Iran Supreme Leader Unseen While War Deal Hangs In Limbo

Vatican bans autonomous weapons and apologizes for papal slave trade authorization

Pope Leo XIV just dropped a 200-page encyclical that declared autonomous weapons morally impermissible, retired 1,700 years of just war doctrine, and buried the first-ever institutional Church apology for legally authorizing the transatlantic slave trade — all in the same document being marketed as the Vatican's AI manifesto. The slavery apology is not a footnote: Leo is arguing that cobalt mines, displaced workers, and algorithmic power concentration are the same moral problem as the 15th-century papal bulls that gave the slave trade its legal backbone, and you cannot name new bondage without reckoning with the old kind your institution helped build. Meanwhile the AI company whose co-founder spoke from the Vatican's dais is currently being sued by the U.S. government — and the Pope, standing next to him, just told his entire industry its technology needs to be disarmed.

The DHS voter list problem courts cannot stop

Trump posted that Maryland's Democratic governor rigged a primary by sending out 500,000 illegal ballots — except the governor doesn't run elections in Maryland, the mix-up was a printing vendor's mistake, and the two parties don't even compete against each other in the same primary, making fraud structurally impossible. The real story isn't the post itself — it's that after a year of election executive orders getting blocked by federal judges, the campaign has shifted to social media accusations that don't need a court's approval to do damage. A potentially flawed DHS national voter list, due 60 days before the next federal election, is the actual thing to watch — because a broken spreadsheet handed to state officials doesn't have to be legal to throw an election into chaos.

Capitol police sue to block 1.8 billion dollar fund for January 6 rioters

Trump sued the federal government over a tax return leak, his own Justice Department settled the case, and the result is a 1.776 billion dollar fund — administered by commissioners appointed by his former personal attorney — that pardoned January 6th rioters are already lining up to collect from. The officers who were beaten in that Capitol tunnel just filed suit to kill it, arguing a president literally cannot sue himself, settle with himself, and hand the money to people who attacked the government. No eligibility rules have been published, no Congress voted on this, and the whole thing sunsets exactly when Trump's term ends.

The 1.8 billion dollar settlement that may pay some Capitol rioters

Bill Cassidy just lost his Senate seat specifically because he voted to convict Trump over January 6th, spent nearly 22 million dollars trying to survive it, and still came in third. His first move back in the Capitol was to flag a 1.8 billion dollar federal fund, created through a Trump IRS lawsuit settlement, that could end up cutting checks to the people who stormed the building that cost him his career. One senator loses everything for calling it an insurrection, some of the rioters may collect a government payout, and the fund doing it is literally called the anti-weaponization fund.

Trump delays 25 billion dollar Taiwan arms decision after Xi summit

Trump just told reporters he's still deciding whether to move forward on 25 billion dollars in Taiwan arms sales — after sitting alone with Xi Jinping for three hours inside Zhongnanhai. That posture alone may have already violated a 44-year-old U.S. policy document written specifically to stop Beijing from getting any say in what weapons Washington sells Taipei. One administrative act — whether that 14-billion-dollar package gets formally transmitted to Congress — is now the cleanest signal of whether China just quietly rewrote the rules without signing a single thing.