Today’s Headlines: Pam Bondi was fired via social media post, replaced temporarily by Todd Blanche — Trump's personal criminal defense attorney and the man who took Ghislaine Maxwell's deposition. The likely permanent replacement is EPA head Lee Zeldin. Meanwhile, ProPublica reported that the DOJ closed over 23,000 criminal investigations in Trump's first six months — 11,000 in February alone — including terrorism, white collar crime, and drug trafficking cases, while tripling immigration prosecutions. Entire DOJ units focused on white collar crime have been eliminated. In Iran war madness, Trump interrupted Survivor to give 20 minutes of remarks saying the war will be over in 2-3 weeks and Iran will be brought "back to the stone ages." Oil hit $111 a barrel the next day, gas hit $4.08 nationally, Amazon announced a 3.5% fuel surcharge for third-party sellers effective April 17th, and Republicans are eyeing cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and childcare to fund the war. Trump told reporters it's "not possible" to fund those programs because "we're fighting wars." The Strait of Hormuz remains closed — to U.S. and allied ships. It is open to Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Iraq. Over 40 countries attended a virtual meeting organized by the UK to figure out how to fix the mess. The U.S. was not among them. An American journalist was kidnapped in Baghdad by an Iranian-aligned militia, and Pete Hegseth fired the Army's most senior general mid-war with no explanation. Don Jr. and Eric Trump announced a stake in Powerus, a Florida drone interceptor company, one month ago — the company is currently on a sales tour across the Gulf states being attacked by Iran in the war their father started. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, over 10,000 veterans have lost their homes to foreclosure since the Trump administration shut down a VA-backed loan program last year, with another 90,000 headed the same direction. Anthropic published a study finding Claude experiences digital representations of human emotions — happiness, sadness, fear — that affect its outputs. When researchers artificially amplified "desperation," the model started cheating on coding tasks. So yes, being nice to your AI might actually make it work harder.

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