What happened
President Donald Trump abruptly ended an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” broadcast yesterday after Kristen Welker challenged his assertions that last week’s California primaries and the 2020 election were “dirty” and “rigged.” During the interview, taped Friday at a farm in Wisconsin, Trump “made a series of false, misleading or exaggerated comments,” NBC News said, including that he “didn’t promise” or “guarantee no war.”

Who said what
Trump “repeatedly pledged not to involve the United States in war,” The New York Times said, including in his 2024 victory speech, when he said “I’m not going to start a war.” During Welker’s interview, Trump “appeared to become agitated” when she asked about the purportedly defunct $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, The Washington Post said. And when she pressed Trump for evidence that there was “cheating” in California’s notoriously slow election count, he raised his voice, called Welker “either stupid or crooked” and said the “fake, dirty press” knows about the “rigged” elections. “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough,” Trump said. “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

What next?
Welker said yesterday that Trump later agreed that heavy rain on the metal barn roof had caused audio complications and agreed to sit down for another interview at an undisclosed time.

What happened
Former “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley yesterday said he hadn’t expected to be fired after criticizing CBS News editorial chief Bari Weiss (pictured above) at a staff meeting last week. But “somebody had to stand up,” he told The New York Times. She was putting “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”

Who said what
After he had gotten final sign-off on a report on ICE’s killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Pelley said, “Weiss sends an email to my boss” asking for some post-deadline changes, including, “Can we make the protesters look more violent?” and “Good’s car — you need to describe her as driving toward the officer.” That is “not what you see on the video,” he said, but it’s “what the president said.” A CBS News spokesperson said Weiss’ suggestions “had no political motivation” and sought to make the piece “strong, fair and accurate.” 

What next?
Weiss is “a lovely person,” but “television’s not her thing” and she needs to be removed, Pelley said. “It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”

The bees of the United States are in trouble, and so is their honey. Disease and budget cuts have put their populations in peril across the country as honey demand has skyrocketed. And the government plans to close an important agricultural research center, risking further loss of bees and their beloved nectar.

The U.S. has seen “staggering honeybee colony losses,” said the bee research nonprofit Project Apis m. Between June 2024 and March 2025, 1.6 million colonies were lost, with commercial beekeepers sustaining an average loss of 62%. More than 60% of honeybee colonies that died from June 2024 to January 2025 were “infected by mites resistant to the industry’s most widely used pesticide,” said Bloomberg.

Despite these losses, the USDA is decommissioning the 6,500-acre Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland, “home to the nation’s premier bee research and disease diagnosis hub,” Jennie L. Durant, a research affiliate in human ecology at the University of California, Davis, said at The Conversation. According to the USDA, the closure is because “building maintenance and renovations would cost an estimated $500 million,” said Durant. 

The Beltsville lab “costs $3.2 million a year” to run, Zac Lamas, a researcher at the facility, told The Associated Foreign Press. “We responded to a $600 million problem,” so the “idea that we are redundant and expensive isn’t a good way to generalize the value of this lab.”