Today's Headlines: Trump attended the Knicks game last night, shutting down a 10-block radius around Madison Square Garden to sit with owner James Dolan and the usual suspects of administration figures — all of whom got to watch their boss get booed louder than the Spurs during the National Anthem. Trump spent the next morning posting at 5am that Israel and Iran must stop "shooting", which neither country is taking seriously given that strikes continued yesterday despite him reportedly calling Netanyahu directly to ask him to stop — again. Meanwhile, Spencer Pratt officially lost the LA mayoral race to progressive Nithya Raman, who will face Karen Bass in November, and Trump responded by claiming without evidence that "two republicans are being cheated" in California, using the state's slow vote-counting as cover to pre-seed election fraud claims — a preview of his midterm strategy. In other news, five cases of flesh-eating New World screwworm have now been confirmed across Texas and New Mexico, with the USDA building a $750 million sterile fly factory in Texas to combat it, while RFK Jr. — according to multiple colleagues — has shown "little interest in managing the details of his department" and is instead hunting for evidence that vaccines are harmful, receiving almost no Ebola briefings, and leaving nearly half of NIH's 27 institutes without permanent directors. The Pentagon accidentally deleted Mormons from its approved religion list, added them back after Senator Mike Lee lost his mind, then failed to classify them as Christians — a three-step own goal that somehow happened in one week. And OpenAI filed its IPO paperwork with the SEC, becoming the third trillion-dollar AI company to go public after Anthropic and SpaceX, in what was described in an unsigned blog post as something they're announcing only because "we expect it to leak" — which is a strange way to announce a trillion-dollar IPO.
Resources/Articles mentioned:
Axios: Trump visit locks down midtown Manhattan, scrambling Knicks game
NYT: President Trump roundly booed by New York crowd at NBA Finals Game 3 at MSG
WTOP: Epstein files reading room to open in DC
Axios: Trump calls on Israel and Iran to "immediately stop shooting" as ceasefire frays
NBC LA: Nithya Raman overtakes Spencer Pratt for 2nd place in LA mayoral race, results show
NYT: Trump Previews Fall Strategy With Baseless Claims of California Vote Fraud
AP News: A flesh-eating cattle parasite spreads beyond Texas as new screwworm cases are found
NYT: RFK Jr. Appears Disengaged on Many Health Department Matters Beyond Vaccines
WaPo: After Mormon lawmakers object, Pentagon revises Christian religious categories
Wired: OpenAI Confidentially Files for IPO on the Heels of SpaceX and Anthropic
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