Lorna Shore, Within Temptation and President are among the best new metal songs this week.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the White House will be informing other countries about how much they will be tariffed via letters and what they will be required to pay on exported goods to the United States.  

A major manhunt was initiated in the state of Louisiana after 11 inmates initially escaped from the Orleans Parish Jail. However, two of the eleven have now been caught -- making it nine escaped inmates on the run.

Democrats, left-leaning pundits, and legacy media outlets are all talking about the “bombshells” included in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s forthcoming book on the last days of the Biden campaign, “Original Sin.” Tapper, a CNN anchor, and Thompson, an Axios reporter, interviewed more than 200 people to catalogue Biden’s obvious cognitive and physical decline, and the lengths to which the people around him went to cover it up. But while the book certainly seems to contain previously unknown details, many don’t seem to be “bombshells” to the average American who watched President Joe Biden stumble his way through his re-election campaign. Here are the “bombshells.” Biden’s staff considered the possibility that he might need a wheelchair. Biden’s halting gait was the topic of much conversation among his critics, and according to “Original Sin,” it was a concern discussed at length by his staffers. The consensus was that he might need a wheelchair, but with him still on the ballot at the time, they worried about the optics of taking that step prior to the 2024 election. “Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election,” Tapper and Thompson wrote. Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, had also privately conveyed his concerns that the president could eventually take a fall that would make a wheelchair a necessity rather than an option. In order to minimize the risk, Biden’s team made sure that the president wore shoes that were made for stability and had him board and disembark from Air Force One using the shorter staircase at the rear of the plane. Still, according to Axios, O’Connor did not believe that Biden’s team was doing enough to safeguard the president: “O’Connor sometimes quipped that Biden’s staff members were trying to kill him, while he was trying to keep him alive.” And when anyone asked about his gait or the fact that he’d switched to the short stairs, Biden’s team brushed aside concerns by claiming that his halting step was simply the result of his refusal to wear the walking boot long enough after fracturing his foot in November of 2020. Biden failed to recognize his friend — and host — George Clooney at his 2024 Hollywood fundraiser. Biden had a long history of flubbing the names of people at large events. But Tapper and Thompson wrote that he failed to recognize the Oscar-winning actor — with whom he’s been friends for years — when he approached him at a Hollywood fundraiser in June of 2024. “You know George,” the assisting aide told the President, gently reminding him who was in front of him. “Yeah, yeah,” the President said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fund-raiser. “Thank you for being here.” “Hi, Mr. President,” Clooney said. “How are ya?” the President replied. “How was your trip?” Clooney asked. “It was fine,” the President said. It seemed clear that the President had not recognized Clooney. “It was not O.K.,” recalled the Hollywood V.I.P. who had witnessed this moment. “That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know—especially a famous person who’s doing a f***ing fund-raiser for you — it was delayed. It was uncomfortable.” Biden ultimately had to be reminded that the man standing in front of him was George Clooney. Biden was hidden from his own staffers and cabinet members since at least 2023. One staffer, who reportedly quit after Biden insisted on pushing ahead with a campaign for reelection, told Tapper and Thompson that access to Biden was strictly limited in order to keep people from seeing just how dramatic a change had taken place. “We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023,” the staffer said. “I love Joe Biden. When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him. Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.” “When he proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious,” another staffer said. The White House Press Corps’ already-limited access to Biden was diminished even further, and reports circulated that he hadn’t met with certain members of his own cabinet in weeks or even months. Full cabinet meetings, which had been few and far between from the word go, spread out to the point that Biden would hold only three in 2023 and one in 2024. “We spoke with several cabinet secretaries for the book, and this period of time is what one of the secretaries called ‘The Weird Period,'” Jake Tapper said. “Despite the earlier praise, the third cabinet secretary we spoke with told us that starting in 2023, quote, ‘For months we didn’t have access to him. There was clearly a deliberate strategy by the White House to have him meet with as few people as necessary,” Tapper continued, noting that very few of Biden’s cabinet secretaries met with the president after late 2023. “And it was not just cabinet members who were kept away from the president. Aides who had once seen Biden regularly say they went months without seeing him. Others told us that in some meetings, Biden would mumble incoherently, something the public only got glimpses of,” he said. If the assertions made in the book — and by other reporters, pundits, and high-ranking Democrats — are to be believed, the White House did such a good job of hiding Biden’s infirmity from all but his closest advisers that none of them were truly aware of how bad things had gotten until the CNN debate. Stay tuned for Part II: Are these really “bombshells”?

The new acting director of The Kennedy Center has responded to reports that employees plan to unionize. “These people who only now want to speak out and organize were silent while the Center was going into deficit spending,” Richard Grenell said in a statement on the situation, per RealClearPolitics. “They missed their moment but should be celebrating now.” His remarks come after multiple legacy news outlets reported on the unionization push. The Washington Post reported that it spoke with Kennedy Center employees about their reasoning, who confirmed it was spurred by President Donald Trump taking control of the center and firing the entire board of trustees. According to newly filed paperwork, the new union will be called the “Kennedy Center United Arts Workers,” and instead of having “at will” employment status, they will be “for cause.” This means instead of being able to be fired at any time for any reason, leadership will be required to prove a reason for any dismissals. One union organizer told The Post, “Communication from leadership to staff has been reduced to emails that are few and far between,” and claimed they haven’t had any staff meetings.   “This lack of transparency from leadership has really contributed to a culture of anxiety and uncertainty,” the unnamed person added. During a visit to the center earlier this year, Trump commented on the state of the building, which first opened to the public in 1971. The president said it was in “tremendous disrepair, as is a lot of the rest of our country — most of it because of bad management,” per the Los Angeles Times. Trump also said he was “disappointed” but promised to “do what has to be done” to make things right again. Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover and shakeup have caused big reactions from leftists. There have been protests, cancellations, and a general aura of doom and gloom, but the venue has been attracting record crowds despite the drama. The Kennedy Center just broke its all-time attendance record for a public event on March 29, welcoming 11,000 attendees, of whom 76% were there for the first time. This comes after Trump also promised to scrub leftist programs from the Center’s lineup. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST,” the president wrote on Truth Social in February.

A Pulitzer Prize administrator mocked a conservative journalist and member of its nominating jury for questioning why the group gave an award to an anti-Israel journalist who downplayed Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, was invited this year to serve on the five-member jury for the Pulitzer Prize’s National Reporting award. But after the Pulitzer’s Commentary award went to Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha — who objected to the media describing an Israeli victim of  the October 7 massacre as a hostage — Johnson had questions. As she wrote in the Free Beacon this week, Johnson asked Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller several questions about the prize, most notably, whether or not “members of the Pulitzer board themselves aware of Abu Toha’s public statements?” The statements in question had to do with Emily Damari, who was taken hostage at Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7 and held by Hamas for 471 days. “How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’),” Abu Toha wrote just before the Pulitzer deliberations began. “This is Emily Damari, a 28 [year-old] UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed [sic] on 10/7… So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage.’” “Imagine for a moment a Pulitzer going to an extremist Israeli settler poet who had minimized and mocked the suffering of civilians in Gaza; who put ‘Palestinian’ or ‘innocent civilian’ in quotation marks the way Abu Toha does ‘hostages,’” Johnson wrote. “You can’t, because it would never happen.” In response to Johnson’s query, Miller — whose social media accounts are littered with pro-Kamala Harris and anti-Trump posts — delivered what Johnson called a “non-response response about the board’s commitment to recognizing ‘excellence in reporting.'” Johnson then began querying other members of the Pulitzer committee, prompting Miller to allege that Johnson’s emails violated the confidentiality agreement she had signed upon joining the jury. Miller ended her email by noting that, while jurors are selected “for their character, expertise and integrity…Unfortunately, we occasionally misjudge.” “She and her colleagues have misjudged, starting with the minor issue of what the confidentiality agreement actually says,” Johnson noted. “As part of providing my services to the Pulitzers, I agreed not to discuss deliberations over the National Reporting category, nor to reveal the finalists before the winner was announced,” Johnson wrote. “I did not agree to refrain from reporting on a separate category in which I had no role. “The Pulitzer board’s position that any reporter who participates on one of its many juries is prohibited from doing any reporting about the organization itself—even when one of its awards has become an international news story—is preposterous.” Other jurors on the board with Johnson included Zeba Khan, the founder of Muslims for Obama; Jon Allsop, who has accused the Israel Defense Forces of deliberately targeting journalists; and Julia Preston, who has stated that President Donald Trump is “an existential threat to our democracy.” Damari slammed the Pulitzer board, saying they had rewarded a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered. “How to use language is precisely a journalist’s job—and a poet’s, too,” Johnson noted. “It’s not outlandish, then, to believe that Abu Toha meant exactly what he said and said exactly what he meant: No mercy for the men, women, and babies Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7.”

On the latest episode of “Michael & …” Daily Wire host Michael Knowles sits down with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a highly-controversial figure who has called for more research into the safety of vaccinations, especially the Measle, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccination, which is typically given to children around 12-15 months of age. Wakefield has been stripped of his medical license and accused of being a fraudster, allegedly falsely claiming in a 1998 study that the MMR vaccine causes autism in children and sparking a dangerous anti-vaccine movement. WATCH:  Speaking to Knowles, however, Wakefield said that study, which focused on children whose parents thought their child was vaccine-injured, never made such a claim. “This was a case series just reporting what the parents had told us, what the doctors had told us, who referred them, and what we found on the clinical investigation,” Wakefield says. “We could not leave out the parents’ reference to the MMR [vaccine]. But we said at the conclusion of the study, this study does not prove an association, let alone a causal association with the MMR vaccine.” “So hold on, hold on,” Knowles interjects. “This is the part that’s the craziest in the story to me.” “You are blamed for creating vaccine skepticism. You are blamed for measles outbreaks. You are blamed and called a terrible fraudster and a horrible practitioner of medicine because you said in your 1998 study that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Except you didn’t say that?” “Quite the opposite,” Wakefield says. “And we said what we do need is further research into this matter. And that was it. And, the study was really a report of bowel disease [symptoms] in combination with this regressive developmental disorder.” Knowles then asks Wakefield if he believes the MMR vaccine causes autism. “Does this vaccine cause autism? Are you willing to say, ‘Yes, it does?’” Knowles asks. “Or do you say, ‘Look, I just think this should be investigated, as I said in my 1998 study.’ And how concerned should parents be?” “I wouldn’t change my position,” Wakefield says. “In my personal belief, there is a very strong indication that it causes autism. But that’s not good enough. You don’t make public policy based on Andy Wakefield’s belief — it needs the science that we advocated for all those years ago.” During the discussion, Wakefield says he never retracted his study, and disputes the media’s claim that his colleagues did. “Nine of my colleagues were persuaded to sign the retraction of an interpretation — the interpretation being that the MMR vaccine causes autism,” Wakefield says. “I said, we never made that claim. How can you retract something that doesn’t exist?” “You know, they were under pressure,” he says of his colleagues. “I don’t judge them, but they fell in line and did that.” Wakefield and two other colleagues “just refused to do that,” he says. “It was a retraction of an interpretation that was never made. And that’s the truth behind it.” Knowles also asks Wakefield about a number of accusations made against him. “So they accused you of misconduct in the methods of the study,” Knowles said. “They accused you of taking money from other interests — they had this whole litany of accusations in the popular media. Was there any truth to the allegations?” “The lawyers had come to me at some point during this, the conduct of this work, not the research, not the Lancet paper, and I had agreed,” Wakefield says. “This is very common practice to undertake a study to determine whether there was a link between the vaccine.” “People work for both defendants and for plaintiffs in medical litigation,” he continues. “But I was singled out as, ‘Oh, Wakefield was doing this to undermine the MMR vaccine and launch his own vaccine onto the market and make a fortune.’” Wakefield says he disclosed that he was working on behalf of these children in litigation, as was proper protocol, despite accusations that he did not. “It’s totally transparent, but the allegation was that it was a cover-up, that…was all a big secret,” he says. “No, it wasn’t…but what do you do about that when you don’t control the editorial you write?” During the lengthy discussion, Wakefield also gives his thoughts on separating out the MMR vaccine, delaying the shot on the vaccination schedule, his film “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” his ties to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and much more.