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President Donald Trump had a meltdown Friday, claiming that Iranian state media was making up terms for a peace deal the president had promised to deliver just hours before. “The terms that Iran leaked out to the Fake News have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, on the 105th day of a war that was only supposed to last two weeks. “What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth. Very dishonorable people to deal with. With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith. AMAZING!” he wrote. “Also, their totally rebuffed Drone attack last night against Indian Ships leaving the Hormuz Strait is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. They better get their act together, and FAST!” IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, reported earlier Friday that the memorandum of understanding established a 60-day ceasefire that the country could use to negotiate retaining some of their enrichment capabilities. They also reported that Tehran would receive compensation for the damage incurred by U.S. and Israeli attacks. Vice President JD Vance also directly contradicted IRNA’s reporting in a post on X, insisting that Iranians “are not receiving any cash, and no funds are being released simply for signing a deal or attending a meeting.”Trump announced Thursday that a deal had been agreed upon by “all parties involved” and would be passed very quickly, but it’s looking increasingly like peace is still very far away. Israeli officials indicated Thursday they were not aware of any deal, and now Iran has presented conditions that the president says he never agreed to.

Today is a triumphant day for Elon Musk, and it should be a sobering one for anyone who still believes in the fairy tale called capitalism.

The president turns 80 on Sunday, and, as with everything pertaining to Donald Trump, his need to place himself at the center of our attention is pathological. He could not just have a dinner at the White House, or a party at Mar-a-Lago. No; he had to build a massive arena on real estate that belongs to the people of the United States to host a vulgar, garish event that is one of the most violent forms of spectacle available to the human race today. Trump will be sitting there like some Roman emperor at the Colosseum watching enslaved men try to stave off lions. The man who wanted law enforcement to shoot protesters “in the knees” is probably bummed he couldn’t just replicate that.But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. Granted, UFC fighting is very popular in the United States and across the world. I’ve read various accounts this week contending that UFC fighting has supplanted hockey as the fourth-most-popular sport on television, behind the big three of football, baseball, and basketball. I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline. “The United States, long the backbone of [mixed martial arts], has seen a sharp decline in activity,” wrote John S. Nash. “In 2009, more than 6,266 professional fights took place across the country. This would be the pinnacle for American MMA contests. By 2024, that number had dropped to just over 3,027—a 52 percent decrease.” Still—it’s popular. Fine. But guess what’s strikingly, overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent. Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of course spend the entire weekend equating men beating each other to a pulpy mass on hallowed civic ground with “real” patriotism.It’s sickening. Oh—and it’s also, as we’ve come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor—surprise, surprise!—is Crypto.com. There are in addition figurines of some of the featured fighters. There’s apparel—garish T-shirts running $40. Over at TrumpStore.com, somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t see any merch specifically tied to the event, but you have to believe that Trump’s short-fingered hand is dipping into some till or another here. A lawsuit filed by the group the Public Integrity Project to block the event from taking place (it’s pending as I write) states that UFC set up a for-profit entity to manage this event, which is selling seating packages that cost up to $1.5 million—and that Trump previously bought $50,000 worth of stock in TKO, UFC’s owner. Out in the real world, Trump is being reduced to impotence by a bunch of dictators who are even more reactionary than he is. He’s about to cut a “deal” with Iran that sounds like it will be little more than an extended ceasefire. It will, many experts fear, compare unfavorably to Barack Obama’s 2015 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018. Trump may achieve what Obama achieved, in terms of getting Iran to agree not to enrich uranium at anywhere close to weapons-grade levels. But as I’ve noted several times, the thing to watch is how much money Trump agrees to transfer to Iran. Which in a sense is fine; it’s Iran’s frozen money. But when Obama agreed to give Iran $1.7 billion, right-wingers screamed that it was capitulation and even treasonous. Iran now wants up to $24 billion. We’ll see how Mr. Art of the Deal fares.But even if he does strike a decent deal, he’s already done enormous damage to the U.S. economy, the global economy, and American prestige and power projection. To sane observers in the United States and across the world, he looks like exactly what he is: a weak and hollow and insecure man who started a needless and counterproductive war out of nowhere because it looked “tough.” But inside his little MAGA cocoon on Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man, presiding over watching other manly men spill each other’s blood for the leader’s greater glory. It’s the most undemocratic pageant one could imagine, a fact that—given that scant 16 percent support—the people know in their bones. In fact, this is exactly what fascism is: grotesque, violent spectacle that repulses most of the population but drives the fervent worshippers to a frenzied state and tries to bully its way into being synonymous with what it means to be a real American. It’s all made worse by the fact that Dear Leader will be embarking upon his ninth decade of life that night, and that six in 10 Americans believe he lacks the mental sharpness to serve as president. So that’s the not-so-secret meaning of this event. I just wonder if Vegas will establish odds on whether he’ll fall asleep. MY NOVEL IS OUT!: Buy my new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, out this week from O/R Books. “Fabulous in every sense,” says Kurt Andersen. “Savagely funny,” says Molly Jong-Fast. They’re right!

Remote work, multi-location operations, and fraud risks are pushing businesses to strengthen internal payroll verification processes and. The post Why More Companies Are Tightening Internal Payroll Verification Processes appeared first on DCReport.org.

A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” on Friday, demanding the Trump administration release signed proof that the president’s pet project is really dead. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a preliminary injunction against the president’s slush fund, but said she was willing to drop the case altogether if acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed a document under penalty of perjury saying they would not move forward with the fund. The judge gave Blanche and Bessent one week to provide their sworn testimony. Last week, Blanche insisted publicly that “we are not moving forward with the fund,” and claimed it wasn’t necessary to release a document reversing the DOJ’s position. It turns out Blanche’s pinky promise won’t be good enough.Staffers in the Justice Department and White House have reportedly been telling the president’s MAGA allies they can still expect to receive some form of payment, and Trump has continued to talk up the fund, later telling NBC’s Meet the Press he and Republicans thought it was a “great idea.” (Spoiler alert: They did not.)Trump’s fund had attracted the attention of some of his most notorious allies, as well as one top DOJ official. This story has been updated.

Mehdi chats with comedian, boxer, and author Nina Kharoufeh about her advocacy for Palestine, the Epstein files, and… DJ Khaled.

Ahead of going public, Anthropic is nearing a $1 trillion valuation, surpassing OpenAI—now valued at $862 billion—to become the world’s most valuable AI company. Not long after that news broke, on Wednesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post and policy framework outlining his preferred way for AI companies like Anthropic to be regulated. Not for the first time, he warns that his company’s products promise both an ill-defined set of benefits and potentially catastrophic risks that “could even threaten humanity itself.” Luckily for us, he has a plan to keep the products that are making him rich from wiping everyone out. Amodei suggests the government should “have the power to block or deter deployment” of models it deems too risky. He calls for frontier large language models to be subjected to technical testing and auditing, workplace protections against AI-related job displacement, coordination among “allied democracies” against “adversaries,” and limits on the use of LLMs’ use in warfare and for domestic surveillance. Anthropic has previously suggested that a pause on frontier model development might be worthwhile, but—for now—impossible, as it might allow “the least cautious actors catch up technologically.” Like OpenAI’s progressive-coded “New Deal,” Amodei’s vision contains plenty of nice-enough-sounding ideas that are unlikely to be implemented so long as Donald Trump is in the White House and our political system is being pumped full of donations from Amodei’s fabulously wealthy, openly reactionary colleagues in Silicon Valley. Amodei, of course, laments the lack of global coordination on these issues, and the disconnect between the scale of the problem at hand and the pace of policymaking: “We now, globally and collectively, need to activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly from here.”As a climate reporter, I find Amodei’s admonitions eerily familiar. For decades, scientists have warned about the enormous dangers posed by continuing to burn fossil fuels that deposit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and warm the planet. Once policymakers seemed to be taking those concerns seriously, the companies whose products have fueled global warming—and that backed efforts to downplay its importance—started to ape those scientists’ warnings, laying out their own plans for a “transition” to a vaguely defined future known as “net-zero.” Ahead of U.N. climate talks in Paris in 2015, for instance, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and other major fossil fuel producers announced their “collective support for an effective global climate change agreement.” Many backed the implementation of a global carbon tax that there was no practical means of implementing, especially given that a foundational premise of what became the Paris climate agreement was that its goals would be nonbinding. The companies poured millions into academic institutions that lent credibility to the idea that fossil fuel companies would play a leading role in the transition to a fossil fuel–free world. These moves weren’t all cynical theatrics. In the lead-up to U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, in 2021, a few European producers released somewhat plausible-sounding plans to start actually scaling back their oil and gas operations and invest in renewables. That was seemingly out of a fear that governments might actually start requiring them to do that, but also because there were a few greenish areas—like carbon storage—that aligned well with their expertise and core business model. Governments never did enforce a global energy transition, and most of those lofty industry climate plans have been walked back. Throughout that saga, at every level of government, even the allegedly more climate-conscious oil and gas companies continued to lobby against laws and regulatory proposals that weren’t to their liking. The regulatory proposals from Anthropic and OpenAI are different from polluters’ net-zero plans in meaningful ways. It may be the case that Amodei, at least, really does believe the scary stories he tells about Anthropic LLMs creating biological weapons and defying their creators. Unlike fossil fuel CEOs, Amodei and Altman have been among the loudest voices broadcasting the existential risks their products pose. However, genuine or not, Amodei and Altman’s philosophizing about the allegedly mystical properties of their products enables them to cast themselves as guided by some deeper, more altruistic purpose because of their access to a special kind of knowledge that endows them with a power nobody else has: If they’re the only ones who truly understand the awe-inspiring powers of Claude and ChatGPT, then who else could possibly know how to regulate them and avert dystopia? The truth is that there’s a business imperative for the likes of Altman and Amodei to avoid talking about the middle ground between the techno-futurist utopia and/or existential threats promised by artificial intelligence—all squishy concepts in their own right. Increasingly advanced large language models may well turn out to be massively important for the businesses that can afford to automate enormous numbers of the entry-level programming jobs and administrative positions. They could at once help advance some genuinely exciting medical breakthroughs and create a generation of kids who never learn to read or think for themselves. Scammers might figure out new ways to trick your grandparents into signing away their life savings as governments automate warfare and make manual tax preparation a thing of the past. These are all transformative developments in their own right. They pose novel dangers that governments ought to take seriously. They do not add up to a new god. Recent headlines, moreover, lend some credence to the idea that AI developers are on the verge of acting more like normal corporations. Companies that have rushed to embrace LLMs are running up unsustainable bills on their token usage, i.e., monetized units of usage that users pay for based on how compute-intensive and numerous the tasks are that they’re asking LLMs to do. Results have been mixed, and, for now, automation remains an expensive and (human), labor-intensive task for many firms. In response to such concerns, OpenAI has signaled that it will start lowering its prices to compete with Anthropic. The most important difference between oil and gas producers’ climate pledges and AI companies’ recent policy proposals is that the world does not run on large language models. Fossil fuels are the foundation of modernity. As the now monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz has shown, abruptly cutting off supplies of coal, oil, gas, and the many products derived from them is economically disastrous. And whereas few people on earth can remember life without fossil fuels, just about everyone can recall—perhaps fondly—a world before Claude and ChatGPT. Despite their best attempts to convince the public and policymakers otherwise, these companies are neither too big to fail nor too magical for regular people to understand. That’s not a case for pulling the plug so much as for seeing through the religious bromides that Amodei and Altman use to describe their companies. Anthropic and OpenAI’s products should indeed be subject to stringent regulations. Their billionaire CEOs are just that: executives with a financial interest in a regulatory regime that preserves their business model and future earnings. Like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, it’s their prerogative to try to convince policymakers and the public that they have a good-faith interest in our collective well-being. But no one should mistake them for philosopher kings building a god. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have some doctrinal differences, but they are both—above all—wealthy men who want to keep getting wealthier by selling their products however and to whoever they want.