to pay for greenhouse gases released by their cows, sheep and pigs.

The Danish government said the aim is to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent by 2030.

“We will take a big step closer in becoming climate neutral in 2045,” Taxation Minister Jeppe Bruus said.

Bruus said he hoped other countries would follow suit and implement a similar tax.

Livestock farmers will be taxed $43 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2030. The tax will increase to $108 by 2035.

The agreement was reached on Monday between the center-right government and representatives of farmers, industry and unions.

New Zealand passed a similar law which was set to be implemented in 2025, but it was quashed on Wednesday, after criticism from farmers.

Livestock account for more than 30 percent of human-caused methane emissions.

Around 90 percent of the methane from raising livestock comes from the way they digest and is released as burps through their mouths. Cows contribute to most of this belched methane.

Maria Reumert Gjerding, Head of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation, said the tax was “a historic compromise.”

“We have succeeded in landing a compromise on a CO2 tax, which lays the groundwork for a restructured food industry -– also on the other side of 2030,” Gjerding said.

A Danish cow produces over six tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year.

The tax is to be approved in parliament, but the bill is expected to pass.

Tuesday’s contests in Colorado, New York, South Carolina and Utah saw the first incumbent House Democrat to lose in a primary this cycle, along with several losses for Trump-endorsed candidates.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party suffered a major blow when Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) lost to Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a moderate, in one of the most tumultuous primaries so far. Meanwhile, former President Trump’s near-perfect endorsement track record this cycle took a hit almost everywhere, while Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), a political lightning rod, all but ensured her survival in Congress in November.

Bowman’s loss deals the ‘squad’ a blow

The New York lawmaker’s defeat was not a shock. A member of the House’s progressive “squad” who stirred controversy on several issues and generated unflattering headlines, Bowman went into Tuesday’s primary facing a steep climb. But his defeat is nonetheless a major setback for the party’s progressive wing, which had made a public show of support in the days and weeks leading up to the race.

The race gained widespread national attention as a test of the Democratic divisions that have been exposed following the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas after Oct. 7.

Latimer’s attacks on Bowman centered on Israel, criticizing the incumbent for his votes against providing additional aid to the country, calls for a permanent cease-fire and comments initially calling the reports of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attack “propaganda” and “lies.” Bowman later walked back those comments and apologized.

Bowman defended his stance on Israel, which he has accused of committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. He also slammed pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for pouring millions into the race against him.

Both candidates sought to portray each other as out of touch with the district, but Bowman was ultimately unable to convince voters that he deserved another two years in office. He’s the first member of the “squad” to lose a primary challenge since the group formed, and his loss could serve as a warning to other lawmakers who criticize Israel.

The next test for progressives will take place in August, when another Squad member, Rep. Cori Bush (D), faces a competitive primary in Missouri.

Trump’s endorsed candidates have a bad night

Arguably no political figure in the country has single-handedly wielded more influence than Trump, whose endorsements are often enough to carry a candidate across the finish line in a GOP primary.

But that wasn’t the case in three high-profile races Tuesday in which Trump-backed candidates fell short.

In a South Carolina runoff to determine the Republican nominee and likely eventual House member for the solidly red 3rd Congressional District, nurse practitioner Sheri Biggs narrowly bested Trump-endorsed pastor Mark Burns for the nomination. Her victory was also a win for Gov. Henry McMaster (R), himself a Trump ally, who had backed her.

And in Utah, Trump-endorsed Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs lost the Republican primary for the Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Mitt Romney (R). Instead, Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), a more moderate candidate, prevailed.

NEW YORK — polls close at 9:00 p.m. ET

SOUTH CAROLINA — polls close at 7:00 p.m. ET

COLORADO — polls close at 9:00 p.m. ET

UTAH — polls close at 10:00 p.m. ET

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he will file a legal brief in support of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stay out of prison.

Bannon made the appeal after he was ordered to report to jail by July 1 in connection to being convicted after he evaded a subpoena from the House panel that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

Two sources familiar with the matters aid that the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group — a House group made up of the Speaker and the leaders and whips of the majority and minority parties in the House, which directs the chamber in taking legal positions — voted along party lines to proceed with an amicus brief in the Bannon matter.

Johnson publicly revealed his plans to file an amicus brief during interviews with Fox News and CNN Tuesday evening, arguing that the Jan. 6 select committee — which investigated the deadly riot for months throughout 2021 — produced work that was “tainted.”

“We’re working on filing an amicus brief in his appellate work there in his case because the Jan. 6 committee was, we think, wrongfully constituted,” Johnson told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “We think the work was tainted. We think that they may have very well covered up evidence and maybe even more nefarious activities.”

“We’ve been investigating the committee itself; we disagree with how Speaker Pelosi put all that together; we think it violated House rules,” he continued. “And so we’ll be expressing that to the court, and I think it will help Steve Bannon in his appeal.”

Republicans have long pushed back on the Jan. 6 select committee’s subpoenas by arguing it was improperly constituted. So far, those arguments have been unsuccessful in court.

Bannon —who was ordered to report to prison for a four-month sentence by July 1 —filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court last week to remain out of jail as he appeals his conviction. The former Trump adviser was found guilty in 2022 on two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to defy a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee, refusing to sit for an interview with the panel and hand over documents.

Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro is currently serving a four-month sentence after being found guilty of contempt charges for similarly flouting the Jan. 6 select committee’s subpoena. He unsuccessfully requested emergency relief from the Supreme Court.

The announcement from Johnson also follows a letter Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) sent to the Speaker earlier on Tuesday urging the Louisiana Republican to file an amicus brief in support of Bannon’s appeal.

The entreaty from Banks is no coincidence: the Indiana Republican was nominated by then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to serve as ranking member of the Jan. 6 panel, but then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blocked him and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) from serving on the select committee.

McCarthy, in response, yanked all his picks from the panel, prompting Pelosi to tap former Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) to sit on the select committee to make it bipartisan. Republicans, however, rejected the notion that the panel was bipartisan since the Republican leader had not appointed them.

Johnson on Tuesday evening rejected the notion that filing an amicus brief in support of Bannon will undercut his ability to enforce Congressional subpoenas in the future.

“No, not at all,” Johnson told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source.”

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a challenge against the Biden administration accusing it of improperly colluding with Big Tech companies to censor social media posts deemed “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and other topics.

In a 6-3 decision, the high court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

“To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion. “No plaintiff has carried that burden.”

During oral arguments in March, the Supreme Court signaled wariness about siding with the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana who brought forward the case, with several conservative justices questioning the precedent it would set.

A lower court had barred multiple White House officials from corresponding with companies like Google, Facebook and X about content moderation amid the case, which the Supreme Court previously paused. The decision on Thursday scraps that.

In a blistering dissent, Alito warned that the actions of officials in the case were “blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”

“Purely private entities like newspapers are not subject to the First Amendment … But government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech,” he wrote. “The record before us is vast.”

The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday published a report recommending that President Joe Biden’s ghost writer be cited for contempt of Congress after he failed to produce documents and other materials as part of the ongoing impeachment inquiry.

The ghost writer, Mark Zwonitzer, is in possession of recordings of his interviews with Biden in which the former vice president allegedly made reference to classified information, the committee says in its report.

After the release of Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur’s separate report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, the House Judiciary committee subpoenaed Zwonitzer for documents, audio recordings and transcripts in his possession related to his interviews of Biden for his memoir.

“To date, Zwonitzer has refused to produce any of the requested documents or materials,” the committee wrote in its report.

You can read the report.

In a post to the social media platform X, the Judiciary Committee says it plans to hold a markup for the contempt resolution on Thursday at 10:00 AM.

House Republicans have recently moved to hold several officials in contempt related to its impeachment inquiry, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, as the probe struggles to obtain the documents and files it has requested.

The unfolding internal crisis at the Washington Post has obscured drama playing out across the river in Rosslyn, Virginia.

Three high-profile employees plan to leave Politico in the coming weeks: Alex Ward, the co-author of Politico’s massive scoop about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, is leaving for The Wall Street Journal along with fellow Pentagon reporter Lara Seligman. Jack Shafer, the longtime Politico columnist, confirmed to Semafor that he is also leaving amid the company’s waning interest in media coverage.

“I had a really good run with a long leash at Politico and appreciate all the great people I worked with,” Shafer said. “But the job has changed in recent months and I think it’s best for me to hit the ground dancing someplace else where media criticism is important to the mix.”

Earlier this month, Sam Stein, a high-profile Washington editor, left for The Bulwark following publicly reported friction with Politico’s new management.

Longtime congressional reporter Burgess Everett also announced last week that he’s leaving the company (This is where media reporting gets messy. Everett is joining Semafor in September; Stein was this reporter’s former editor at Politico in 2022).

The high-profile departures come amid a yearlong transformation of Politico’s newsroom by a new leadership group, which has attempted to refocus the company’s editorial offerings, but has also at times clashed with former employees.

In a series of interviews with Vanity Fair earlier this year, top editor John Harris, head of news Alex Burns, and CEO Goli Sheikholeslami said that the organization had lost its edge, created complacent commodity news, and needed to compete harder with new digital upstarts on Capitol Hill.

The leadership team made it clear to employees: Changes needed to be made for Politico to adapt to a turbulent news media environment and increasingly crowded DC media landscape. Part of this has meant an editorial overhaul in which nearly all news stories are read by top editors to ensure consistency with Politico’s new brand. Burns himself has often rewritten individual stories filed by reporters.

Some journalists, in turn, felt that some of the new editorial leaders were too focused on changing the editorial output, slowing down stories and causing journalists to get scooped by competitors. Semafor previously reported friction between Burns and other top editorial leaders. Vanity Fair reported that Stein had disputes with Burns before they left the publication this year. Deputy White House editor Eun Kim similarly left this year following well-known frustrations with the new leadership team. Two people with knowledge of the situation told Semafor that in recent months, the company has fielded complaints about the abrasive treatment of editors by the new upper management.

In an email with Semafor, Harris said he wants Politico’s journalism to be “even more original, more topical, more rigorously edited, and more responsive to our publication’s long-term strategy,” and some reporters may not fit within that strategy.

“These cases you cite involve different circumstances,” he said. “There are journalists I really respect, and I think respect me, but who don’t like some of the changes I have asked for. I want people to find the right home for their work, even if sometimes it is elsewhere. There are also times when competitors occasionally snag people I want with us here. My response to that is to compete even harder tomorrow. We have 600 journalists worldwide who show we are winning that competition way more often than not.”

Part of the tensions within Politico are an attempt to rebalance a newsroom that management felt was unfairly weighted towards certain teams. Politico has felt that it can withstand individual staff losses without a real impact on its Washington, D.C. business. Some reporters at Politico in other policy areas have felt that the new editorial focus has created a more equitable newsroom.

“Politico has shown a remarkable way of regenerating itself,” one staffer with no discernable agenda told Semafor. “These cycles have happened in the past, but it’s a large newsroom. I think it’s still a good place to work.”

Some of the 51 “Spies Who Lie” were active CIA contractors when they claimed files from first son Hunter Biden’s laptop had “the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 election — a fact that was uneasily noted inside the agency, records acquired by The Post show.

Former CIA acting director Michael Morell, who previously told Congress he organized the Oct. 19, 2020, letter to give Joe Biden a “talking point” ahead of a debate against then-President Donald Trump, was under contract with the CIA at the time, the agency told Congress.

Ex-agency inspector general David Buckley also was a contractor at the time of the letter, according to an interim report from two House committees investigating the matter, and records suggest that at least two other letter-signers may also have had active contracts at the time.

The terms of the contracts and compensation were not immediately clear.

Morell flatly denied he was a contractor when contacted by The Post, writing Tuesday in an email, “If you write that, you would [be] wrong.”

Morell doubled down in a second email, writing that “I can’t” speculate on why he was listed as such by the agency he once led and insisting: “It’s wrong.”

A congressional source provided The Post with the CIA’s document outing Morell as a contractor after his denial.

Robert Dugas, CIA deputy general counsel for litigation and investigations, shared the information in an April 25 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio).

“I write to provide an UNCLASSIFIED document related to your … letters seeking information,” Dugas wrote, along with a five-name chart that listed Morell and Buckley, who could not be reached for comment, as contractors on the date of the laptop letter.

“The evidence in our report speaks for itself and it seems that the spy who lied is continuing to do so,” Russell Dye, a spokesman for the Judiciary Committee, fired back Tuesday evening.

The five-name table identifying Morell as a contractor specified that former CIA Director John Brennan and fellow letter-signers Nick Rasmussen and Marc Polymeropoulos had no such arrangement.

The letter suggesting that laptop files linking Joe Biden to his relatives’ foreign dealings were Russian disinformation notably only described signers as “former” intelligence operatives.

The document was controversial within the CIA, internal records indicate.

“This frustrates me. I don’t think it is helpful to the Agency in the long run,” a CIA official whose identity was redacted wrote on Oct. 20, 2020 — the day after the letter was distributed to Politico — with a link to the outlet’s story.

“I also love that at least a few of the random signatures belong to individuals currently working here on contracts…,” responded another official, whose name also was redacted.

The Hatch Act bars most CIA employees from engaging in partisan political activity, but the status of contractors is murkier. A 2015 intelligence community directive on contract personnel, for example, doesn’t mention the issue.

A second table provided by the CIA to Congress shows laptop letter-signers who had contracts and “green badge” access with the agency — indicating other signatories had formal relationships with The Company.

That table indicates that Morell’s contract lapsed at some point after Oct. 19, 2020, and that he entered into a new contract on May 1, 2021, as an “independent contractor” — with a “no fee senior advisory services” role.

Morell’s colleague at Beacon Global Strategies, letter-signer Jeremy Bash, is identified in the second table as an “independent contractor” as well — serving as a “contractor/green badge” holder from April 2, 2019, through April 1, 2022, with a brief gap before receiving a new deal beginning in August 2022.

Yet another letter-signer, former National Security Agency deputy director, Richard Ledgett, was also listed as having the same status at the time of the letter.

The disclosures are contained within an interim report by the House Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — which also reveals that then-CIA Director Gina Haspel likely knew about the letter when it was submitted for review.

“The new information included in this report, based on new testimony and declassified documents, shows the potential dangers of a politicized intelligence community,” the interim report by the House panels says.

“Some of the signatories of the statement were on the CIA payroll at the time as contractors and others had special access to CIA facilities.

“Even Michael Morell — before the Committees learned of his contract with the CIA — acknowledged, ‘It’s inappropriate for a currently serving staff officer or contractor to be involved in the political process.’”

The report adds: “Due to purported operational concerns, the CIA declined to declassify the entire universe of signatories who were on active contract.”

Then-candidate Biden used the intelligence alumni letter to falsely claim at his second and final 2020 presidential debate with Trump that The Post’s reporting on his role in his family’s international business dealings was a “Russian plant” and “garbage.”

“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” Biden said of Trump. “Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”

The FBI, which took possession of the laptop in 2019 before a copy of the hard drive was provided to The Post in 2020, told Twitter on the day of the initial bombshell reporting that the laptop was authentic, but the bureau’s stance was not widely known until well after the election.

Morell testified to Congress last year that he was inspired to organize the letter after receiving a call from future Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime Biden adviser.

The Post’s first laptop bombshell — published five days before the 51-person letter — revealed that Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, emailed Hunter in 2015 to thank him for the “opportunity to meet your father” — directly contradicting Biden’s 2019 claim that he’d “never spoken” with his son about “his overseas business dealings.”

The Biden campaign vaguely denied that the meeting occurred. But further reporting corroborated key details, including the fact that Joe Biden attended a 2015 DC dinner one day before the Burisma exec’s email. A group of his son’s associates, including Pozharskyi and a trio from Kazakhstan that posed for a photo with the Bidens, attended.

Hunter earned up to $1 million per year to serve on Burisma’s board from 2014 to 2019, beginning when his father led the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

A second October 2020 bombshell from The Post — published four days before the spies’ statement — described communications about Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden’s venture with Chinese state-linked CEFC China Energy.

A May 13, 2017, email from the laptop said the “big guy” would get 10% of the CEFC deal and former Biden family associate Rob Walker testified to Congress that Joe Biden met with the company’s chairman Ye Jianming before cash began to flow earlier that year.

The CIA issued a statement Tuesday night that did not elaborate on the agency contracts with “former” officeholders who signed the letter.

The agency focused primarily on defending the pre-publication review process that inspected the statement for classified information and found that there was none — allowing for its public release.

“CIA officers, as a condition of their employment, are required to sign a secrecy agreement that includes a lifelong obligation to submit any and all intelligence-related materials to CIA’s Pre-Publication Review Board (PCRB) before they are published. That process was followed in this case,” a CIA spokeswoman said.

“The PCRB reviews material to determine if they contain any classified information. The PCRB’s confirmation that information is unclassified is never an endorsement of the reviewed content or its veracity. These former officers were not speaking for CIA.”

An Atlanta judge, who was recently arrested for allegedly hitting a police officer outside an Atlanta nightclub, should be removed from office after an ongoing investigation into separate ethics charges, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

Douglas County Probate Judge Christina Peterson, 38, was removed from the bench effective Tuesday. The Georgia Supreme Court ruling comes after the Judicial Qualifications Commission found Peterson guilty of “systemic incompetence” and recommended her removal in April.

In one misconduct case, the court was troubled by Peterson’s decision to jail a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Thailand after the woman sought to amend her marriage license with the name of her real father.

Peterson ruled the woman was trying to defraud the court and sentenced her to a maximum of 20 days in jail, which could be reduced to two days if the woman paid a $500 fine. The woman paid the fine and was released after two days.

The panel, however, found that the woman was “in good faith trying to correct” what appeared to be “an innocent mistake borne out of ignorance rather than ill-intent,” according to the court documents.

The court found that Peterson made “untruthful” testimony to the panel about the case, saying that “underscores her conscious wrongdoing” in finding the woman guilty of criminal contempt.

This was one of 30 counts brought against Peterson. The court found that 12 of those counts warranted discipline.

“Accordingly, it is ordered that Judge Christina Peterson of the Douglas County Probate Court be removed from office, effective upon the date of this opinion,” the court ruled, noting that Peterson will not be eligible to be elected or appointed to any future judicial position in Georgia for seven years.

As Peterson was dealing with the misconduct allegations, she was arrested early Thursday at the Red Martini Restaurant and Lounge after allegedly pushing an Atlanta police officer in the chest twice during an altercation.

Atlanta police released bodycam video of the incident and said the officer was working an approved extra job at the time.

Peterson’s attorney, Marvin Arrington Jr., told reporters during a press conference on Friday that Peterson was trying to defend a woman who was being attacked by an unknown man and should not have been arrested.

Watch:

EQUITY: Atlanta-area Judge Christina Peterson attacked police at a Nightclub in Fulton County. Will Big Fani Willis throw the book at her or give her a pass? BTW: She prefers Grey Goose. pic.twitter.com/hLxu56tEtF

— @amuse (@amuse) June 23, 2024

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga.

The criminal case of international intrigue, which had played out for years, came to a surprise end in a most unusual setting with Assange, 52, entering his plea in a U.S. district court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to Assange’s native Australia and accommodated his desire to avoid entering the continental United States.

Assange was accused of receiving and publishing hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables that included details of U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. His activities drew an outpouring of support from press freedom advocates, who heralded his role in bringing to light military conduct that might otherwise have been concealed from view and warned of a chilling effect on journalists. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

Assange raised his right fist as he emerged for the plane and his supporters at the Canberra airport cheered from a distance. Dressed in the same suit and tie he wore during his earlier court appearance, he embraced his wife Stella Assange and father John Shipton who were waiting on the tarmac.

“He described it as a surreal and happy moment, his landing here in our national capital, Canberra,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in Parliament House. “I had a very warm discussion with him this evening. He was very generous in his praise of the Australian government’s efforts.”

Assange was accompanied on the flights by Australian Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Stephen Smith, both of whom played key roles in negotiating his freedom with London and Washington.

The flights were paid for by the “Assange team,” Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said, adding his government played a role in facilitating the transport.

Albanese told Parliament that Assange’s freedom, after he spent five years in a British prison fighting extradition to the U.S., was the result of his government’s “careful, patient and determined work.”

Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson, speaking outside the Saipan court, thanked Albanese “for his statesmanship, his principled leadership and his diplomacy, which made this outcome possible.”

It is unclear where Assange will go from Canberra and what his future plans are. His South African lawyer wife and mother of his two children, Stella Assange, has been in Australia for days awaiting her husband’s release.

Another of Julian Assange’s lawyers, Barry Pollack, expected his client would continue vocal campaigning.

“WikiLeaks’s work will continue and Mr. Assange, I have no doubt, will be a continuing force for freedom of speech and transparency in government,” Pollack told reporters outside the Saipan court.

Assange’s father John Shipton said ahead of his son’s arrival that he hoped the iconoclastic internet publisher was coming home to the “great beauty of ordinary life.”

“He will be able to spend quality time with his wife, Stella, and his two children, be able to walk up and down the beach and feel the sand through his toes in winter, that lovely chill,” Shipton told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

The plea deal required Assange to admit guilt to a single felony count but also permitted him to return to Australia without any time in an American prison. The judge sentenced him to the five years he’d already spent behind bars in the U.K. fighting extradition to the U.S. on an Espionage Act indictment that could have carried a lengthy prison sentence in the event of a conviction. He was holed up for seven years before that in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The conclusion enables both sides to claim a degree of satisfaction.

The Justice Department, facing a defendant who had already served substantial jail time, was able to resolve — without trial — a case that raised thorny legal issues and that might never have reached a jury at all given the plodding pace of the extradition process. Assange, for his part, signaled a begrudging contentment with the resolution, saying in court that though he believed the Espionage Act contradicted the First Amendment, he accepted the consequences of soliciting classified information from sources for publication.

The plea deal, disclosed Monday night in a sparsely detailed Justice Department letter, represents the latest — and presumably final — chapter in a court fight involving the eccentric Australian computer expert who has been celebrated by supporters as a transparency crusader but lambasted by national security hawks who insist that his conduct put lives at risks and strayed far beyond the bounds of traditional journalism duties.

Prosecutors alleged that Assange teamed with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain the records, including by conspiring to crack a Defense Department computer password, and published them without regard to American national security. Names of human sources who provided information to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were among the details exposed, prosecutors have said.

The indictment was unsealed in 2019, but Assange’s legal woes long predated the criminal case and continued well past it.

Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s allegation of rape and another’s allegation of molestation. Assange has long maintained his innocence, and the investigation was later dropped.

He presented himself in 2012 to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he claimed asylum on the grounds of political persecution, and spent the following seven years in self-exile there, welcoming a parade of celebrity visitors and making periodic appearances from the building’s balcony to address supporters.

In 2019, his hosts revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him. He remained locked up for the last five years while the Justice Department sought to extradite him, in a process that encountered skepticism from British judges who worried about how Assange would be treated by the U.S.

Ultimately, though, the resolution sparing Assange prison time in the U.S. contradicts years of ominous warnings by Assange and his supporters that the American criminal justice system would expose him to unduly harsh treatment, including potentially the death penalty — something prosecutors never sought.

Last month, Assange won the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the U.S. government provided “blatantly inadequate” assurances that he would have the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from Britain.

His wife, Stella Assange, told the BBC from Australia that it had been “touch and go” over 72 hours whether the deal would go ahead but she felt “elated” at the news.

Assange on Monday had left the London prison where he has spent the last five years after being granted bail during a secret hearing last week.

Finland plans to offer preemptive bird flu vaccination as soon as next week to some workers with exposure to animals, health authorities said on Tuesday, making it the first country in the world to do so.

The Nordic country has bought vaccines for 10,000 people, each consisting of two injections, as part of a joint EU procurement of up to 40 million doses for 15 nations from manufacturer CSL Seqirus.

The Australian company in a statement to Reuters said Finland would be the first country to roll out the vaccine.

“The vaccine will be offered to those aged 18 or over who are at increased risk of contracting avian influenza due to their work or other circumstances,” the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) said in a statement.

Finland has not detected the virus in humans, THL said.

However, the country is eager to roll out vaccinations given transmission risks posed by its fur farms.

“The conditions in Finland are very different in that we have fur farms where the animals can end up in contact with wildlife,” Chief Physician Hanna Nohynek at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) told Reuters.

Widespread outbreaks of bird flu among mink and foxes at Finland’s mostly open-air fur farms led to the culling last year of some 485,000 animals to stop the virus from spreading among the animals as well as to humans.

Vaccinations are likely to start as early as next week in at least some parts of Finland, a THL spokesperson told Reuters.

Finland said it procured vaccines for people it deems to be at risk, such as workers at fur and poultry farms, lab technicians who handle bird flu samples and veterinarians who work as animal control officers in regions where fur farms are located.

People working in sanctuaries caring for wild birds, in livestock farms or in the cleaning of premises, such as animal by-products processing plants, will also be offered vaccines, THL said.

If human infection of avian influenza were to occur, close contacts of a suspected or confirmed case would also be offered the vaccine, it added.

Bird flu vaccine for cows

Twenty-four companies are working to develop an avian flu vaccine for cattle, as the virus spreads among U.S. dairy herds, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told Reuters.

In addition to the two dozen companies working at varying stages of vaccine development, the USDA is conducting its own preliminary research into a vaccine at its laboratory in Ames, Iowa, Vilsack said in an interview.

The agency is looking for a vaccine candidate to test for efficacy, he said.

“That could happen tomorrow, or it could take six months, or it could take a year,” Vilsack said.

A New York judge on Tuesday partially lifted a gag order imposed on former President Trump’s speech in his hush money criminal case.

The updated terms allow Trump to resume speaking about trial witnesses including Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.

The partial lifting of the order comes just days before the first 2024 presidential debate Thursday, where Trump is expected to address his conviction in the case.

The gag order remains in place when it comes to prosecutors overseeing the case, with the exception of District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) as well as Judge Juan Merchan, though Merchan said he’d lift those restrictions after the July 11 sentencing.

The partial lift will allow Trump to address the jury that convicted him last month on 34 criminal charges, though the former president remains under a separate protective order that prohibits him from publicly disclosing their identities.

Merchan reluctantly lifted those restrictions, saying it would be his “strong preference” to extend the jurors’ protection, as Bragg’s office had urged.

“However, circumstances have now changed. The trial portion of these proceedings ended when the verdict was rendered, and the jury discharged,” Merchan wrote in his ruling.

Though the ruling comes just two days before Trump is expected to face off against President Biden in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle Thursday, the event is not mentioned in the judge’s order.

Trump was convicted of falsifying business records last month in connection with a hush money payment his ex-fixer, Cohen, made to Daniels, a porn actor, ahead of the 2016 election to keep her story of an alleged affair with Trump a secret. Trump has denied the affair and vowed to appeal the guilty verdict.

He has long railed against the gag order as violation of his First Amendment rights, stressing his status as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. After the trial ended, Trump’s lawyers after the trial demanded the judge lift the restrictions.

In Tuesday’s order, Merchan defended his original decision to impose the order, noting appeals courts had upheld it.

“Both Orders were narrowly tailored to address the significant concerns regarding the Defendant’s extrajudicial speech,” Merchan wrote.

“The Orders were overwhelmingly supported by the record.”

Merchan found that Trump violated the gag order on 10 occasions in the lead-up to and during his trial, fining him $1,000 for each and warning that additional violations could lead to jail time.

The jury’s guilty verdict made Trump the first former U.S. president ever convicted. Bragg has so far declined to say whether his office will seek jail time for Trump.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump will take the debate stage together for the first time in four years on Thursday as they gear up for a tight presidential rematch in November.

In the days leading up to the debate, the candidates have adopted dueling prep strategies. Biden has hunkered down at Camp David, surrounding himself with top advisers as he practices and homes in on themes the campaign hopes to emphasize during the debate.

Trump, on the other hand, hit the campaign trail on Saturday with a Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering in Washington and a rally in Philadelphia, where he polled the audience on whether he should be “tough and nasty” or “nice and calm” with Biden at the debate. Off the trail, allies and experts have engaged Trump in policy discussions.

Here’s everything you need to know before the upcoming debate:

When is the debate?

The first 2024 presidential debate will be held on Thursday, June 27 at 9 p.m. EST. It will run for 90 minutes with two commercial breaks.

Where is the debate, and who’s moderating?

CNN is hosting the debate at its studios in Atlanta, with network anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash moderating.

How can I watch the debate?

The debate will air live on CNN, CNN International, CNN en Español and the streaming platform Max. Viewers who do not have a cable subscription can watch on CNN.com.

CNN is offering other networks a free simulcast of the debate with one main stipulation: The network’s on-air watermark must remain on screen. Fox News, ABC, NBC and C-SPAN have all agreed to CNN’s terms and will carry the broadcast.

What are the debate rules?

In a departure from debate tradition, there will be no studio audience — a demand Biden’s advisers felt could strip Trump of a major advantage and prevent a rowdy crowd of supporters from overtaking the event. Biden and Trump will get two commercial breaks to refresh, but they cannot confer with their campaign staff during this time.

The moderators will also have the ability to mute the candidates’ mics to avoid cross-talk and interruptions between turns, which plagued Biden and Trump’s first debate showdown in 2020. There will be no opening statements; candidates will dive straight into the moderators’ questions. Biden and Trump will have two minutes each for answers, one minute for rebuttals and one minute for responses to the rebuttals.

Candidates will be provided with a pen, pad of paper and water bottle. Props or pre-written notes will be prohibited on stage.

Biden’s campaign won the coin toss to decide either the order of the candidates’ closing statements or their podium position. The president selected the right podium, placing Trump to the left of viewers’ screens. Trump’s campaign opted to take the last word of the night, positioning Biden to deliver his closing statement first.

What were the qualifications for making the debate?

To qualify for the debates, candidates first needed to satisfy the U.S. Constitution’s requirements to serve as president and file a formal statement of candidacy to the Federal Election Commission. Biden, Trump, independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., independent Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein all met these qualifications.

CNN also required that debaters appeared on enough state ballots to possibly win at least 270 electoral votes and received at least 15 percent of the vote in four separate national polls that met CNN’s standards. Kennedy did not qualify because he hit 15 percent in only three polls and fell short of the required number of electoral votes, according to CNN — although he called his exclusion from the debate “undemocratic, un-American, and cowardly.”

West and Stein also did not meet the necessary thresholds.

The D.C. Court of Appeals on Tuesday suspended Hunter Biden’s law license after he was convicted earlier this month of three federal gun charges.

It’s the latest fallout from the president’s son’s conviction and trial, which aired some of the Biden family’s darkest moments.

Hunter Biden faces up to 25 years in prison, although as a first-time offender it’s unlikely he will receive the maximum sentence.

The court order stated that Hunter Biden is “suspended immediately from the practice of law” in D.C., after considering the indictment and jury verdict in his federal gun trial.

The appeals court also directed D.C.’s Board on Professional Responsibility to “institute a formal proceeding to determine the nature of the offense and whether it involves moral turpitude.”

The D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel wrote in an order earlier this month that Hunter Biden’s offenses in his federal gun case amount to a “serious crime,” which constitutes automatic suspension under the counsel’s rules.

Hunter Biden has been licensed to practice law in Washington, D.C., since 2007, per the Washington Post.

A sentencing date has not yet been scheduled for Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial.

His legal team in a motion on Monday sought a new trial for the gun charges, arguing “lack of jurisdiction” in the trial handled by a federal court in Delaware.