Democratic Senator Urges Criminal Investigation Of RFK Jr. Following Samoa ReportSen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) says he’ll urge Republicans to refer Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation after a new report raised questions about the Trump official’s testimony regarding his past trip to Samoa. Previously, Kennedy had said that a 2019 trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines,” when asked about the visit during a Congressional hearing in 2025.New documents obtained by The Associated Press and The Guardian, however, revealed that Kennedy had specifically reached out to the Samoan prime minister about studying “what happened with your MMR vaccines” in a letter prior to the visit. The Department of Health and Human Services maintained that the trip “was unrelated to vaccines” in a comment to the AP. “Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory,” the Department said. HHS did not immediately respond to The Guardian’s request for comment about the call for an investigation. In addition to pressing his Republican colleagues, Wyden noted that Democrats could also hold Trump officials accountable if they retake the Senate majority. “RFK’s platform is built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake. There are consequences for lying to Congress,” Wyden said in a statement to The Guardian. Read more from The Guardian: Latest Live UpdatesIntelligence Reports Reveal That Putin Views U.S. As Weakened By Iran War: WaPoU.S. intelligence reportedly showed that Russian President Vladimir Putin sees the U.S. as weakened by the Iran war, giving the Kremlin an opening to ramp up pressure in Europe, according to The Washington Post, which cited two anonymous sources familiar with the matter. The classified assessment preceded a surprise trip that CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently made to Moscow, where he warned the Kremlin against escalating operations toward Ukraine during the visit, one source told The Post. CBS News and ABC had previously reported that Ratcliffe also cautioned Moscow against attacking NATO countries. The CIA and the White House declined to comment to The Post on Ratcliffe’s visit. Read more from The Washington Post: Judge Again Blocks Trump Mail Ballot Executive Order In Ruling That’s Likely To Be Swiftly AppealedA federal judge on Thursday halted — at least for now — attempts to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting.The move stalled the directive for a second time only about a week before the first mail ballots are due to be sent out for the rapidly approaching midterm elections. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani placed a 14-day hold on the government implementing the order in a case that could be headed back to the Supreme Court, which on Monday overturned an earlier ruling of hers that had blocked Trump’s order from taking effect.Read more from The AP:Trump Planning To Skip The 9/11 25th Anniversary Ceremony At World Trade Center: ReportPresident Donald Trump plans to skip the 25th anniversary ceremony of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York, according to The New York Times.Trump’s team, which visited ground zero ahead of time, initially told officials he planned to attend and was interested in speaking at the ceremony on September 11, which he had attended previously. However, politicians have been prohibited from speaking at the site since 2012 in an effort to keep it nonpartisan.Trump, who is from New York, has apparently since backed out in part because he wanted to deliver the speech. He also has travel plans the following day for the Irish Open tournament, The Times reported. Instead, Trump plans to commemorate the terrorist attack at the Pentagon, which was also targeted during the 9/11 attacks, sources told The Times. He gave a speech at the Pentagon last year for the anniversary of the attack.Read more at The New York Times:Obama, Jeffries To Headline Democrat Fundraiser In New York: NYTFormer President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) are slated to headline a fundraiser for House Democrats in September as the party seeks to retake the lower chamber this fall. The event, which will be held in New York, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by The New York Times, is taking place as Democrats work to boost their campaign coffers going into the final stretch of a crucial election cycle. Read more from The New York Times: GOP Gov. Says Trump's Lake Ontario Stunt Is "Petty And Disappointing"Phil Scott, Vermont’s Republican governor, slammed President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” calling the decision “petty and disappointing.” The order comes amid a simmering dispute between the U.S. and Canada, long close allies, that has been driven mainly by the president’s retaliatory tariffs and threats of an all-out trade war.“We should be at the negotiating table, finding a path forward that strengthens both the U.S. and Canadian economies,” the governor wrote Thursday on X. “Further escalating tensions does nothing to help American or Canadian families and businesses.” Carney Reminds Trump Who Had Naming Rights To Lake Ontario Long Before HimCanadian Prime Minister Mark Carney nodded to the Indigenous roots of Lake Ontario’s name in a pointed response to President Donald Trump’s latest renaming stunt on Thursday. “The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big,’” Carney wrote in a post on X. “The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.”Earlier that day, Trump signed an executive order in a bid to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” a move that comes as the president has escalated a trade war with the U.S.’s northern neighbor. Trump’s order can change how the U.S. federal government refers to the body of water, but carries no weight with other countries or international entities. Carney noted as much in his response.“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” he added. “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”Jury Finds DeSantis Admin Wrongly Gave $10M In Taxpayer Money To His Wife's CharityA Florida grand jury found that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer dollars by giving it to a charity led by his wife, according to a sealed grand jury report obtained by CBS News Miami. The Hope Florida Foundation, launched by Casey DeSantis in 2021, sparked backlash when it received $10 million in 2024 from a state Medicaid settlement intended to cover the cost of health insurance for children in need.The foundation in turn passed the funds through a number of organizations before it was given to two nonprofit political action groups utilized by the governor to defeat a ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana, according to the report. The report found that none of the testifying witnesses could recall who was responsible for transferring the money to Hope Florida and therefore charges could not be filed. The grand jury found that “a large portion of the money ended up in the coffers of the Republican Party of Florida,” the report states.Read more: GOP Senator: ‘Canada Is Not China’Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) thanked Canada for removing seafood and fish products from its retaliatory tariff list and urged the U.S. to settle the ongoing trade dispute. “Canada is not China. Canada is one of our closest allies and largest trading partners. Our economies are inextricably linked, especially in the border regions,” Collins, who is running for reelection, said in a statement, emphasizing the impact of tariffs on Maine specifically. “Continuing with these tariffs will harm Maine families, small businesses, municipalities, manufacturers, and farmers,” she continuedTrump Jokes About Creating The ‘American Ocean’ NextShortly after signing an executive order purporting to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” President Donald Trump joked that he might have to go a step further, having already redubbed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”“If you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake — now all we need is an ocean,” Trump said. “Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”The U.S. president has limited power to change the name of international bodies of water. Trump’s “Gulf of America” has been relabeled where applicable on federal websites, but remains known as the Gulf of Mexico to most of the world. Trump Suggests Trade War With Canada Will Help Affordability CrisisPresident Donald Trump apparently believes a trade war with America’s second-largest trading partner will be good for Americans’ wallets.Asked Thursday by a reporter what he’d tell Americans who worry his trade dispute with Canada will make things less affordable, Trump asserted it’s a good thing. He did not show his work.“Well, ultimately it’s going to be very good for us, because when you talk about affordability, we’re losing $62 billion a year on average with Canada,” Trump claimed, without explaining how he arrived at that figure. ”And if you really look at it we’re losing more than that. It’s too much. It’s too much … we don’t want to lose that anymore.”Earlier in the press conference Trump signed an executive order purporting to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” and claimed that Canada wants “to be treated like a state but they’re not a state, but they want to be treated like they’re a state, and so we just can’t do that anymore.”See All Updates