SmartNews

Legendary rock star Bruce Springsteen kicked off this year's European tour with a fiery tirade against President Donald Trump.

According to Rolling Stone, Springsteen, performing in Manchester, England, issued the rebuke before launching into his hit song, "Land of Hope and Dreams."

The fierce back and forth between border policy adviser Tom Homan and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) saw no signs of slowing Wednesday after the progressive lawmaker accused him and other Trump administration officials of breaking the law in their border security efforts.

“If anyone’s breaking the law in this situation, it’s not the members of Congress. It’s the Department of Homeland Security. It’s people like Tom Homan and Secretary Kristi Noem,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram post. “You lay a finger on…any of the representatives that were there – you lay a finger on them – we are going to have a problem.”

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Mike Lawler (R-NY) got into a bitter, public fight on social media on Wednesday over President Donald Trump's sweeping budget bill on tax cuts, energy deregulation, and border security.

Lawler, like some other members of the New York delegation, is currently opposing the bill because it only includes a partial, rather than full, repeal of the cap on state and local tax deductions, or SALT. Republicans representing districts in higher-tax states like New York have demanded to eliminate this cap. While Republicans themselves passed it in 2018, thinking it would mostly raise revenue from Democratic-controlled states, it also amounted to a significant tax increase on wealthier homeowners who tend to back the Republican Party.

The Texas-based rock band Lord Buffalo has been forced to cancel their tour of Europe after Customs and Border Protection agents snatched their drummer off the plane.

According to NBC News, drummer Yamal Said, a Mexican citizen with lawful permanent residency in the United States, was seized by immigration agents without any clear explanation beyond an unspecified warrant for his arrest.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) got visibly agitated during a heated CNN exchange Wednesday as he defended President Donald Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million plane from the Qatari government.

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Mullin pushed back on the mounting bipartisan concerns surrounding Trump taking ownership of the plane, which was once owned by Qatar’s royal family, and transforming it into a new Air Force One.

Top House Republicans were caught off guard by some of the provisions in their massive budget bill as the process to get it ready for passage began, Politico reported on Wednesday.

The bill, which is meant to gather up all of President Donald Trump's priorities on tax cuts, energy deregulation, and border security, is jam-packed with a number of controversial proposals, like $600 billion in cuts to Medicaid, all while projected to massively increase the federal deficit to permanently extend tax cuts that flow mostly to the rich.

Federal investigators are investigating a major health insurer for possible criminal Medicare fraud, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Health care fraud investigators at the Justice Department have been probing UnitedHealth Group since at least the summer of 2024, according to the report.

Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan is moving to have the federal charges against her thrown out — and she's citing the very ruling that gave President Donald Trump a presumption of immunity.

Dugan, who was arrested earlier this year after Trump administration officials alleged she helped Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican immigrant in her courtroom on unrelated charges, attempt to escape from federal arrest, was formally charged this week with concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stumbled over basic details surrounding a child health initiative housed within his own department – and named after his aunt.

The revealing moment came Wednesday as Kennedy appeared before Congress for a hearing to discuss President Donald Trump's budget. But when Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) pressed him on the Safe to Sleep campaign, a 30-year-old federal effort to reduce infant sleep-related deaths, the MAGA secretary appeared fuzzy on the particulars.

The new book on President Joe Biden by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson reveals that some Cabinet secretaries in the final two years of the administration lost access to the president, only being able to brief Biden's senior aides, who would then brief him.

The book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” is set to detail how certain people in the White House kept the former president on a tight leash.

U.S. AG Pam Bondi Sold More than $1 Million in Trump Media Stock the Day Trump Announced Sweeping Tariffs

by Robert Faturechi and Brandon Roberts

Donald Trump’s legal team was handed a potential victory Wednesday after Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) signed a new law that could allow the president to recoup millions of dollars in legal expenses connected to the state’s election interference case against him.

The legislation, Senate Bill 244, would allow criminal defendants to recover legal costs from taxpayers if a prosecutor is disqualified for misconduct and the case is thrown out, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Trump’s lead attorney in Georgia, Steve Sadow, quickly celebrated the move.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visibly lost his temper during a Senate hearing as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) confronted him with promises he made to respect public health and not interfere in vaccine approval during his confirmation hearing, only to change his tune the second he got into office.

Kennedy, who heads up Trump's so-called "Make America Healthy Again" agenda, is an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who has falsely linked vaccines to autism and promised to defer to experts to win over a handful of skeptical Republicans, including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician.