Today in History: June 2, Queen Elizabeth II crowned
In 1886, 49-year-old President Grover Cleveland became the first president to get married in the White House, wedding 21-year-old Frances Folsom.
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In 1924, Congress passed, and President Calvin Coolidge signed, the Indian Citizenship Act, a measure guaranteeing full American citizenship for all Native Americans born within US territorial limits.
In 1941, baseball's 'Iron Horse,' Lou Gehrig, died in New York of the degenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease; he was 37.
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In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at age 27 at a ceremony in London's Westminster Abbey, 16 months after the death of her father, King George VI.
In 1966, US space probe Surveyor 1 landed on the moon and began transmitting detailed photographs of the lunar surface.
In 1997, Timothy McVeigh was convicted of murder by a federal jury in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. (McVeigh would be sentenced to death and was executed in 2001.)
In 1999, South Africans went to the polls in their second post-apartheid election, giving the African National Congress a decisive victory; retiring President Nelson Mandela was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki.
In 2012, ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison after a court convicted him on charges of complicity in the killing of protesters during the 2011 uprising that forced him from power. (Mubarak was later acquitted and freed in March 2017; he died in February 2020).
In 2016, autopsy results revealed that musician Prince died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a powerful opioid painkiller.
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Yahoo
35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Some Dems Warn Colleagues: Crypto Bill Could Inject Some 19th Century Chaos Into US Economy
The Senate is poised to pass the GENIUS Act in the coming weeks. The bill will bestow upon the crypto industry a long-sought blessing: a key form of the digital currency, stablecoins, will now be subject to a bespoke (and notably light-touch) regulatory system created by Congress. With it will come the U.S. government's stamp of approval. After years spent being dismissed as a haven for money launderers and speculators, the bill is in part a marker that the crypto industry has arrived in Washington. And yet, there are a few problems. The bill could open multiple pathways toward contagion that could spread throughout the financial system, Hill staffers and experts familiar with the legislation warn TPM. Some argue that it would create a financial system that operates with many of the same risks the U.S. left behind in the 20th century, including banks and private companies issuing their own, alternate currencies; others regard the bill as priming the country for a series of runs on digital currencies. Among legislators, the fighting over the proper level alarm about these possible eventualities has been most acute among Senate Democrats. While nearly the entire Republican Senate conference supports the bill, a few Senate Dems have broken off to lead negotiations over the legislation and persuade others in their party to support it. Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) was the first Democrat to co-sponsor the bill; others, including Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), have taken the lead in pushing it. Stablecoins, the form of crypto that the GENIUS Act addresses, are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the value of a state-issued currency, like the dollar. Crypto advocates tout stablecoins as solving a few problems: consumers can use their stability to buy other forms of cryptocurrency; they can also, advocates say, double as a means to quickly transfer payments between people. In that sense, they're kind of like Venmo, only based in the blockchain and, often, possessing perplexing foreign ties. (One of the biggest stablecoins, Tether, is run from El Salvador.) It's that quality that causes anxiety among many experts in banking and financial regulation, including Democratic staffers on the Senate Banking Committee. Stablecoins, under the GENIUS Act, will receive the benefits that the U.S. legal system gives to deposits, but without most of the qualities that make that system secure. 'The GENIUS Act folds stablecoins directly into the traditional financial system, while applying weaker safeguards than banks or investment companies must adhere to,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in a speech last month. Under the bill, there's no deposit insurance to guarantee stablecoin holdings. But more troubling than that, for critics, is the limited regulation of how stablecoin issuers can use the money they receive and how, in the event of a crisis, customers would be made whole. New kinds of businesses will be able to issue stablecoins under the legislation, including banks (typically via subsidiaries) and tech megafirms like Meta, X, Amazon, and others. The risk, experts told TPM, partly stems from how stablecoin issuers would meet a run on their coins. Stablecoins are typically backed up by bank deposits or investments in treasuries; customers pulling their stablecoin deposits at once could resemble an old-school bank run, depleting these assets. 'It would be a financial crisis grease fire,' one Senate staffer told TPM about the possibility. Under this scenario, even people who don't hold crypto investments could be affected. A bank that holds a large amount of stablecoin deposits, when faced with mass withdrawals to shore up one or multiple failing stablecoins, could see its balance sheet falter. The same thing could happen if treasury securities or other backing assets are sold en masse, causing prices to plummet. Mark Hays, who covers cryptocurrency issues for American for Financial Reform, told TPM last month that banks themselves might be exposed in another way. Bank subsidiaries that issue stablecoins could experience a run, meaning that the parent bank would have to bail it out. These are all means by which risks inherent to the form of cryptocurrency might spread. 'The more banks get exposed to that, the more the fallout could be significant,' Hays said. Many critics of the GENIUS Act say that features of the bill will revive the problems that America's financial system experienced in the 19th century. There's an irony here. Some of Trump II's staunchest backers, particularly those on the new tech right, frame their support for the president as part of an effort to return to the 1890s. Trump himself has supposedly become enamored with President William McKinley; some supporters speak about going further than undoing the social changes of the 1960s or the New Deal, and instead call to undo the changes brought by the Progressive Era. That includes the federal reserve, income tax, and many early banking regulations. Of course, in the case of cryptocurrency, this effort to turn back the clock skips right past a key point of the push for legislation. The GENIUS Act, some observers say, could prompt mass adoption of the coins. That, in the event of a crisis, could prompt the Federal Reserve to bail out issuers — a decidedly post-1890s backstop. But one feature of the bill would turn time back: it would allow banks and some businesses to issue their own stablecoins. This hasn't escaped the attention of analysts at JP Morgan; strategists at the bank reportedly noted in a letter to clients that such a system would recall that of 'the 19th century, when various types of banknotes were valued differently.' For big tech firms, stablecoins present an opportunity: users could pay for purchases entirely within an app. Companies with operations around the world could unify transactions under one, in-house coin; they could also charge small transaction fees on each purchase that would open up a new way of making money. Hilary Allen, an American University professor who studies financial regulation, told TPM that the problem, again, would be that these are not actual bank deposits: they are lightly regulated cryptocurrencies. 'People will quite happily leave all their money in an app offered by a big tech platform,' she said. The scale of the risk to the financial system all depends on how many people adopt the use of stablecoins. Relatively few people use cryptocurrencies, though industry boosters argue that passing the GENIUS Act and market structure legislation later this summer will spur more people to do so. Big tech firms issuing their own coins as a means to buy products sold by the firms would also prompt more people to join. But even that, Allen said, could raise troubling questions about how it affects the nature of these businesses. 'Do they become too-big-to-fail financial institutions with all the power and the implicit bailouts that come with that?' 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Yahoo
35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘It is a whole different environment': Republicans revisit key Biden investigations with new momentum
The House Judiciary Committee is expected to interview former Hunter Biden special counsel David Weiss behind closed doors on Friday, two sources familiar with the interview told CNN, as part of a broader Republican effort to revisit previous probes into the Biden family that stalled last Congress but are gaining new momentum now that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House. The scheduled interview, which could still be moved, would be the second time the Republican-led panel will interview Weiss about his work as Republicans continue to probe whether the investigation was hampered by political interference. Weiss has still never testified publicly about his six-year criminal probe into the president's son, which included three convictions, but was ultimately short-circuited as a result of the former president's unconditional pardon of his son. House Judiciary Republicans have long wanted to call Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney, back for questioning after his first closed-door interview in 2023. Committee Republicans were also able to finally secure interviews with two Department of Justice tax division prosecutors involved in the Hunter Biden probe who they had been aggressively pursuing for months, one of the sources familiar told CNN. The Justice Department is working with Weiss to provide access to documents he may need for his interview, a person briefed on the matter said. Any delays in getting access to documents would be a scheduling issue and the ability to have personnel who can oversee it, the person briefed on the matter said. It's not the only Biden investigation Republicans are reexamining that leans into a fresh political appetite with GOP control of Washington. House Oversight Chair James Comer is returning to his probe of the former president's mental fitness in an entirely new landscape after a recent book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson put Joe Biden's physical and mental decline back in the spotlight. Comer told CNN he is in the process of scheduling key interviews with Biden's White House physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, and other senior aides who had all rebuffed his efforts last Congress. Beyond the five initial interviews from Biden's orbit, the Republican Chairman told CNN he wants to look at the executive orders Biden signed in his last six months in office and use of the autopen. In the weeks immediately after Biden's disastrous 2024 debate performance that unraveled his presidential campaign and upended the Democratic party, Comer requested to interview Biden's doctor and subpoenaed three senior Biden aides to discuss their roles in the Biden White House, which never materialized. Now, Comer said in an interview with CNN, 'it is a whole different environment.' At the time of his 2024 interview requests, Comer's impeachment inquiry into the Biden family's business dealings had fallen apart and the Biden administration felt no incentive to comply with the House Oversight Committee. Probing Biden's decline now, Comer says, will be a lot easier than trying to convince his colleagues of an alleged Biden family foreign influence peddling scheme, which even Comer conceded was difficult to do, particularly in a minute or less on Fox News. Republicans failed to uncover evidence to support their core allegations against the president, and lacked the votes in their divided, narrow majority last Congress to impeach the president. 'The money laundering and the shell companies, the average American couldn't understand that. I mean, that was hard to understand,' Comer told CNN. 'You know, I did not do a good job explaining that.' But with his investigation into Biden's mental and physical decline, Comer said, 'people see a president that clearly is in decline. They saw it in the debate.' Democrats sought to dismantle the Republican-led 11 month impeachment inquiry into Biden last Congress at every turn. Comer told CNN that although those Democrats aren't jumping at the opportunity to cooperate now, he does not see them as being obstructive either. 'I take that as a step in the right direction,' he told CNN. Tapper and Thompson's book documents how Biden, his closest aides and his family forged ahead with the former president's doomed 2024 reelection bid despite signs of his physical and mental decline. In a previous statement to CNN, a Biden spokesman criticized the book, saying that evidence shows that 'he was a very effective president.' Former Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips, who launched a long-shot challenge to Biden and was outspoken about his concerns over the former president's age, told CNN he did not think there needed to be an investigation on Capitol Hill at this point into Biden's fitness as president. 'This case already went to trial, the jury of American voters convicted the party of the accused, and handed out the harshest political punishment possible-losing the single most consequential election in modern history,' Phillips told CNN. Instead, Phillips called on Biden to authorize his physician to disclose his health file and condition under oath. 'Only if the former president refuses, or if questioning uncovers possible criminal activity, should an investigation be initiated,' Phillips added. Biden was recently diagnosed with an 'aggressive form' of prostate cancer. CNN's Evan Perez contributed to this report.
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Romanian pleads guilty to swatting calls targeting former US president, lawmakers
A Romanian citizen pleaded guilty on Monday to leading a years-long conspiracy targeting dozens of individuals — including members of Congress, places of worship, and a former United States president — with 'swatting' calls and bomb threats intended to provoke fear and solicit a police response. Thomasz Szabo, 26, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C., to one count of conspiracy and one count of threats and false information regarding explosives. The sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 23. Federal prosecutors say Szabo was the leader of an online community that engaged in bomb threats and 'swatting' — a term that refers to making false reports of an ongoing threat of violence — since late 2020. He was extradited from Romania in November 2024, the DOJ said. 'This defendant led a dangerous swatting criminal conspiracy, deliberately threatening dozens of government officials with violent hoaxes and targeting our nation's security infrastructure from behind a screen overseas,' Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. 'This case reflects our continued focus on protecting the American people and working with international partners to stop these threats at their source,' she continued. Szabo made numerous false reports to law enforcement, including in December 2020, when he threatened to commit a mass shooting at New York City synagogues and, in January 2021, when he threatened to detonate explosives at the U.S. Capitol and to kill then-President-elect Biden, according to a DOJ press release. Members of Szabo's group then engaged in a 'spree of swatting and bomb threats' from Dec. 24, 2023, to early January 2024, the DOJ said. During that time, the group targeted at least 25 members of Congress or their family members; at least six officials who were, either then or previously, serving as a senior Executive Branch official, including multiple Cabinet-level officials; at least 13 senior federal law enforcement officials; and various members of the judiciary, according to the DOJ. The DOJ said the group also targeted at least 27 officials who were serving at the time, or who previously served, as state government officials or their family members; four religious institutions; and multiple members of the media. In recent years, political violence and 'swatting' incidents have been on the rise, in particular targeting members of Congress and other high-profile public figures. Local Georgia news outlets reported that among the officials targeted by Szabo are Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Georgia State Sen. Clint Dixon. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
