May 11 (Reuters) - Junior Alvarado, who rode Sovereignty to victory in last weekend's Kentucky Derby, has been fined $62,000 and suspended two racing days for striking the horse more times than is allowed, horse racing authorities said on Saturday.

Alvarado whipped the bay colt eight times during the race, above the maximum six allowed by the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority. Had he used the riding crop 10 times during the race, he would have been disqualified.

Alvarado will also be suspended for two races in Kentucky on May 29 and 30.

The fine and length of the suspension were doubled because it was Alvarado's second offense in a 180-day period. The $62,000 represents 20% of his $310,000 share of the winnings.

https://www.reuters.com/sports/horse-racing-jockey-kentucky-derby-winner-sovereignty-fined-62000-whipping-2025-05-11/

With a new single racking up millions of streams, Kanye West is continuing to spread alarming antisemitic rhetoric.

On Thursday, the 24x Grammy winner released ‘Heil Hitler’ on multiple streaming platforms, many of which have since removed the track while it continues to rack up millions of streams on Elon Musk‘s X, along with the single’s art, which resembles a swastika.

As of Saturday, the song remains on the social media site while Spotify, Soundcloud and other platforms have worked to remove it.

“‘Heil Hitler’ by Ye has been banned by all digital streaming platforms while ‘Rednecks’ by Randy Newman remains streamable,” wrote West in a post. “They’re literally keeping the n—s down.”

https://deadline.com/2025/05/kanye-west-pro-hitler-song-millions-streams-x-1236392436/

The new Pope didn't tweet once in 2024. In 2025, he's posted 5 times, in which he:

- Criticized JD Vance's views on Catholicism and Jesus
- Posted an article opposing Trump's immigration policies
- Retweeted twice about the Pope's health
- Retweeted a criticism of Trump & Bukele's laughter at KAG.

https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3looh2t6zhc2e

On a lab bench in the basement of Weill Hall, a tiny device silently pumps fluid through a series of tubes and vessels that mimic the human heart. It has the potential to save the lives of tens of thousands of babies with heart defects.

But after receiving a stop-work order from the federal government, the project’s future is uncertain.

On March 30, the U.S. Department of Defense accepted a proposal to prepare the device for in-human clinical trial, ramping up manufacturing and obtaining regulatory approvals. A week later, the researchers got word that the funding – $6.7 million over the course of four years – wasn’t coming.

“Interruption of that funding has really brought us to a screeching halt,” said James Antaki, the Susan K. McAdam Professor of Heart Assist Technology at the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, in Cornell Engineering. “If the interruption lasts very long, it would be irreversible. We’ll have to start laying off people, and I don’t think we’d be able to recover.”

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/05/research-risk-life-saving-heart-pumps-babies

EMMITSBURG, Md. — Frank Davis saw a lot of waste during his decades in the federal government. In November, he voted for Donald Trump to get rid of it. So far, Davis likes a lot of what he's seen.

"I'm probably gonna get shot for this, but he is doing what he said he was going to do," says Davis, who serves as mayor of this town of about 3,000 people in Western Maryland, just south of Gettysburg, Pa.

In March, the Trump administration suddenly cancelled in-person classes at the National Fire Academy here, which trains the country's firefighters. The academy is not only a big part of Emmitsburg's identity, it also helps drive the local economy.

Davis says the administration is reviewing the academy's operations, and he is hopeful it will restore classes. If not, he says, he'll see the administration somewhat differently.

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/05/nx-s1-5351764/trump-cuts-national-fire-academy-maryland-emmitsburg-fema-federal-spending

President Trump plans to announce Monday that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 NFL Draft, with the aim of holding it on the National Mall, Axios has learned.

The announcement is expected to be made with National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris at the White House, two sources familiar with the plan tell Axios.

Driving the news: It comes days after the Commanders and D.C. officials announced a plan to bring the team back to the city with a new domed stadium on the site of the old RFK Stadium.

The team has played in suburban Prince George's County, Maryland, for nearly three decades at a stadium built by former team owner Jack Kent Cooke.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/05/nfl-draft-2027-washington-dc-trump

Israeli soldiers have filmed themselves blowing up a building in Gaza for a ‘gender reveal’, having rigged it with explosives that give off blue smoke to indicate a fetus is male.

https://bsky.app/profile/aljazeera.com/post/3log5h6na7c2n

A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.

The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.

Data related to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, and other financial institutions are included in the hacked material, according to screenshots of messages and backend systems obtained by 404 Media.

The breach is hugely significant not just for those individual customers, but also for the U.S. government more widely. On Thursday, 404 Media was first to report that at the time U.S. National Security Advisor Waltz accidentally revealed he was using TeleMessage’s modified version of Signal during the cabinet meeting. The use of that tool raised questions about what classification of information was being discussed across the app and how that data was being secured, and came after revelations top U.S. officials were using Signal to discuss active combat operations.

https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-uses-was-hacked/