
Judge rejects West Memphis Three member's request for new DNA testing
CNN
The story of the "West Memphis Three," whose decades-long murder case was the source for a noted documentary trilogy, returned to court Thursday, with a judge denying one of the men access to evidence he wants tested for DNA, according to his defense team.
The hearing was requested by attorneys for Damien Echols, one of three teenagers convicted in 1994 of the brutal murder of three Cub Scouts in West Memphis, Arkansas. A year earlier, the bodies of 8-year-olds Steve Branch, Chris Byers and Michael Moore had been left in a ditch, hogtied with their own shoelaces.
Prosecutors argued that Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. killed the boys as part of a satanic ritual and that Echols had been the ringleader.

The US military’s strikes in Iran over the weekend prompted a swift response from across the federal government to react to any fallout, but current and former officials say the administration’s DOGE-driven cuts to a host of agencies have made it harder to grapple with the conflict and prepare for potential retaliation.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday said in a statement that the agency had obtained “a body of credible evidence [that] indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged” by recent strikes, underscoring a broad intelligence community effort is ongoing to determine the impact of the US strikes on three of the country’s nuclear sites on Saturday.

White House’s DOGE spending cuts request runs into criticism, questions from some Senate Republicans
The head of the White House budget office on Wednesday defended the Trump administration’s push to enact sweeping cuts to federal funding, even as some Republican senators voiced concerns and raised questions about the breadth of them.