This sounds like the plot of a spy thriller movie, except federal prosecutors say it was real and the target was Ivanka Trump. Federal prosecutors say a suspected Iran-linked terrorist plotted against Ivanka Trump as payback for President Trump ordering the strike that killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani back in 2020. According to the New York Post, recently captured terror suspect Mohammad Baqer Al-Saadi vowed to target Ivanka Trump after Soleimani was killed in the U.S. drone strike ordered during Trump’s first term. Sources told the Post the suspect viewed Ivanka as a symbolic way to “burn down the house of Trump” in retaliation for Soleimani’s death. The report claims Al-Saadi had a map of the Florida enclave where Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, own a multimillion-dollar home, along with threatening social media posts warning that neither “palaces nor the Secret Service” would protect Americans. Federal prosecutors say Al-Saadi was arrested in Turkey earlier this month before being extradited to the United States. According to court filings cited by the Post, investigators accuse him of involvement in multiple terror attacks and attempted attacks targeting American and Jewish sites across Europe and North America, including alleged firebombings, stabbings, and shootings tied to Iran-backed extremist networks. The Post also reported that Al-Saadi maintained close ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iraqi militia groups connected to Soleimani. Photos included in federal filings reportedly show the suspect meeting with Soleimani at military facilities, posing with missiles, and posting threats online for years. One image allegedly posted by the suspect showed a map near Ivanka Trump’s Florida neighborhood alongside an ominous message about “surveillance and analysis.” The allegations arrive as tensions involving Iran and Iranian-backed terror groups remain a major focus for the Trump administration following Operation Epic Fury. Neither Ivanka Trump nor the White House publicly commented on the alleged plot.

In a standoff over ethics and foreign affairs with the leader of the free world, a company can do worse than to post up a co-founder alongside the spiritual father of roughly 1 in 5 living human beings. Anthropic will pull that off next week, when Chris Olah, its lead on interpreting AI, joins the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, as he presents his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (that is, magnificent humanity), which concerns “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” The pope will break with tradition by appearing at the publication of his letter. The event will also include other church leaders and two theologians. It will undoubtedly be a day of envy in the comms office at OpenAI. And the White House will be frustrated seeing a firm it shut out go global, but these are temporal matters. All signs indicate that next week’s event will instead seek to refocus the attention of the faithful on what recurs through history, on the eternal. In one of his first speeches to fellow cardinals, Pope Leo echoed the past with the present, calling artificial intelligence “another industrial revolution.” On new things We don’t know what his encyclical will say, but its context indicates the pope believes humanity has entered an era of rapid growth powered by data centers, neural networks, and a vast electrical dynamo bent to the will of a manmade demiurge. Notably, his first encyclical will be dated May 15, the anniversary of the day his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, published the Rerum Novarum (or “On New Things”), the crucial Catholic doctrine written amid humanity’s first age of machines, on workers and capitalists and how they might collaborate for the “beauty of good order.” But for a hint of what to expect, we can look to prior messages on AI from the church. In January 2025, the Roman Curia released a note, Antiqua Et Nova (ancient and new), calling on believers to “a renewed appreciation of all that is human.” Which echoes a sentiment from the Rerum Novarum, that “it is the mind, or reason, which is the predominant element in us who are human creatures; it is this which renders a human being human, and distinguishes him essentially from the brute.” After humans But now brute machinery may, as Anthropic’s founder Dario Amodei wrote in his own extensive missive in 2024, “Machines of Loving Grace,” create a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” How is the Holy Father to console his flock when faced with its potential obsolescence? And why would he stand alongside one of the companies most responsible for ushering in this fresh new flavor of existential dread? Anthropic did not reply to a request for comment. But it may simply be that Anthropic has shown its willingness to engage with Christian theologians, among others, on these difficult questions. It is a company that has said humanity is in a kind of adolescence. And, in adolescence, we turn to fathers. Olah has reportedly been convening Christian thinkers on such topics since at least March. And, in his essay, Amodei wrote hopefully of AI furthering economic equity and men living meaningfully after we enter the era of truly powerful but benignly aligned artificial intelligence. If that’s how it turns out. Final days In particular, this question of alignment looms over next week. If the pope takes seriously AI’s economic potential, what might he make of basilisk and paperclip monster prophecies? Anthropic, after all, has been a leading proponent of guarding against a computer-powered apocalypse. Nathan Schneider, a professor at the University of Colorado who has been writing about the deep questions raised by artificial intelligence, drew attention to just this question when we spoke. “One other question I would pose, that I’m going to be reading the document for, is whether the Pope buys an apocalyptic narrative around AGI and a Singularity event,” he said. “I think there’s a good theological case to be made that too much worrying about AGI is a kind of idolatry.” The Rerum Novarum, he noted, was written in part as a rejection of another apocalyptic vision from man’s first industrial revolution: Karl Marx’s foretelling of the collapse of Capitalism (which, so far, not so good). AGI doomerism is, to Schneider, another attempt to secularize the end times. Stewarding the Earth is man’s business. Ending it is God’s. What lasts But the secular world will watch whether and how President Trump reacts to the joint appearance by two present-day giants who refuse to toe his particular line. The pope has had, after all, his own disagreements with the president, over immigration and U.S. incursions into Iran, but it’s unlikely that Anthropic is there for politics. This appearance has likely been in the works for some time. So the loudest thing both parties can say about those disputes with the White House is nothing at all. Moments like these are about what is enduring. Meanwhile, political controversies are the Kleenex of history. They dissolve. Look, Schneider says, for the pope, like his predecessor, to craft another path through the thicket of secular futures, of doomscapes and utopias, to a vision in which this new era might permit humans to give more attention to what his fellow bishops called “the continual search for the True and the Good.” Or as the prior Leo put it, to remember that “age gives way to age, but the events of one century are wonderfully like those of another, for they are directed by the providence of God, who overrules the course of history in accordance with His purposes in creating the race of man.” *** This is republished with permission from the author and Pirate Wires. The original can be found here. Brady Dale is the writer of the Front Stage Exit newsletter and writes for Pirate Wires. He was the author of the first book about FTX founder, crypto billionaire and convicted felon, Sam Bankman-Fried. 

America’s most hated time ritual may finally be clocking out. Twice a year, Americans collectively stumble through the same bizarre routine: forgetting how microwaves work, showing up early to church, late to brunch, and spending three straight days wondering why they suddenly feel exhausted. Now, Congress is finally inching toward ending the clock-changing madness for good. The Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Committee just advanced legislation that could eventually make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, pushing the long-running “lock the clock” movement closer to reality than it has been in years. The proposal, known as the Sunshine Protection Act, was folded into a larger transportation package this week and passed out of committee by a massive 48-1 vote. In other words, Washington may have finally found the one issue capable of uniting exhausted Americans. Florida Republicans Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Vern Buchanan have been leading the charge after years of public frustration over changing clocks twice a year. The effort was previously championed by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose version famously passed the Senate in 2022 before dying in the House. Buchanan celebrated the latest momentum this week, calling the twice-a-year clock change “outdated and unpopular.” At this point, changing clocks feels like one of those strange traditions Americans continue mostly because nobody in Washington can quite figure out how to stop it. If the legislation eventually becomes law, most Americans would remain on the brighter summer-style schedule year-round. That means sunsets after 5 p.m. during winter instead of darkness arriving before many people even leave work. Of course, there’s a catch. Sunrises in some parts of the country would drift past 8 a.m. — and in certain areas, even closer to 9 a.m. Critics argue that could create problems for children heading to school in darkness and potentially affect sleep and health. Some Democrats and sleep experts are already pushing back. During Thursday’s markup, Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-CA) warned about possible health concerns tied to permanent daylight saving time. But honestly, Americans increasingly seem willing to accept almost any trade-off if it means never having to manually reset the clock in a car dashboard again. Nineteen states have already passed laws supporting permanent daylight saving time if Congress approves it federally. Maine and Texas joined the list last year. There are still several hurdles before anything changes nationally. The full House would need to pass the package, the Senate would need to agree, and President Donald Trump would ultimately need to sign it. Until then, Americans can look forward to once again pretending they totally remembered the time change when clocks roll back this November.

Stephen Colbert spent a decade obsessing over President Donald Trump. For his final “Late Show” appearance, the far-Left host wouldn’t so much as utter Trump’s name. By design, of course. Thursday’s CBS finale proved a bizarre affair, a forced repudiation of what Colbert & co. built over the show’s 11-year run. He pretended he was Johnny Carson signing off for the last time, an aw, shucks comic looking back on a show filled with gentle riffs on news and culture. “The Late Show” was anything but that. Still, Colbert must have decided not to give his literal devil his due. That left an hour-plus affair that felt dishonest and jarring. Think a mashup of forced gratitude and weak-tea jokes. “The Late Show” went out not with Clapter but by defying its true nature. The veteran host began with charity to both the gig and his employers. “We were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years … we can’t take that for granted,” he said, despite having attacked the Tiffany Network early and often since it announced his cancellation last July. Remember how, mere days ago, Colbert and former “Late Show” host David Letterman watched as employees hurled furniture from atop the Ed Sullivan Theater to target the CBS logo waiting below? Lucky or spiteful? Colbert can’t make up his mind. Still. Celebrities in the crowd interrupted Colbert’s final monologue, including Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, Tig Notaro, Ryan Reynolds, and “Saturday Night Live” veteran Tim Meadows. None proved funny, but the star power fed Colbert’s assertion that his cancellation will be a loss for the culture. It’s actually more painful for stars who will have one less outlet to hawk their films, TV shows, and records. Colbert described his late-night approach as “feeling the news with you” over the years, which made even less sense than his trademark “truthiness” shtick. He lectured audiences on how to process the news headlines and avoided stories that hurt his fellow Democrats. But he couldn’t say that aloud. Not even on his final night. That last monologue avoided politics entirely, including a certain world leader. The results were tepid, like a weak spin on what Jay Leno shared for more than two decades on NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” Colbert’s heart wasn’t in it. Nor were the writers’, apparently. Yet throughout the night, Colbert flashed his considerable skills as a host and comic. He always had solid timing and delivery chops. That was never in question. “What do I plan to do after tonight? The answer is, ‘drugs,’” he quipped, turning a milquetoast joke into a solid laugh. Still, throughout the night, Colbert’s rage at his dismissal and anti-Trump fury peeked through. One daffy dolphin sketch included a line suggesting his dismissal “was purely a financial decision.” Yes, a network has every right to cancel a show that loses a reported $40 million a year. No one has disputed that number, shared at the time of the show’s cancellation. Yet the legacy media and Colbert himself have done all they could to ignore that inconvenient truth. Colbert played the rebellious employee to the end, forcing his band to play a classic “Peanuts” song he claimed could get CBS in legal hot water. Unlikely, but this Rebel Without a Cause never took any prisoners. He played The Victim and Martyr Cards to the bitter end. The final episode did land a stellar guest – Sir Paul McCartney. Sir Paul remains miraculously unaffected by both Father Time and the fact that he’s Paul Bleepin’ McCartney. He’s just a funny, unassuming lad from Liverpool. Still. The final interview was far from Colbert’s best, but the moment didn’t require a Walter Cronkite-level interrogation. Macca merely played along with the bits, an old pro delivering as usual. McCartney did allow for two Trumpian references. He shared how he had to wear bright orange makeup when he appeared with his old band at The Ed Sullivan Theater back in 1964. “I hear that’s popular in certain circles these days,” Colbert said. The host didn’t lean into that Orange Man Bad shtick, though. He wanted to make his final show about him, not the man who became his White Whale and drained the humor from him. McCartney attempted a second Trumpian reference, explaining what it meant to play in America for the first time, way back when. “America was the land of the free, the greatest democracy … that’s what it was, and still is hopefully,” the singer said, another wink to Colbert’s far-Left faithful. Then things got … weird. A recurring bit throughout the night found The Ed Sullivan Theater flooded with an odd green light. Later, backstage, a green wormhole appeared, ready to suck Colbert and everyone in the studio into a void. They even trotted out astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to quasi-explain it. You’ve got the number one late-night talk show but you’re still getting canceled, Tyson said, another attempt to ignore that $40 million annual loss. “It’s not a hole, it’s a metaphor,” said Jon Stewart, offering his old “Daily Show” chum some wisdom. “When faced with something dark … stare it down and laugh,” Stewart said, sharing some final wisdom for his pal. Colbert got paid untold millions for hosting a talk show, will write a future “Lord of the Rings” movie, and will likely host a podcast or similar program before the year ends. If only the rest of us faced such dark challenges. Then, Colbert’s other late-night hosts dropped by (except Bill Maher, who wouldn’t be caught dead in such stale shtick) for more forced gaiety. The show wrapped with McCartney performing The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” while Colbert sang backup with Elvis Costello, ex-“Late Show” bandleader Jon Batiste, and the band’s current head honcho, Louis Cato. “This may come for all of our shows,” fellow far-Left talker John Oliver said late in the final episode, referencing Colbert’s fate. Yes, it will, and likely sooner than later. Even Letterman predicted as much recently. And everyone in The Ed Sullivan Theater on Thursday was likely in denial as to why. *** Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. He’s also the host of The Hollywood in Toto Podcast. Follow him at @HollywoodInToto. 

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** My trivia team, Post Trebek Stress Disorder, just won the first-ever “Jeopardy!” Bar Trivia League. It might seem like a team made up entirely of former “Jeopardy!” contestants (whose deep bench includes several three-time “Jeopardy!” winners, some of whom didn’t come out to play during the course of the Bar Trivia League) would automatically be the front-runner in a bar trivia contest. But we were weren’t. It felt like we were underdogs the entire time, and we had to overcome several tremendous obstacles to win the whole thing. At least in our minds, we were the Little Trivia Team That Could. I started PTSD in 2013 after I won three games of “Jeopardy!” and couldn’t let go of the afterglow. One other guy, Jared Hall, who lived in Austin and had recently won six games, was my co-founder. The rule quickly became that in order to play on our team, you had to have at least appeared on “Jeopardy!” once. So whenever someone from Austin showed up on my TV, I found them on social media and asked them to join. Not everyone said yes, but those who did soon found themselves belonging to what a 2017 Texas Monthly article called “The Best Little Trivia Team In Texas.” But in recent years, PTSD had faded. The desire to answer questions while drinking cider still burned in me, but other teammates had moved out of town, lost interest, had families, or, in a couple of extremely sad cases, passed away. Then in the summer of 2024, my teammates Kate, Cecily, and I got the call to appear on “Pop Culture Jeopardy!,” a new “Jeopardy!” variant that was airing on Amazon Prime (though is now on Netflix, where people actually watch it). Our team lost, but it turns out that Jessica, one of the women who barely beat us, also lives in Austin and, in fact, had been one of my prospective PTSD recruits after she won three games. But her episodes aired in March of 2020, a time when everyone kind of lost track of reality for a couple of years.  Jessica was such a good trivia player that I said to myself, “I’m never playing against her again.” Instead of avoiding her entirely, which wasn’t an option, I re-upped my invitation to play with us. She was down, which was very fortunate because she proved to be the secret sauce that would bring my wavering trivia team back to life. She was not only the perfect teammate but also a co-captain and partner with whom I could trust my trivia team’s legacy. When “Jeopardy!” announced the Bar Trivia League, she was, as always, into it.  And so Jess and I set forth to slay the trivia dragon. It wasn’t always just the two of us, though sometimes it was. Occasionally, guest stars would join. Her husband came out one night, and my wife came out another night, to enjoy the drinks and encourage us as we engaged in our dorky mental athletics. For two games, the most important two of the season, I stacked the box with a full team of six former “Jeopardy!” contestants, and it’s a good thing I did — because we needed to get every one of those answers right.  Our first week, we played conservatively, probably too conservatively, but it’s a good thing we did because the Final Jeopardy! question was a stumper about an obscure cable company (Optimum), and if we’d bet too aggressively, our league would have been over before it started. After that, the strategy became clear. Though you receive five points for a league win, teams were playing all over the country, and not directly against us on any given night, so total points earned serve as the tiebreaker. You need to bet all your points every time a Daily Double hits.  Unlike in regular “Jeopardy!,” in the bar league every team gets a chance to answer every question, so you see scores in the hundreds of thousands that would never be possible in a regular “Jeopardy!” game. For the next four weeks, we scored more than 300,000 points a game, except for one off week where we scored 252,000 points. One week, we scored more than 388,000 points. But this strategy also has its risky side; if we missed a big Daily Double question, we’d zero out our scoreboard. Like a slugger swinging for the fences on every pitch, there was a chance for a big whiff that would cost us the title.  By week two, there were already only 31 undefeated teams left in the country. That number cut in half the next week. After week five, there were eight, and we were one of them. However, there was another team in Austin, also comprised of several former “Jeopardy!” contestants, that remained undefeated. I had a bitter personal conflict with them, as I chronicled in an article at my previous employer. Jess, who’s friends with everybody, continued to hang out with them. But at their regular Wednesday night trivia gig, they basically avoided her and spoke around her in whispers.  The other team had found a loophole. You can only play JBL under your official team name one night a week. But since the games change every day, you can play multiple times a week under a pseudonym. This occurred to me early on, and I proposed to Jess that we occasionally invoke the Assassin’s Creed and try to do that to take out rivals. But she said that would be unsportsmanlike and uncool. So I allowed my co-captain to guide my conscience like Jiminy Cricket.  Our rivals, desperate for victory, had no such compunction. On that Thursday night at the Via 313 pizzeria near the University of Texas, they snuck in right before the game started at 7. They might as well have thrown down the glove. They’d come to take us out.  Unluckily for them, a new ringer had appeared on our team, a guy named Caleb who just two weeks earlier had fought “Jeopardy!” super-champion Jamie Ding to the death and had lost. Fortunately for us, Caleb is engaged to a guy who’s a big professional wrestling fan, so he knew a WWE answer, “ladder match,” that our enemy team didn’t. And then, in Final Jeopardy!, we got the right answer (Ian Fleming), while they didn’t (John le Carré). When the host announced their wrong answer, our entire team laughed involuntarily, and our enemies slunk out of there ashamed. Demoralized, they lost their next game under their official team name and emailed Jess, wishing us good luck. One more obstacle removed.  By this point, we were down to six undefeated teams left in the country. PTSD stood well ahead of most of them, in second place. But there was a team in Flossmoor, Illinois, called “Bucket of Kneecaps,” that was a couple hundred thousand points ahead of us. We decided to play conservatively since catching them was basically impossible if they won out. Even if we didn’t win the national title, we could still win the Central South region, which would at least come with a thousand-dollar prize.  After an uninspiring week seven win, it seemed like second place was our destiny. But then I woke up on Wednesday morning of the last week of play to find out that Bucket of Kneecaps had lost. What I didn’t know then, but know now, is that a player from Washington, D.C., also a former “Jeopardy!” contestant, had traveled to Chicago specifically to take them out. Apparently, his team had finished second after a drunkenly bad Daily Double bet in week one, removing their chances at a national title. But he was determined to challenge whoever was left in the final week, because he wanted the league to have, as he later told me, a “worthy champion.”  This is apparently an extremely well-connected man because he put together two teams to challenge Bucket of Kneecaps at that bar in suburban Chicago. And he won. It turns out that Bucket of Kneecaps was just one man, apparently quite friendly with the trivia host and bar ownership. Let’s just say they all exchanged angry words after the game.  It won’t surprise you that this trivia ronin showed up at Via 313 in Austin the very next night, to test PTSD, which was now playing for the national title. And he gave us hell. We were in third place after round one. Early on in Double Jeopardy!, one of our teammates, who’d been sitting quietly for weeks, pulled an answer about a question involving a pasta shape named after an Italian word for cake (tortellini). No one else in the bar got it right, and suddenly we were in first place.  At the end of the round, we remained in first, tied for points with another team that showed up every week to try and beat us. But we were ahead of them because Jess had been speed-typing our answers on her laptop all night. The final category was NOVELS, which I felt good about, and the final question involved a 24-hour live reading of a novel in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was obvious pretty quickly that the answer was Moby Dick, and that was ballgame. We’d won the “Jeopardy!” Bar Trivia League.  As a prize, we get $1,000 for winning our region, plus a pizza party at the venue paid for by “Jeopardy!” In addition, everyone who played 50% of the games or more gets an all-expense-paid trip to LA, including airfare, hotel, a tour of the “Jeopardy!” studio, attendance at a “Jeopardy!” taping, and a meeting with “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings and “Jeopardy!” producers. The initial prize involved a “Jeopardy!” audition, but obviously, we don’t qualify for that. Three of us, Jess, Kate, and I, will gladly accept the prize and will head to LA whenever the call comes. This may seem like an ironic reward for a team comprised of former “Jeopardy!” contestants, but I have a plan. When I appeared on “Jeopardy!” in the Paleolithic year of 2013, it was a very different show. Once your run was done, you didn’t get to appear again unless you’d qualified for the Tournament of Champions. But the rules have changed, and there are many different levels of tournaments now. People who’ve won three games come back all the time. Contestants who won zero games get second chances, and in a few cases have advanced deep into tournaments and won hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, you know, why not us? There was no other chance on earth “Jeopardy!” would invite me, a guy who’d been on the show a decade and a half ago and had performed well but not exceptionally, back for another bite of the apple. For Jessica, who also appeared before the super-tournament era, the situation was the same. And Kate had never won at all, not finishing up her Final Jeopardy! answer in time despite the fact that she knew it, a fact that has haunted her for nearly a decade. I want redemption for myself and for two of my best friends in the world. The only way any of us were going to even have a prayer to get back on “Jeopardy!” was to claw our way up (with integrity and friendship) out of the bar-trivia pits, like Bruce Wayne in “The Dark Knight Rises.” And we did it. *** Neal Pollack, “the greatest living American writer,” is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time “Jeopardy!” champion.