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Pope Leo said “we’re in big trouble” when it comes to the ever-widening pay gap between the rich and poor, citing Elon Musk, who may be on course to become the world’s first trillionaire.

Leo made the remarks while criticising executive pay packages during his first interview with the media.

Reflecting on why the world was so polarised, he said one significant factor was the “continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive”.

“CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving … 600 times more [now],” the pontiff said in excerpts of the interview conducted by Elise Ann Allen, a senior correspondent with the Catholic newspaper Crux as part of a forthcoming biography.

Earlier this month, the board of the electric car maker Tesla said it had proposed a new trillion-dollar pay package for Musk, its chief executive and largest shareholder, if he hit targets set by the company.

Outlining the incentive package, which is unprecedented in corporate history, in a stock market update, the company said: “Yes, you read that correctly.”

The pope, who turned 70 on Sunday, has so far shown to be much more low-key than his predecessor, even if they shared similar progressive political views.

Francis often clashed with the US president, Donald Trump, over his hardline immigration policies, while Leo, formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost, also criticised Trump’s policies on his X account before becoming pope.

“Put moral formation at the centre of your society”

David Brooks' speech was challenging and thought provoking, calling for us to reassess what we think cultural renewal looks like and to reconnect to our spiritual roots.

The FBI on Friday searched the home of President Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton.

Bolton served in Trump's first term in the White House for just over a year but has since become a sharp critic of the president. He has said he believed Trump would use the Department of Justice to enact a "retribution presidency."

The FBI on Friday said it conducted "court-authorized activity in the area" when asked about a search at Bolton's Maryland home.

"There is no threat to public safety. We have no further comment," the FBI added. The search of Bolton's home was first reported by the New York Post. Bolton's office declined immediate comment.

Bolton was one of the former administration officials whose security clearances Trump stripped when he returned to office. Trump also revoked Bolton's security detail, which was in place because of threats from Iran.

Bolton published The Room Where It Happened in 2020, a memoir about his time in the White House that was critical of Trump's approach to foreign policy and the presidency in general.

The Trump administration sued to try to block the book's publication, alleging that Bolton hadn't gone through the proper clearance process and that his manuscript contained classified information. A judge declined that request, but said Bolton's conduct raised national security concerns. The Biden administration dismissed the lawsuit, and prosecutors dropped a grand jury investigation the following year.

Feel free to share when you came in with a line or joke at just the right time - nothing beats a well timed moment!

The Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.

The release involves more than 240,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

In a lengthy statement released Monday, King’s two living children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, said their father’s killing has been a “captivating public curiosity for decades.” But the pair emphasized the personal nature of the matter and urged that the files “be viewed within their full historical context.”

The Kings got advance access to the records and had their own teams reviewing them. Those efforts continued even as the government granted public access. Among the documents are leads the FBI received after King’s assassination and details of the CIA’s fixation on King’s pivot to international anti-war and anti-poverty movements in the years before he was killed. It was not immediately clear whether the documents shed new light on King’s life, the Civil Rights Movement or his murder.

“As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief — a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met — an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,” they wrote. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”

They also repeated the family’s long-held contention that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating King, was not solely responsible, if at all.

Besides fulfilling the intent of his January executive order, the latest release serves as another alternative headline for Trump as he tries to mollify supporters angry over his administration’s handling of records concerning the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself behind bars while awaiting trial in 2019, during Trump’s first presidency. Trump last Friday ordered the Justice Department to release grand jury testimony but stopped short of unsealing the entire case file.

Bernice King and Martin Luther King III did not mention Trump in their statement Monday. But Bernice King later posted on her personal Instagram account a black-and-white photo of her father, looking annoyed, with the caption “Now, do the Epstein files.”

And some civil rights activists did not spare the president.

“Trump releasing the MLK assassination files is not about transparency or justice,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton. “It’s a desperate attempt to distract people from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility among the MAGA base.”

The King Center, founded by King’s widow and now led by Bernice King, reacted separately from what Bernice said jointly with her brother. The King Center statement framed the release as a distraction — but from more than short-term political controversy.

Former federal officials and outside experts have warned for months that President Donald Trump’s deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service could endanger lives.

After torrential rains and flash flooding struck Friday in the Texas Hill Country, the weather service came under fire from local officials who criticized what they described as inadequate forecasts, though most in the Republican-controlled state stopped short of blaming Trump’s cuts. Democrats, meanwhile, wasted little time in linking the staff reductions to the disaster, which is being blamed for the deaths of at least 80 people, including more than two dozen girls and counselors attending a summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River.

“This was an exceptional service to come out first with the catastrophic flash flood warning and this shows the awareness of the meteorologists on shift at the NWS office,” said Brian LaMarre, who retired at the end of April as the meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS forecast office in Tampa, Florida. ″There is always the challenge of pinpointing extreme values, however, the fact the catastrophic warning was issued first showed the level of urgency.”

Questions remain, however, about the level of coordination and communication between NWS and local officials on the night of the disaster. The Trump administration has cut hundreds of jobs at NWS, with staffing down by at least 20% at nearly half of the 122 NWS field offices nationally and at least a half dozen no longer staffed 24 hours a day. Hundreds more experienced forecasters and senior managers were encouraged to retire early.

Former federal officials and experts have said Trump’s indiscriminate job reductions at NWS and other weather-related agencies will result in brain drain that imperils the federal government’s ability to issue timely and accurate forecasts. Such predictions can save lives, particularly for those in the path of quick-moving storms.

“This situation is getting to the point where something could break,” said Louis Uccellini, a meteorologist who served as NWS director under three presidents, including during Trump’s first term. “The people are being tired out, working through the night and then being there during the day because the next shift is short staffed. Anything like that could create a situation in which important elements of forecasts and warnings are missed.”

The cuts follow a decade-long Republican effort to dismantle and privatize many of the duties of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency within the Commerce Department that includes the NWS. The reductions have come as Trump has handed top public posts to officials with ties to private companies that stand to profit from hobbling the taxpayer-funded system for predicting the weather.

At a pair of Congressional hearings last month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called it “fake news” that the Trump administration had axed any meteorologists, despite detailed reporting from The Associated Press and other media organizations that chronicled the layoffs.

Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman plans to bankroll a New York City mayoral campaign, arguing that his affluent associates are poised to flood the election with money in an effort to defeat Democratic Socialist frontrunner Zohran Mamdani.

Ackman said he was “gravely concerned” because he believed the left-wing candidate’s policies would be disastrous, triggering an exodus of the wealthy that would endanger New York’s public services by hollowing out its tax base.

Arguing that his own support of President Trump would automatically disqualify anyone Ackman might put forward, the activist investor said he was making a public appeal: Anyone capable of taking down Mamdani in the Nov. 4 election should step forward and volunteer.

“Importantly, there are hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani that can be put together overnight (believe me, I am in the text strings and the WhatsApp groups) so that a great alternative candidate won’t spend any time,” he wrote.

“So if the right candidate would raise his or her hand tomorrow, the funds will pour in.”

It’s unclear whether New Yorkers would honor such a candidate. The recent intervention by Elon Musk in Wisconsin’s state supreme court election indicated the voting public does not always respond well to billionaires using their money to sway races.

New York mayoral races are notoriously unpredictable due to the city’s chronically low turnout. In 2017, for example, Bill de Blasio won reelection with only 14% of registered voters coming out to support him.

A large influx of New Yorkers heading to the voting booth because they are as concerned as Ackman could easily affect the outcome. If Cuomo can hold on to enough fundraisers, political pundits also point out, it’s possible he could run as an independent like Adams, splitting the left vote and spoiling the race.

Ackman, however, argued all these factors would support the emergence of a centrist candidate looking to position themself on the national stage. It could even be another businessman like Bloomberg, he suggested, although Ackman in an earlier post appeared to indicate he would not seek to run himself.

“For the aspiring politician there is no better way to get name recognition, build relationships with long-term donors, and to showcase oneself,” the hedge fund manager wrote, pitching the campaign like a business deal. “The risk/reward of running for mayor over the next 132 days is extremely compelling as the cost in time and energy is small and the upside is enormous.”

President Donald Trump said on Monday he would support the arrest of California's Gavin Newsom, in a dramatic escalation of a growing conflict with the Democratic governor over immigration protests that roiled Los Angeles over the weekend.

As Los Angeles faced a fourth day of protests over immigration raids in the city, Democrats and Republicans clashed over what has become the biggest flashpoint in the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to deport migrants living in the country illegally.

"This is exactly what Donald Trump wanted. He flamed the fires and illegally acted to federalize the National Guard," Newsom, who is viewed as a potential Democratic presidential contender in 2028, said on X.

Federal law allows the president to deploy the Guard if the nation is invaded, if there is “rebellion or danger of rebellion,” or the president is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” Returning to the White House after a night at Camp David, Trump was asked by a reporter whether his border czar, Tom Homan, should arrest Newsom. Homan has threatened to arrest anyone who obstructs immigration enforcement efforts, including the governor.

"I would do it if I were Tom. I think it's great," Trump replied. "Gavin likes the publicity, but I think it would be a great thing."

Newsom on X called the arrest threat an "unmistakable step toward authoritarianism."

Source of news: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/7/ice-launches-military-style-raids-in-los-angeles-what-we-know

This is Stephen Miller's (White House Deputy Chief) response to Karen Bass (Los Angeles Mayor).

Billionaire Elon Musk alleged that President Trump has ties to convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein as the part of his growing feud with the president, a fight that boiled over and turned personal on Thursday.

“Time to drop the really big bomb,” Musk wrote on X, the social platform he owns. “[Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.”

Minutes later, he followed up: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

A source familiar emphasized to The Hill that Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his Palm Beach Golf Club years ago and noted the administration previously released Epstein files with the President’s name included.

Musk for months, before and after the campaign, spoke glowingly of Trump’s character, the source emphasized, noting at one point the billionaire posted on social media saying he “loves him as much as a straight man can love a straight man.”

Musk’s allegation came just minutes after Trump threatened to cancel government contracts with Musk’s companies, calling him “crazy” and escalating an explosive feud between the two former allies.

The billionaire tech and media mogul suggested earlier Thursday that Trump would not have gotten elected last fall without him and called him ungrateful.

Source Link: https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2025/06/02/see-canada-wildfire-smoke-map-nj-air-quality-as-summer-heat-nears-nj-weather-temperatures-heat/83989333007/