Conn. Gov. Ned Lamont had thousands of trees, bushes ‘illegally’ cut behind $7.5M home

Meghan Leahy, a parenting coach, author, mother of three, takes your questions about the all encompassing job we call parenting.

Happy baby, happy parents and caregivers.

The Department of Justice, California and other states sued the concert behemoth Live Nation, alleging anti-trust violations that could break up the company.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito faces new calls to remove himself from cases tied to former President Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. The New York Times reports Alito's home displayed a second flag used by Jan. 6 protesters.

Artificial intelligence can create fake images and videos of real people, including so-called deepfake porn. Congress is now considering a bill to make it illegal to share those images, exposing those who post deepfake porn to jail time and a hefty fine. There were more than 21,000 deepfake porn videos online last year.

Radio host Charlamagne tha God is known for his straightforward opinions on "The Breakfast Club." In his new book, "Get Honest or Die Lying," he writes about the impact of having meaningful conversations.

The model, 37, shared a risqué shot as part of a Cannes photo dump.

At least five people were killed and dozens of others were hurt when part of a stage collapsed during a campaign rally in Mexico attended by a long-shot presidential candidate who escaped injury, according to officials. Terrifying video shows a strong gust of wind crumpling the top of the stage while at least seven people...

Your feed, finally printed.

Judge Kelli Johnson, one of Harris County's longest-serving current judges, hasn't been seen at the 178th District Courthouse in Houston since May 1 -- with no explanation on where she has gone or when she’s set to return.

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Supreme Court's conservatives uphold a state's right to engage in partisan gerrymandering.

The "Atlas" actress clapped back at the point blank question herself, smiling after chiding the reporter for "know[ing] better than that."

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Three-year-old Levi Wright was left brain dead when he drove his toy tractor into a river Tuesday night.

Two missing boys from Texas were found safe on Wednesday as the whereabouts of their kidnapper remains unknown.

"It is time to break up Live Nation," AG Merrick Garland said in a statement.

Comedian Shane Gillis co-created and stars in "Tires," a sitcom filled with crude jokes that follows a pair of cousins who run an auto repair shop.

It is the highest number of named storms that NOAA has ever issued for the May outlook.

The full list of hurricane names for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season include Alberto, Joyce and Kirk.

A furious mom has shared her outrage after discovering that her two-year-old son was fitted with ankle weights at his daycare to stop him from moving quickly. 

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a newly-drawn South Carolina congressional district, saying it was not the result of racial gerrymandering.

Charles Barkley had some WNBA players frustrated after comments about women hating on Fever rookie Caitlin Clark.

"The Simpsons" showrunner Matt Selman slammed the "goofball" who created the fake image of Diddy running from police.

New York City-area flights were grounded Thursday morning amid powerful torrential rain and thunderstorms. Flights at La Guardia Airport, Newark International Airport, Westchester County Airport and Teterboro Airport have been affected by the severe weather and thunderstorms, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Delays averaging about 30 minutes were reported at Newark and La Guardia,...

The "reality of the potential cause ran me over like a freight train," Hillary Weiss Presswood told Newsweek.

The Supreme Court reversed a decision from lower court that found GOP lawmakers improperly used race when designing one of South Carolina's congressional districts.

Rogan criticized Kathy Hochul over comments she made about Black children living in the Bronx, New York City.

Two committees are seeking information from oil executives about a dinner where, the lawmakers say, the former president proposed a quid pro quo.

"CBS Mornings" co-anchor Gayle King sits down with music legend Lenny Kravitz to talk about his upcoming album, growing up in New York City, overcoming his insecurities and more.

Grammy-winning artist Lenny Kravitz tells Gayle King about some of the inspiration behind his new album "Blue Electric Light" in a sitdown interview for "CBS Mornings."

Donald Trump is facing some of the most serious threats to his financial empire in his long and tumultuous career. That’s his problem.But the methods he’s using to get out of those troubles make him beholden to wealthy people with interests of their own—which, if reelected president, he would be in a position to advance. And that could be everyone’s problem.Trump’s money woes begin with his urgent need for huge amounts of liquid cash—both to cover his never-ending legal fees and judgments, and to fund his campaign. A jury awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll more than $83 million in a defamation case in January. (Trump has posted a $92 million bond while he appeals the verdict.) In February, a judge in New York fined him nearly half a billion dollars in a civil fraud case involving property valuations. He owes legal fees for many other cases he’s involved in. Making matters worse, various aspects of his business suffered during his presidency because of negative publicity, and those troubles are compounded by the current weakness of the commercial real-estate market.To make up for these challenges, Trump has turned to a few sources. He obtained a highly unusual bond from a California businessman for the civil fraud case, having convinced an appellate court to reduce the amount to $175 million. He has been using political donations to pay his hefty legal bills, and his campaign’s effective merger with the Republican National Committee creates a new stream of cash for those. He has also brazenly pleaded for cash from large donors, reportedly telling a gathering of oil executives that he would pursue favorable policies if they raised $1 billion for his campaign and he won in November. Finally, the Trump Media and Technology Group went public this spring, providing Trump with a potentially enormous windfall, at least on paper. (“It’s one of the most obvious worthless stocks I have ever seen,’’ Alan Jagolinzer, an accounting professor at the University of Cambridge in England, told The New York Times.) Each of these revenue streams gives leverage—financial, and perhaps psychological—over Trump to rich people whose fortunes could be affected by actions of the federal government.[David A. Graham: Trump’s money problems are very real and very bad]“He made very clear throughout his presidency, and in the plan since then, that he is very open to people currying favor with him by financing him in a variety of ways,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. Previously, someone looking for favor could donate to his campaign, schedule an event at a Trump golf course, or spend big at his hotel in Washington. Now the hotel is gone, but other possibilities have arisen.“Donald Trump's finances and the ways of potentially influencing him have gotten more complicated than what we were talking about in 2016, and even 2020,” Bookbinder said. “It’s a whole new world of ways to potentially funnel money to Donald Trump.”Trump’s ongoing trial in Manhattan, on charges that he falsified business records to cover up a hush-money payment, showcases a small-scale example of how this works. David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified that after he agreed to pay $150,000 to purchase and sit on the story of a woman who said she had sex with Trump, he was invited to a Trump Tower meeting with officials including FBI Director James Comey and future Cabinet-level officials, and later feted with a White House dinner. This is deeply embarrassing—for Trump, given the reason he was indebted to Pecker; for the officials, who were made to mingle with a tabloid publisher (“Here is David Pecker, he’s the publisher of the National Enquirer, and he probably knows more than anybody else in this room,” Trump joked, per Pecker’s testimony; the men didn’t laugh, he recalled); and for the country. As a matter of substance, it’s probably relatively harmless.But if $150,000 gets you a meeting with the director of the FBI, what does $175 million get you?That’s the question raised by Trump’s bond in his civil fraud case. A defendant who is appealing a judgment is obliged to either post the amount he owes or to get a bonding company to offer an IOU—assuring that if the appeal is unsuccessful, the penalty will be paid. Trump’s attorneys testified in court that they had tried and failed to obtain a bond for the full amount of more than $450 million, and persuaded an appellate court to reduce the amount to $175 million. Trump was then able to secure a bond—but rather than use a New York State bonding company, he got it from Knight Specialty Insurance, a California-based company. Knight is owned by Don Hankey, a relatively unknown billionaire who has made millions in subprime loans.The bond was odd. Initial filings for it contained errors that had to be corrected. Knight wasn’t licensed in New York, and the attorney general’s office raised questions about whether the company had enough money to actually cover the bond. Justice Arthur Engoron, the judge in the case, only approved it after a hearing in which Trump agreed to place collateral assets under Knight’s control.The strangeness doesn’t end there. Hankey told Reuters that he charged Trump below market rate for the bond. He also said he supported Trump politically previously and in the current election and called the case against him “unfair,” though he said they had never met. Hankey has a financial incentive to get in Trump’s good graces: Federal regulators have taken actions against companies he controls at least four times in the past decade, NBC News reported, including repeated fines levied by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As president, Trump could shield Hankey’s business from enforcement. He has made political interference in the Justice Department a centerpiece of his campaign for president, and during his first term, the CFPB was moribund and shackled.“If you look at the laws of what an in-kind contribution is, it is exactly this, when you give a goods or services for not the full price because you want to curry favor with a candidate,” Adam Pollock, an attorney in New York and former assistant attorney general, told me. “In this day and age, nobody ever prosecutes those kind of in-kind contributions anymore, ever. But there’s a reason those laws exist. It’s because you don’t want to provide that kind of untoward access of how money corrupts politics. And I think we’re all just so jaded.”Worth noting is that if Trump loses the appeal, he will still have to pay the penalty, or else he faces the prospect of the state attorney general seizing assets. (If appeals courts affirm Engoron’s ruling, Trump and his sons will also be barred from serving as officers of a company in the state for several years, which could paralyze the Trump Organization’s operations as they exist.) Trump has already acknowledged that he doesn’t have sufficient cash. That’s not a huge surprise—many of his holdings are in real estate, which is not liquid—but it is a problem for him, especially because the market for some of the assets he holds, specifically his large portfolio of urban office buildings, is depressed right now.So when Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent of Trump’s Truth Social site, became a public company earlier this spring, it seemed like a timely windfall for the former president. Trump has a knack for wriggling out of a jam, and this looks like yet another example. His stake in the company is estimated at about $6 billion. But experts told me that paper wealth like this doesn’t always translate to liquid assets. The company’s equity is trading more like a meme stock than anything related to its underlying fundamental value: The price has dropped, and analysts expect it to fall further eventually. Regardless, Trump is barred from selling shares for months and may be unable to use stock as collateral. Once he is allowed to sell, he will be unable to cash out quickly, as doing so would tank the share price. (The company faces other question marks related to its auditor, who has agreed to cease operations and been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with “massive fraud.”)This means that TMTG may not provide a miraculous cash infusion benefiting Trump, but it’s still a big gain for him. TMTG also illustrates other ways in which Trump is susceptible to financial leverage. The investor Jeff Yass was one of the biggest shareholders in the company that merged with Trump’s to go public. Assuming Yass still owns the shares, that gives him substantial sway in keeping the inflated stock price high, which would in turn help Trump’s net worth swell. Perhaps Yass would not have invested simply to aid Trump—or to cozy up to him. But he and his wife are already the biggest political donors so far this election cycle, with all of their funds going to conservative causes. A Trump campaign source told The New York Times that Yass was expected to donate to pro-Trump efforts; Yass said he never had and would not. Because many donations can be hidden, the truth is almost impossible to know.[David A. Graham: Trump flaunts his corruption]Yass is also a major investor in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Trump was once a noisy critic of the Chinese-owned social-media platform. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he said in 2020. He issued an executive order to do so if ByteDance didn’t sell TikTok, but the order was soon blocked by judges. When Congress, backed by the Biden administration, took up a law to do the same this year, however, Trump suddenly turned against it. “Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” he posted on Truth Social in April. The reversal came shortly after a meeting with Yass.The public has no way to know why Trump flip-flopped, and both Trump and Yass say they didn’t discuss TikTok at their meeting, but some skepticism is reasonable under the circumstances. “We don't know for sure whether [the meeting] resulted in Donald Trump changing his position,” Bookbinder told me. “But it's certainly something where the American people have to question that.” Any other person of means might also conclude that a good way to get Trump to take up a view that benefits them—including reversing a long-held position—is to make a large investment in him.Meanwhile, many of the old methods of influencing Trump remain. A Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in a private-equity firm founded by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner has recently been raising money for the former president’s campaign. Serious questions also surround a development in Serbia led by Kushner and Ric Grenell, a former Trump-administration official who is rumored to be a candidate for secretary of state or national-security adviser in a second term. Serbian and American observers have charged that the deal, which did not move through typical channels, is an attempt to win favor with Trump. All involved parties deny it, naturally.That Trump would seek these bailouts should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his business career. When he has struck serious financial difficulties in the past, he has sought and usually found some new source of funds. In 1990, for example, with Trump’s casino in Atlantic City foundering, his father walked onto the floor and bought $3.5 million in chips. (This turned out to violate state rules.) Later, when others had cut him off because of his habit of not paying his debts, he found in Deutsche Bank a willing lender. But DB was no more successful in dealing with Trump. An old joke goes that if you owe the bank $1 million, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank. Trump defaulted on more than $600 million in DB loans.When he was fined in the civil fraud case earlier this year, Trump found that none of his old lenders, including DB, were willing to help. His new sources of cash knew Trump’s history of stiffing those he owes, but they may have calculated that they stand to gain something far more valuable than repayment with interest: the power of the federal government at their beck and call.

Grill, baby, grill!

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/ReutersA group of Nikki Haley supporters from Vermont to Arizona met with President Joe Biden’s campaign on Wednesday night almost immediately after she announced her plan to vote for Donald Trump, The Daily Beast has learned.In the previously unreported meeting, a Biden campaign representative listened to the concerns of top Haley supporters from various states as part of Bidenworld’s ongoing outreach to win over Haley voters.“The fact they actually sent someone last night to speak to a small group … I think that’s a good signal that they’re aware there are huge numbers of Haley voters out there,” Robert Schwartz, founder of the Haley Voters For Biden PAC, told The Daily Beast. Schwartz said the meeting was highly encouraging, and likened it to other listening sessions the Biden campaign has done with the pro-Palestinian uncommitted vote.Read more at The Daily Beast.

It was bound to happen again. For the second time in two months, the United States has confirmed a case of bird flu in a dairy worker employed by a farm with H5N1-infected cows. “The only thing I’m surprised about is that it’s taken this long to get another confirmed case,” Steve Valeika, a veterinarian and an epidemiologist based in North Carolina, told me.The true case count is almost certainly higher. For weeks, anecdotal reports of sick farmworkers have been trickling in from around the nation, where H5N1 has been detected in dozens of herds in nine states, according to federal counts. Testing among humans and animals remains limited, and buy-in from farms is still spotty. The gap between reality and what the government can measure is hindering the world from realizing the full scope of the outbreak. And it may hamper experts’ ability to detect human-to-human spread, should that someday occur. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there have been dozens of cases at this point,” Valeika said.The risk to most of the public is still low, as federal guidelines continue to emphasize. But that assurance feels tenuous when “the threat to farmworkers remains high,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the pandemic center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. Too often, infectious disease most affects a society’s most vulnerable people; now the future of this virus depends on America’s ability to protect a community whose health and safety are routinely discounted.[Read: America’s infectious-disease barometer is off]Like the first case of a dairy worker contracting avian flu, this second one has at least one reassuring element: Exposure in both cases seems to have involved heavy, repeated contact with infected, lactating animals and resulted in a mild illness that involved only eye symptoms. (In another U.S. case, from 2022, in which a man contracted the virus from poultry, fatigue was the only reported symptom.) Cow udders and human eyes both contain receptors for H5N1 that resemble the ones primarily found in birds, and experts suspect that those receptors are an easy entry point for the virus, which still seems to be very much an avian pathogen. To spread in earnest among people, the virus would still probably need to make a few more evolutionary leaps. For most of the public, “I’m not worried about H5 right now,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me.People who work on dairy farms, though, have reason to worry, Lakdawala added. In the so-called parlors where dairy cows are milked, animals are strapped into machines that latch on to their udders, pump until the rate of flow slows, then release, swinging “off the animal at eye height,” Lakdawala told me, and blasting bystanders with frothy liquid. The machines aren’t necessarily sanitized between each animal—and what cleaning does occur often involves a high-pressure hose-down that also mists up milk. The entire process involves a lot of direct maneuvering of udders, as workers load machinery onto each cow and prime their initial milk flow manually. If workers aren’t directly getting milk on their hands—which will, at some point, touch their face—they’re “constantly being bombarded with aerosols, droplets, and spray,” Lakdawala said.When infected cows are present, that can mean a lot of virus exposure. Lakdawala’s lab has been studying how long H5N1 can persist on milky surfaces, and the initial results, not yet published in a scientific journal, suggest that the virus may linger for at least one to three hours on the same sorts of plastic and metal commonly used in milking equipment. That creates a clear conduit for the virus to move among animals, Lakdawala said—and a very easy path for a human to pick it up, too. Improper disposal of milk could also pose some transmission risk, especially milk from infected farm cows, which still have to be milked if they’re lactating. (Several farm cats appear to have caught the virus from drinking raw milk.) The USDA recommends heat-treating all milk before it’s discarded, but some farms, especially smaller ones, may not have consistent access to the necessary equipment or human power, Lakdawala told me.The CDC has urged farmworkers to don goggles, gloves, high-quality respirators, and other protective equipment in these environments. But those recommendations can’t really be enforced, and it’s unclear how many farms have been following them, or how many workers on those farms are complying. In the rising spring and summer heat, wearing that gear may get even less palatable, Lakdawala pointed out, especially in the steamy, cramped environments in which the people with the most exposure do the brunt of their work. Goggles and other tight-fitting eye protection, in particular, are tricky: “They get dirty very quickly,” Lakdawala said. Workers can’t see what they’re doing through milk-spattered lenses.Enthusiasm for testing cows and people has also been low on farms, as business owners and employees alike weigh the economic and personal risks they face if one of their herd is reported as sick. And although asymptomatic cows are likely responsible for a good degree of spread, the USDA requires testing of only a subset of the cows being moved between states. That basically ensures that “we won’t find a virus before a farmworker is exposed,” Nuzzo told me. Similarly, the CDC maintains that “testing of asymptomatic persons” for H5N1 “is not routinely recommended,” and close contacts of infected people aren’t guaranteed a screen for the virus. Those sorts of delays could allow infections to simmer—potentially past the window in which intervention with treatments such as Tamiflu or forestalling transmission to close contacts is possible. The fact that this second case was caught doesn’t mean that testing is anywhere near sufficient: The diagnosis was made for a farmworker in Michigan, which has more aggressively tested its dairy herds, Nuzzo said. Nuzzo and Lakdawala both argue that stockpiled vaccines should be offered en masse to farmworkers while their risk remains so high—but federal officials haven’t yet made the injections available. (The USDA and the CDC did not respond to requests for comment.)[Read: The bird-flu host we should worry about]These shortfalls would be concerning for any population contending with under-the-radar infections. But among farmworkers especially—a group that includes many migrants and uninsured individuals living in rural regions—H5N1 could play on existing health disparities, Anne Sosin, a public-health researcher at Dartmouth, told me. If protecting farmworkers is a priority, Valeika said, “I think we’re kind of failing.”Researchers are also unsure just how much risk infected farmworkers may pose to their close contacts. Other forms of pink eye are pretty transmissible—and someone who has recently rubbed their eye, Lakdawala said, could presumably pass H5N1 by touching someone else’s hand, which could then touch their face. Experts also remain worried that an infection in the eye might find a way to travel to other parts of the body, including the respiratory tract, especially if the virus were to pick up the sorts of mutations that could adapt it to the receptors in our lungs. (The Michigan dairy worker’s nose swab, thankfully, turned up negative for an H5 virus.)The virus doesn’t yet seem poised for such a jump. But these flu infections are still a problem for everyone. “If we fail to stop it in the highest-risk groups,” Sosin told me, the threat to the rest of the public will only grow. H5N1 may never spread human-to-human. If it does, though, it will almost certainly have been helped along by transmission in a community of people that American society has failed to properly protect.

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President Joe Biden and the Democrats could alter the current conservative-majority SCOTUS bench depending on November's results.

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Buying London is essentially Selling Sunset in a colder climate, but it's well-cast and features impressive real estate to ogle.

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Lenny Kravitz sits down exclusively with "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King to discuss his upcoming 12th studio album "Blue Electric Light," releasing just days before his 60th birthday. The Grammy award-winning rockstar also talks about his NYC roots, his insecurities, and being open to finding love.