“A federal judge is allowing a civil suit brought against President Trump for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021 to proceed in court, a victory for Democratic lawmakers and Capitol Police officers who brought the litigation. The late Tuesday ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta found that Trump’s speech on the Ellipse that day was not covered by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, determining it could not be considered a core presidential act. He also determined the phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) asking him to ‘find’ more votes was clearly an effort ‘to alter the outcome of Georgia’s election.'” (04/01/26)
“If the pending Artemis II mission is successful, it will not just send Americans around the moon and back for the first time in more than half a century — it will send them further than any human being has traveled into space. If the rest of the Artemis program proceeds on schedule, astronauts will return to the lunar surface by the end of the decade. That’s been a long time coming. The government has been working to get Americans back on the moon since the Bush administration created the Constellation program in the mid-2000s. Wondering why it’s taking so long, given that the original moon mission required only seven years? The answer involves the familiar forces of government inefficiency and pork barrel congressional politics.” (04/01/26)
“The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved Eli Lilly’s pill version of a GLP-1 medication for weight loss, making it the second company to offer a non-injectable version of the drug. The orforglipron medication, which will be sold under the brand name Foundayo, joins Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill as the only two oral GLP-1 medications to have FDA approval. Eli Lilly also manufactures the injectable Zepound and Mounjaro GLP-1 medications and Novo Nordisk makes Wegovy and Ozempic. Eli Lilly said Foundayo differs from the Wegovy pill in that there are no restrictions on when the pill can be taken. The Wegovy pill must be taken in the morning 30 minutes before eating or drinking.” (04/01/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by William J Watkins Jr.
“Since the beginning of the war, President Donald Trump has touted dismantlement of the Iranian government as the American endgame. Even as U.S. officials negotiate with their Iranian counterparts to end the fighting and restore stability to world energy markets, Trump says he still wants to see a ‘very serious form of a regime change’ in the ultimate peace deal. This imperial hubris is unworthy of the president of a federal republic and would cause the Founding Fathers to cringe.” (04/01/26)
“On March 18, a jury in rural Adams County, Ohio, rejected a defamation lawsuit in a matter of hours. That speed was itself a verdict — not just on the merits, but on the character of the case. Seven law enforcement officers had sued a music artist for using his own home security footage to criticize a police raid on his own home. The officers lost, in what civil liberties advocates called a huge First Amendment victory. The more important question, though, is going largely unasked — whether the officers who brought this lawsuit should face criminal scrutiny as well.” (04/01/26)
“Anthropic PBC is rushing to address the inadvertent release of internal source code behind Claude Code, an AI-powered assistant that has become a key moneymaker for the company. Thousands of copies of the code were removed from GitHub in response to copyright takedown requests from Anthropic, according to a notice on the popular developer platform. Anthropic later said the takedown impacted more GitHub repositories than intended and has since been significantly scaled back. … In a statement Tuesday, Anthropic confirmed the leak and said ‘no sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed.’ The company added: ‘This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach.'” (04/01/26)
“Political dysfunction is not limited to the United States of America. Take Canada. Things have gotten bad enough there that one province is taking measures to ‘dissolve the political bands which have connected them’ with the folks running everything from Ottawa. … Alberta’s secession is going to the ballot. Will the voters choose yes? Secession is a messy, difficult business. But it’s easier in Canada than in, say, the United States (where it led to war). So we will see how the people of the province really feel about how horrific the government in Ottawa really is.” (04/01/26)
