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Bridget Brink, who stepped down as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine this year in protest of what she said was President Donald Trump's unfair treatment of the the war-torn country, announced Wednesday that she's running for Congress in one of Michigan's most competitive districts.

The longtime diplomat, who previously held high-ranking State Department roles in other former Soviet and Eastern European countries, is casting herself as a public servant as she runs in next year's midterm elections, when her Democrats hope to win control of the House.

“My next mission: to fight for what’s right here at home,” she said.

Trump picked Brink to be the country's ambassador to Slovakia in 2019 and Biden tapped her to be ambassador to Ukraine shortly after Russia invaded the country in 2022. She resigned in April, saying in an op-ed published in the Detroit Free Press that Trump continues to pressure Ukraine and not Russia.

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A new study finds that addiction to social media, mobile phones and video games is linked to a higher risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

The study, published in JAMA on Wednesday, looked at data on more than 4,000 kids from an ongoing longitudinal study following them for years, starting at ages 9 to 10. It found that by age 14, about a third of the kids had become increasingly addicted to social media, about a quarter had become increasingly addicted to their mobile phone and more than 40% showed signs of addiction to video games.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has imposed new guidelines on VA hospitals nationwide that remove language that explicitly prohibited doctors from discriminating against patients based on their political beliefs or marital status.

The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.

Under federal law, eligible veterans must be given hospital care and services, and the revised VA hospital rules still instruct medical staff that they cannot discriminate against veterans on the basis of race, color, religion and sex. But language within VA hospital bylaws requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated from these bylaws, raising questions about whether individual workers could now be free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not expressly protected by federal law.

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Despite Donald Trump’s recent claim that Iran was “very close” to making a nuclear weapon when Israel launched its bombing campaign, Mark Warner, the vice-chairman of the US Senate intelligence committee, said on Wednesday that senators were briefed on Monday, after Israel’s attack, that US intelligence agencies still see no evidence that Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons.

In an interview with MSNBC, Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said that Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified to the Senate in March “that Iran had taken no action towards, moving towards a bomb”.

“And we got reconfirmed … Monday of this week, that the intelligence hasn’t changed,” Warner added.

In her written, opening testimony to the Senate select committee on intelligence on 25 March, Gabbard summarized the collective assessment on Iran of the 18 US intelligence elements that comprise the US intelligence community, which she referred to using the acronym IC:

The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003. The IC is closely monitoring if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is placing new limitations on lawmakers seeking to visit detention facilities, releasing guidelines in the wake of visits from Democrats that have turned confrontational.

Members of Congress have the legal right to make unannounced visits to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities.

But new guidance posted by ICE seeks to rein in that power, asking lawmakers to give 72 hours notice before any visits, while requiring their staff to give 24 hours notice.

Though lawmakers retain the ability to make unannounced visits to ICE detention facilities, the new policy blocks them from visiting field offices, where most agency action takes place.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) had harsh words for embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday: President Trump’s previous Defense leader, Mark Esper, “had more guts and balls” than Hegseth because Esper refused to maim unarmed protesters, she said.

“[Esper] didn’t accept the order,” Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and Defense official, told Hegseth. “He had more guts and balls than you, because he said, I’m not going to send in the uniformed military to do something that I know in my gut isn’t right.”

Esper, who was Defense secretary for a year until Trump fired him after the 2020 election, wrote in his 2022 memoir that Trump wanted authorities to shoot protesters in the legs during demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd.

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A federal appeals court panel on Wednesday refused the Justice Department’s effort to put itself on the hook for an $83.3 million defamation award advice columnist E. Jean Carroll won at trial from President Trump.

It’s the latest setback for the president in his efforts to fight Carroll’s lawsuits at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Last week, the 2nd Circuit upheld her earlier $5 million jury award.

On Wednesday, the three-judge panel denied the Justice Department’s request to replace Trump as the defendant in Carroll’s defamation lawsuit under the Westfall Act, a 1988 law that protects federal employees from certain lawsuits concerning things they did in the course of their jobs.

The Justice Department contended Trump’s denials of Carroll’s sexual assault claims in a written statement and comments he made on the White House South Lawn in 2019 — the basis of her suit — were made within the scope of Trump’s employment as president.ee

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