It’s only May, but some lawmakers are already thinking about having to change the clocks.

Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.

Burgum bashes the pope

The Trump administration’s pattern of targeting Catholics who opine on world happenings continued after Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical (basically, a teaching document) railing against the corrosive impacts of artificial intelligence.

“I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being Pope,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday after Bartiromo mentioned the Pope’s AI criticism. 

Burgum is just the latest Trump administration official to tee off on the pope for expressing humanitarian concerns — in this case, about the potential downsides of the robot revolution. Polling data suggests Leo is in line with the majority of Americans who are skeptical of AI tools. Nonetheless, we’ve now seen President Donald Trump attack the pope for opposing war, Trump’s so-called deportation czar attack Catholic bishops for opposing mass deportations and now Trump’s interior secretary jab the pope for daring to question the unfettered rise of AI.

AI is arguably one of the most pressing matters in our time, and the Trump administration would have us believe religious figures have no business weighing in on them — at least, if the views these figures are offering contradict Trump’s wishes. 

Read more on Burgum’s comments at Mediaite here. 

SpaceX IPO goes after Grok

A public filing from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX warns that a controversial “spicy” feature of its chatbot, Grok, that some users deployed to essentially create AI-generated child pornography risks “reputational harm” for the company. As Forbes reported, the initial public offering filing submitted last week warns about “the generation of potentially explicit content and misinformation or deceptive outputs” as well as “potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery.” 

Read more in Forbes here. 

Data surveillance denial

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has “no relationship” with Paragon Solutions, the controversial spyware company that has developed technologies used by some repressive regimes to spy on journalists and dissidents. The statement comes after the Trump administration lifted a previous hold the Biden administration placed on its contract with Paragon Solutions. 

Read more at NPR here. 

DOJ’s extremist erasure

My colleague Steve Benen wrote about the Justice Department’s erasure of government websites acknowledging the pro-Trump insurrection that MAGA loyalists attempted on Jan. 6, 2021. The erasure continues Trump officials’ desperate efforts to hide the truth about what happened that day and MAGA figures’ role in fomenting it. 

Read more on MS NOW here. 

Ride-share union recognition

State and labor officials in Massachusetts are celebrating what they say is the first ride-share drivers’ union in the country, consisting of drivers from Uber and Lyft. 

Read more at NBC News here. 

Conveniently timed attack on CFTC

A new report in The New York Times spotlights how the Trump administration has gutted the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission. Members of Trump’s family have invested deeply in prediction markets that the agency is technically supposed to regulate. 

Read more at the Times here. 

Bank CEO’s AI comments face backlash

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was among a group of people who leaped to the defense of fellow bank CEO Bill Winters, who leads the Standard Chartered bank, after Winters made a social media post that referenced the bank replacing “lower-value human capital” with AI tools. The backlash underscored the widespread public concern about AI tools and their impact on the economy. 

Read more in The Wall Street Journal here. 

Enhanced Games dud

Ahead of the event, I wrote about the unethical monstrosity that was the Enhanced Games, an Olympic-style competition backed by Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., in which participants were encouraged to use performance-enhancing drugs. The event was marketed as a potential demonstration of new human capabilities, with numerous world records expected to be broken by juiced-up athletes. As The Guardian reports, only one record was broken — a time that has come under dispute — and a bunch of juiced-up competitors lost to athletes who competed without performance-enhancing drugs. 

Read more at The Guardian here.

The post Doug Burgum jabs Pope Leo for sounding the alarm on AI appeared first on MS NOW.

EXCLUSIVE: Live Nation streaming service Veeps has locked in Major League Wrestling for a new Saturday night programming block. The wrestling circuit’s weekly flagship series, MLW Fusion, will start streaming via Veeps.com this coming Saturday, available free to global viewers. Those tuning in will get access to limited-edition merchandise drops, giveaways, and special offers available […]

Vice President Vance on Tuesday said that Pope Leo XIV’s warnings on the risks of AI were “profound.” The Vatican published the pontiff’s first encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” on Monday. In the 42,000-word letter, the first American pope urged policymakers to address the widespread availability of AI with “clarity to establish adequate regulatory tools capable…

Michael Preysman addresses what happened at Everlane, and reveals what he plans to do about it. Hint: he’s still radical.

Ray J checked himself into a Vegas hospital hours after being knocked out by Supa Hot Fire, TMZ has learned.  Sources close to Ray J tell TMZ he decided to go to the hospital two hours after the event on Saturday.  The source tells TMZ…

A federal judge rejected a challenge to temporarily block a new set of GOP-favored congressional lines in Tennessee on Tuesday, delivering a blow to Democrats who are all but expected to appeal the ruling as they look to undo new GOP redistricting.  U.S. Chief District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. denied a request from several Black Memphis voters and…

EXCLUSIVE: Tony Award nominee Tom Francis (Sunset Blvd., Jay Kelly, You) is set for a recurring role opposite Richard Gere in The Off Weeks Apple TV‘s eight-episode limited series starring and executive produced by Jessica Chastain and Ben Stiller, from director Michael Showalter, showrunner Alissa Nutting and Apple Studios. In The Off Weeks, when divorce throws […]

President Trump said Tuesday that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) should “call for help” after an 18-year-old allegedly struck five police officers with a car over Memorial Day weekend.   “Teen takeover in Chicago. Five officers badly hurt. Mayor and Governor are terrible. Should call for help!” Trump wrote…

The New Mexico Department of Justice is urging survivors of Jeffrey Epstein to aid its criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch, a sprawling property outside Santa Fe where the convicted sex offender allegedly trafficked and abused multiple women.

“Your abuse was systematically disregarded as investigations into Epstein’s crimes were deliberately stalled, abandoned, or compromised by the power Epstein wielded,” New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said Tuesday in a statement directed to Epstein survivors.

“Your input is essential to conducting this investigation with the rigor, respect, and compassion it deserves,” Torrez added. “That’s why I want to hear directly from you.”

A letter to survivors pic.twitter.com/R1HWk04gzC

— New Mexico Department of Justice (@NewMexicoDOJ) May 26, 2026

New Mexico authorities started investigating allegations of crimes that took place on the nearly 10,000-acre ranch in February. At the time, Torrez cited new information in the Epstein files, which the U.S. Justice Department began releasing piecemeal in December 2025.

State authorities conducted a search of the property in March.

Zorro Ranch was mentioned thousands of times in the Epstein files. Multiple women, including the late Virginia Giuffre, have also alleged that they were abused on the property.

Epstein purchased the ranch in 1993. The family of former Texas State Sen. Don Huffines bought the property in 2023 after the financier’s death.

The post New Mexico urges Epstein survivors to aid in criminal probe of Zorro Ranch appeared first on MS NOW.

“He got paid and he has moved on, that’s all he cares about”

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Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson are wasting zero time leaning into the newlywed life … because Bettina’s already rocking the Trump name online, even though she hasn’t legally changed it. Just days after the couple tied the knot in Florida…