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Anthropic PBC hired the lobbying firm Ballard Partners as it draws out its fight with the Pentagon, a new public document shows.

The artificial intelligence company hired Ballard Partners—the biggest shop in Washington, which also has strong ties to the Trump administration—just days after the Pentagon designated the company as a supply chain risk, according to a recent lobbying disclosure filing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45561217

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that the Trump administration reports to him every day about the ongoing war in Iran.

In a meeting with Israel’s Cabinet ministers, Netanyahu said, “I spoke yesterday with Vice President JD Vance. He called me from his plane on his way back from Islamabad. He reported to me in detail, as this administration does every day, about the development of the negotiations. In this case, the explosion in the negotiations.”

Netanyahu went on to claim that the U.S. broke off the negotiations because Iran didn’t immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz and wouldn’t commit to getting rid of all of its enriched uranium.

After two Molotov cocktails, now this... either the worst organized group ever, or just straw graspers.

Over the past year and a half, Trump frequently issued maximal threats against various trading partners to varying degrees of success. Although Trump earned a well-deserved reputation for backing off his most alarming threats (taking control of Greenland, forcing Brazil to call off its election fraud case against former President Jair Bolsonaro), many trading partners acquiesced to Trump’s terms.

But Iran is following China’s model instead.

Trump last spring dialed up China’s tariffs so high that it created a virtual embargo on Chinese goods to the United States. China retaliated by restricting exports of rare-earth minerals critical to a wide range of electronics, threatening US businesses, consumers and even the military.

Trump relented and brought tariffs way down – in exchange for China’s pledge to reopen the rare-earth floodgates. But China never backed down, hanging onto its trump card, despite Trump’s repeated threats to raise tariffs again – a power the Supreme Court recently blunted.

Iran, similarly, views control over the Strait of Hormuz as the one piece of leverage it wields over the United States as a tool to stop an existential war and bring America to the negotiating table.

TMTG drops defamation claim over report that prosecutors were investigating payments received as possible money laundering

Donald Trump’s media corporation has dropped a defamation claim against the Guardian and two other defendants over a report that federal prosecutors were investigating $8m in payments the company received from entities with ties to Vladimir Putin as possible money laundering.

A filing in the 12th judicial circuit in Sarasota county, Florida, on Friday confirms that Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the parent company of the president’s Truth Social platform, was withdrawing its claims without prejudice, meaning it could refile the lawsuit at a later date.

The Guardian reported in March 2023 that New York prosecutors had launched a criminal inquiry into money wired to TMTG through the Caribbean by two entities that appeared to be controlled in part by the relation of an ally of Putin, Russia’s president.

A US judge has dismissed a case against the publisher of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) over a story about ties the US president had to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump sued the American newspaper and its owners including Rupert Murdoch in a Florida federal court last summer, asking for at least $10bn (£7.4bn) in damages.

The president claimed the newspaper defamed him in a 17 July report that said Trump's name was in a "birthday book" given to Epstein in 2003. In that message, the Journal reported, Trump included a drawing of a woman's body.

Trump's lawyer told CBS News, the BBC's US news partner, that the president will refile the "powerhouse" suit.

The Senate returns to work today, while the House will hold a brief procedural session before getting back to regular business on Tuesday.

Lawmakers have still not passed a funding bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subagencies affected by the record-breaking partial government shutdown, now in its ninth week.

During the two-week recess, House Republican speaker Mike Johnson took no action to advance a Senate-passed measure that would reopen agencies like the Transport Security Administration (TSA) and Coast Guard, but withhold funds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol. Democrats have demanded stronger guardrails on federal immigration enforcement after the killing of two US citizens by officers in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Johnson is also facing pressure from hardline House Republicans members who argue that the Senate bill hands Democrats a win. Now, John Thune, the Senate majority leader, and Johnson are expected to try to move a new tax package that includes immigration enforcement funding for at least three years, aiming to avoid another standoff on Capitol Hill. They hope to pass it through a process known as reconciliation, which only requires a simple majority to advance.

If you’re one of Meta’s 79,000 employees and can’t get hold of the boss, don’t worry. The owner of Facebook and Instagram is reportedly working on an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg who can answer all your queries.

The AI clone of Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, is being trained on his mannerisms and tone as well as his public statements and thoughts on company strategy.

The rationale behind the project, according to the Financial Times, is that employees might feel more connected to one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley.

The Meta chief has a history of creating and experimenting with digitalised versions of himself.

This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the federal agency that oversees Wall Street—announced that it has brought almost 30 percent fewer new enforcement actions against companies in the first year of the Trump administration.

In practice, this means that the SEC is bringing fewer cases against bad actors in the financial markets for crimes like insider trading or fraud. That contradicts statements that the SEC’s head, Paul Atkins, made to Congress in February, disputing reports that suggested his agency was prosecuting fewer crimes, and assuring lawmakers that SEC enforcement work had not seen a steep decline.

In its release of case numbers this week, the agency framed its enforcement drop as an effort to focus more on cases where investors saw direct harm and to better use agency resources.

“Regrettably, such resources have been misapplied in prior years to pursue media headlines and run up numbers, and in turn, led to misguided expectations on what constitutes effective enforcement,” the SEC wrote in its statement.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1046436

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Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year out of state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.

Despite these generous subsidies, data center owners are legally allowed to shield many of their financial details from state oversight. They aren’t required to prove their ongoing eligibility for the tax exemptions unless they are audited by the state Department of Revenue. Lawmakers enacted sales and use tax breaks for data centers in 2010 and expanded them in 2015.

“At that time, no one could have predicted the explosive growth of data centers and how much energy they consumed,” Gov. Josh Stein told his Energy Policy Task Force, which met this week. “And because data centers at that point were a brand-new industry, they benefited from financial incentives to induce capital to invest. Those days are long gone.”

The U.S. military vowed to blockade all Iranian ports starting Monday, part of efforts to force Tehran into agreeing to open the crucial Strait of Hormuz and accepting a peace deal. Iran responded with threats on all ports in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, taking aim at U.S.-allied countries.

That set the stage for an extraordinary showdown that contains serious risks for the global economy and raises the specter that a ceasefire that is currently holding could collapse and the war could resume. Talks aimed at permanently ending the conflict — which began Feb. 28 with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran — finished without an agreement this weekend, and there has been no word on whether negotiations will resume.

Soybeans, which are used for livestock feed, food and biofuels, are among the top U.S. agricultural exports. That hasn’t always been the case. Before the 1960s soybeans weren’t a major crop in the U.S, according to Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. It wasn’t until the 1990s that soybean production accelerated due to international demand — primarily from China — and soybeans and corn are now dominant in U.S. agriculture.

But U.S. soybean farmers, who typically also grow corn, have been facing financial issues for years even before the onset of the Iran war.

Soybean prices have been persistently low in recent years. The global market has been awash in soybeans, driven in part by Brazil, which surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest soybean producer years ago.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45533900

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — The Supreme Court in the African kingdom of Eswatini has ruled that four men sent there by the United States last July under the Trump administration’s third-country deportation program can finally meet with a lawyer after they were denied in-person legal counsel for nine months while held at a maximum-security prison.

A lower court had previously ruled that local lawyer Sibusiso Nhlabatsi, who is working on behalf of the men’s U.S.-based lawyers, could meet with them, but the Eswatini government immediately appealed that decision.

In a ruling delivered on Thursday, the Supreme Court dismissed arguments by Eswatini authorities that the deportees didn’t want to meet with Nhlabatsi, and that they had no right to legal counsel anyway because they had not been arrested or charged with a crime in Eswatini.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday declared unconstitutional a nearly 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling, calling it an unnecessary and improper means for ​Congress to exercise its power to tax.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of ‌Appeals in New Orleans ruled in favor of the nonprofit Hobby Distillers Association and four of its 1,300 members.

They argued that people should be free to distill spirits at home, whether as ​a hobby or for personal consumption including, in one instance, to create ​an apple-pie-vodka recipe.

The ban was part of a law passed during ⁠Reconstruction in July 1868, in part to thwart liquor tax evasion, and subjected violators ​to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Car ownership has long been integral to the American dream. But as automakers slash the production of inexpensive models to cater to customers who can afford oversized pickups and sport utility vehicles, buyers find themselves facing sticker shock at the same time they are already frustrated by the lingering effects of high inflation.

Consumer prices rose 3.3% in March, the biggest yearly increase since May 2024, while new car prices were up 12.6% from a year ago, the Labor Department reported Friday.

New vehicles now sell for an average of nearly $50,000, up 30% in six years, and average monthly payments — based on 10% down and a 6-year note — recently hit $775. Looking for something on the cheap end? The share of vehicles listing for less than $30,000 is about 13% — down from 40% five years ago, per the car review site CarGurus.

IBM reached a settlement with the federal government on Friday, agreeing to pay roughly $17 million to resolve allegations of illegal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the settlement agreement in a press release.

The DOJ had alleged that the New York-based technology firm “knowingly” made “false claims” about its hiring and employment practices in its federal contracts, according to the settlement. IBM allegedly identified “diverse” candidates for hiring or promotions, while developing race and sex demographic goals.