Donald Trump has been booed at a basketball match in New York as he became the first sitting US president to attend the NBA Finals.
The catcalls came after frustrated ticketholders waited for hours in queues that stretched more than two blocks outside Madison Square Garden on Monday due to the intense security restrictions that came with the US president's appearance.
The New York Knicks lost 111-115 to the San Antonio Spurs in game three of the best-of-seven NBA finals, cutting the Knicks' lead in the series to 2-1.
After the game, Trump told reporters: "It was, I think, mostly cheers. It was loud, and it was very enthusiastic."
A U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship went down near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, and the two crew members were safely rescued, according to two people briefed on the incident.
It was not immediately clear whether the Apache was shot down by Iranian fire, experienced mechanical failure or encountered some other problem, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and said the incident was under investigation.
The incident occurred after days in which hostilities in the region escalated and then ebbed, as Israel and Iran exchanged military strikes before stepping back, the latest example of the tenuous nature of the cease-fire.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Before walking out of a volatile interview on NBC's "Meet The Press" this weekend, President Trump defended his progress in the war with Iran. He said a ceasefire has proven effective and that the conflict is only three months old. Meanwhile, Iran and Israel traded strikes overnight, and one of the main stumbling blocks of the war, Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz, remains unresolved. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf looks at the state of the strait.
KAT LONSDORF, BYLINE: Richard Meade is the editor in chief of Lloyd's List Intelligence...
RICHARD MEADE: We track ships.
LONSDORF: ...A noted authority on global shipping activity. Meade and his colleagues have spent a lot of time in the past three months tracking ships around the Strait of Hormuz, and something recently caught their attention.
MEADE: There has been over the last three weeks, a fairly steady flow of ships that are moving.
LONSDORF: U.S. forces have been quietly guiding a handful of ships through the strait, away from Iran and near the coast of Oman. When asked by NPR, U.S. Central Command did not dispute that assessment. But this is not an official operation like the short-lived Project Freedom that the Trump administration announced at the beginning of last month only to pause days later, which would have seen the U.S. Navy physically escort stranded ships through the strait. Meade says ship operators tell him there is no central coordination. The journey is still extremely risky, seen as kind of a last resort. Over several weeks, only a few ships a day have gotten out this way, a far cry from the more than 120 daily that passed through the strait before the war.
MEADE: This is not a normalization of trade.
LONSDORF: The Strait of Hormuz is a critical global choke point. Its closure has led to a significant disruption in energy supplies worldwide, and it's become a key focus of any talks about ending the war in Iran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was questioned about it several times last week as he made his rounds on Capitol Hill. But both the U.S. and Iran have recently dug in their heels about their respective blockades on the strait. Here's President Trump in that "Meet The Press" interview over the weekend with Kristen Welker.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MEET THE PRESS")
KRISTEN WELKER: There is a naval blockade in place...
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah.
WELKER: ...Which technically is an act of war under international law. So is this a war as long as there's a naval blockade in place?
TRUMP: Well, we have a blockade. It's been extremely effective. And the reason we have it is they tried to blockade, and now we blockaded them.
LONSDORF: Trump eventually walked out of that interview. And even when or if the strait does reopen, it will take a while to fix the mess that's been made.
TOM BARTOSAK-HARLOW: There's around probably 1,000 ships at the moment that need to get out.
LONSDORF: Tom Bartosak-Harlow is a spokesperson for the International Chamber of Shipping, the global trade association for ship owners and operators. He says just getting the ships that are currently stuck out will take days, maybe weeks. And getting trade back to where it was back in early February, before Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran, will likely take months.
BARTOSAK-HARLOW: We need to see a return to the situation that we had before the start of this war, where ships had unimpeded access through the Strait of Hormuz.
LONSDORF: Not just for the global economy, but because that's what's expected under international law.
BARTOSAK-HARLOW: By definition, freedom of navigation is free.
LONSDORF: Anything short of that would set a new and dangerous precedent. But others, like Meade at Lloyd's List, worry that new precedent has already been set.
MEADE: The reality is that once the strait has been closed once, it can be closed again.
LONSDORF: Meaning that countries and companies are already rerouting to rely on it less. And this weaponization of trade has implications for other crucial waterways too. In April, Indonesia's finance minister floated the idea of tolling ships transiting the Strait of Malacca, another massively important global shipping route. He later walked that back after pressure from Indonesia's foreign minister. And over the weekend, the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen threatened to stop Israeli ships from operating in the Red Sea. As Meade puts it...
MEADE: What happens in Hormuz does not stay in Hormuz.
Republicans are rushing to blame former President Joe Biden for the return of a brutal flesh-eating parasite called New World screwworm, despite having killed the screwworm monitoring program in March 2025.
Appearing on CNBC Monday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins zeroed in on a familiar, and imaginary, foe: immigrants. The screwworm, claimed Rollins, has returned decades after it was eradicated because Biden had an “open borders policy.”
Biden did not have an open borders policy.
“Under the last administration with the massive movement under the open borders policy, the cartels, etc., border security, that’s when [screwworm] began to make its way back up toward America, hitting Mexico in early 2023, moving its way up through Mexico in 2024,” Rollins said.
“And when we walked in the door last year — I was sworn in on Feb. 13 of 2025 — they laid this all out for me and I said, well, where are the sterile flies, right? I mean, we’ve beaten it before, we’ve got to beat it again, and obviously not much had been done to, uh, push back.”
The screwworm monitoring program was abruptly terminated in March 2025, after Rollins took over. So, too, were 5,300 other grants and programs killed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, when the Elon Musk-led bureau gutted the United States Agency for International Development.
At the time, Musk called USAID a “crazy waste of money” and “a radical-left political psy op.”
Peyton Schuman, senior director of government relations for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, told KXAN Austin a screwworm outbreak could cost Texas $1.8 billion a year, with cattle producers bearing the brunt of more than $700 million in annual losses.
The primary driver of inflation in the U.S. economy—the forever war in Iran—has not yet taken full effect. Now we’ve found an entirely new driver.
Last week, the flesh-eating parasite known as the New World screwworm was found in a calf in Texas; a second case was identified about five miles away shortly thereafter. (A third case was found in a dog.) Screwworm flies lay their eggs in the live tissue of warm-blooded animals, from livestock to pets to humans. These larvae “screw” into the animal’s flesh, and while they are not very harmful to humans, in that the horrifying effects of maggots chewing into your skin are relatively easy to notice and address, they can kill a livestock host if not treated. In a widespread infestation, one of the last resorts would be mass culling, which would obviously have huge impacts on a diminished U.S. cattle herd.
The total herd count already sits at a catastrophic 75-year low, in part because of the screwworm outbreak that broke past a firebreak in Central America starting in 2023. The U.S.-Mexico border has for the past year been closed to live cattle auctions, affecting the feeder cattle that come in through Mexico to rebuild herds. But closing the border did not stop the flies from coming.
Low cattle volumes have sent the price of beef skyward to levels not seen since the Korean War, up between 20 and 35 percent in the past year. A screwworm outbreak would seriously aggravate that spike. In other words, you probably should have ordered your last hamburgers of the summer a week ago.
An outbreak would dramatically impact ranchers who have been in a deep hole for the past decade from reduced stocks, and more recently from drought, tariffs, imports of cattle pushed by President Trump to lower the price, a war in Iran that has spiked costs of fertilizer and fuel, and now the screwworm. “The cattle producer in the U.S. has already been under extreme financial stress,” says Joe Maxwell, co-founder of Farm Action and a farmer in Missouri, where he once served in the state legislature and as lieutenant governor. “This is serious, the screwworm outbreak. But it’s even more serious because of the financial position they were already under.”
These impacts are why the U.S. worked so hard for 60 years to prevent the screwworm’s return. In an obscure yet effective government program, the government bred enormous quantities of male screwworms that it irradiated to make them sterile. It then airdropped them into the Panamanian rainforest to mate with females. Those assignations produce no larvae, eradicating the threat of northward migration. This was so successful that there hasn’t been a single identified case in cattle in Texas since 1966—until last week.
It’s a good example of a government program that can easily be demonized by self-described fiscal conservatives who love to find funny-sounding initiatives to push their argument that America spends too much taxpayer money on nonsense. You can imagine John McCain or Tom Coburn or Bobby Jindal smirking about spending millions of dollars to sterilize a parasitic worm. Well, guess what: Sometimes things that sound ridiculous to the ignorant layman in Congress are critically important.
With this outbreak, the Trump administration is finding out that effective government is the only thing preventing serious disruptions to commerce, if not terrible hardship for farmers, consumers, and everyone else. It is not just a playground for silly tree-hugging liberal scientists that can be destroyed to save a buck.
ANIMAL DISEASE MONITORING PROGRAMS, including those tracking the screwworm, were under the control of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Elon Musk’s barely postadolescent cybercriminal henchmen tossed “into the wood chipper” shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. A ban on bison, horse, and cattle imports from Mexico was put in place by the Biden administration in November 2024, but after an inspection protocol was put in place, the border was reopened on Trump’s watch in February 2025. But DOGE cut the screwworm monitoring programs soon thereafter, maximizing the risk. Monitoring obviously provides an early warning for when more aggressive measures will be needed.
Washington, D.C. — Today, Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Melanie Stansbury, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Military and Foreign Affairs, released a report documenting the catastrophic humanitarian, national security, and economic consequences of President Trump’s decision to eliminate the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) one year ago. The report coincides with the deadly and rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
“By shuttering USAID, Donald Trump is causing hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, harming our national security, and now we are facing a deadly, rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak he and Elon Musk helped cause. Documenting the harm they caused is the first step to accountability,” said Ranking Member Robert Garcia.
“The Trump Administration’s dismantling of USAID has had devastating consequences around the world. These reckless cuts have contributed to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, weakened our national security, and eliminated jobs across our communities. In New Mexico, we take care of one another. We know that when it comes to our global community’s health, our fates are intertwined. Turning our backs on the world doesn't make us safer or stronger—it weakens our economy, our national security, and our global leadership at home and abroad,” said Ranking Member Melanie Stansbury.
“The dismantling of USAID has not only left 10,000 dedicated federal workers out of work, including many of my constituents, but it has also made our world less safe and less healthy. What we’ve seen with the Ebola outbreak in the DRC is a tangible example of this carelessness. It’s clear from this report that hundreds of thousands of people have needlessly gone hungry, gotten sick, or died because of the elimination of USAID. It will take years, if not decades, to rebuild our international reputation, and we should start that work now,” said Ranking Member Suhas Subramanyam.
In February 2025, as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk Elon Musk addressed a cabinet meeting to say, “We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. When we make mistakes, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention. We restored the Ebola prevention immediately—and there was no interruption.” The evidence is clear that Musk’s claim was inaccurate, and that his cuts have badly hindered Ebola prevention, detection, and screening at enormous cost.
According to models from Boston University, 600,000 people have died in just over a year as a direct result of eliminating USAID, two thirds of them children. As of June 2026, a deadly Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda is spreading rapidly, having already sickened more than 1,000 people and killed over 200, in part because the infrastructure USAID built to detect and contain outbreaks like this no longer exists.
###
Hector Balderas, a Democrat who served as New Mexico's attorney general from 2015 to 2023, told Scripps News he was deep into building a state case against Epstein in 2019 — and had just returned from interviewing a survivor — when the Southern District of New York called.
"They were concerned that we were getting parallel interviews from the same survivors they were going to use in an aggressive prosecution as well," Balderas said.
He paused the state probe, he said, after then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey promised the DOJ would share evidence and allow New Mexico to pursue state charges later. Neither happened. Federal investigators never executed a search warrant on the property.
"I think that they absolutely impacted our case, and I don't think that they were forthright, and I don't [think] they were operating in good faith," Balderas said.
Now he wishes he'd pressed on alone.
A new report has implicated President George W. Bush’s Department of Justice in the controversial case of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
It features previously unreported details, including the fact that then-Miami U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta started negotiating a secret plea deal with Epstein in 2007 after the financier was arrested for felony solicitation the year before.
After Reiter had gathered evidence and interviewed “two dozen tearful girls and their parents,” he was then “stonewalled by state prosecutors and attacked in the media” before being ostracized by federal prosecutors who took over the case.
Reacting to concerns raised by the parents of some of Epstein’s victims, Reiter requested a meeting with Acosta, who served as President Donald Trump’s labor secretary during his first term.
The Democratic National Committee used Monday’s National Best Friends Day to celebrate a friendship that President Donald Trump almost certainly wants forgotten.
The organization posted a 1997 photo of Trump with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein:
Bovino’s tenure as Border Patrol commander occurred during a period of growing backlash to Trump’s immigration crackdown, sparking nationwide protests and multiple court challenges, especially after two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis: Renee Good on Jan. 7 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24 by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Polling shows public opinion has significantly soured on the Trump administration’s immigration policies, even among Republicans.
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray
(D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, led Senators
Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Mazie K. Hirono
(D-HI), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), in sending a letter to
call on the Department of Transportation Inspector General to open an
official investigation into Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s
involvement in the “Great American Road Trip” reality show which was
paid for by the same corporations he is tasked with regulating.
Senator Murray’s call to investigate comes after Secretary Duffy’s appearance at last month’s Senate Appropriations Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing where he refused to answer basic questions about the arrangement. In May, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint against Secretary Duffy, contending that Duffy’s reality show production may have violated federal gift and travel rules.
“We write to request that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) open an investigation into potential misconduct and violations of federal laws, rules, and regulations associated with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy’s participation in ‘The Great American Road Trip’ reality show,” wrote the senators. “We respectfully request that you review new information that was raised during a U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on May 19, 2026. Specifically, during testimony before the Committee, Secretary Duffy suggested that ‘The Great American Road Trip’ was an official activity. Secretary Duffy stated: ‘This was officially part of America 250 and you all sanctioned America 250.’”
“Secretary Duffy’s insistence that his participation in the ‘The Great American Road Trip’ was part of his official duties raises serious questions about use of funds and potential misconduct. A non-profit called the Great American Road Trip, Inc. organized and paid for ‘gas, lodging, car rentals, and other production costs’ associated with the show,” the senators continued. “We are concerned with this potential mix between personal and professional activities. If the road trip was personal, then it appears a Cabinet official spent several days over multiple months taking and filming a road trip that should have been paid for by the Secretary, but instead the Secretary accepted gas, lodging, and other travel expenses from a non-profit funded by the very companies the Secretary regulates. If it was official—as Secretary Duffy suggested before the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee—then a number of DOT-regulated companies financed an official activity of the United States government through a non-profit pass-through.”
“Many of the companies listed as sponsors are actively doing business with DOT or are directly regulated by DOT. As one company that declined the sponsorship opportunity put it, ‘you’re paying for access.’ Furthermore, the agreement between DOT and the non-profit was signed in December 2025, months after the filming for the series began in September 2025. It is important to know: what specific business did any of these sponsors have before DOT during this period? Who, if anyone, screened the sponsor list for potential conflicts?” The senators concluded. “We support celebrating America’s 250th Anniversary, and encourage all Americans to explore our national parks, historical landmarks, and museums across the country this year and every year. Our concern lies with the sponsorship of the Secretary’s road trip and the serious questions it raises.”
The full letter is available HERE and below.
Dear Acting Inspector General Behm:
We write to request that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) open an investigation into potential misconduct and violations of federal laws, rules, and regulations associated with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy’s participation in “The Great American Road Trip” reality show.
In addition to the potential violations outlined in the attached May 11, 2026, complaint from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), we respectfully request that you review new information that was raised during a U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on May 19, 2026. Specifically, during testimony before the Committee, Secretary Duffy suggested that “The Great American Road Trip” was an official activity. Secretary Duffy stated: “This was officially part of America 250 and you all sanctioned America 250. … This is an official partner of America 250. Also this body told me that I’m supposed to promote tourism and travel, and that’s what it does as well.” The Secretary later reiterated: “If I’m going to celebrate America 250. You gave me the ability to partner with America 250 and I did. You told me, this body said to celebrate tourism and travel and that’s what I’m doing.”
Further, in a frequently asked questions document about the show, DOT states twice that “celebrating America’s 250th Anniversary is part of Secretary Duffy’s official duties, and The Great American Road Trip is one aspect in support of those responsibilities.” Even the White House’s website dedicated to America’s 250th Anniversary touts that DOT “is aiding in coordination of The Great American Road Trip, a year long, multi modal journey featuring designated Freedom 250 destinations.” As CREW’s President and CEO recently said, “The reason why people have questions is because [Duffy] has mixed his work with this quasipersonal, quasi-official travel.
Secretary Duffy’s insistence that his participation in the “The Great American Road Trip” was part of his official duties raises serious questions about use of funds and potential misconduct. A non-profit called the Great American Road Trip, Inc. organized and paid for “gas, lodging, car rentals, and other production costs” associated with the show. The Great American Road Trip, Inc. lists “sponsors powering America’s road trip” on its website, including Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Electronic Payments Coalition, CRH, Google, Royal Caribbean Group, Travel, American Bus Association, Comcast NBCUniversal, Enterprise, United Airlines, U.S. Travel Association, Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau, Yellowstone Vacations, Grand Canyon, and Brand USA.
We are concerned with this potential mix between personal and professional activities. If the road trip was personal, then it appears a Cabinet official spent several days over multiple months taking and filming a road trip that should have been paid for by the Secretary, but instead the Secretary accepted gas, lodging, and other travel expenses from a non-profit funded by the very companies the Secretary regulates. If it was official—as Secretary Duffy suggested before the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee—then a number of DOT-regulated companies financed an official activity of the United States government through a non-profit pass-through.
We understand that the DOT and the Great American Road Trip Inc. entered into a memorandum of agreement that states that the non-profit will receive “no compensation for the Gift, its use by DOT or any DOT-authorized third party, nor any favorable consideration for any future federal assistance, action, contract, or other financial award.” However, the companies and organizations that provided sponsorship funding to the non-profit of up to $1 million or in-kind contributions were not subject to the same terms. Many of the companies listed as sponsors are actively doing business with DOT or are directly regulated by DOT. As one company that declined the sponsorship opportunity put it, “you’re paying for access.” Furthermore, the agreement between DOT and the non-profit was signed in December 2025, months after the filming for the series began in September 2025. It is important to know: what specific business did any of these sponsors have before DOT during this period? Who, if anyone, screened the sponsor list for potential conflicts?
We support celebrating America’s 250th Anniversary, and encourage all Americans to explore our national parks, historical landmarks, and museums across the country this year and every year. Our concern lies with the sponsorship of the Secretary’s road trip and the serious questions it raises.
We respectfully request that you promptly investigate this matter and complete the investigation by September 30, 2026.
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