By Holmes Lybrand, CNN

Washington, DC (CNN) — During his first news conference Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche showcased his loyalty to President Donald Trump while declining to answer specific questions about the war with Iran, why Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired or other investigations into the president’s enemies.

“I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime,” Blanche said when asked whether he wanted to be nominated as the full-time attorney general. “If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say: ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir.’”

When asked why Bondi was fired and how the DOJ will change, Blanche was dismissive.

“I’m going to lead the way that I’ve been leading as the deputy attorney general,” said Blanche, a former Trump defense attorney.

“Nobody has any idea why the attorney general is no longer the attorney general and I’m the acting attorney general except for President Trump,” Blanche added.

Epstein investigation subponea

Beyond her failure to successfully bring cases against Trump’s personal and political enemies, Bondi’s standing was harmed her drastic and self-inflicted stumbles in handling the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

When asked about Bondi’s outstanding House Oversight Committee subpoena over the botched handling of the Epstein investigation, Blanche said he would said he would leave the matter “to Chairman (James) Comer and others to figure out.”

Blanche said he didn’t know whether the Justice Department would assert privilege in the matter in an effort to stop the subpoena.

“I’m not committing to anything,” he said. “I’m just saying I don’t know.”

Backs the White House and Pentagon on Iran

Blanche, in a news conference meant to focus on efforts to investigate and prosecute fraud in the US, decline to answer a question on the Justice Department’s position on preemptivearguments that Trump might be committing war crimes if he follows through with, as he said Tuesday, killing “a whole civilization” Tuesday night in Iran, barring a deal.

The interim DOJ head said the Justice Department supports the White House and Department of Defense and provides “counsel to them, and we have been doing that, as you would expect.”

CNN also pressed Blanche on what, if any, investigative steps have been taken after Trump threatened to jail an unspecified reporter as part of a hunt for the “leaker” behind initial reports Friday of the missing Air Force officers in Iran.

Two officers went missing after their US fighter jet was downed in Iran. Both have since been rescued.

While first saying he wouldn’t comment on ongoing investigations, Blanche noted that “we will always investigate” leaks involving classified information, especially those that put US soldiers at risk.

“And we will investigate if it means sending a subpoena to the reporter,” Blanche said. “That’s exactly what we should do, and that’s exactly what we will be doing.”

CNN’s Devan Cole contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
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SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) – The Santa Barbara Bowl is an attraction for thousands of fans each year, but it also draws in touring performers.

The bowl is starting its 2026 season with back-to-back shows from Disclosure this week prior to the band heading out to the Coachella Music Festival for two weekends.

That's just an indicator of the way the bowl has found its way into the traveling schedules for performers coming through California.

The bowl was often a stop in between Los Angeles and San Francisco "back in the day."  Now its both a set day or a warm-up date for several acts depending on when they start their tour and what the venue can provide for their show logistics. With upgrades over the years it has proven to be a perfect fit.

This year the lineup has 28 shows with room for more.    

It includes Jack Johnson, Carlos Santana, comedian Trevor Noah and Disclosure for two nights each along with comedian Gabriel Fluffy Iglesias plus a range of talent that brings in Bob Dylan, Train, Brandi Carlisle, Alabama Shakes, Young the Giant and the Black Keyes. 

The fan base is expected to bring families, teens and lifelong concert-goers with flowing gray hair through the gates with enthusiasm and anticipation.

The seating is changed slightly between shows with a open area General Admission pit or one with chairs. Overall it is about 5,000 seats.

Last year, Beatles legend Paul McCartney surprised the late season music lovers when he booked a date to start off a small tour.  The fan reaction, demand and in some cases, tearful emotion was as impactful as the landmark venue has ever seen.

In 2023, the Foo Fighters appeared as part of their smaller venue pop up shows with only a tight window for ticket purchases.

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By Sean Lyngaas, CNN

(CNN) — Anthropic will make its new AI model available to some of the world’s biggest cybersecurity and software firms in an effort to slow the arms race ignited by AI in the hands of hackers, Anthropic said Tuesday.

Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Google, JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft, among other firms, will now have access to Anthropic’s Mythos model for cyber defense purposes. That includes finding bugs in those firms’ software and testing whether specific hacking techniques work on their products.

Mythos (officially dubbed “Claude Mythos Preview”) is not ready for a public launch because of the ways it could be abused by cybercriminals and spies, according to Anthropic — a prospect that has prompted widespread concern in Washington and in Silicon Valley.

Experts have told CNN that the speed and scale of AI agents looking for vulnerabilities, far beyond normal human capabilities, represent a sea change in cybersecurity. A single AI agent could scan for vulnerabilities and potentially take advantage of them faster and more persistently than hundreds of human hackers.

“We did not feel comfortable releasing this generally,” Logan Graham, who heads the team at Anthropic its AI models’ defenses, told CNN. “We think that there’s a long way to go to have the appropriate safeguards.”

Anthropic has also briefed senior US officials “across the US government” on Mythos’ full offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, an Anthropic official told CNN. The firm has also “made itself available to support the government’s own testing and evaluation of the technology,” the official said.

Anthropic executives hope the selected release of Mythos to companies that serve billions of users will help even the playing field with attackers. The goal is to head off major security flaws in widely used internet browsers and operating systems before they are released publicly.

Other firms or organizations that Anthropic said will have access to Mythos include chipmakers Broadcom and Nvidia, the nonprofit Linux Foundation, which supports the popular Linux operating system that powers many phones and supercomputers, and cybersecurity vendors CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.

“If models are going to be this good — and probably much better than this — at all cybersecurity tasks, we need to prepare pretty fast,” Graham told CNN. “The world is very different now if these model capabilities are going to be in our lives.”

A blog post previewing Mythos’s capabilities, which leaked last month claimed that the AI model was “far ahead” of other models’ cyber capabilities. Mythos “presages an upcoming wave of models that can exploit vulnerabilities in ways that far outpace the efforts of defenders,” said the blog post, which Fortune first reported.

Some of the concerns around how Mythos’ could be abused by bad actors were overblown, experts previously told CNN. But the leak also pointed to an uncomfortable truth, those sources said: Barring a change in course, the gap between attackers and defenders enabled by AI could widen further.

Anthropic claims Mythos has already produced impactful results. The model has in recent weeks found “thousands” of previously unknown software vulnerabilities — a rate far outpacing human researchers, the firm said. CNN could not immediately verify this figure.

Such software flaws can be painstaking for human researchers to find and are coveted by spy agencies and cybercriminals for conducting stealthy hacks.

But cyber

Nancy Prado

La ciudad de Desert Hot Springs evaluará un posible nuevo aumento al impuesto sobre las ventas.

El concilio tiene previsto discutir el tema en la reunión de esta semana, el incremento de medio centavo ayudaría a financiar mejoras en las calles de la ciudad. Dependiendo de la discusión, el concejo podría incluir el tema en una futura agenda para su aprobación, a pesar de que muchas personas se oponen al incremento.

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Nancy Prado

Una vez más cambiaron la fecha del juicio que enfrenta William Rodríguez, quien tiene cargos de asesinato por manejar borracho y con su auto atropellar y matar a una mujer en Catedral City, pero la audiencia se pospuso después que la defensa indicara que aún no se han entregado pruebas clave para evaluar adecuadamente el caso y preparar los próximos pasos.

Este es el segundo retraso relacionado con evidencia faltante y el tribunal programo una nueva audiencia para el 14 de abril.

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