Donald Trump's transition team has approached leading House Republicans to let them know the president-elect prefers to have Congress pay for the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, House GOP officials told CNN Thursday.

Throughout his campaign, Trump emphatically promised that he would force Mexico to pay for the border wall.

But now the transition team is telling Republicans in private meetings that Trump wants to fund it through the appropriations process, the officials said. The GOP could add billions of dollars to the spending bill that must be passed by April 28 in order to keep the government open, and the Democrats "may well find themselves in the position to shut down all of government to stop the build out of a wall, or of a barrier, or of a fence," Indiana Rep. Luke Messer (R) said Thursday. Messer added that while it's "big dollars," it's also a "question of priorities." Catherine Garcia

Republican voters in Alabama will decide Tuesday whether to nominate Sen. Luther Strange, the incumbent appointed by the state's unpopular former governor and supported by President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), or Roy Moore, the controversial former judge who has consistently led in the polls and is backed by Trump's most prominent supporters. Trump held a rally for Strange in Huntsville last Friday, and Vice President Mike Pence was in Birmingham to boost him on Monday night, while Stephen Bannon headlined a Monday night barn rally for Moore, joined by Brexit leader Nigel Farange and Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson.

McConnell's allied super PAC has spent millions on ads against Moore, a conservative most famous for defying court orders to remove 10 Commandment monuments and accept a Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage — both of which got him removed from the Alabama Supreme Court. Trump has tweeted his support for Strange and phoned in to local radio shows to talk him up as a loyal backer in the Senate.

Bannon has made it his top priority to unseat Strange and boost Moore, hoping to launch an insurgency against the Republican establishment. He was unsparing in his comments Monday night. He called Tuesday a "day of reckoning" for McConnell, his allies, and "the donors" and "corporatists that put up the money" for campaigns. "Mitch McConnell and his permanent political class is the most corrupt, incompetent group of individuals in this country!" he said, insisting, "We did not come here to defy Donald Trump, we came here to praise and honor him."

The winner of Tuesday's primary will face Democrat Doug Jones in deep-red Alabama's December special election. Peter Weber

If President Trump's speeches weren't like gas station bathrooms — "you can only really complain about on thing at a time" — people might be asking "what kind of a human being wants more brain damage?" Trevor Noah said on Monday's Daily Show. But of course, Trump's comments about the NFL not allowing hard enough hits were overshadowed by his broadside against NFL players who protest racism by kneeling during get nation anthem.

Noah compared Trump's "son of bitches" comment with his "nice people" line from last month's neo-Nazi march, and said the weird thing is that until Friday, taking the knee — which started under Obama — had nothing to do with Trump. It does now, he said, and now the NFL is kneeling against Trump and racism, but not the flag. "If they wanted to disrespect the country," he noted pointedly, "they wouldn't kneel silently, they would do crazy things like insult Gold Star families, or make fun of POWs like John McCain, or say that America is morally equivalent to Putin's Russia."

If Trump doesn't think black athletes should kneel during the anthem, when is it the right time for black people to protest in Trump's America? Noah asked. He ran through some comments from Trump, his press secretary, his treasury secretary, and his supporters, finding the most pernicious argument to be that wealthy black players kneeling quietly are being ungrateful. After all, "when a white billionaire spends a year screaming that America is a disaster, he's in touch with the country," Noah said. He ended with an homage to Dr. Seuss: "You still haven't told us the right way for black people to protest. I mean, we know it's wrong to do it in the streets, it's wrong to do it in the tweets, you cannot do it on the field, you cannot do it if you've kneeled. And don't do it if you're rich, you ungrateful son of a bitch, because there's one thing that's a fact: you cannot protest if you're black." Watch below. Peter Weber

Early Tuesday, a Palestinian man opened fire at a checkpoint to enter the upscale Israeli settlement Har Adar, between Jerusalem and the West Bank, killing an Israeli police officer and two private security guards, and wounding a fourth man. The attacker, identified as Nimr Mahmoud Ahmed Jamal, 37, was shot dead. He had hidden among the 150 or so Palestinian workers lined up to enter the settlement, and fired when police grew suspicious and asked him to stop, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said. The attack, during Jewish high holidays, could set back U.S. mediation efforts. President Trump's envoy, Jason Greenblatt, had just arrived in the region.

Gaza's Hamas-led government praised the attack but did not claim responsibility for it, and Israel's Shin Bet security service said the troubled gunman appeared to have acted alone. Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz said the attack was "a message to special U.S. envoy Greenblatt" that "Israel's security was and yet remains the supreme consideration in the government's policy, and is above any other consideration of improving and easing the lives of the Palestinians." Palestinian attacks are eased recently, but since September 2015, Palestinians have killed 51 Israelis, two American visitors, and a British tourist; in that time, Israeli forces have killed more than 255 Palestinians. Peter Weber

Stephen Colbert said Monday that he watched the news over the weekend, then "to cheer up, I watched Ken Burns' Vietnam," about a "slightly less divisive time in America." He was talking about President Trump's feud with the NFL, which began Friday when the president encouraged NFL owners to fire "son of a bitch" players who kneel during the national anthem. "After all, the singing of the national anthem is a sacred time," Colbert said, "when red-blooded Americans stand up and run to the bathroom, because that's when the line is the shortest."

"'Son of a bitch,'" Colbert repeated. "That was unnecessary roughness. There should be a flag on that play, and I'm going to say, a Confederate flag." Trump insisted that his comments targeting only black athletes had nothing to do with race, but Colbert wasn't convinced. "Kneeling during the national anthem has everything to do with race — just like your presidency," he said. It has nothing to do with the American flag, however. "Saying that kneeling is a protest against the flag is like saying that Gandhi's hunger strikes were a protest against snacking," Colbert said. In fact, there are rules about how to act around a flag, he added, but it's clearly Trump violating them, not the NFL players.

"Believe it or not, Trump's war with the NFL this weekend wasn't the only fight with black athletes," Colbert said, pointing to Trump's other feud, with the NBA, disinviting the Golden Warriors to the White House because Steph Curry was meh on attending. "But in this instance, Donald Trump is messing with forces he doesn't understand: LeBron James," Colbert said. And James wasn't the only one dunking on Trump on Twitter, he added, reading the "sickest" burn from the Chicago Bulls' Robin Lopez. "It's official," he concluded. "Donald Trump is now going to get fewer visits from basketball players than Kim Jong Un." Watch below. Peter Weber

Monday night's installment of celebrity mean tweets on Jimmy Kimmel Live featured some of America's biggest stars reading unkind things about themselves from Twitter, and in some cases, responding with their own insults, a few of which are pretty profane. Gal Gadot kicked things off, confusedly responding to an admirer's critique of her body while R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" played in the background. Emma Watson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jennifer Anniston, Dave Chappelle, Kristin Bell, and Elisabeth Moss swatted away relatively mild tweets before John Lithgow, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Jennifer Lawrence got saltier ones, and Kumail Nanjiani reacted to his 140-character query by going NSFW himself. Most of the mean-tweeters were people you have never heard of, but Alec Baldwin's tweet was from a certain current president of the United States. Watch below. Peter Weber

Six days after Hurricane Maria churned over Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm, destroying homes and leaving almost the entire U.S. territory without electricity during the hottest season, things are "brutal," resident Juan Bautista Gonzalez tells Bloomberg News. "No one can sleep. I spend all night tossing and turning. This is chaos." Many people don't have enough food or water, there is no internet, cellphone service is scarce, gas lines are long, and few people have air conditioning.

Maria cost $40 billion to $85 billion in insured losses across the Caribbean but mostly in Puerto Rico, catastrophe-modeling firm AIR Worldwide estimated on Monday. The federal government stepped up its relief efforts on Monday, sending FEMA head Brock Long and Tom Bossert to the island. Along with 1,400 National Guard personnel, FEMA said it has 700 people on the ground in Puerto Rico and the Energy Department has crews working on the long process of restoring power.

Congress is discussing an aid package, the five living former presidents extended their One America Appeal fundraising campaign to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands on Monday, and after being criticized for tweeting about the NFL but not a U.S. territory with 3.4 million suffering Americans, President Trump sent out some tweets on Monday night:

In an interview with Fox News, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló acknowledged the territory's debt problem but asked for Congress to send help to address the "unfolding humanitarian crisis" in part of America. Peter Weber

Dressed in his wedding suit, Clayton Cook didn't hesitate to leap into a park lake to rescue one of the children watching him take photos with his new wife.

Last Friday, Canadian newlyweds Clayton and Brittany Cook noticed three kids were following them around Victoria Park in Kitchener, Ontario, as they took their pictures. At one point, Clayton saw two of the kids looking at the water, and spotted the third child struggling to get out. Clayton jumped in, grabbed the boy, and brought him to safety.

The entire time, photographer Darren Hatt was snapping pictures, and he shared the story on his Facebook page. It wasn't until later that the couple realized how the situation could have played out if Clayton hadn't noticed what was going on. "It's hitting us more that if we weren't in the right place at the right time, things may have gone differently and perhaps even tragically," Brittany told HuffPost. Catherine Garcia