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US President Donald Trump will host top purchasers of the cryptocurrency that bears his name at a gala dinner on Thursday.

$TRUMP was launched shortly before his inauguration in January, initially rocketing in value before falling sharply shortly afterwards.

"It's fundamentally corrupt -- a way to buy access to the President," Democrat senator Chris Murphy wrote on X, one of a number of people to question the ethics of the event.

Some have also suggested the expected attendance of many foreign investors poses a threat to national security.

But the White House has batted away such allegations, saying Trump is only motivated by public service.

"This is something that doesn't have obvious utility. It's not being used for payments. It's not being used as a store of value," said Rob Hadick, General Partner of Dragonfly, a crypto venture fund.

The dinner - which is being held at Trump's golf course near the nation's capital - is advertised on the website gettrumpmemes.com as "the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World."

The top 220 purchasers of the meme coin, viewable on a leaderboard, received invitations to the "black-tie optional" event.

The top investor in the $TRUMP meme coin is billionaire crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun who was charged with fraud and market manipulation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden Administration.

A Trump administration official told the BBC that the meme coin has nothing to do with the White House.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly pushed back on concerns about potential conflicts.

"The President is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself," Kelly said in a statement.

But one former financial regulator likened the meme coin to gambling.

"It's like selling membership cards for his personal fan club which are then traded," said Timothy Massad, Director of the Digital Asset Policy Project at Harvard.

"They have no value. But people speculate on the price and those purchases and that trading enriches him."

• Btw, here's the Leaderboard if anyone's interested.

Alexus Byrd-Maxey had just finished her second month at the Chicago police academy, well on her way to fulfilling her childhood dream.

The South Side native wanted to become a detective so she could bring closure to families who have lost loved ones to homicides by arresting those responsible.

But on March 17, 2023, an encounter with a fellow recruit derailed that dream. On that day, she was leaning over a classmate’s computer, helping him log on to do their lesson. As another recruit walked behind her, she said she felt his hands on her waist and his body pressed up against her. He was close enough, she told reporters, that she felt “his penis on my butt.”

The following week, when Byrd-Maxey reported the incident to her class leader, he talked to fellow recruits and they downplayed the encounter. A recruit who allegedly witnessed the incident and was friends with Tabb later told investigators that Byrd-Maxey was “trying to victimize herself.”

The academy instructor never filed a sexual misconduct complaint. Two and a half weeks later, Byrd-Maxey was fired from the academy for supposedly cursing and using gang language — allegations she has denied. Tabb soon became an officer and began patrolling streets.

Eight months after Byrd-Maxey was fired, Tabb was arrested for allegedly grabbing a fellow officer’s genitals repeatedly over her uniform after roll call in their police precinct.

Tabb now faces multiple felony charges, including aggravated criminal sexual abuse.

Frank Taylor’s idea for the Stable Recovery program was born six years ago out of a need for help on his family’s 1,100-acre farm that has foaled and raised some of racing’s biggest stars in the heart of Kentucky horse country.

The area is also home to America’s bourbon industry and racing has long been associated with alcohol.

“If a horse won, I drank a lot,” Taylor said. “If a horse lost, I drank a lot.”

The basic framework for the program at Taylor Made Farm came from a restaurant he frequents whose owner operates it as a second-chance employment opportunity for people in recovery. Taylor thought something similar would work on his farm, given the physical labor involved in caring for horses and the peaceful atmosphere.

The U.S. social safety net would be jolted if the budget bill backed by President Donald Trump and passed Thursday by the House of Representatives becomes law.

It would require many low-income adults to work to receive Medicaid health insurance coverage and more to work to get food assistance, require hospitals to verify the citizenship status of patients, and cut funding for services like birth control to the nation’s biggest abortion provider.

Supporters of the bill say the moves will save money, root out waste and encourage personal responsibility.

A preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with health care by 8.6 million over the decade.

A private jet crashed into military housing in San Diego during foggy weather early Thursday, igniting cars parked along a suburban neighborhood block and killing multiple people on board the plane, authorities said.

The plane could hold eight to 10 people but it’s not yet known how many were on the aircraft, Assistant San Diego Fire Chief Dan Eddy said at a news conference. Authorities will be investigating whether the plane hit a power line, he said.

The aircraft crashed just before 4 a.m. into the U.S. military’s largest housing neighborhood. It appeared to strike at least one home that had a charred and collapsed roof and smash through half a dozen vehicles. About 10 homes suffered damage.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out Trump's executive order calling for the secretary to close the Education Department.

The judge also told the administration to reinstate the roughly 1,300 Education Department employees who were told in March that they would lose their jobs as part of a sweeping reduction-in-force and "to restore the Department to the status quo."

In his ruling, District Court Judge Myong J. Joun wrote, "A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all. This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department's employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/44884488

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250522120541/https://www.kpbs.org/news/public-safety/2025/05/19/san-diegos-highest-paid-city-employees-cops-racking-up-overtime-and-earning-over-400-000

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250522120511/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/19/oregon-addiction-spending

The new strategy would continue the current vaccine approval process for people ages 65 and older and younger people with health problems that put them at high risk, according to an articlepublished Tuesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250522120645/https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/a-gun-deemed-too-dangerous-for-cops-but-fine-for-civilians/

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250522115616/https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/18/ice-tactic-deport-before-court-immigration/83515061007/

Head of strategy of Finnish defence forces says they are monitoring Moscow’s manoeuvring ‘very closely’

Police said a suspect was in custody after the shooting near the Capital Jewish Museum

A suspect is in custody after shooting dead two Israeli embassy staff outside a Jewish museum in Washington on Wednesday night.

The gunman, named by police as Elias Rodriguez, 30, of Chicago, approached a group of four people leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum and opened fire, killing Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.

Metropolitan police chief Pamela Smith said the shooter had been pacing outside the museum, which is steps away from the FBI’s field office, before the shooting.

After killing the pair, who officials said were a couple, he walked inside, where event security detained him. The suspect yelled: “Free, free Palestine,” after he was arrested, police said.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250522115401/https://www.sltrib.com/news/2025/05/18/utah-prosecutors-worry/

Johnathan Buma, who was arrested in March and is out on bail, claims in new interview that efforts to target Musk were ‘intense’_

A former FBI counterintelligence agent turned whistleblower has claimed he tried to gain access to Elon Musk in 2022 to warn the billionaire that he was the target of a covert Russian campaign seeking to infiltrate his inner circle, possibly to gain access to sensitive information.

Johnathan Buma, who was arrested by the FBI earlier this year on a misdemeanor charge of disclosing confidential information, said in an interview that he tried – but ultimately failed – to gain access to Musk to personally brief and “inoculate” him against “outreach from the Kremlin”.

Buma, who is on bail and living in Arizona after his 17 March arrest at New York’s Kennedy airport, spoke to both ZDF, the German broadcaster, and the Guardian. He has also recently filed paperwork to run as a Democratic candidate for a congressional House seat in Arizona.

An Iowa sheriff is warning that his county may be publicly shamed by the Trump administration for insufficiently backing the president’s immigration agenda, though he says he is “more than happy” to help. He said he just wants to ensure he doesn’t end up with too few officers, jail beds and dollars to respond to the county’s needs.

Dubuque County Sheriff Joe Kennedy, who serves nearly 100,000 people in the area bordering Wisconsin and Illinois, seemed to try not to alienate the federal government when he declined to participate in a program that would commit county revenue and jail space to immigration enforcement. He explained his decision before a packed county chamber this week, drawing mixed reactions.

...

“It has generally been my experience that when we partner with larger entities (Federal, state), those agencies usually ‘take’ more than they ‘give.’ Essentially, we usually end up with the short end of the stick in some way,” he wrote.

Kennedy said he would be “more than happy to assist your agents in our area” but asked ICE not to rely on his 181-bed jail because he doesn’t have room.

David Bindert, an official in ICE’s Cedar Rapids, Iowa, office, was sympathetic in his brief response: “No worries Sir, I completely understand, and I thank you for your time in this matter.”

...

An Iowa law prohibits state and local officials from adopting policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Attorney General Brenna Bird recently sued the Winneshiek County sheriff over a Facebook post that she said discouraged cooperation, potentially jeopardizing state funding to the county.

The Trump administration has also taken legal action against governments with policies limiting immigration arrests, suing Chicago, Denver and Rochester, New York.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250522115734/https://apnews.com/article/iowa-dubuque-county-sheriff-trump-287g-immigration-d5c35a6dabbf54b00daf75130fa915d8