5 things to know for Mar. 14: Middle East, TikTok ban, Alabama cyberattack, Trump, SpaceX
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The total solar eclipse next month will leave millions in awe — and potentially expose some perplexing animal behaviors. During the Great American Eclipse of 2017, several zoos across the US said their animals were acting strangely in the brief moments when the sky darkened. Here’s what else you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day. Senior White House officials are planning to meet with Arab, Muslim and Palestinian-American community leaders in Chicago today, sources told CNN, as President Joe Biden grapples with anger across the country about the Israel-Hamas war. Officials are also expected to more broadly discuss concerns about Islamophobia in the US. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other top US officials have escalated calls for a temporary ceasefire and to ramp up humanitarian aid going into Gaza, urging Israel to do more to protect civilians. But negotiations remain stalled amid the mounting death toll. The latest violence has caused more than 1,200 deaths in Israel and more than 31,000 in Gaza, according to authorities on both sides. A bill that could ban TikTok in the US now heads to the Senate after the House voted on Wednesday — with overwhelming bipartisan support — to remove the social media platform from US app stores. The House vote was 352 to 65, with 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voting in opposition. Lawmakers supportive of the bill have argued TikTok poses a national security threat and should be spun off from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, because the Chinese government could force the company to hand over the data of US app users. Many of the roughly 170 million Americans who use the app have raised concerns about the ban, saying it is where they go to find connection, get entertained, seek information and earn a living. The bill now faces numerous hurdles to being signed into law in the coming months and will almost certainly face legal challenges if it is. A cyberattack caused intermittent “disruptions” for websites of multiple Alabama government agencies on Wednesday. While there was no data stolen in the incident, some state officials were left scrambling to defend their networks from hackers with little notice. “[W]e understand that the disruptions were initially widespread across state services, and those effects have diminished throughout the day,” a spokesperson for Alabama’s Office of Information Technology told CNN shortly after the attack. Cybersecurity experts said the hackers flooded government sites with phony traffic in an apparent attempt to knock them offline — a common but not sophisticated method to cause disruptions across numerous targets at once. Former President Donald Trump is now facing 88 charges over four criminal indictments in Georgia, New York, Washington, DC, and Florida. This comes after a Georgia judge dismissed some of the election subversion charges against Trump and several of his co-defendants on Wednesday. Judge Scott McAfee has also said he will issue a ruling on the ethics allegations brought against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis by the end of the week. Meanwhile, Trump will have the chance to argue in court with special counsel Jack Smith later today about his most-cited legal argument in the classified documents case against him: whether, as president, he was allowed to keep any documents he wanted. Trump’s legal team has argued on multiple occasions that he had unfettered authority to decide what documents from his time in the White House he could keep as his personal records. SpaceX is once again set to launch its massive Starship rocket — the most powerful launch vehicle ever constructed — on a third test flight. The launch could take place today during a 110-minute window that opens at 8 a.m. ET. The massive Starship rocket is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in more than five decades as part of its Artemis program. However, two attempts to get the massive vehicle to orbital speeds in 2023 ended in explosions, with the spacecraft and booster erupting into flames before reaching their intended landing sites. SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk have embraced fiery mishaps in the early stages of spacecraft development, saying these failures help the company rapidly implement design changes that lead to better results.
Speaker Mike Johnson is a political survivor, weathering crisis after crisis since his unlikely ascent two years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan are well matched, rhetorically forceful opposites. And they have been clashing for more than a decade over an increasingly relevant question of presidential power: How easy should it be for the president to fire the heads of independent agencies?
The Army gynecologist described in a recent lawsuit as a “predator in uniform” is now being held in the Bell County Jail in Texas, “after apparently violating conditions of liberty imposed by his commander,” according to an Army spokesperson.
Brian Walshe on Thursday came face-to-face for the first time with the man who had been having an affair with his wife before her death, as he took the stand to testify in Walshe’s murder trial.
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a congressional map that will boost President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress, blocking a lower court decision that found the new boundaries were likely unconstitutional because they were drawn based on race.
The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command.
A grand jury voted against indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James after being asked to look at the mortgage fraud case against her a second time, according to multiple people familiar with the development Thursday.
National Guard troops deployed to Washington, DC, can remain there for now, after a federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily froze a judge’s ruling that would have soon required them to leave the city’s streets.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bad week just got worse. That’s after the long-awaited release Thursday of an inspector general’s report on his sharing of highly sensitive military attack plans on the unclassified app Signal earlier this year.
President Donald Trump has hired a new architect for the White House ballroom amid disputes between the president and his architect originally contracted to complete the project, several sources have told CNN.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked compromising sensitive military information that could have endangered US troops through his use of Signal to discuss attack plans, a Pentagon watchdog said in an unclassified report released Thursday. It also details how Hegseth declined to cooperate with the probe.
If nothing else, the controversy over the Trump administration’s second strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean has surfaced a long-overdue debate about its already legally dubious first strikes.
Two top House lawmakers emerged divided along party lines after a private briefing with the military official who oversaw September’s attack on an alleged drug vessel that included a so-called double-tap strike that killed surviving crew members, with a top Democrat calling video of the incident that was shared as part of the briefing “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker.