The U.S. attacks Iran. Supremes rule nuns don’t have to pay for abortions for employees. And an AI Chatbot company worth $1.5 billion was really 700 coders in India.
The U.S. Attacks Iran
President Trump gave the order to attack Iran.
Seven stealth B-2 bombers took off from here in Missouri, their anti-radar invisibility allowing them to fly through air detection and air defense systems. After an 18-hour flight, they arrived at their target sites in Iran on Saturday evening U.S. time.
The B-2s dropped 14 “bunker buster” bombs on two Iranian nuclear facilities. The largest and reportedly most important site, where Iran has been making enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, is at Fordow, which is buried some 300 feet below the surface of a mountain.
Israel has said that only the American-made “Massive Ordnance Penetrators” (MOPs), 30,000 pound bombs that penetrate 200 feet before blowing up can take out that facility. And only American B-2s have the capability of deploying them.
An American submarine also fired some two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at a third nuclear facility.
So now what? Vice President Vance said that the U.S. is not at war with Iran, that this was a targeted strike designed “to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” and that there are no plans to put “boots on the ground.”
But Iran’s leader, the Ayatollah Khameini, has vowed retaliation. Iran’s parliament voted to close the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor of one-fifth of the world’s oil. Iran is threatening missile strikes on American military bases throughout the middle east. Iranian TV says that now any American civilian is a legitimate target.
If any of that happens, won’t that mean escalating our military involvement?
President Trump campaigned on the promise to avoid “forever wars” in the middle east. MAGA has routinely lambasted “neo-conservatives” like President Bush who got us into futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in order “to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
Some of the MAGA movement’s strongest supporters–such as commentator Tucker Carlson, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene–have been strongly criticizing the president for his action against Iran.
What do you think will happen now? Will Americans support another out-and-out war in the middle east, if it comes to that? Will Trump supporters stay with him? What do you think Iran will do?
Supremes Rule Nuns Don’t Have to Pay for Abortions for Employees
In 2017, the state of New York passed a law requiring all employer-paid health insurance programs to cover abortions. There was a religious exemption, but it applied solely to religious organizations that hire and serve only members of their faith.
An order of nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, which serves the elderly, pushed back against the law, which would force them to pay for abortions against their convictions and the teaching of their church. With the support of other pro-life religious organizations across denominations–including the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod–the nuns filed suit to stop the law.
A New York state court ruled against the nuns, as did a New York appeals court. In 2021, the Supreme Court vacated those rulings and instructed the courts to reconsider them. They did, but still upheld the abortion mandate!
This time the Supreme Court issued a definitive ruling in the nuns’ favor, requiring lower courts to follow its recent unanimous ruling in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission that governments could not favor one religion over another based on who receives and who performs its charitable works.
AI Chatbot Company Worth $1.5 Billion Was Really 700 Coders in India
Builder.ai’s niche in the Artificial Intelligence industry was to use AI to generate software code. Customers were promised that all they would have to do is tell the virtual assistant “Natasha” what they needed and they would get custom software as easily as ordering a pizza.
The London-based company was valued at $1.5 billion and attracted nearly half a billion dollars in investments from major players like Microsoft.
But an audit, a whistleblower, and a lawsuit led to scrutiny from federal investigators. They discovered that the Natasha chatbot was really 700 engineers in India who manually handled the requests and coded the software.
Comments tech journalist M. B. Mack, who reported on the discovery and the dissolution of the company:
The fallout is seen as one of the biggest failures of the post-ChatGPT AI investment boom and has renewed scrutiny of “AI washing”—the trend of rebranding manual services as artificial intelligence to secure funding.
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