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Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has unveiled his plan to move foreign aid through the House, pitching four separate bills to address aid for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and other national security priorities.

Johnson rolled out his proposal during a closed-door House GOP conference meeting on Monday, after months of delaying any decisions on the politically prickly topic.

The plan — according to two GOP lawmakers at the meeting — is to move the four bills under one procedural rule that would allow for an amendment process.

The fourth national security-related bill, according to one of the GOP lawmakers, would include a TikTok ban, a provision to allow the U.S. to use seized Russian assets to assist Ukraine, a lend-lease act for military aid and convertible loans for humanitarian relief.

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Massive coral bleaching across the world's oceans during the past year's extremely warm water temperatures was labeled a “global coral bleaching event” by federal officials on Monday.

It’s the fourth global coral bleaching overall and the second in the last 10 years, with extensive bleaching and heat stress across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

"From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of each major ocean basin," said Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch. Reef Watch monitors heat stress based on sea surface temperatures measured by satellite.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday he will try to advance wartime aid for Israel this week as he attempts the difficult task of winning House approval for a national security package that also includes funding for Ukraine and allies in Asia.

Johnson, R-La., is already under immense political pressure from his fellow GOP lawmakers as he tries to stretch between the Republican Party’s divided support for helping Kyiv defend itself from Moscow’s invasion. The Republican speaker has sat for two months on a $95 billion supplemental package that would send support to the U.S. allies, as well as provide humanitarian aid for civilians in Ukraine and Gaza and funding to replenish U.S. weapons provided to Taiwan.

The attack by Iran on Israel early Sunday further ratcheted up the pressure on Johnson, but also gave him an opportunity to underscore the urgency of approving the funding.

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A majority of voters believe former President Donald Trump has committed “serious federal crimes,” according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.

Fifty-three percent of likely voters said they believe this, while 39 percent of those surveyed said they did not believe that Trump committed serious crimes. Nine percent said they didn’t know or didn’t answer the question.

The numbers broken down by party affiliation show that 90 percent of Democrats believe he has committed serious crimes, while 17 percent of Republicans fall in this category. Forty-nine percent of independents shared this sentiment.

It was Annie Lewis' idea to put a "Republicans for Biden" sign in the front yard in the lead-up to 2020. For her, it came down to civility. As a teacher for over a decade, the mother of six little ones, and a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she felt then-President Trump did not show true leadership.

"I was embarrassed anytime a clip of Trump, at that time, was on and my children were in the room," Lewis said.

Lewis was not alone in her thinking. In 2020, GOP residents of Maricopa County in Arizona banded together to stand up against Trump. The signs were created by Dan Barker, a leader in the Maricopa County LDS community and former GOP-appointed judge, who wanted to find a way to support Biden without giving up his lifelong Republican identity.

Iran launched a retaliatory strike Saturday night on Israel for its deadly attack on Iranian officers in the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Damascus after days of signaling it would do so.

The response came in waves throughout Saturday, beginning with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seizing a vessel in the Red Sea connected to Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s company, Zodiac Maritime. By around 11 pm local time, that had graduated to multiple waves of attack drones and missiles headed toward Israeli targets.

The Environmental Protection Agency has set the country’s first federal limits on forms of PFAS in drinking water, a class of “forever chemicals” that have been tied to negative health outcomes and have been found in one form or another in nearly half of the US’s tap water supply.

The policy could help improve the water quality of as many as 100 million people.

Having a standardized federal policy will eventually take the pressure of monitoring drinking water off of individuals, who currently have to do so in most states. The proposal, however, falls short of calling for companies that have utilized PFAS heavily — like DuPont and 3M — to curb their usage or cover cleanup costs, a move that experts say is needed to fully address the problem of these contaminants.

“The issue and the cost and the burden of all this shouldn’t fall on communities, it shouldn’t fall on the consumer. It’s the polluter that needs to pay,” Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, told Vox last year.

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A defiant Donald Trump continued to attack the prosecutor, judge and a key witness in the New York hush-money criminal trial against him, a signal that the former president will continue to embrace bombast as jury selection in the case begins on Monday.

Trump described what will be the first criminal trial against a former US president as a “communist show trial”, during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. He also described his indictment as a “badge of honor” and cast himself as a martyr for his supporters. “I’m proud to do it for you,” he said.

“On Monday in New York City, I will be forced to sit, fully gagged,” he added.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection to a $130,000 payment he made in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, to keep quiet about an alleged affair. The charges were filed last year by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney.

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