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 Mark Peterson/AFP via GettyDavid Pecker, much like Arnold Schwarzenegger, will be back.
On Friday, the former National Enquirer boss will take the stand for the fourth time this week in Donald Trump's hush money trial to face a second grilling from the former president's defense team. Pecker, the former CEO of American Media Inc (AMI), has already testified about his efforts to act as Trump's "eyes and ears" ahead of the 2016 presidential election by buying up the exclusive rights to negative stories about the Republican as a way of burying them, a practice known as "catch and kill."
Pecker spoke Thursday about his role in silencing stories from two women who claimed to have had extramarital trysts with Trump (Trump denies the sexual encounters ever took place). One involved AMI paying $150,000 to Playboy model Karen McDougal, who said she'd had an affair with Trump in 2006. The other was a payment of $130,000 that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to porn star Stormy Daniels—which is at the center of the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records that prosecutors have brought against the former president.
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A Senate hearing highlights the dangers of bogus, artificial intelligence materials in elections. A bill was introduced in 2023, but the urgency is now.
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 NBC NewsAs the Supreme Court weighs whether Donald Trump is shielded from prosecution for acts committed while president, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he opposes Trump's view of absolute immunity.
McConnell spoke with Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker Thursday for a pre-recorded interview set to air Sunday.
During their talk, Welker inquired whether McConnell stood by his February 2021 comment—made just after he voted to acquit "shameful" Trump during his Jan. 6-related impeachment trial—that former presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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Student protests calling for university divestment from Israel and the U.S. arms industry have rocked campuses from coast to coast. The nonviolent protests, which have been characterized as "antisemitic" for their criticism of Israel, have been met with an intensifying police crackdown as university administrators threaten academic discipline and arrests. On Wednesday, local and state troopers violently arrested dozens at the University of Texas at Austin. Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University in New York City, the site of a high-profile student encampment and one of the first to be met with police action, where he called on university president Minouche Shafik to resign. We hear from two Jewish students involved in protests at their schools. Joshua Sklar, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and an organizer with Jewish Voice of Peace Austin, says concern over campus antisemitism is insincere, and that, in fact, "The people who are being targeted are Muslim students, Arab students, and especially Palestinian students." Sklar and Sarah King, a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest who was arrested at the campus's Gaza Solidarity Encampment, also point out that a large percentage of protesters are Jewish anti-Zionists concerned about their safety from state repression. "The threat is really coming from Columbia University, which has set the police on hundreds of its students who are entrusted to its care," says King.
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