Immigrant Caravan Is Now A Political Play For Midterms: Today's Talker

The U. S. Justice Department won’t pursue allegations that ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok misled U. S. consumers about their data security in a forthcoming suit accusing the company of children’s privacy violations, according to people familiar with the decision. The department is preparing to file a consumer protection lawsuit against TikTok later this year on behalf of the U.

Dallas — American Airlines put an unspecified number of employees on leave for their involvement in an incident in which several Black passengers were removed from a flight in Phoenix, allegedly over a complaint about body odor. American CEO Robert Isom wrote in a note to staff that the incident was unacceptable. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “I am incredibly disappointed by what happened on that flight and the breakdown of our procedures,” Isom said in the note this week.

Grand Rapids, Minn. — The Minnesota hometown of Judy Garland, the actress who wore a pair of ruby slippers in “The Wizard of Oz,” is raising money to purchase the prized footwear after it was stolen from a local museum and then later turned over to an auction company. Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where the late actress was born in 1922, is fundraising at its annual Judy Garland festival, which kicks off Thursday.

This article is part of The D. C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry knew the score when he signed into law a requirement that every classroom in his state—from kindergarten classrooms to college chemistry labs—must post a copy of the Ten Commandments.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has been hammering away at President Joe Biden for the “nightmare” of “disastrous inflation.” He has made inflation one of his key attacks against the incumbent President, even blaming Biden for food prices increasing by up to 50% or 60%. (They have not.) Trump’s attack conveniently ignores the economic facts: as Nobel Prize Laureate Paul Romer wrote this week, inflation as measured by CPI is about 2.8% and still falling, which Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell celebrated last week as down from a high of over 7%. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] And this falling inflation is not just matched by record low unemployment but also 2.5% economic growth.

Anthropic launched a new AI model Thursday which it says is its “most intelligent model yet.” The new model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, is reportedly twice as fast as Claude 3 Opus, the company’s previous best-in-class AI, and five times cheaper to run. Following a trend set by its competitor OpenAI—which just last month released the newest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4o—Claude 3.5 Sonnet is free for all users on the web and iOS to access.