US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent both announced talks had progressed to allow shipments to resume.

Source: BBC.

“Love and Hip Hop” star Sidney Starr is locked up in a special section of the Fulton County jail … due to her identifying as a trans woman … TMZ has learned. Sidney was transferred to the vulnerable population unit for the LGBTQ community after…

From TMZ.

From The Hill

Maine showed that a party can hold its own accountable without waiting for November to do it for them. The Republican Party leadership in Ohio can still prove it meant what it said about Graham Platner. So far, it has chosen not to. 

EXCLUSIVE: Wave, the next-gen digital entertainment company, has inked a deal with comedians Langston Kerman and David Gborie to oversee ad sales and distribution for their comedy podcast, My Momma Told Me. The pod joins Wave’s expanding comedy slate, which as of last winter, includes So True with Caleb Hearon, as we first reported. As part of his […]

Source: Deadline.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has achieved the biggest-opening weekend of all time for a film in Middle East box office history. Empire Entertainment, the exclusive theatrical distributor for Sony Pictures across the region, said the film generated US$18.4 million at the Middle East box office. United Arab Emirates contributed $7.4 million and Saudi Arabia delivered […]

Source: Deadline.

Sony/Marvel Studio’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day crossed the $1 billion mark on Monday becoming the second fastest to movie to reach that global milestone after 2019’s Avengers: Endgame which opened to $1.22 billion worldwide. Current running cume on the Destin Daniel Cretton directed pic is $1.052 billion. Again, have to emphasize, but this billion dollar […]

Source: Deadline.

The “Tonight Show” host identified one heckuva scapegoat for the dragged-out conflict that the president started.

Source: HuffPost.

When Donald Trump decided to blame “vandals” for his Reflecting Pool fiasco, many of the president’s critics pointed to the inconvenient fact that these nefarious scoundrels did not appear to exist in reality. Many of the White House’s Republican allies, however, clung to a specific argument.

That some people were formally accused by prosecutors of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, Republicans said, suggested that Trump’s claims couldn’t be entirely made up. After all, these GOP partisans argued, if the president’s claims didn’t have at least some merit, the charges wouldn’t have been filed in the first place.

This argument has collapsed in humiliating fashion in recent days.

The most notable example came late Friday, when U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., moved to drop her felony case against former Olympian David Hearn, conceding that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by “botched work” performed by the project’s contractor, not by criminal conduct.

Hearn, however, was not alone. The New York Times reported:

Prosecutors in Washington are dropping charges against three more defendants who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. […]

Along with Mr. Hearn, prosecutors moved to drop charges against three others: Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers, who all were charged with destruction of property less than $1,000.

For the White House, this is a genuine political disaster. With four collapsed cases, it appears increasingly obvious that the incumbent president’s embarrassment at his own failure led him to advance these fraudulent claims to the American public.

Common sense suggests that Trump should try to change the subject and hope people forget that he spent months pointing to nonexistent vandals, but at an unrelated event on Monday afternoon, the Republican couldn’t seem to help himself.

Trump: “We have photographs or tapes — like moving cameras, right? — where people are on the side cutting it with a box knife.”

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-03T18:31:24.631Z

Pointing to evidence he keeps claiming to have, Trump told reporters, “We have photographs or tapes, like moving cameras” that show people “cutting it with a box knife.” He added, “Jeanine Pirro made a mistake. There was vandalism.”

The lawyers in Trump’s Justice Department who have actually seen the evidence came to the opposite conclusion, which necessarily leads to questions as to why the president keeps doubling down on a self-satisfying fiction he prefers to reality.

The post It’s not just David Hearn: Prosecutors drop 3 more Reflecting Pool cases appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.

A federal appeals court in New York on Tuesday upheld Sam Bankman-Fried’s conviction fraud and conspiracy charges that followed the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX.

Source: ABC News

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday voted to advance acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination to permanently lead the Department of Justice.

Source: ABC News

“I recognized it. It was the worst day of my life. I made amends.”

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Source BuzzFeed.

Ben Davis, a star of Broadway’s Tony-winning Ragtime revival, will join the cast of Hadestown in the role left vacant with the recently announced departure of Geno Segers. Davis will take the role of Hades beginning Tuesday, September 1. Segers had been set to begin performances in September but left the show following a public […]

Source: Deadline.