Author: Isabella Taylor

Supreme Court news broke Friday as sources close to both justices confirmed to CBS News that neither Justice Samuel Alito nor Justice Clarence Thomas plans to retire this year, ending months of speculation that Trump might be able to lock in a fourth Supreme Court appointment before the November midterms. Summary Alito, 76, has already hired all four law clerks for the upcoming annual term and intends to continue serving into at least 2027, sources close to the justice told ABC News, while Thomas, 77, the court’s longest-serving current member, is also expected to remain on the bench. The decision…

Circle launched CPN Managed Payments on April 8, a fully managed stablecoin settlement solution that makes the Circle Payments Network accessible to banks, payment service providers, and fintechs without requiring them to manage digital assets, custody infrastructure, or blockchain operations directly. Summary Partners interact entirely in fiat while Circle manages the complete digital asset lifecycle including USDC minting and burning, payment orchestration, compliance controls, and blockchain infrastructure, reducing the adoption barrier for institutions that lack crypto licenses or technical capacity. USDC has supported more than $70 trillion in total on-chain settlement since inception, with on-chain transaction volume approaching $12 trillion…

BitGo announced that AndX USA LLC has launched its US crypto exchange 2026 entry on top of BitGo’s Crypto-as-a-Service infrastructure, giving the global digital asset platform nationwide operations across all 50 states under an OCC-regulated custody framework backed by $250 million in insurance coverage. Summary AndX, a New York-headquartered AI-native Web3 financial platform that already operates in Turkey, the UAE, India, Brazil, the Philippines, and South Africa. The platform runs on BitGo Bank and Trust, National Association, the first federally chartered digital asset trust bank owned by a publicly traded company. AndX CEO Viru Raparthi said the partnership enables the…

In Trump news today, President Trump criticized Pope Leo XIV as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” in a social media post that escalated a days-long public feud with the first American pope, who has repeatedly condemned the US-Israel war on Iran and called Trump’s pre-strike threat to wipe out Iranian civilization “truly unacceptable.” Summary Trump also claimed Pope Leo supports Iran having nuclear weapons, a claim the pope did not make, and said he did not want “a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States,” adding that Leo had not been on anyone’s list to…

CBS News reported that AI in Hollywood has reached a new threshold as actor Val Kilmer, who died in April 2025 at 65, appears in over an hour of finished footage in the upcoming film As Deep as the Grave through state-of-the-art generative AI, constructed from archival material his family provided and executed under SAG guidelines with compensation paid to his estate. Summary Kilmer was cast as Father Fintan, a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist, five years before his death but was too ill from throat cancer to shoot any scenes, leading director Coerte Voorhees to pursue a generative…

Goldman Sachs filed a registration statement with the SEC on April 14 for the Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Premium Income ETF, the first bitcoin ETF news from the Wall Street giant that proposes directly issuing its own crypto income product rather than simply holding third-party spot funds. Summary The fund will invest at least 80% of net assets in instruments providing bitcoin exposure, primarily shares of spot bitcoin ETPs such as BlackRock’s IBIT and Fidelity’s FBTC, then sell call options on those positions to collect monthly premiums. The options overwrite level will range from 40% to 100% of exposure depending on…

Coinglass shows $2.221B of BTC longs below $73,610 and $913M of shorts above $81,264, turning the next $10K band into a $3.1B liquidation minefield for traders. Summary Coinglass data indicate that if Bitcoin falls below $73,610, cumulative long liquidation intensity on major centralized exchanges jumps to about $2.221 billion. On the upside, a clean break above $81,264 would put around $913 million of shorts at risk of liquidation, turning a relatively small move into a potential $3.1 billion forced‑flow event. The new band extends an April pattern in which Coinglass maps have repeatedly shown billion‑dollar liquidation clusters just a few…

An ICE agent charged 2026 with two counts of felony second-degree assault faces a nationwide arrest warrant after allegedly pointing his duty weapon at the heads of two civilians in a moving vehicle during the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Thursday. Summary Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., 35, a Maryland resident and ICE Enforcement and Removal officer, allegedly pulled alongside a civilian vehicle on a Minneapolis highway shoulder on February 5 and pointed his weapon directly at the driver and passenger. This is the first criminal case against a federal immigration officer stemming from Operation…

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index shows the performance gap between US and Chinese AI models has compressed to just 2.7%, down from a double-digit lead as recently as 2023, as Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 holds a 39-point Elo lead over ByteDance’s best-performing model on the benchmarks Stanford tracks. Summary The 423-page report, released April 14, finds that the US and Chinese models have traded first place multiple times since early 2025, with DeepSeek-R1 briefly matching the top US model in February 2025 before being surpassed. The US leads China in private AI investment ($285.9 billion vs $12.4 billion) and notable model…

CFTC AI news came directly from Capitol Hill Thursday as Chairman Mike Selig told the House Agriculture Committee that artificial intelligence tools, specifically Microsoft’s Copilot, are filling surveillance and investigation gaps at an agency that has lost roughly 25% of its workforce since 2025, even as Congress prepares to hand it primary oversight of the US crypto market. Summary Tools such as AI are going to be very helpful in surveilling and bringing the investigations, and we’re incorporating that into various workflows,” Selig told lawmakers, citing Copilot as one productivity tool across the agency. The CFTC currently operates with only…