Trump stokes controversy by posting new AI Jesus image

President Donald Trump on Wednesday posted a controversial AI-generated image of himself and Jesus Christ just a day after he yanked a meme that appeared to depict him as the holy man amid widespread criticism.

Trump re-posted an image depicting Jesus blessing him, which was first posted by a right-wing Republican candidate for a Boston congressional seat.

“God might be playing his Trump card,” Daniel Kelly, the candidate who uses the Twitter handle @Irish4Trump, wrote in a caption, adding that “I was never a very religious man.”

Trump made no secret of his approval of the new meme and message. “The radical LEFT LUNATICS may not like this, but I think it’s quite nice,” Trump wrote on his social media site.

—New York Daily News

Trump administration promised 'gold standard science.' Scientists say they got fool's gold

LOS ANGELES — When President Donald Trump announced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his pick for Health and Human Services secretary, he declared that the appointment marked the return of "Gold Standard Scientific Research" in the U.S.

In May 2025 Trump signed the "Restoring Gold Standard Science" executive order. Agencies including NASA and the Department of Energy filed reports on how their science met the official White House "gold standard." Administration figures peppered public remarks, publications and social media posts with the phrase.

On paper, the administration's nine-point definition for "gold standard science" reads like a list of fundamental research integrity principles that any scientist would endorse: science that is reproducible, transparent, forthcoming on error and uncertainty, collaborative, skeptical, built on falsifiable hypotheses, impartially peer reviewed, accepting of negative results and free of conflicts of interest.

In practice, critics say, the phrase has become shorthand for science in which preferred outcomes outweigh inconvenient evidence. "This use of 'gold standard science' is deceptive. It sounds really good on its face. It's advocating for things that are normative in the scientific community," said Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group.

—Los Angeles Times

Minnesota Supreme Court rules Google ‘geofence’ data used to identify murder suspect unconstitutional

MINNEAPOLIS — A divided Minnesota Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that state law enforcement violated the rights of a Minneapolis man convicted of murder because a warrant that obtained data from Google to identify him as a suspect was overly broad.

Lawsuits around the country have tested the constitutionality of geofence warrants — which law enforcement use to gather digital data when they know the general location and time of a crime but do not have a suspect — including Chatrie v. United States, which is set to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court later this month.

This was the first constitutional analysis of geofence warrants by the state Supreme Court, and Justice Sarah Hennesy wrote the majority opinion, though the decision to rule on the case before the U.S. Supreme Court issues its opinion was questioned by other justices.

Hennesy wrote that Google holds a vast amount of “highly sensitive information about deeply personal activities.” That potentially includes a person’s “familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.” The fact that the government can obtain, through Google, a “comprehensive catalogue of a person’s physical movements recorded by the phone they carry is a privacy concern.”

—Star Tribune

Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner in critical condition, brother says

TEHRAN, Iran — Imprisoned Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi is in critical condition following a heart attack, her brother said Wednesday.

Hamidreza Mohammadi wrote on X that his sister has been severely weakened since suffering the heart attack in late March and has lost significant weight, raising serious concerns within the family.

Medical care in prison is also inadequate, he said, an issue supporters have raised in the past. Mohammadi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 for her activism against the oppression of women and the death penalty in Iran, is being held in a prison in the city of Zanjan.

According to her lawyer, she was sentenced again in early February to several years in prison and faces a two-year travel ban. Previous reports had already raised concerns about insufficient medical treatment, including calls for urgent cardiological care.

—dpa