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.

Jocelyn Nungaray, the 12-year-old Houston girl found strangled to death last week, fought back against her attackers, two illegal immigrants who lured her under a bridge where they sexually assaulted her, prosecutors said Tuesday.

The alleged killers, Johan Jose Rangel Martinez, 21, and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26, met each other when they were both on their way to the United States from Venezuela and then later connected in Houston, Fox Houston reported.

Bail for Martinez, a father of two young children, 2 and 5, who aren’t in Texas, was set at $10 million after prosecutors labeled him a flight risk. He still had marks on him left by Nungaray during the June 16 attack, authorities said. Nungaray’s hands and feet were bound, she was nude from the waist down, had marks on her neck, and scrapes on her backside consistent with being dragged, prosecutors said.

Ramos told authorities he tried to convince Martinez to stop, but he allegedly refused and climbed on top of the girl and strangled her, according to Harris County prosecutor Megan Long. He said Martinez strangled her and suggested placing her in the water to remove DNA evidence.

“It’s especially difficult when it’s a loss of a 12-year-old child who had their whole life ahead of them. So, this will be an emotional case for us as prosecutors as well as the family,” Long said.

Martinez allegedly told authorities that he tied Jocelyn’s legs and instructed Pena to throw her in the bayou. Martinez had bite marks and scratches on his arm and had shaved his beard to avoid detection, authorities allege.

After the killing, Ramos allegedly sent a message to his boss at a construction crew saying the two had been partying the night of the killing and that someone ended up dead, and they needed money to leave town, prosecutors said.

Ramos, who entered the U.S. illegally a month before the killing, appeared in court on Monday where he was also given a $10 million bail amount. Both men are charged with capital murder.

Harris County District Court Judge Josh Hill said he set a high bail amount because he didn’t want Ramos or Martinez to flee, but also because he didn’t want them to get deported.

“I’ve seen individuals go into ICE custody, go through the deportation or removal process where they have been ordered to be removed… and that the feds have deported or removed those individuals with the Harris County criminal charges still pending,” Hill said.

“And it puts us in the position where those charges would never be answered.”

The killing shocked the community in and around Houston and was one in a series of crimes involving illegal immigrants this month.

Harris County Judge Lina Hildago, who often comments on local and national political matters, including illegal immigration, has not publicly said anything about the slaying. Fox News Digital has reached out to her office.

Nungaray’s family, including her mother Alexis Nungaray, was in court Tuesday. Melfri Vargas, stepmother to Alexis Nungaray, called Rangel a “murderer” and said, “I hope they kill your children,” the news station reported.

Canadian Conservative candidate Don Stewart won a close election on Monday in Toronto-St.Paul’s, taking a seat that has been held by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party for the past 30 years.

“Before Monday’s vote, a Conservative candidate hadn’t been competitive in Toronto–St. Paul’s since the 1980s. The party hadn’t won a seat in urban Toronto since the 2011 federal election,” CBC News marveled.

CBC called the race a “nail-biter to the very end,” with Stewart’s Liberal opponent Leslie Church in the lead for about six out of seven hours of vote-counting.

Stewart only took the lead when the final batch of votes was counted, vaulting to 42.1 percent over Church’s 40.5 percent. Stewart won the race by 590 votes. Liberals won the previous nine elections in the district by over 20 points each time.

“The Liberals’ poor showing in a stronghold like this could prompt some soul-searching for Trudeau, who has seen his popularity plummet as inflation, the cost of living crisis, high home prices and surging immigration levels drive voter discontent,” CBC suggested.

The Canadian Press compared Church’s glum evening to Canada losing the Stanley Cup on Monday night. The election upset was already so painful for Liberals that the Canadian Press could not bring itself to pour lemon juice on their paper cuts by mentioning who took the Stanley Cup from Canada.

The only consolation for Liberals was that independent candidates might have siphoned off enough votes to make first-time candidate Stewart’s shock victory possible. Amrit Parhar of the New Democratic Party (NDP) finished with 10.9 percent, while Christian Cullis of the Green Party took 2.9 percent.

“The race was considered a must-win for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the loss is a massive blow that could trigger calls for him to step down after 11 years as Liberal leader,” the Canadian Press warned.

Stewart himself said the election was a “chance to send Justin Trudeau a message.”

The contest on Monday was a “by-election” or special election, prompted when Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett resigned in December.

Bennett, a 73-year-old former doctor who first entered the House of Commons in 1997, decided it was time to end her time in Parliament – but she did not stay out of government for very long, as Trudeau named her ambassador to Denmark in January. She chose to resign her parliamentary seat immediately instead of waiting for the next regular election in 2025.

Bennett, who won almost all of her parliamentary races with over half the vote, was the major reason Toronto-St.Paul’s was considered an invulnerable “safe seat” for Liberals. The party quickly chose Church, a veteran staffer whose last post was chief of staff to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, as Bennett’s successor.

The Conservatives went with Stewart, an eight-year resident of the St. Paul’s district who served as director of market surveillance at the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization. Stewart is also a military reservist and treasurer of a non-profit organization devoted to veterans. He has long been involved in Conservative politics, but never ran for office before.

CTV News reported Conservative leaders were almost as surprised by Stewart’s shock win as Liberals. Both sides agreed the outcome was a devastating blow to Trudeau and a tremendous boost to Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

Most political analysts went into the race assuming Church would win, but they warned that if she won by five points or less, it would still be a sign that Poilievre might crush Trudeau in the next general election.

David Colletto, CEO of analytics firm Abacus Data, said before the election that Trudeau should think about throwing in the towel if Church won by less than ten points. Conservative analysts spoke of internal polls that showed Stewart losing by five points, and said that would be close enough to send Trudeau an unmistakable message. Virtually no one in the media or political sphere expected Stewart to actually win.

CTV spoke to Liberals who grumbled that the deeply unpopular Trudeau was an anchor around Church’s neck. For that matter, CTV’s own commentators blasted Trudeau for dragging Church down.

“I feel sick for Leslie. She poured everything into this, uprooting her life and campaigning endlessly. This isn’t really her loss. But it will still hurt,” sighed CTV analyst Scott Reid.

The Liberal Party pulled out all the stops to save Church, sending in just about every party heavyweight except Trudeau, including Church’s old boss Freeland.

Liberal sources mostly said they were not ready to call on Trudeau to step aside just yet, but their position might change if Conservatives do well in the next few by-elections.

Poilievre’s deputy Melissa Lantsman certainly seemed to think the future looked bright for her party on Monday:

Good morning, Toronto. Meet @donstewartTO your newest common sense Conservative MP.

Congratulations to the team, @CPC_HQ and to the unwavering leadership of @PierrePoilievre on brining it home in this Toronto fortress.

Thank you most of all to the voters of Toronto – St.… pic.twitter.com/aV6wMVcQTn

— Melissa Lantsman (@MelissaLantsman) June 25, 2024

The National Post suggested that in addition to public discontent with Trudeau, another factor in Toronto-St. Paul’s could be Jewish voters, who make up about ten percent of the district.

Canada’s Liberals – like left-wing parties in the United States and across Europe – maintained an awkward silence during vicious pro-Hamas demonstrations, while Stewart loudly declared that “repulsive acts of anti-Semitism” should be “unequivocally condemned by our leaders at all levels of government.” Stewart showed up for massive pro-Israel rallies, while Liberals found reasons to be elsewhere.

Stewart also ran on supporting Poilievre as prime minister-in-waiting and promised to advance his legislative agenda. Stewart said his campaign “echoes the things that Mr. Poilievre has said.”

“We want to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. I think I can add to that in Parliament,” Stewart said.

Poilievre campaigned alongside Stewart and praised him as a “common-sense Conservative” who understands that Canadians are “sick of a government that taxes food, punishes work, doubles housing costs and unleashes crime and chaos in the community.”

Writing at the National Post on Tuesday, columnist Tasha Kheiriddin saluted Stewart as a “giant-killer” and predicted the pressure on Trudeau to resign before the next election would grow intense.

Kheiriddin said Trudeau dropping out would be the worst thing that could happen to Conservatives, because while their “consistent messaging on the economy” and “the populist wave that is sweeping the planet” might be the wind beneath their wings, popular disgust with Trudeau is the jet fuel in their engines.

Kheiriddin tossed in a bonus prediction that Trudeau’s replacement would not be Chrystia Freeland, who came off as ineffective and desperate while campaigning for Church in Toronto-St.Paul.

“Anyone who is part of the current Liberal inner circle will be promptly slammed by the Tories as Trudeau 2.0,” she noted.

The European Union on Tuesday launched membership talks with Ukraine, a decade after Russian troops seized the Crimean Peninsula to deter the country from moving closer to the West, part of a chain of events that set the two neighbors on the path to war.

Ukraine’s accession negotiations were set in motion at an intergovernmental conference in Luxembourg. Just a few hours later, Moldova also launched its membership talks. While the events are a major milestone on their European paths, the talks could take years to conclude.

In opening remarks presented via video-link, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal described it as “a historic day” that marks “a new chapter” in his country’s ties with the bloc, particularly as the war with Russia rages on.

“We fully understand that there is still much work ahead of us on the path to accession. We are ready for it. We have demonstrated that we can move swiftly and achieve the impossible,” Shmyhal said.

Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib, whose country currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, described it as “a historic moment for us all, and marks a milestone in our relationship.”

Lahbib said the EU condemns “Russia’s unjustified and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine and salutes the resilience of the Ukrainian people,” and added that the bloc will continue to support Ukraine in the war “for as long as it takes and as intensely as needed.”

Ukraine’s delegation was led in Luxembourg by deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration Olga Stefanishyna. “This is a truly historical moment for my country. All the nation stands as one behind this decision,” she told reporters as she arrived for the ceremony.

Stefanishyna said the hope embodied in the opening of the talks will give Ukraine’s citizens “the moral power to continue withstanding” the Russian invasion.

The intergovernmental conferences officially started the process of aligning the countries’ laws and standards with those of the 27-nation bloc, which is notably concerned about corruption in both. However, the actual negotiations are unlikely to begin for a few months.

Ukraine and Moldova applied to join the EU in the days and weeks after Russia invaded in February 2022. By June 2022, EU leaders had quickly made it all official. But things have moved more slowly since then for Kyiv and membership, if it comes, might be years away.

Turkey’s accession talks have lasted almost two decades without result.

Still, starting the talks process is sending another strong signal of solidarity with Ukraine beyond the financial support the EU has provided, which officials estimate at around 100 billion euros ($107 billion). It’s also a show of support for Moldova, which has faced its own challenges with Russia.

“It is a historic event for us in historical times for Europe and it signifies the strong commitment of both sides to European peace, security, stability and prosperity,” said Prime Minister Dorin Recean. “We will spare no effort to achieve our strategic goal of becoming an EU member.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, neighboring Moldova has faced several crises that have at times raised fears the country might also be in Russia’s crosshairs, from errant missiles landing on its territory, to an energy crisis sparked after Moscow cut gas supplies.

“We are very much affected by the brutal war of Russia in Ukraine, and we are helping each other in the security matters but also in the European accession and we will continue to do so,” Recean told reporters.

Candidate countries must bring their laws and standards into line with those of the EU in 35 policy areas, known as chapters, ranging from the free movement of goods through fisheries, taxation, energy and the environment to judicial rights and security.

Unanimous agreement must be given by all 27 member countries to open or close chapters, providing ample opportunity for EU nations to demand more work or to delay proceedings.

Hungary, which takes over the EU’s rotating presidency from Belgium in July, has routinely put the brakes on EU and NATO support for Ukraine.

“We are still at the beginning of the screening process. It’s very difficult to say at what stage Ukraine is in. From what I see here, as we speak, they are very far from meeting the accession criteria,” Hungarian Minister for European Affairs Janos Boka said as he arrived at the venue.

Bordering EU members Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, Ukraine would overtake France to become the largest member of the bloc if it joined, shifting its center of gravity further eastward. As a top grain producer its entry would have a huge impact on EU agriculture policy.

Together with Moldova, Ukraine stands in a long line of EU hopefuls — Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey — with years-long membership aspirations and which have felt left behind by Kyiv’s rapid progress.

Ukraine wants to join by 2030, but it must carry out dozens of institutional and legal reforms first. That daunting list is led by steps to combat corruption and includes broad reforms to public administration and judiciary.

Kenyan President William Ruto said on Tuesday security was his “utmost priority” after protests against a bill to raise taxes descended into violence, with police firing on demonstrators trying to storm the legislature, killing at least five.

In chaotic scenes in the capital Nairobi, protesters overwhelmed police and chased them away in an attempt to enter the parliament compound, with Citizen TV later showing damage from inside the building, which had been partially set ablaze.

Protests and clashes also took place in several other cities and towns across Kenya, with many calling for Ruto to quit as well as voicing their opposition to the tax rises.

In a televised address to the nation, Ruto said the tax debate had been “hijacked by dangerous people”.

“It is not in order, or even conceivable, that criminals pretending to be peaceful protesters can reign terror against the people…,” he said, pledging a swift response to Tuesday’s “treasonous events”.

Police in Nairobi opened fire after tear gas and water cannon failed to disperse the crowds. They eventually managed to drive protesters from the parliament building and lawmakers were evacuated through an underground tunnel, local media said.

Later on Tuesday, Defence Minister Aden Duale said the army had been deployed to help the police deal with a “security emergency” which had resulted in the “destruction and breaching of critical infrastructure”.

The Kenya Medical Association said that at least five people had been shot dead while treating the injured, and that 31 people had been injured, with 13 shot with live bullets and four with rubber bullets.

The association called on authorities to establish safe medical corridors to protect medical staff and ambulances.

Caught Between Competing Demands

Ruto won an election almost two years ago on a platform of championing Kenya’s working poor, but has been caught between the competing demands of lenders such as the International Monetary Fund, which is urging the government to cut deficits to obtain more funding, and a hard-pressed population.

The finance bill aims to raise an additional $2.7 billion in taxes as part of an effort to lighten Kenya’s heavy debt load, with interest payments alone consuming 37% of annual revenue.

In Washington, the White House said the United States was closely monitoring the situation in Nairobi and urging calm.

Ambassadors and high commissioners from countries including Britain, the U.S. and Germany said in a joint statement they were deeply concerned by violence they had witnessed during recent anti-tax protests and called for restraint on all sides.

Kenyan activist Auma Obama, the half-sister of former U.S. President Barack Obama, was among protesters tear-gassed during the demonstrations, a CNN interview showed.

Internet services across the East African country experienced severe disruptions during the police crackdown, internet monitor Netblocks said. Kenya’s leading network operator Safaricom said outages had affected two of its undersea cables but the root cause of the outages remained unclear.

Parliament approved the finance bill, moving it through to a third reading by lawmakers. The next step is for the legislation to be sent to the president for signing. He can send it back to parliament if he has any objections.

Opposition politicians called on Ruto to step down.

“Ruto must go, Ruto must resign, he must do the honourable thing,” senior opposition leader Eugene Wamalwa said in a statement on TV.
Another opposition leader, Raila Odinga, urged the immediate withdrawal of the finance bill to make way for dialogue.

“I am disturbed at the murders, arrests, detentions and surveillance being perpetrated by police on boys and girls who are only seeking to be heard over taxation policies that are stealing both their present and future,” he said in a statement.

The government has made some concessions, promising to scrap proposed new taxes on bread, cooking oil, car ownership and financial transactions. But that has not been enough for protesters.

The finance ministry says the concessions would blow a 200 billion Kenyan shilling ($1.56 billion) hole in the 2024-25 budget, and compel the government to make spending cuts or raise taxes elsewhere.

Tuesday’s protests began in a festival-like atmosphere but as crowds swelled, police fired tear gas in Nairobi’s Central Business District and the poor neighbourhood of Kibera. Protesters ducked for cover and threw stones at police lines.

Police also fired tear gas in Eldoret, Ruto’s hometown in western Kenya, where crowds of protesters filled the streets and many businesses were closed for fear of violence.
Further clashes broke out in the coastal city of Mombasa and demonstrations were held in Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, and Garissa in eastern Kenya, where police blocked the main road to neighbouring Somalia’s port of Kismayu.

In Nairobi, people chanted “Ruto must go” and crowds sang in Swahili: “All can be possible without Ruto”. Music played from loudspeakers and protesters waved Kenyan flags and blew whistles in the few hours before the violence escalated.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was released from a British prison and on his way to a remote Pacific island on Tuesday where he will plead guilty to a conspiracy charge as part of a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department, according to court documents.

The agreement will free Assange and end the yearslong legal battle over the publication of a trove of classified documents.

Assange was charged by criminal information — which typically signifies a plea deal — with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, the court documents said.

Wikileaks posted footage to X of Assange boarding a plane at Stanstead Airport near London at 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) on Monday.

A letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie said Assange would appear in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S.-controlled territory north of Guam, at 9 a.m. local time Wednesday (7 p.m. ET Tuesday) to plead guilty.

A plane believed to be carrying Assange landed early Tuesday in the Thai capital Bangkok to refuel. He will later arrive for what could be a final court hearing after spending five years in a British jail.

The islands are 3,400 miles north of Australia, Assange’s country of citizenship, where the Justice Department expects he will return following the proceedings.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that “the case has dragged on for too long, there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia.”

Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, said in a statement widely reported by Australian media: “I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end. This shows the importance and power of quiet diplomacy.”

His wife, Stella Assange, is currently in Australia with the couple’s two children, aged 5 and 7, waiting for his arrival, she told BBC Radio 4. “He will be a free man once it is signed off by a judge,” she said, adding that she wasn’t sure the deal would happen until the last 24 hours.

She said she was “elated.”

U.S. charges against Assange stem from one of the largest publications of classified information in American history, which took place during President Barack Obama’s first term.

Starting in late 2009, according to the government, Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, to use his WikiLeaks website to disclose tens of thousands of activity reports about the war in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of reports about the war in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and assessment briefs of detainees at the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Court documents revealing Assange’s plea deal were filed Monday evening in U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands. Assange was expected to appear in that court and to be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for time served in British prison, meaning he would be free to return to Australia, where he was born.

“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice and there was no White House involvement in the plea deal decision,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement Monday evening.

Assange has been held in the high-security Belmarsh Prison in east London for five years, and he previously spent seven years in self-exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London — where he reportedly fathered two children — until his asylum was withdrawn and he was forcibly carried out of the embassy and arrested in April 2019. A superseding indictment was returned more than five years ago, in May 2019, and a second superseding indictment was returned in June 2020.

Assange has been fighting extradition for more than a decade: first in connection with a sex crimes case in Sweden, then in connection with the case against him in the United States.

In March, the High Court in London gave him permission for a full hearing on his appeal as he sought assurances that he could rely upon the First Amendment at a trial in the U.S. In May, two judges on the High Court said he could have a full hearing on whether he would be discriminated against in the U.S. because he is a foreign national. A hearing on the issue of Assange’s free speech rights had been scheduled for July 9-10.

WikiLeaks also published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee that upended the 2016 presidential race. Russian intelligence officers were subsequently indicted in connection with the hacking in 2018 in a case brought by then-special counsel Robert Mueller.

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison, but Obama commuted her sentence in the final days of his presidency in 2017. Manning was subsequently held in contempt of court for nearly a year after she refused to answer questions for a grand jury; she was then released after an attempted suicide.

During a long day of hearings in Fort Pierce, Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon challenged prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s team to show how former President Donald Trump’s repeated comments about the FBI translated into a threat against law enforcement officers.

The special counsel’s office says that a gag order is needed because Trump has repeatedly, and misleadingly, alleged that the agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 were authorized to murder him.

Cannon did not seem inclined to approve the limitations on Trump’s speech but did not immediately issue a ruling.

The judge also heard arguments on Trump’s long-shot motion alleging that the special counsel’s office is being improperly funded. She did not rule on that motion either.

Here’s what to know from Monday’s hearings:

Cannon is skeptical of a gag order

Cannon showed some skepticism toward prosecutors’ arguments, asking where they saw a call to violence in Trump’s comments and saying that they had needed to show some connecting facts between what the former president has said and the threats they are warning about.

Cannon said that the statute prosecutors are citing for the gag order “still requires a finding” related to the potential risks to others, noting that prosecutors don’t need a direct cause.

“There still needs to be a factual connection between A and B,” Cannon said of the bridge between Trump’s comments and potential threats.

Prosecutor David Harbach responded that other posts and comments by Trump “ultimately result in all types of terrible things,” including threats or harassment of law enforcement.

He said that while Trump is welcome to campaign, there should be certain limits when it comes to the safety of FBI agents on the case.

Judge dresses down prosecutor

Cannon repeatedly sparred with Harbach, who she said was being snippy during his arguments.

First, Cannon dressed down the prosecutor for his lack of “decorum” while addressing her.

Harbach had seemingly become irritated at Cannon’s detailed questions.

Cannon quickly stopped Harbach, telling him, “I don’t appreciate your tone.” She added that she would “appreciate decorum at all times” and said, “If you aren’t able to do that, I’m sure one of your colleagues can take up arguing this motion.”

“Yes, your honor,” Harbach replied.

The judge also slammed Harbach for not providing evidence of other court rulings on gag orders against Trump, despite referring to those orders in their arguments.

Harbach later apologized to Cannon, saying, “I didn’t mean to be unprofessional. I’m sorry about that.”

Trump accuses Smith of trying to punish him for others’ actions

Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche said Monday that there were no threats to FBI agents in Trump’s email or social media posts cited by the government, and argued the Justice Department was trying to punish Trump for other people’s comments.

“The attacks, very clearly, are against President Biden,” Blanche said of Trump’s communications at issue.

Blanche acknowledged that the DOJ’s “deadly force” policy in place for the Mar-a-Lago search was standard for the execution of such search warrants but said that “It doesn’t mean that it was right” for agents to have been armed during the search (as they normally are).

The defense attorney also said that prosecutors were trying to set a “dangerous precedent” by changing the former president’s conditions of release. He said that prosecutors are too vaguely defining what a threat is, making any potential new rules difficult to follow and potentially making him liable for other peoples’ comments.

“Steve Bannon making a comment is potentially the kind of thing that could send President Trump to jail,” Blanche said.

Cannon has tough questions on how special counsel’s office is funded

In the morning session, though the judge was careful to say her questions shouldn’t imply she was leaning one way, Cannon pushed Justice Department attorney James Pearce to explain how much money the department has used for its work in the Trump criminal cases.

The judge noted that even if the office discloses its spending publicly every six months, a financial disclosure that would encompass last fall through this March was overdue.

She also sought from prosecutors guidance on explaining the laws and regulations that governed past special prosecutors, at one point bringing up Watergate and the era of Janet Reno as attorney general.

Cannon’s questions were so pointed toward Pearce that at one point the prosecutor mentioned how other courts have been overturned if they invalidated a government function in the way Cannon was probing, and said he hoped the Justice Department could provide additional written argument to the court if invalidating Smith was a serious possibility.

President Biden’s latest iteration of his student-loan “forgiveness” plan has been temporarily blocked, as two federal judges sided with multiple Republican states in ruling that only Congress holds the authority to erase student debt.

Both preliminary injunctions were filed Monday, prohibiting the Biden administration from canceling student loans under the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment program.

It was set to take effect July 1. The pair of orders are a victory for Kansas and Missouri, both of which led multistate lawsuits against implementation of the SAVE plan this spring.

SAVE would have canceled at least $156 billion in student-loan debt, transferring it to taxpayers, according to Kansas’s lawsuit. Missouri’s lawsuit estimated that the “forgiveness” plan would have cost American taxpayers $475 billion over the next decade.

Attorney General Kris Kobach of Kansas led his multistate coalition in suing Biden, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, and the Department of Education for attempting to bypass Congress and approve the cancellation of student debt for a second time.

The SAVE program was created after the Supreme Court last June struck down a similar “forgiveness” plan, one that would have transferred to taxpayers up to $430 billion in student debt.

Kobach’s lawsuit argued that the Department of Education doesn’t have the authority to cancel billions in student debt. It also contended that the SAVE program is violating the Supereme Court’s ruling and that Congress is the only government body that can authorize student-loan “forgiveness,” since it would require the spending of taxpayer money.

Kansas and Missouri were two of the six states that successfully challenged the Biden administration’s Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act last year.

In Biden v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that Cardona does not have authority under the HEROES Act to cancel roughly $430 billion in student debt. The Court held that this move would have affected nearly all borrowers.

“Kansas’s victory today is a victory for the entire country,” Kobach said in a statement.

“As the court correctly held, whether to forgive billions of dollars of student debt is a major question that only Congress can answer. Biden’s administration is attempting to usurp Congress’s authority. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s unfair. Blue-collar Kansas workers who didn’t go to college shouldn’t have to pay off the student loans of New Yorkers with gender studies degrees.”

Attorney General Andrew Bailey of Missouri likewise praised the injunction order related to his lawsuit, calling it a “huge win for the Constitution.”

With both lawsuits, more than a dozen states have sued Biden, the Department of Education, and its leader over this student-debt issue.

Kansas was joined by Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah in its litigation. In Missouri’s lawsuit, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma were listed as additional plaintiffs.

So far, since Biden took office, 4.75 million borrowers have had $167 billion in student debt canceled, with the bill transferred to taxpayers.

The U.S. Army and National Guard acknowledged a soldier’s “debilitating heart condition” is connected to the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new report by former CBS reporter Catherine Herridge.

Army National Guard Specialist Karoline Stancik, 24, has reportedly racked up over $70,000 in medical debt after being hospitalized for heart complications.

She suffered her first heart attack after receiving the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

An Army memo about Stancik’s situation acquired by Herridge shows she had been diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or “POTS.” Stancik described having intense adverse reactions to her vaccinations, including high heart rate, neuropathic pain and difficulty breathing.

She was released from active duty in 2022, costing her medical benefits and a salary.

Watch:

WATCH: Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge, releases an interview with a 24-year-old soldier that has developed a “debilitating heart condition” linked to the army mandated COVID-19 mRNA vaccine pic.twitter.com/nPFn1Qqoc3

— Overton (@OvertonLive) June 24, 2024

The effects she experienced were so detrimental to her health, Stancik said, that she considered suicide. She now requires a pacemaker and heart surgery.

It’s not what I expected for myself,” she said. “I though it was going to be doing marathons.”

Stancik is now being represented by USJAG, an advocacy organization for soldiers injured in the lie of duty. Veterans Advocate Jeremy Sorenson told The National Desk (TND) the case represents a larger trend of removing benefits from injured troops as a cost-saving measure within the Department of Defense.

They have the money,” Sorenson said. “They choose to spend the money on other things. The Department of Defense chooses to spend its money not on its people, not on injured servicemembers, they have other priorities.”

“Our country has a responsibility to take care of our injured service members,” he added. “[Branches of the military] ignore the Department of Defense instructions, they ignore federal law and they make policies and they make determinations that are wholesale illegal.”

An Army spokesperson reportedly told Herridge that Stancik could have remained on active duty while receiving treatment. She denied having ever been counseled about this option.

Neither the Pentagon nor Moderna responded to a request for comment from TND Monday.

The GOP side of the House Judiciary Committee applauded Herridge’s return to journalism in a post on X Monday afternoon, claiming the “Left tried to silence” her. Herridge was laid off from CBS News in February.