Correspondents’ dinner chaos offset by viral clip of man eating salad

As guests dove for cover and Secret Service agents spirited high-level federal officials out of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, one man could be seen casually finishing his salad.

Michael Glantz, a senior agent with Creative Artists Agency, appeared unperturbed amid the chaos as Secret Service agents swirled around him and freaked-out fellow diners huddled under their tables.

Elsewhere in the room, one journalist could be seen pouring himself another glass of wine— perhaps understandable under the circumstances — and other guests apparently grabbed bottles on their way out. But Glantz was the only one to go viral.

The approximately 2,000 attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner had barely dug into their spring pea and burrata salad when a series of apparent gunshots rang out on the other side of the doors to the ballroom at the Washington Hilton.

—New York Daily News

Supreme Court wary of barring police from phone searches to find crime suspects

WASHINGTON — A divided Supreme Court heard arguments Monday on whether the police use of phone tracking data violates the Constitution’s protection against “unreasonable searches.”

Most of the justices sounded wary of barring investigators from obtaining precise location history from Google or cellphone providers if it helps find a murderer or a bank robber.

“I’m trying to figure out why this was bad police work,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh told an attorney representing the defendant, Odell Chatrie.

He said a police detective in Virginia was seeking clues to find a bank robber and sought a “geofence warrant” from a judge that told Google to turn over data from phones that were near the bank during the hour of the robbery. “In the end, he got three names,” Kavanaugh said, including Chatrie, who pleaded guilty.

—Los Angeles Times

Hoover Dam is headed for trouble under new emergency Colorado River plan

Federal water managers are putting the nation’s largest dam in a precarious position as they try to balance out the Colorado River system in a year of record low snowpack.

Toward the bottom of the Bureau of Reclamation’s marquee announcement last week was a paragraph that said lower flows out of Lake Powell could reduce Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric power generation by about 40% as soon as this fall.

According to projections, Lake Mead could fall nearly 30 feet in the next two years, more than 8 feet past the 2022 record low.

The announcement underscores a problem that rural, urban and tribal utilities across Nevada, California and Arizona have been grappling with — aging turbines cannot accommodate low reservoir levels, and a lack of accessible funding means officials may have to look elsewhere to meet their power needs.

—Las Vegas Review-Journal

Al-Qaida branch kills Mali defense chief in suicide attack

Mali’s defense minister was killed in a suicide attack on his home on Saturday, during a coordinated assault by an al-Qaida affiliate across several locations in the West African country.

Sadio Camara’s assailants struck his residence near a military barracks close to the capital, Bamako, with a car bomb, Interior Minister Issa ​Ousmane ​Coulibaly ⁠said. The fighting also killed worshipers at a nearby mosque, he ⁠said.

“A suicide car bomb targeted the residence of the minister as part of the wider wave of terrorist incidents,” Coulibaly said. “He engaged in a firefight with the assailants, some of whom he managed to eliminate, before being caught in intense clashes.”

The Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and separatist rebel group Front de libération de l’Azawad claimed responsibility for the wave of assaults at military sites in Bamako, Kati, Kidal and other areas including Gao and Mopti, according to authorities.

—Bloomberg News